Generalismo

Here’s the video I said I was putting together. Beyond the fact that I have to be careful when I chew (as to not get food in the large holes I have in my gums :P), that I have to rinse with salt water, and I’m just a tad bit sore when opening my mouth all of the way, I feel like I’m just about done with this wisdom tooth thing. My gum on the left side is a little “flappy” where they cut. It’s not totally loose, I can just see where they cut and there’s a flap at the end that wobbles around.

There is absolutely nothing graphic about the video, and there is no footage about the surgery. Just me rambling before and after. There is shot of me on percocet though, and it’s interesting to me to see the contrast between the shot before the percocet and about an hour after I had taken it. Basically it’s Bonnie all drugged up and very happy You can also see the cool map I have on my wall now instead of the quilt

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I’ve been made the unofficial book lady at the secondhand store I volunteer at. That’s GREAT, because in organizing and putting all the donated books on the shelf I get too look at all of the books that come in. Although the books were getting put on the shelf just fine before I started helping, there wasn’t a whole lot of organization outside of a few specified shelves. Novels and how-tos were right next to each other, classics were mixed in with silly novels, etc., etc. So I have it semi-organized now, I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep that up or how much more I will be able to organize. It’s fun anyway.

Here are some of my latest finds:

• A few readers from a history class at a college around here. These are so nice! They’re old, but they’re works from Bede and Gregory of Tours, and that sort of thing. There is one on Rome, two on the Dark Ages, and one on The Peloponnesian War. They’re such easy reading, I guess they must have been meant for beginners at history. In any case, I’m enjoying them.
• A Russian Phrasebook. I don’t really want to learn Russian, but I told myself I’d just keep it around “in case.” That’s what I said about the German dictionary, too
• A book of Russian short stories. So far these have been very good. I hate going through a modern short story book and getting half way (or not even that far) through a story and discovering I really am not getting anything out of it, and quitting. Or making it all the way to the end just to say “What a waste of time!”
• Various books on language and linguistics. These mostly haven’t been gone through yet, because I know it’s going to take brain power to appreciate them. The phonetics as described in Invitation to Linguistics (Mario Pei) have been very interesting! It’s amazing to hear the way we make vowels described, and how consonants are classed and what characteristics they have. As I’m reading through this chapter I’m constantly testing out what it says and am surprisingly delighted when what is written proves to be just what my mouth is doing. Do you know where your tongue is when you say “father,” (your tongue is low) as opposed to “deed” (high). There are also different places that the tongue arches, and there are tiny variations in the placement of the tongue that make huge differences in how the sound comes out. But I’m going to stop here because I don’t really know much about it and explaining will only reveal my lack of expertise

Thank God for this wonderful opportunity to find good books. If you know of a Salvation Army or thrift store with a rough looking book section, maybe you would like to volunteer to straighten them out (the books, that is). In the meantime, you’ll end up making a thorough search through them all.

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I’ve downloaded sermons from sermonindex.com and sermonaudio.com in Spanish and in German. I even found Ray Comfort’s Hell’s Best Kept Secret in a variety of languages. (Be forewarned, some of them are not complete). I put them on my mp3 player and I have been trying to listen to them whenever I get a chance. I don’t know exactly what they’re saying, but I think it’ll help to have my ear accustomed to hearing them. Now an interesting question would be is if you don’t understand a language but you are exposed to it enough to ingrain some in your subconscious, will you remember any of it as meaningful after you are fluent in the language? If you memorized Scripture in Spanish, for instance, in the abstract without knowing what a single word meant, and then you studied Spanish for a while without reviewing the verses you had memorized, would they just pop into your head as meaningful? If I listen to sermons that are really not biblical could I be influenced by them by ingraining them into my subconscious without currently knowing what they mean? I’m finding the question hard to explain, but hopefully you will understand anyway.

