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Grammar For Decoding

March 25, 2009 by Josh | 2 comments

Geoff wrote a post a few weeks ago about the idea of learning a language without grammar, and I quite liked this bit:

I personally favor the use of grammar for decoding, but am more reluctant to use it for encoding. That is, it’s good to find out what’s going on with a language when you’re getting frustrated trying to “just take it in.” But the more I play with Assimil programs, phrasebooks and Pimsleur, the more convinced I am that the way you master grammatical patterns is to say a lot of sentences the right way and let your brain do the grammar processing based on habits formed rather than through deliberate conscious processing.

In learning Russian, I’m experiencing something like this. I’m using Assimil’s Russisch ohne Mhe along with the New Penguin Russian Course; Assimil is more packed with sentences, whereas the Penguin course is rather grammar heavy.

I’m finding it to this to be a nice blend. If I were just using the Assimil course, I really do think that I’d be frustrated due to not fully understanding all of the declensions. On the other hand, if I were just using the Penguin course (which I at first attempted to do, many moons ago), I’d be suffering from grammar overload and not enough real Russian content.

I’m finding that I grasp grammar more fully after learning the grammar points via the Penguin course, and then seeing the grammar in use repeatedly in the Assimil course. The courses are playing off of each other very nicely, and I’m not getting tired of either.

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Language Geek New Year Intentions

January 2, 2009 by Josh | 8 comments

I know, I know – you expected to see “resolutions” in the title. I decided to copy Geoff’s lead, by using intentions rather than resolutions. Every New Year resolution I’ve ever made, I’ve failed miserably at; and as Einstein said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The empirical evidence I have on hand (that is, my memory of years gone by) says that if I make a language resolution, it’ll fail, so I’m going to avoid stepping into the quicksand altogether, and just not make any resolutions. It’s intentions this year.

So, the intentions:

  • In general, I intend to continue working on my three current languages, German, French, and Russian. This may seem silly, but I think it’s important to have that base intention. I suppose giving up language learning altogether would be a possibility, so…
  • For German, I intend to continue increasing my vocabulary, and reading native materials. I also intend to work more intensively using Hammer’s German Grammar and the associated Exercise book; I’ve neglected them too long.
  • For French, I intend to finish up working with Assimil’s New French with Ease, and start on Assimil’s Using French. I also intend to continue getting a basic vocabulary under my belt, using Mastering French Vocabulary as my primary source. While I’m not going to do so just yet, as I don’t think I’m far enough along, I intend on getting a French language exchange partner sometime during 2009.
  • For Russian, I have two specific intentions: finish working through New Penguin’s Russian Course, and finish working through Assimil’s Russisch ohne Mhe. I’d like to make it through at least one of them by mid-2009, and both of them by the end of the year. Even with regular university courses and my other language pursuits, I think this should be achievable, with a bit of focus on my part.
  • And finally, I intend to display my utter madness, by perhaps starting a new language in 2009. I won’t be doing it right now, as with Russian, I still feel like I’m floating in a vast, turbulent sea, with no life jacket. Once I feel like I’m in said ocean with a sad little boat, then I may start a new language. If I do start a new language this year, it will be Spanish.

What are your language learning intentions / resolutions / plans for the year?

And of course – happy new year! I hope you all had nice holidays.

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Cyrillic Handwriting – Take Three!

September 25, 2008 by Josh | 11 comments

After reading the comments on my last post, along with Geoff’s blog post response, I wanted to clarify my position a bit on Cyrillic handwriting. I think learning the cursive form of Cyrillic is useful for the foreign learner – up to a point, depending on the personality of the learner. As many people pointed out, it only takes an hour or two to learn the cursive forms once you know the Cyrillic alphabet, and so to not gain at least a passive recognition of it would be silly. The passive recognition, though, is where I have stopped with my usage of it. The reasons are fairly simple:

