A few things in the works:

• Some free lessons at edufire.com for Language Geek readers. I have 3 coupon codes worth $30 to give out. I’m not sure how I’m going to do it; I’ve considered a contest, but I’m not sure what kind of contest. Ideas certainly welcome; if you have any, throw them in the comments, please.
• A post about global understanding vs. understanding of individual words. Dr. Arguelles’ video on shadowing brought this idea to my attention, and I’ve been ruminating on it.

I’ve also been suffering from wanderlust, and am considering throwing Dutch onto the heap of languages I’m learning. Quick, someone convince me to not do this.

The blog here isn’t going to stop, however; I need to get back to it, as I enjoy doing it. I’ve got a post about my current language learning brewing, as well as a few other ideas floating around. If you’re subscribed, I ask that you stay that way; it’s not hurting your feedreader any just sitting there, and I promise to get back it.

In my stats, I see that someone – I assume a professor – linked to my blog here for one of his or her classes, via an installation of Blackboard. The installation of Blackboard in question is on the Brigham Young University – Idaho website. I can’t see what was linked to, and the curiosity is really getting to me. If someone who clicks over to my site from Brigham Young University, drop me a comment and tell me what it is that’s linked to in your Blackboard area, please.

I’ve been using Anki diligently, and am still enjoying the program far more than I ever enjoyed SuperMemo. However, I think I need to rethink my usage of it. I’ve mostly been putting in sentence items, based on the ideas presented at antimoon.com and All Japanese All The Time. However, I just came across this page on learning at the Anki website, which makes a fine case for more active recall items, rather than passive stuff. While I don’t have 10,000 items in Anki (AJATT puts forth the “10,000 sentences method”), I think I’ve made enough sentence items in SuperMemo and now Anki to see that they’re not making my production skills advance very much. When I abandoned SuperMemo I had about 600 items; I have about 300 in Anki. In both pieces of software, I was (or am) up to date on all of my reviews – in other words, I should “know” the words or whatever is of interest in each card. Did I in SuperMemo? Do I in Anki? No. I can understand the material, which is better than nothing, but I don’t think I could come close to producing even half of it if I needed to.

Now I’m wondering whether I should change the title of my blog. What do you folks think? I don’t really want to, because I’ve obviously already bought the domain name, languagegeek.net. On the other hand, I hate to be called Language Geek 2 (or cause someone else to be called Language Geek 1!)

I suppose a subdomain or a simple addon folder (languagegeek.net/namethief) would be fine.

Suggestions?

I won’t, however, post here without writing at least a little bit about language. So:

I have long been frustrated with people thinking that modern words with an -e slapped on the end constitute “Old English.” (Or should I say “Olde English”?) I hear expressions from people surprisingly often, showing how little they know about the evolution of their own, native language.

The most recent case was when I was discussing Myne Owne Ground, a book I had to read for a class I’m in. As can be discerned from the extended title (Myne Owne Ground: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676), the book is concerned with 17th century Virginia. Throughout the book, there are excerpts from court cases, land grants, etc. Many of the words in these excerpts are spelled incorrectly or inconsistently, and a great deal of the words have an unneeded -e appended to the end.

When talking about this with a fellow classmate, he commented that, “Yeah, all of that Old English will get you everytime.” (I suppose he could have meant “old” as an antiquated, from a previous time, etc., but I seriously doubt it.) I just nodded and smiled, but I wanted to say: “Alas, no – that’s not Old English! You’re only about 5 centuries late. If I were to show you real Old English – Anglo-Saxon – you’d realize how silly you sound.”

Old[e] English, indeed.

However, that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped working diligently on my vocabulary. I’ve started using sentence items almost exclusively; after trying them out, I’ve found that they’re much, much more helpful than a simple word-to-word translation. I’ve been using a plethora of different programs, attempting to get a system in place: SuperMemo, VTrain, Interlex, and Mnemosyne. In the past week, I’ve added about 100 sentence items to my collection, and thus far, I think the regular vocabulary work is paying off.

Let me know what you think of the new look. There are a few things I’m going to tweak, but for the most part, the theme will remain as it is now.

Thanks for your patience!

Update: Okay, after a few days of looking at that theme, I ended up… well, hating it, for a variety of reasons. At any rate, for now, I’ve dropped back to Cutline until I decide how I want LG to look.