Posted by Bonnie under books, english, languages, learning, recipe

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I am getting fed up with getting ims, emails, and now, seeing even ads with the spelling of “ur” for You’re/Your and “U’ for you. To some people it isn’t a big deal, either to use it or to see it, but it’s soo widespread now. Oops. Did I transgress the laws of spelling when I said “soooo” with more than the called for amount of ‘O’s? Ok, so I guess we’re all guilty of breaking the rules sometimes. I guess the reason I’m not yet accustomed to spelling words that way is because I’m not a mobile messenger. I didn’t even have any messengers installed on my new laptop until a few weeks ago I downloaded Skype.

By the way, for any of you who have Skype or are going to get it, are you aware that in their user agreement they have the rights to record all audio, text, or video communication that is received or sent by Skype? I think they can use it as they see fit, or however they word it.

I have to yet again mention LiveMocha.com even though it feels like I blog about this once a week. I usually go there at least once a day and do some Spanish (and lately German.) It’s a great way to learn a language. If you’ve been thinking about taking up a language , why not go and check it out? I was thinking I wanted to learn French, but I discovered learning how to pronounce certain sounds that don’t occur in our language was too painstaking. So I decided German was a better choice. And then, when I read up in the book I have on it I discovered that the definite article changes based on the context! (In these three sentences: The man is here. The man’s hat is here. I gave the man a hat. I see the man. The definite article (the) would be different in all three cases!). For now though, learning German articles beats learning French sounds.

For anyone here that does visit live mocha, look me up: Authorized77 One note of interest - the site doesn’t function well with the browser Opera. I use Firefox when visiting livemocha and it works fine.

Be careful who you talk with, though, and be aware that cultural and language differences might result in some quite strange conversation. Someone from Brazil asked me if Americans shower every day, and do they smell OK? I later found out from a different, more globally aware Brazilian, that there is a myth in some parts of South America and in Africa that people in cold climates don’t shower.

One more word on language learning. Don’t worry if all you learn is a smattering. I know that I want to be able to converse in Spanish and my goal is to become at least halfway fluent. But I don’t really have an immediate use for German, I may just learn a bit and then move on to something else. Learning languages is almost like learning music. Once you learn how language works, it’s much easier to learn how to speak more than one. It’s not quite as simple as it sounds, but it is a whole lot easier if you know about the structure of languages - even your own language. Hey, if I had studied more English in high school I would have already know about all sorts of things that I am just starting to learn in Spanish! So whatever you find yourself studying, just apply yourself and chances are, whether you remember it or not, it’ll help out down the road. When you go over drills of verbs, or multiplication tables, or memory verses, or anything else, you may not be consciously memorizing it, but it often happens that later on it just pops into your mind when needed. And I’m convinced the more you do, the better your brain becomes at memorizing.

So if you’re bored, and want something relaxing to do? Go over your verb conjugations and don’t make it a point to memorize them. Just read them, study them, make observations if you can, and let the material seep into your brain while you’re having a fun time. If you forget them, it doesn’t matter. You can’t erase what you continually put into you.

Do I sound nuts? If so, you’re drawing a completely logical conclusion

I’ve been struck with a desire to write more music. I know I’m not that great of a flat picker in the big realm of flat pickers, and I don’t know that I’ll ever be really good. Good, maybe someday, but not really good. So I got to thinking, if I’m not going to be up there playin’ with the big boys, I may as well try to do something behind the scenes. If song writing is an art that can be learned, I want to learn what it takes. Someone told me once to write every day. If I had done that since he told me, I’d have just about 100 songs written I reckon. Out of those 100, I’m pretty sure that ONE would have been decent enough to play. But no, I’ve let a lot of times pass, a lot of emotion just waste away without one word to describe it. Like painting, every piece doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. If it sharpens your skills in some way then it wasn’t a failure. So if you feel the urge to write a song, don’t push it away because it might not be any good. Of course, it might not be any good (I’ve written loads of the bad ones!) but just write it down, get the chords down, etc, maybe record it in *“rough draft style” and put it away. Ah, yes, it’s exciting! But don’t play it for anyone. Just keep it in a safe place and continue to write when the urge arises, or if you can make yourself write. Then go back to it in a few weeks, or months, and see how it feels. Are there any things that pop out that make you cringe? Should you change a few words at the end of the line before the chorus? Then, if you’re satisfied with it, share it with people if you have the hankering to. It‘s really painful to play a song for someone and realize that you can hear a bunch of “mistakes,“ and you know the person you‘re playing it for can hear all those things too. Correct and revise before you let people hear it. I’m not saying you can’t get some help or advice from someone you trust, but it’s a shame that you lose the urge to write because you think you’ve failed and all you can remember are those embarrassing moments of putting yourself out on the proverbial limb. It’s hard to tell if you’re comfortable with a song immediately after you write it, which is why I suggest waiting a little bit before appraising it.

