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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