  1. I have no real plans at this point of ever living in Russia, nor of having a snail-mail Russian penpal. That latter point isn’t me being a snob; I just know my personality. I’ve had many German penpals during my studies, and they’ve all been on the internet. It’s infinitely faster, and assuming each person already has an internet connection, email is free. It’s nice to get corrections the next day, rather than two or three weeks later.
  2. It’s faster for me to print. I know many people find that their cursive writing is faster than their printing, but mine is not. I long ago abandoned my English handwriting (excluding my signature) in favor of my printing. While the handwriting is different for Cyrillic and the Roman alphabets, there are many similarities between them in handwritten form, and so it would seem my slowness in writing English handwriting has crossed the bridge to Russian. I have to write it at a real crawl to make it legible, which brings me to my last point:
  3. I can read my printing much easier than my handwriting, whether it be English or Russian. The slowness and relative illegibility of my handwriting are the exact reasons which caused me to abandon it so long ago. While I can now quickly read my English handwriting (when I use it, which is practically never), due to the Russian words still being rather unfamiliar to me, I really struggle to read many of them when I write them in cursive. When I print them with block letters, if I know the word, there’s no struggle. I see it and I recognize the word; there’s no 5 minute process of peering at it, saying “is that 2 И’s, or a Ш?” I can actually see such peering and wondering as detrimental to my acquisition of the language, and Russian has enough hurdles without me adding more! :)

In short, for me, using the cursive form of the writing has no practical use for me, and I don’t gain any particular buzz of “Russian-ness” from making myself use it; on the contrary, I actually find it a bit uncomfortable, just as I find writing in cursive English uncomfortable these days.

Having said that, if you’re learning Russian, do learn the cursive, at least to a passive recognition stage; and furthermore, if you find it faster, more legible, or just plain more fun to use cursive over block letters – by all means, do so!

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Cyrillic Handwriting, Take Two

August 28, 2008 by Josh | 5 comments

I posted back in March of ‘07 about some videos that Natasha at Spoonful of Russian had made, showing how to write each Cyrillic letter. These videos are still available, but if you’re wanting something a bit quicker, Brown University has a page with all of the Cyrillic letters; hover your mouse over each letter to see how it’s written. The “videos” are actually animated GIFs, so they’re much quicker to load than the QuickTime movies on Natasha’s site. They automatically loop, so you can quickly verify if you’re making the letters correctly or not.

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WordReference.com Now Has German and Russian Dictionaries

July 17, 2008 by Josh | 2 comments

WordReference.com used to have a German dictionary, but for whatever reason, they had to take it down. If I remember correctly, the publisher of the dictionary decided they didn’t want WordReference.com to offer it for free.

I was pleasantly surprised, however, when I went to the site yesterday to look up a French word, and saw that they have a German dictionary again, as well as a new Russian one. This makes it so that the site now offers translations for:

Pretty cool.

For those wondering, the new German dictionary being offered is the Pocket Oxford-Duden German Dictionary (2008 version), and the Russian is the Pocket Oxford Russian Dictionary (2006 version).

Throttling Russian

March 24, 2008 by Josh | 8 comments

I’ve recently throttled back on studying Russian, largely because I feel that I just don’t have enough time to continue enlarging my German vocabulary, learn the basics of French with my Assimil course, and learn the basics of Russian. I’ve not ran into any troubles in continuing with German and starting with French, probably because when I started French, I was quite familiar with most, if not all, of the grammar of German, and had a decent sized vocabulary. My German learning now consists of just learning more (and more) vocabulary; there aren’t any new concepts being added.

Trying to learn the basics of two drastically different languages has proven a bit more difficult. For French, I’ve been usually spending 30-45 minutes a day, doing one Assimil lesson a day. I don’t really have enough time in the day to spend a similar amount of time on Russian as well, and doing anything less, I feel like I’m making little to no progress. There’s so much to cover when starting a new language, and with the Russian declension system, it seems even worse. With the limited amount of time I’ve been able to give it, I feel as if I’ve done little more than learn enough to get things mixed up. :)

I think my attack plan at this point is going to be to finish the Assimil course, which, if reports from folks online are trustworthy, will give me a very good base in French on which to build. Perhaps at that point I’ll be able to continue with German and French, and start over with Russian. I’m going to continue peeking at my Russian texts, but I’m not going to try and set any real goals for myself with it right now, because I think I’d just be setting myself up for failure.

