Trip cancelled, trains missed, self-isolating at home…what do I do?

Part 1 of the Polyglot Gathering vlog

What do I study? What have I done this year?

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so i
have covered

before you freak out i’m mostly okay i’m
triple jabbed and i got my booster back

in december which means it’s been over
six months but i mean

so far i don’t want to drink things but
i’m feeling quite okay the worst i’ve

had is a sore throat and like some
muscle pains so fingers crossed it

doesn’t get worse than this i really
hope i don’t jinx myself

so it’s been a day and a half since i
tested positive and the worst part so

far
isn’t actually the symptoms uh it is

actually um well
there it is

uh it’s actually having to cancel lots
of my travel plans

that i’ve made just for this week it’s
the worst timing ever

i could have gotten it last week or next
week it would have been better but now

so tomorrow i would have gone down to
london to meet some friends and

particularly an israeli friend who was
visiting the uk for a couple of days

so i was going to film a vlog in hebrew
for you guys maybe to show off my skills

a little bit
but um speaking is hard i haven’t spoken

since i tested positive and now suddenly
i realize how hard it is but yeah so

that’s why for the past
couple of weeks

since the polygon gathering i’ve been
trying to brush up on my hero a little

bit so
that’s kind of pointless now isn’t it

i did have fun though
so now that i’m sick and officially very

terribly sick my brain is on full
procrastination mode so there are lots

of things i’m supposed to do
but my brain just refuses to do any of

it um but at the same time i consciously
refuse to

do nothing at all
so what i’ve decided to do is spend some

more time than usual working on my
languages

oh there is
so here is the peek into what i’ve been

up to so far
in terms of languages so because i can’t

film that vlog i can’t show you my
hebrew level but i can tell you about it

i’m at a point where i can speak quite
comfortably

in daily life situations back at the
polygon gathering i had a lot of

fun speaking to hebrew speaking people
um especially after a couple of years

and
for most daily conversations i think i

do quite well but ironically my reading
is still crap which is atypical for me

because i usually
spend more time immersing the language

before actually using it with people but
because of the way hebrew language is

written which is well for one it’s a
foreign script and also it’s written

without vowels so i have to spend a lot
of time getting used to figuring out

what the words are when i read
as a result reading hebrew doesn’t come

as naturally as speaking for me
so a couple of months ago i talked to an

israeli friend about this and they
suggested i’d get some short stories

which is so obvious now that i mentioned
it but yeah that’s what i did i went to

amazon picked up some books and i
started reading this month but now that

i look at the books i actually booked
it’s really ironic

you see in a second so the first one
that i’ve actually started reading is

called
uh sipurona i think so it’s a

portmanteau of sipu which means story
and kohona obviously you see this

cute little virus here
so this is a collection of stories that

were written by various authors
during the

coronavirus lockdown in israel
i’ve successfully read the first one

which is
a really weird sci-fi story that

involves
a lot of different

pop culture sci-fi elements and somehow
a lot of

and somehow something that’s very not
child appropriate

uh i won’t mention it here but you can
imagine there’s some aliens in there

and um
yeah so it took me around two nights to

read that first story which is around 15
pages

and it wasn’t easy uh because for one
there’s a lot of sci-fi vocabulary that

i didn’t know for example igelet which
is sort of

communique as we say in english
i think that just means a message which

we have easier words for but because
it’s a sci-fi they use more complicated

words
and uh

which means to hover well they will
hover

so these are words that i’ve never come
across before and i just find it really

exciting to learn about them so i
started trying to read without

dictionary so the first part of it
i did try to do that and i realized that

wasn’t going to work because of the
special vocabulary that wasn’t very

easy for me to guess
especially when there is too many

unknown words put together it’s just
impossible to guess from context so i

started looking up words that seemed
important judging from the sentence or

from the frequency of the word
and so i actively tried to avoid

looking up every word that i didn’t know
even though i did end up doing something

like that but at least i did enjoy the
story and i had a good idea of what was

going on in it so now i’m trying to
re-read it uh with the knowledge of

the storyline and this time i’m actually
trying to read it without

dictionary oh by the way i really love
how

the book opens this way
um

which is the opposite of english books
uh because it feels really familiar

because
because back when i read chinese novels

there are vertical ones they also open
this way because

chinese when written vertically goes
from right to left

so this is this feels right at home
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and the other book i picked up which i
haven’t started reading yet is

asmr
so what now and that’s also really

ironic because after i tested positive
and told my israeli friend whom i was

going to meet that was exactly what i
said to them

so uh
i don’t know what it’s about but uh it

looks interesting and i got it
so last week before i knew that i had

the virus i went to the university
language center so they have a language

learning library which i found really
interesting but last time i went which

was uh the better part of a year ago uh
they

had just had a flooding
and thankfully the books and the shows

were not affected for some reason thank
god

but uh they were busy sort of fixing the
place so i couldn’t actually go inside

and check them out and it turns out a
few months ago it has reopened but i

didn’t realize that so i went to visit
the library last week and

was slightly disappointed because i
expected a much bigger place

it was sort of one room
with a bunch of shelves in the middle uh

for each language
and on the walls they have a bunch of

shells with dvds of movies in those
languages

um
so i started wanting to look at some

dvds but then i realized there’s so much
more i can watch on the internet

than
from a dvd and on the internet there may

be subtitles i can rewind more easily so
i just threw that idea out the window

and then i looked at books
and something that

surprised me but really shouldn’t was
the lack of welsh things because

we live kind of close to north wales
where is most spoken

but i guess it’s a really niche language
that’s why there isn’t much materials so

