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DONE [T-NA] Running tests

Hey Winston,

Just testing if my Hugo workflow still functions.

Test 1 Test 2.

DONE [T-927] Planned absence

Hey Rine,

Just wanted to let you know that I’ll be traveling for a vacation the next six days so I won’t be able to blog.

I probably won’t be able to do active immersion neither. But at least I’ll try to maintain passive immersion.

It seems that I won’t be able to drive tomorrow because I managed to injure myself a little bit today, so I’m not sure I’ll be able to operate the clutch with my left foot.

You see, today I was doing my SRS reps while my son was sleeping in the other room. It’s real hot these days, I live in the attic, and we don’t have A/C.

When my son woke up he started crying for water. I jumped like a puma and started sprinting to the room he was in. This super fast urgent reaction on my part is a leftover habit since the days he was a tiny helpless baby.

Only this time I didn’t make it through the door in once piece and instead slammed my pinkie toe against the doorway so hard I had to take a fall and crawl the rest of the way.

This is all to say that I’ll perhaps be able to do some passive immersion while sitting in the passenger seat tomorrow, nursing my swollen pinkie. We’ll see how it goes.

DONE [T-928] Points system to rate my immersion

Dear Rine,

Six sentences mined today. The show I’m watching is the best immersion source so far. It’s a kid-friendly high-school sports drama so the language level is simpler than the show I watched previously.

Still though, my mind wanders. Particularly when I have to stop to look up a word.

So I was thinking I could introduce penalty points. Like this: each time I drift away from active immersion, I’ll trim five minutes from my clock report.

With this kind of checks & balances mechanism, maybe I’ll be more hesitant to indulge in distractions.

I know it sounds silly. The number doesn’t matter either way, you might think. And maybe you are right. But I know how much I hate when I go out for a bike ride and my GPS malfunctions and as a result I don’t have the log of all the kilometers I rode. I like collecting cool stats. I like hoarding numbers.

TODO [T-929] How I run this blog

DONE [T-930] Weekly stats

Rine, sir,

Let me introduce a weekly stats table as well:

In conjunction with the daily:

Well that’s, I don’t know…

It’s not bad I’d say.

But won’t get me too far by the time a thousand days end.

I guess I’m keeping the oven warm, you know.

In cycling there’s the idea of “junk miles.” Have I spoken about this? I’m not sure. Let me search the archives.

Ha!

I did, from post 961, look:

Among cyclists, there’s this concept of junk miles. These are all the miles you ride that don’t contribute to your fitness. When you ride around without any plan or purpose, noodling around, neither slow enough for aerobic adaptations nor fast enough for anaerobic capacity gains, we call those junk miles.

Well, I think that most people, me included, accumulate a lot of mental junk miles throughout the day. That’s all the time we spend spinning trivial thoughts in your brain… looping over the same set of vague worries… thinking about money and bills or entertaining some other base instincts. There’s perhaps an opportunity to replace those mental junk miles with something more constructive. And if there are no other opportunities presently available, drilling tricky vocab may be a good choice, perhaps?

Well I also have some junk miles in immersion. My thoughts drift. So I manually trim down the clock records. For instance, when I clocked out today it measured an hour and fifteen minutes of immersion. But I arbitrarily removed 20 minutes to account for the few times I wandered off to Facebook.

If only I could become better at eliminating all the junk miles I accumulate throughout my days. Whether it’s while cycling, thinking, browsing the web. Days would be longer.

Oh, since I quoted post 961 it might be a good time to reflect on the experiment I ran, if you remember:

when I rode this Monday, I realized that this might be an excellent opportunity to do a mental subset review of a some items from my N5 deck that were giving me some trouble in the last few days: the ordinal numbers for days of the month.

You know: 1日、二日、三日，四日、五日… and so on all the way to 10 (after which they take on a predictable pattern). I kept messing them up and confusing them with each other.