In short, I believe that, in jumping in with both French and Russian, I bit off more than I could chew.

As an aside (I’ll blog more about this soon), I’m nearing lesson 50 in the Assimil course, at which point I’ll start the second, or “active” wave. I’m looking forward to seeing how my understanding of the language progresses from that point on; thus far I’ve had a blast using the course, and I’m at least passively understanding everything. Most importantly, it’s been fairly painless work – the Assimil course is fun, which is not something I can say of cramming grammar tables. :)

Princeton Russian in a zip file

October 26, 2007 by Josh | 2 comments

Harold let me know that the Princeton Russian course, which I had made a torrent file for, is now available as a zip file from freelanguagecourses.com. I can assure you from experience that getting it from that site will be 1) much faster and 2) much less hassle, than it would be if you got it via the torrent.  You can locate the zip file link here; just pay attention to the stipulations for the download. (Basically, contact the creator and let him know you’re using it.)

Thanks, Harold!

A torrent of the Princeton Russian courses

September 22, 2007 by Josh | 12 comments

I posted previously about the wonderful Russian courses available for free from Princeton. They have, however, recently taken the courses down. This happened once before in the past, and the courses were later put back up, but there’s no real way to know whether Princeton will do this again.

However – I have come to the rescue! Before the files disappeared, I had downloaded them all to my hard drive. I was able to contact the creator of the courses, David Freedel, and asked if he had any problem with me sharing them. He said, basically, “Nope, I don’t work at Princeton anymore – feel free to share them however you wish!”

So, I’ve created a torrent of the files. You can download the torrent here. Please note that, since I just created the torrent, I’m the only seeder – so you’ll need to be patient with the download! I’d also ask, if it’s not too inconvenient, that you please help seed the files, at least for a while, once you’ve downloaded them. That way the whole brunt of the downloads won’t be placed on my internet connection.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: I screwed up the creation of the torrent, using a tracker that won’t work. I’m recreating the torrent now; I’ll post a new link soon. Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE #2: Alright, here is the new torrent link. Please ignore the numbers (0 seeds, 0 leechers); I know for a fact they’re wrong. I checked the actual seeding files a few minutes ago, and there were 25 peers connected out of a total queue of 66. And I know there’s at least one seed – me.

What am I doing, language-wise?

September 4, 2007 by Josh | No comments

I’ve not posted about how my language learning is going for a while now, so here’s the obligatory update.

My German is going extremely well. It’s mostly just an activity of vocabulary acquisition at this point. I’m familiar with all of the grammar, and can read most things with a bit of help from a dictionary. I’m still working on my listening comprehension, by regularly listening to German podcasts and audiobooks. I’m slowly chipping away at the German version of Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen.

I’ve shuffled my learning plan around some in regards to Russian. I was initially just working with the texts I have, Russian for Beginners (Duff) and New Penguin Russian Course (Brown). While I was making so-so progress with them, I felt like I wasn’t really learning how to say anything. So, I’ve added in a final element, which comes with a huge amount of audio: the Princeton Russian course. I posted about this previously, and sadly, it appears Princeton has taken the course material down. However, I downloaded it all when it was available. I’m listening to one dialogue a day, repeatedly, until I understand it in full. I’ve already found that I was overpronouncing a lot of things, in particular, the y soft sound on е, ё, etc. Despite my efforts, I’m still finding that my progress with Russian is much, much slower than my progress was when I started learning German. However, I think from listening to the dialogues regularly from the Princeton course, I’m starting to get a better feel for the language.