what i found was
like one or two beginner self-study

books but from the 1970s
so

i was sort of put off by the sheer
ancientness

of the paper in those books and then
there was one binder of actual course

notes from a welsh course of a beginner
class which was really interesting why

are there
class notes in the library so someone

must have donated them
as a book maybe

and then there was a bunch of native
welsh books which maybe someday i can

read but i’m definitely not there yet
so what i ended up picking up there was

this self-study hebrew book again it
opens from this way

uh it’s all in hebrew which is good i
think that’s uh yeah it says

intermediate which is where i am now in
hebrew

and i thought this might help me
practice reading especially oh my god

these handwritten letters i can’t read
them at all so at least this is

kind of a new book it’s not from like
half a century ago

my goodness the 70s are half a century
ago

but the problem with this book is that
uh i have to renew it every single week

and the way to do it is
by email or by phone i can’t even do it

online so i’m kind of put off
by this procedure that i have to take in

order to keep the book
uh because i don’t know about public

libraries here but back home
libraries usually give up loans of like

at least two weeks and then you can
renew them online which is way more

handy and of course with a textbook like
this it’s gonna take a while to go

through i think maybe a few months at
least it is quite a thick book

but so i don’t know if i’m actually
gonna go through it or maybe i might try

to buy this somewhere it looks really
good

so yeah
another thing that i’ve been doing which

i’ve been doing for like a year now is
doing some clothes master

every single day i have a decently long
streak on there which i’m

actually more proud of than duolingo
because

for one clothes master doesn’t have
streak freezes so if you messed up it’s

gone and also it has separate streaks
for each language so i actually have to

do the different languages every single
day so closed master is a website

not sponsored where you can practice
your vocabulary in context as in it

shows you a sentence and then you have
to fill in the blank so you have the

option of
multiple choice or you have to type it

in so i decided to be quite strict on
myself because i want to make sure that

i actually learn the words so i turn off
multiple choice i have to type in each

word myself and also if that word
reaches 100 which means i’ve gone

through it four times
but i still can’t recall it without help

then i kick it all the way back to
25 or 50

so i make sure that
i keep doing the sentences until

i
can recall each word

on my own
just from the sentence and from the

translation
so every day i wake up to around 150

reviews could be more or less so my
pattern or rule for myself is every day

i do at least 50 sentences or 50 reviews
but also

i make sure that i take the number of
reviews down to 50 or less

so
i usually end up doing around 100

reviews every day in each language
and

i then do 20 new sentences

so sorry for the cuts because i’m
coughing a lot i’m cutting a lot that’s

a cantonese pun for you
um

so yeah i’m i’m doing clothes master
only in

polish and hebrew for now i tried doing
some welsh but because again welsh is a

niche language
the support isn’t as good in welsh so

when you go in there your only option is
to do random sentences instead of

sentences sorted by difficulty words by
frequency

or
from easy to hard etc etc

so
a lot of times you would actually get

really hard sentences right from the
start so i gave up doing that

and the last language thing i’ve been
doing is

some
leisure reading for fun so i actually

showed off this book when i filmed the
last part of my polygon gathering vlog

which you should definitely check out
it’s in cantonese but subtitled in

english
i have this book actually another one as

well that i picked up in poland when i
casually went into a language bookshop

in krakow

so it’s
a grammar of the turkish language in

polish
and i started reading it because i found

it interesting uh there’s such a nerdy
thing to do but

because it’s an aggro native language
which means it’s built from

sort of like lego blocks
so you can actually grab a bunch of

different suffixes and stack them
together to get a new word

so i started reading it simply out of
interest and i’m sort of halfway through

way more than halfway through
um i read about the verbs and the

conjugations and the funny thing is i
actually don’t know

any words any vocabulary [ __ ] in this
language i just know the grammar and

whatever words that happened to be in
their examples

so i would read the example sentences in
turkish and in polish and then try to

figure out what word means what i
started doing that

on my flight back home from poland and
of course on the flight i didn’t have

google translate so it was a lot of
guesswork and it was really fun it’s

kind of like doing the linguistics
olympiad

i’ve sort of taken a break since
finishing reading the verbs but i might

pick it up again soon so we’ll see
so yeah all in all i think i’ve sort of

taken a short hiatus after the toilet
gathering because that was such a

burnout i kept telling people that my
brain was so fried by the end of the

thing i couldn’t even keep cantonese
words out of my english

and speaking cantonese and english or
switching between them is one of the

things i do on a daily basis
that was really funny i would speak it

to someone and then suddenly use a
cantonese word

yeah
but it was a lot of fun so i sort of

took a break but now i’m sort of trying
to get back in the swing of things i’m

trying to book some lessons now with my
old teachers that you would have seen on

my channel check out my speaking
everyday series

i’m really bummed out that i’m not
meeting my friend

and also not filming that hero vlog in
that order

but uh i’m yeah trying to get my hebrew
reading

in order
but now i’m also trying to learn to

balance my work and life so in this case
work would be music life would be

languages so over the past year whenever
i had a music deadline i would dedicate

way too much time and energy to it in
order to finish

my work
and that sort of caused me a lot of

stress and i couldn’t relax at all
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which isn’t good for my mental health so
now i’m trying to get a good balance of

things to work hard and also play hard
to play in the sense of studying

languages so over the summer i’ll be
trying to do some welsh as well

for real this time not just duolingo
because i’m going to cardiff in

september for a
week or so not expecting to actually

speak any there but i would be very
excited to actually see the welsh in the

wild in the shops and stuff
so yeah let’s see how it goes i’ll keep

you updated and thanks so much for
watching this video if you liked it

please do give me a like and subscribe
and

ring that notification bell
and if you want to know more about my

studies and the language things i’ve
been doing i recently published

a blog post which is an update on what
i’ve been doing so far this year

and i hope to see in the next video
cheers

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do

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