So I thought if I can practice for long enough to nail them down while out riding, they will stop troubling me. And it would be a great use of time, relative to whistling the Indiana Jones theme on repeat.

The challenge I gave myself is to time my counting with my pedal strokes, which hover at a cadence of about 90 rpm.

I can tell you, for the first few kilometers while I tried to drill the numbers, my head was hurting, wanting to burst out of the vents of my helmet. My brain was, or so I imagined, burning more glucose than my quads. I was unable to count to three without stumbling and stuttering.

But I tried and tried and tried. It felt like I was clearing a neural pathway through a thicket, going back and forth, clearing more of the undergrowth with each pass.

After about an hour I mastered the first four digits. Then I practiced from the fourth to the eight. And then I tried chaining them all together.

And indeed, I can tell you, by the time I turned off from the main road for the last 10 km, the tricky ordinals became completely automatic and trivial. The next day, on my way back, I did a few more drills to verify, and indeed it was still easy.

Now, SuperMemo can take over the long-term maintenance of this newly cleared neural pathway, to prevent the creeping undergrowth of forgetfulness to take over again. I ran into a few of those items today and yesterday and I was able to answer them quickly, with no confusion or hesitation.

Whether this newly-acquired ease is a short-term effect or a permanent gain (as long as its augmented with SRS reviews) remains to be seen.

Well I can confirm now, about a month later, that I still have a solid grasp of those numbers.

DONE [T-931] I found new shows!

Hey Rine,

I’m excited because I found two new shows to watch!

The first one is the live action version of Yowamushi Pedal, this one:

The second is perhaps one of my favorite Anime movies of all time: Nasu, Summer in Andalusia:

This second one isn’t a TV show but a standalone movie, 45 minutes long. But I like it so much I think I will be able to watch it three or four times before I get bored.

I found them both on Netflix.

Ah, you see, this summer I renewed my interest in cycling. Last weekend I rode about 140 km and discovered this cool wooden bridge over the Kolubara river some ~50-60 km away from home.

And so I have been consuming cycling-related content on Youtube relentlessly in the last few days. Both English and Japanese. But I can’t really do proper active immersion on Japanese Youtube because the subtitles are often auto-generated. I spotted a few errors here and there. So it’s too unreliable for mining sentences.

But these two shows… I think they will keep me interested. The only reason I did only half an hour today is because I had to leave time to write this report to you, because it was late.

DONE [T-932] Inching by

Dear Rine,

I’m just inching it a little, day by day.

I’m not in a great mood these days. It’s a downturn you know.

All I am trying to do is maintain my momentum so that when I get out of my rut I won’t have to start all over again.

DONE [T-933] Enjoying the show

Dear Rine,

I switched to watching this show:

It’s a comedy about Tokugawa Ieyasu arriving in today’s Japan and getting involved in the production of a TV show about him.

I find it less cumbersome to follow than the previous show I was watching. I am mining less, but enjoying it more. I get a rough idea of what’s going on while watching. Plus there’s no English subtitle do defer to.

Oh yes and I installed a spell-checker to use with emacs so I will no longer have typos in my posts.

By the way, these posts of mine are not so substantial now so I don’t share them on Discord anymore. I feel like I solved a bunch of problems I had with the initial setup, and now I am cruising. My only struggle is to find the time to immerse.

Also, I have been slacking a little with passive immersion, have to get ahold of that. I’ll upload new content tomorrow.

Stats for today:

DONE [T-935] Transitioning to more casual immersion

Dear Rine,

I find myself transitioning to less intensive immersion. I just spent 38 minutes watching/reading a show and I mined only a single sentence. The nice thing is that I could get a sense of what’s happening. So I’d say my Japanese has improved somewhat since this project began. This gives me motivation to keep trucking on. But I’ll be coasting for a while.

I won’t be chasing any weekly targets or such. I’ll just keep showing up every day until I get up to speed again.