Finally, I’ve decided to throw another language onto my list: French. I’m using the Assimil course, New French with Ease, and am loving every minute of it. For those not familiar with Assimil, the setup of the course is thus:

You have the audio portion, and the book. The audio is all in the target language. In the book, you have a transcript of each lesson on one side of the page, and the translation on the opposite page. There are also grammar and vocabulary notes for each lesson, but these are generally kept relatively short. You go at the material in two waves: the first passive, the second active. You do the first 50 or so lessons passively, simply listening and repeateding the audio, and making sure you understand all of it. Once you’ve reached lesson 50 or thereabouts, you go back to the beginning of the book, and go through the lessons “actively”, doing the exercises and translating from English to French. While doing this, you obviously continue on with the passive phase until you reach the end of the course. I’m about 10 lessons into the course now, and I really like it. I wish I’d started learning German with the Assimil course. I’d nab the Russian course, but they don’t offer a new version, at least not with English as the base version. I guess there’s not much market right now for English-speaking people wanting to learn Russian.

Setting up a phonetic Cyrillic keyboard in Windows XP

August 12, 2007 by Josh | 9 comments

I wrote back in January about setting up my computer to allow me to type in Cyrillic. Setting it up was the easy part; the hard part was memorizing what English letters corresponded to what Cyrillic letters. The default Windows XP Cyrillic keyboard layout is the same one that is used in Russian-speaking countries – that is, there is little rhyme nor reason to how the letters are laid out on a keyboard based on the Latin alphabet. For example, the T key produces the Cyrillic Е, the Y key produces Cyrillic Н, and the W key produces the Cyrillic Ц.

Still having not mastered the Russian keyboard layout, I went hunting for a better solution – and found one. From this page, you can install a phonetic keyboard layout which makes a lot more sense. Instead of having to memorize the random (to English users) layout, with the phonetic layout, you only have to memorize the placement of 7 of the letters. The rest of them are fairly logical – for example, the D key produces Д, the U key produces У, and the S key produces С.

The fellow who maintains the site has a fairly complicated set of instructions, which I personally found to be too complicated. If you’re running Windows XP or Windows Vista, just do this:

  1. Download this zip file, and unzip it to an easily accessible (and findable!) folder.
  2. Go to the folder and double click setup.exe.
  3. Wait.
  4. That’s it.

You should now have, on your taskbar, a button that says “EN”. Click on it and click RU to switch to Russian. The keyboard layout that you’ll be using, when typing Cyrillic, will be this:

yawert.png

If, at any time, you wish to remove the phonetic keyboard, just return to the setup.exe file, double click it, and click Remove.

Russian reflections

July 12, 2007 by Josh | 3 comments

During the past few months, I’ve really been trying to bring some balance to the amount of time I spend on my two current languages, German and Russian. My German is coming along nicely, as I add more and more vocabulary to my memory. I have, however, been a bit frustrated with the advances I’ve made with my Russian.

I first started learning Russian earlier this year, in January, when I received a copy of the New Penguin Russian Course book. It is now July of this year, and where am I? Chapter 7, 50 or so pages into the book. Not a whole lot of progress, when you look at it like that.

However, when I look at it in a different way, I feel a bit better:

I know a smattering of Russian words; the present tense conjugations of a few different types of verbs; and the basics of adjectives. I also know a bit about the nominative case, the prepositional case, and the accusative case. Furthermore, I can write in Russian script, and pronounce Russian with few problems (some of the big consonant clusters still make my English-speaking tongue wrap around itself).

I skimmed through my book earlier, looking far, far ahead, and at first felt rather daunted. A lot of the grammar looks very complicated, and for a brief moment, I even considered throwing in the towel. But then I thought back to how I felt when I first started working on learning Russian.

When I first started with the book, the Cyrillic alphabet looked like something from a different planet. Me? I’d never be able to make sense of that. Well, I can now make sense of it just fine. Later, I started trying to learn the words at the end of each chapter, in the vocabulary lists. When I first started, I felt that I’d never remember those slippery Russian words. Well, now I remember about 95% of them. I had similar feelings when I first ran into the prepositional cases of personal pronouns, but those have since been locked into my memory.

In other words, if I try to worry about learning all the grammar of Russian all at once, of course it’s going to appear daunting. Of course I’ll be overwhelmed. Anyone would be. But if I just keep chipping away at it, like someone chipping away at a large boulder with a small chisel, eventually, they will chisel the boulder down to nothing. It may take them quite a long time, and they’re certainly not going to pull it off in a day or two, but it’s possible.

