He tells them every single day not to trust anyone, not to believe in the healing power of love and redemption and peace.

Still working to boot and reboot a bunch of habits; but it was a productive month.

I’ve recently discovered the L-R system of language learning and have been setting up to learn it.

The idea is that you begin with long texts - novels, for example - in your target language (L2) and follow a systematic approach to reading and listening.

L-R system in a nutshell

Here are the steps:

1. Read the text in L1 (your native language) and become familiar with it.^[I rephrased this instruction from other sources that say “read the translation” because what if the text itself if a translation? For example, my first text to try this with is Гарри Поттер и философский камень which was originally written in English and then translated into Russian, among other languages. So, it’s best to say for the first step “Read the text in your L1 and become very very familiar with what it says.”]
2. Listen to the recording and simultaneously read the text in L2.
3. Listen to the recording while reading the text in L1.
4. Repeat after the speaker. But only do this once you truly understand the meaning of what you’re repeating. The goal is meaning, not only pronunciation.
5. Translate the text from L1 to L2 by covering up one side while reading the other.

Tips

It is hard, very hard in fact, to find parallel texts. Even if you can find .txt documents online, the formatting is a challenge. Columns in Word or Pages simply don’t work, because the L2 and L1 doesn’t line up properly. So here’s what I did for formatting Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone^[Before you accuse me of intellectual property theft, I will mention that I own both the Russian translation and the English language original in book form. So no harm done to anyone.]:

Political candidates - minimum requirements

When the following wind of privilege is misread as merit, then the inequalities that result are legitimized.

Sometimes, Trump’s remarks read like an old “Dick and Jane” primer.

Case in point: “We’re keeping the oil. We have the oil. The oil is secure. We left troops behind, only for the oil.”

Of course, this merely reinforces what experts have documented about Trump’s speech patterns. He speaks at the level of an 8 year-old according to one analysis.¹ This president speaks at a grade level lower than any U.S. president since 1929.¹ John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University notes, among other verbal quirks, Trump’s tendency toward parataxis, string together multiple short clauses without joining words or subordinate clauses.².

Here’s the simplest reading of Trump’s plans for the Ukraine: “Oh you guys have a problem with corruption? Here let me help. How? By injecting a little corruption of my own.”

The United States has never been a shining model of unqualified good, but there are moments in its history where it stood as an example to fledgling or threatened democracies. Now is not one of those times.

Books and podcasts that I’ve been cogitating about.

This is an interesting study nicely summarized in The Bulletproof Musician.

Learners exposed to two different study methods - blocked vs interleaved practice - preferred the blocked practice method, a learning method known to be less effective. Rather than attribute it to laziness, the authors of the study hypothesized that learner’s simply don’t know what method of practice (study) is more effective so that interpret the more difficult method (interleaved) as being harder.