I also have to refresh the content on my passive immersion iPod as I have been slacking a little. I’m just bored with the same pieces of content I listened on repeat endlessly by now.

DONE [T-938] Perhaps I should do more reading?

Dear Rine,

Active immersion doesn’t do much to boost listening comprehension, does it? At least it’s how it is the way I’m doing it. My Migaku plugin, it is set to “reading” mode. That means that whenever a new line of subtitle appears, the plugin automatically pauses the video, even before the actors say their lines. So I first see the text, then hear the words.

Because of this I don’t need to focus on the audio as much. Frankly, I would miss a lot of it, as much of the spoken dialogue is slurred and mumbled. Too much for my untrained ears to cope with.

Anyway I’m not writing this to complain, but to ponder: maybe I ought to spend more time reading Japanese texts, instead of focusing on video so much?

It’s not a substitute for Netflix immersion by any means, given the poverty of contextual cues in plain text (compared to video w/ audio). But as a supplemental activity, it’s much easier to pull off. And it’s easier to jump randomly from source to source.

Today I had the Japanese Wikipedia article on Shimano opened in a tab right next to my Netflix. So when I drifted off from watching the show, I could go and skim that article. A much better way to be distracted then to look at Instagram.

Stats for today:

DONE [T-939] Erasing the last 13 days

Hey Rine,

I forgot how hard it is to pick a habit back up.

So we have to start small and start rebuilding!

I just mined one sentence.

And I wrote four sentences here :)

Give me some time to spin up again!

DONE [T-940] Pitiful performance this week

Hey Rine,

This week I fell of the bandwagon. I didn’t even do passive immersion. I was immersed in another unrelated project which took away all my time. And I wasn’t waking up early enough to fit in all my activities.

What can I say, it is what it is. I did the reps, that’s the least I can say.

I don’t have any special remedy. It’s not like time accidentally slipped away. I was aware of what I was doing when I broke through all the slots in my SM Plan. I am eager to finish this other thing I am doing by the end of this week so as not to let it carry over.

But those kinds of things will always pop up.

The only possible buffer I have in my life, as it is currently organized, is to wake up at early hours. Like, if I wake up at 5:30 AM, I can keep all the plates spinning.

Last week I managed that. This week I failed miserably. Mind you, I’m not using an alarm clock.

I even went to bed early on Sunday evening to try to get a good early start on Monday.

You know what it is perhaps? Perhaps I overdid it with cycling last weekend. Once again I rode 62 km on Saturday to my inlaws, then 62 km on Sunday on my way back. Except this time I kept the tempo up on my return trip, instead of recovering. I felt strong but the ride left me exhausted. I spent the remainder of Sunday napping and watching Youtube clips.

Perhaps the exhaustion carried over into the workweek, just to tip my sleep demands ever so slightly. As a consequence (when considered together with the other excuse mentioned above, the project I was working on) I didn’t get to do any riding during this workweek, nor any immersion, except for a little symbolic time today.

Maybe I should be more moderate about my rides and gradually build up my fitness, so as to sustain more frequent rides.

We’ll see.

Anyway, here’s the table:

DONE [T-943] Half-time last week

Oh man Rine,

Numbers don’t lie. I was expecting that I got more immersion hours in last week.

But no, just a measly:

Never mind, moving on.

Srdjan.

DONE [T-946] Experiment: what if I ignore Refold advice and broaden my immersion sources?

Dear Rine,

Today I got close to my target of one hour of immersion time:

However, I must admit that my attention drifted. A few times I wandered off to check my Instagram, if only briefly.

The urge to check instagram and tabloid newspaper headlines is an excellent indicator. It means that my interest in whatever I am doing at that moment fell below some base-line level.

I know active immersion is supposed to be intense. But from all we know reading the works of Woz and like-minded thinkers, intense doesn’t mean boring. In fact it should mean just the opposite.