It just takes a lot of steady, slow work. I need to keep that in mind as I chisel away at my Russian.

Learn the basics of Russian through videos

June 26, 2007 by Josh | 2 comments

While exploring the forums at MasterRussian.com, I came across a post pointing to a set of Russian language learning videos on YouTube.

To make it a bit easier on Language Geek readers, here’s all of the links to the individual videos, along with what they go over:

RL101 – 1 :Some Enchanted Evening to learn Russian!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlJw08uMvE4

RL101 – 2 : The Six Letters That Are The Same
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj9B-d7iDkw

RL101 – 3: Six Letters that look the same but are different!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnq0LrVauTQ

RL101 – 4 The next five letters
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eoN46jprhU

RL101 – 5 Revision of the first 17 letters
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly_XZFHFYPs

RL101 – 6 The Next Five – 2/3 of the way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiSzIXXkl3U

RL101 – 7 The Sibilants
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuyP2×8vRDU

RL101 – 8: The Missing Vowels – part one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbdzd-BNC-U

RL101 – 8: The Missing Vowels – part two
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3OidoFoo2A

RL101 – 9 Soft sign, hard sign
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wbyiBKeFKI

RL101 – 10 Russkaya Azbuka
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDEYGwDEahc

RL102 – 1 Basic Russian grammar lesson 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUVNA_loG_o

RL102 – 2 Basic Russian grammar lesson 2 part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS6ksHAT4sY

RL102 – 2 Basic Russian grammar lesson 2 part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F0eH5paKW4

RL102 – 3 Basic Russian grammar lesson 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnp–PtRajc

RL102 – 4/1 Basic Russian grammar lesson 4 part one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQKfQIZRFVY

RL102 – 4/2 Basic Russian grammar lesson 4 part two
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtXb19sMu7g

Roll your “r”s now, baybee!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPIpTERosZY

RL102 – 5/1 Basic Russian grammar lesson 5 part one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSLtHXrwm30

RL102 – 5/2 Basic Russian grammar lesson 5 part two
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87o6TS3rUaw

RL102 – 6/1 Basic Russian grammar lesson 6 part one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ_RYKpYfg0

RL102 – 6/2 Basic Russian grammar lesson 6 part two (corr)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJW-IamMaCs

Gold List Method for learning to L/T memory part one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH6FERpM5fQ

Gold List Method for learning to L/T memory part two
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTyJiGVJ0LM

RL102 – 7 Basic Russian grammar lesson 7
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaPCFWLN5uI

By the way, despite him speaking English with a thick Russian accent, he’s not actually Russian; it’s just part of his skit. He’s actually English.

The top 2000 words in Russian

June 16, 2007 by Josh | 3 comments

I came across a good resource for learners of Russian just now: this page, which has the top 2000 words used in modern Russian. The words provided are based on The frequency dictionary for Russian.

According to the frequency dictionary, the top 2000 most used words in Russian account for 72% of the word forms used in texts, so if you learn these, you’ll be well on your way to being able to (slowly) work your way through many Russian texts. The site provides both lists of the words, coupled with their usage frequency, along with their parts of speech, and of course, the translations. Also available are quizes for all of the words.

While the frequency dictionary page doesn’t offer any definitions, they offer lists of Russian words beyond the top 2000. They offer one list of “32,000 words with frequency greater than 1 ipm (one instance per million).” They offer a second list, with the top 5,000 most often used words in Russian. I’d say the latter would be more useful for learners of Russian.

There’s a bit of “interesting” data on the frequency dictionary page which I enjoyed reading:

  • The average word length is 5.28 characters.
  • The average sentence length is 10.38 words.
  • 1000 most frequent lemmas cover 64.0708% of word forms in texts.
  • 2000 most frequent lemmas cover 71.9521% of word forms in texts.
  • 3000 most frequent lemmas cover 76.6824% of word forms in texts.
  • 5000 most frequent lemmas cover 82.0604% of word forms in texts.

