Sometimes the best you can do is to keep things from getting worse.

[mereilin]

Yesterday for a couple of glorious hours I had the house ALL TO MYSELF. My husband went out with his siblings to finish cleaning out their late father's apartment, Sadie went to a friend's house for a movie date, and Dan left for a bike ride. I should of course have spent that time getting a jump on my Tuesday deadline, but the sun was shining and the house was quiet and I just couldn't force myself to do it.

Then Dan came home from his ride, and his friend Lindsey came with him, and the two of them spent the entire afternoon watching videos together on the Chromebook. Just before Sadie came home, her friend Jenny (Lindsey's sister) showed up on her bike, and from the time Sadie got home at 5:00 there were four of them in the living room watching videos.

Around suppertime I texted the girls' parents to ask if they wouldn't come and hang out for the evening since we already had their kids; they had some stuff they needed to finish before Monday but came over to drop off pizzas and drinks... and the kids hung out together and had pizza and microwave mug brownies until 9:30 when Jon finally got home with the car.

So yeah... I really should have used that time in the morning. But I think the fact that I didn't was the main reason I didn't mind the noise and disorder of the two extra kids all evening.

I've been mostly working this morning, and I do have this evening and all day tomorrow, so it should be okay.

In an hour or so we're all driving down to visit Jon's mother. I haven't had occasion to mention to her that I'm studying Japanese (she's a native speaker). More than trying to speak, I'm interested in having her look at my kana scribblings to see if they're actually recognizable to anyone besides myself.

And I splurged and ordered a book online called Remembering the Kanji. It got mixed reviews; some people said it was a silly parlor trick that didn't help anyone learn the language, and other people said it was the most brilliant thing they'd ever seen. I was sold when I read the preview chapter online. The premise is that if you can learn to recognize the pictures independently of learning the vocabulary -- by assigning them an English meaning that's similar in concept to the Japanese reading -- then when you encounter them again with the appropriate vocabulary you can just substitute the reading. The author noted that native Chinese speakers would do this as a matter of course, as the kanji are really Chinese characters to begin with. They just have to learn to read them differently.

So. The book should be here next week; I guess I'll be finding out for myself!

Comments

[seabroth.livejournal.com]

I only buy textbooks if I can't find them online for download already, or available at the library. So I always check Google and uztranslations. Then I can scan pages, take notes, or print them out.

[mereilin.livejournal.com]

I do try to avail myself of all the free resources I can get my hands on, but maybe because I predate the Internet age by a generation or so, there's something about a book I can hold in my hands. :)

[seabroth.livejournal.com]

My eyesight is really bad, I'm almost blind. So I prefer e-books and e-texts and so on since I can really easily enlarge the size and have an easier time reading. Plus I'm poor so I can't afford books hahah.

When I have a physical textbook, I end up being a bit scared of it for some reason. So if I just have one chapter printed out on paper, or a PDF I can scroll through, it feels less serious and I'm not so scared to dive into it.