Boredom is a signal that learning isn’t taking place.

This is not to say that my daily immersion is some kind of torture session I barely slog through. Far from it. I’m not constantly battling the urge to check Instagram. It happens only a few times throughout the session.

All this means is that there’s an opportunity. If I figure out how to make these sessions more engaging, I will be learning more from each one.

The obvious thing to do is to try watching another TV show.

But I was thinking, why should I limit myself to one show?

Even when I’m watching Netflix in English, I have to resist the urge to switch from one movie to another. My brain yearns to channel surf.

So here’s the hypothesis I want to test:

Switching between multiple immersion sources makes immersion more fun which makes learning more effective, in the same way incremental reading is more engagin than sequential reading of books one by one.

I’ll start the test tomorrow. The key indicators to monitor are:

1. Total sentences mined in session.
2. Total number of times I felt the urge to open instagram.

Let’s see what happens!

P.S. I don’t have a spell checker now that I’m writing in org-mode. I just didn’t get to figuring it out. So please tolerate a typo here and there until I get everyting in order.

DONE [T-947] Forty seconds in half an hour

Dear Rine,

In a little over half an hour of intense immersion, I watched 40 seconds of a TV show. In that time, I captured six sentences to review tomorrow.

How’s that sound to you?

Sounds like a slog to me.

On the other hand, I am starting to appreciate the Refold doctrine of narrowing the scope of your immersion.

I notice that, in this TV show I’m watching, there is a set of particular domain-specific words and phrases that the character use over and over and over again.

These high-frequency words help with sentence mining. They are like scaffolding that makes it easier to acquire new vocabulary.

Anyway, here are my numbers for today:

I’m hoping to sneak 20 more minutes later in the evening. But the org-mode columnview tells no lies: whether I succeded or not, you will find out by looking at the total time tomorrow.

As you could have expected, I didn’t resist further tinkering with my setup. I tried to make that other table that reports the number of sentences mined on a given day, week, month.

It seems to be fairly straightforward. The id of each Anki card is a Unix time-stamp of its creation date. The ankipandas Python library makes it easy to access it.

It’s as trivial as this:

from tabulate import tabulate
import pandas as pd
from ankipandas import Collection

col = Collection() # This finds the Anki database in your system

col.cards # This returns a dataframe of all your cards

df = col.cards.tail(2)

Which exports this:

Sorry for the ugly export, I haven’t figured out how to output nice tables.

And so these cid and nid numbers are actual dates as unix time-stamps.

I just didn’t have the time to figure out how to subset rows matching today’s date.

Just another thing to figure out…

But I digress. I must not digress so often.

Maybe I ought to find myself a children’s guide to org-mode in Japanese?

DONE [T-948] I am back

Dear Rine,

I am back. Now that I am writing from org, I can do some fun stuff, like report total and daily active immersion times every day, like so:

Note: The totals don’t include the hours prior to me learning how to clock in in org.

I would like if the tables looked nicer. But for now you’ll have to tolerate these ugly ones. You will undestand why when I show you this other table which is about how much time I spent fiddling with ox-hugo last week and this week:

• Must… resist… fiddling

  In theory, I could also include another table that reports the number of sentences I added each day. I can do this with that Anki Python lib I explored while trying to solve the problem I had with Migaku. All I would need to do is write a Python block here in org-mode that would return the total number of items whose creation date matches today.

  But the more hours I pour into that kind of stuff… the less I do into immersion.

  This org-mode stuff man… it’s like the defaults are intentionally set to be not quite satisfactory, for no other reason but to tease you deeper into org-mode internals where you will be eaten alive and digested for a thousand years like you fell inside the pit of the mighty Sarlacc from Return of the Jedi.

  George Lucas, by the way, got the word Jedi from 時代劇 (じだいげき) which are Japanese period dramas… samurai movies that is to say.

  So now we resume our regularly scheduled program.

INBOX

TODO proba