I think it’s interesting to note that the first 2000 words gets you to 72%, and yet learning another three thousand words will only gain another 10%. Diminishing returns, ineed. :)

Russian grammar overview and dictionary from Cornell

June 10, 2007 by Josh | No comments

Earlier today I was looking around online for some Russian material, namely a grammar overview. I ended up finding that, and quite a lot more!

For grammar, Cornell has the Beginning Russian Grammar page. While all of the essentials of Russian grammar seem to be covered there, the explanations might seem a bit short for beginners. However, it’s a good reference page if you’re already well along the Russian language road.

What I found far more interesting, however, is their Russian Dictionary Tree. It’s an expanded version of this book, 5000 Russian Words: With All Their Inflected Forms and Other Grammatical Information. The authors of the book, who apparently work at Cornell, have made the expanded online version available for anyone to use. Considering the stand-alone CD version offered by Lexicon Bridge Publishers costs $54.50, this is quite a deal, to have it online for free!

Here’s the description of the Russian Dictionary Tree from Lexicon Bridge Publishers:

This 12,000-entry dictionary allows you to search for a Russian or English word, and gives you all the forms and all the endings for every word. Unlike many electronic dictionaries, it is not an abridged version of a printed dictionary. On the contrary, definitions are far more detailed, and many entries contain examples and extensive notes on style and usage.

I’ve looked up a few words thus far, and they aren’t kidding – it’s quite thorough! All of the words I’ve looked up have had a complete declension table, but most of them also had example sentences showing how the word was used.

To use the dictionary, there’s only one thing you have to do: install one of Cornell’s Russian fonts. This is because they use a special font that allows them to place accent marks over letters. It’s not hard to install, though, if you follow their short instructions.

Looking for a good Russian news podcast? Here’s one.

June 2, 2007 by Josh | 1 comment

The Slavic department of the George Washington University offers a bi-weekly podcast (or webcast, as they call it). The webcast, entitled News of the week in simplified Russian, offers, as the title of the webcast indicates, summaries of the news from the past 2 weeks. :) Snippet from the site:

News of the week in simplified Russian is posted to the web bi-weekly and delivers a survey of the previous two weeks’ news in simplified standard Russian Listeners of Voice of America’s “Special English” broadcasts will recognize the slightly slower rate of speech and textual redundancy which characterize these webcasts.

Why News of the week in simplified Russian ? Back in Soviet times, the news was easy to understand. The propaganda-laden messages were predictable and the diction clear and slow. Post-communist newscasts feature telegraphic speech and slurry diction. Our webcasts serve as a stepping stone between the teacher talk of the classroom and the “real” Russian of the media.

Authentic news. The news itself is taken from a number of Russian sites, including Lenta.Ru, Vesti.Ru, Ytro.ru and other authentic sites.

Perhaps one of the best features of the site is that there are full transcripts of every episode they’ve ever done. It’s recommended that you listen to the audio first without the text, to get the most out of it – but once you get stuck, you can always fall back on the transcripts. Not only are transcripts available, but there are also exercises for every single episode.

The archives for the website go back to 2003, so there’s a lot of content here. The interface of the website is a bit clunky, but it’s worth fighting with.

In regards to language level, the webcasts are recommended for “students with listening skills at ACTFL Intermediate Mid to Intermediate High. In most cases, that corresponds to college Russian at the end of second-year.”

Last (but certainly not least!), the webcasts are a project of the National Capital Language Resource Center (NCLRC).

More Russian cursive writing videos

May 26, 2007 by Josh | 1 comment

I posted back at the end of March that Natalia of A Spoonful of Russian was making videos of how to write Russian cursive letters. In the videos, she also sounds out the letters. I hadn’t checked A Spoonful of Russian for a while – until today actually! – but it looks like she’s finished up her series. Here are links to all of the videos, along with the letters that are covered in each one:

And of course, don’t just watch the videos and leave her site. She’s got a lot of good material there, both in her regular podcasts as well as in her Downloads section.