Posted by Bonnie under english, learning, spanish, world

[4] Comments

The resources available to aid in our learning of foreign languages has changed since the good ol’ days. I remember starting out with the Berlitz Language Course records - not that I’m old enough to have purchased it new, I got it used for nothing because someone else didn’t want it anymore. Now, instead of records we have CDs containing not only text and audio, but also pictures and videos.

Rosetta Stone is one computer program that is popular, and Pimsleur is a popular audio course. There are also programs from Berlitz, their company being over 125 years old.

There are also many free resources available. For example, Youtube has a variety of different vloggers that make videos primarily in Spanish, and some made with the express intent to serve the student of Spanish language. Ben and Marina Diez, who are a couple in Spain, make videos and pod casts in Spanish directed at the student. But forget the typical lesson material, Ben y Marina have pod casts on things like MySpace, the ethics of tazing, and summers in Madrid. .

There are also a wide variety of internet radio stations available. No longer do you need a shortwave radio to be able to hear what is broadcasting in Mexico, or even Spain. They include talk shows and music of all types. All you need is a high speed connection, some speakers, and a search engine. Check out this list of Spanish radio stations to help you learn every day, spoken Spanish.

Still, with all the courses available, languages can be very difficult to learn without someone to interact with. Find someone to call on the phone, or the meet with in person on a regular basis to practice what you’ve learned. For Spanish, you can visit the forum at Notes In Spanish and practice what you’ve learned and get feedback from others.

Posted by Bonnie under books, english, languages, learning, spanish

[10] Comments

For me hyphens have always been a kind of curious wonder. Putting in
hyphens is fun, but worrying afterwards about whether or not it was
correctly used is not fun.

One common use of hyphens is to separate words that won’t fit at the
end of a line. They should be placed in places that break up  the word in
roughly equal parts, and between syllables, such as ”encour-aging”,
and not ”enc-ouraging.” This post, however, is going to be about one
particular use of hyphens that I never can remember.

Hypens are sometimes used to make two words read like one word.
This site likens them to trailer hitches, making the two one. Hyphens
are used to connect words that make up an adjective describing nouns,
such as:

•  coffee-brown colored suit
• well-known celebrity
• nineteenth-century play
• strawberry-smoothie flavoring
• red-apple smoothie flavoring

Now in the next to last case, you can be sure that the flavoring is
“strawberry smoothie,” and not that it’s a strawberry flavoring meant
only for use in smoothies. If it was a flavoring for smoothies, the hyphen
would not be necessary. However in the last case, it is a smoothie
flavoring (red apple).

Here are some more examples of different meanings of the same sentences
without and with hyphens

•  black-raspberry soda (the flavoring is black raspberry)
• black raspberry soda (the soda is black, the flavor is raspberry)
• great-pink daisy (the variety is great pink)
• great pink daisy (it’s a pink daisy that is a wonderful flower)
• green-crayon carpet (it’s a carpet that is the same color as a green crayon)
• green crayon carpet (it’s a carpet made out of crayons)

Note that there are some two word combinations that are acceptable without the hyphen, such as waterproof, or highschool, or floppy disk. Check a current dictionary to be sure. Hopefully this clears up some of the confusion over hyphens, and I’ll be hyphenating two-worded adjectives without worry. To read more check out the information at The Writer’s Complex, or from The University of Sussex.

Posted by Bonnie under Uncategorized, english

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