Mnemonics

I had a dream today about a girl with an interesting superpower: she could make the people around her invisible at will. I wonder whether that or becoming invisible yourself is more financially exploitable.

The knot of the day is the Bowline on a Bight, which creates a double loop in the middle of a rope (that last part might be plagiarism but there are only so many ways to convey that meaning):


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

A.k.a. boring as a...what's a bight?

I did a lot of French flashcards today. As my brain gets more and more saturated, I need to rely more on mnemonics. Here's a random sampler. Some are based on the pronunciation, some on the spelling, some on images that point in the direction of the French word. Basic knowledge of French pronunciation and a very loose definition of "makes sense" may be assets.

(Some accents may be missing or wrong)

My earl gray too! Noooo! (malgré tout - despite everything)
"Say 'Tundra!' or you can't get up!" (s'étendre - sprawl out, lie down)
Chevy rides over someone's ankle, crushing it (la cheville - ankle)
Checkmate (l'échec - failure)
Hate test in hate class. They time you to see how fast you can hate someone so you have to hurry. (hâter - hurry)
Oh, Sara A! + something rated R (serrer - to squeeze, tighten)
Baloo (poilu - hairy)
You're in the middle of two hungry tigers and you're the meal, "meal you" (milieu - middle)
"this I want (but can't have)" (decevant - disappointing)
Mom, I brought back Rapper Tay, he's going to live with us from now on (rapporter - bring back)
Ack! Someone hang that roach right away! (accrocher - to hang)
This (insert four letter word that sounds like the French word after the é) is too narrow, eh? (étroite - narrow)
A ring on a finger is like a bag over your head (la bague - ring)
A giant flea is biting pieces of flesh off a dog. Dog gets up and says: "Will you stop that? That is SO irritating." (affligeante - annoying, irritating)
"Sorry, you have to have a menage a trois before you can have your breakfast." (le menage - household chores)
Uncle Jesus wants YOU to be a nun (l'annonce - advertisement)
"I believe this part of an ear belongs to you?" (appartenir - to belong)
Hotel sign: sorry, we have mice (un souris - mouse)
Say Kuwait three times fast while you shake your booty (secouer - shake)
Gryaznaya luzha with fishes (louche - fishy, shady)
"Holy crap you have a thick epee!" (epais - thick)

Two more songs uploaded today on YouTube and TuDou ("Money" and "Go Away").

PG-Michelle

I found a pretty decent language learning tool today while looking for language learning tools. Coincidence? Obviously you don't watch NCIS enough. What I found was a bunch of Brothers' Grimm fairy tales in French. Usually when I learn a new language I download my trusty Harry Potter / Harry Potter (French) / 哈利波特 from my trusty internet pirates, which is why half the words I know in all but my mother tongues were made up by J.K. Rowling. But this time I was feeling adventurous and looked for some other sources of useful vocabulary.

The story I read was The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs. Turned out that the devil had more than three, but each being so potent, three were all one story could hold.

You know when there's three of something in a fairy-tale, you're going to hear every damn sentence three times. It used to be the bane of parents' existence. Imagine reading the same story to your kid every night. Now imagine reading that story three times every night, with slight asymmetries interspersed here and there. The new generation thinks the Brothers Grimm are Matt Damon and Heath Ledger and there's not a parent from infinity to beyond who's going to shatter that illusion and subject themselves to playing broken record every night.

But. For learning languages, and especially for memorizing useful phrases like "what are you doing, woman! If you pull out one more of my hairs, I'm going to slap you silly!", it's a pretty good device.

Hmm...there's something else here. Those clever Brothers Grimm were probably being paid per word. Maybe that's why the number 13 is so unlucky: originally they repeated everything 13 times, driving everyone up trees with madness (the ones left over after all that printing). Somehow they narrowed down the acceptable number of repetitions to three. And then pop and rock artists shamelessly stole their idea.

[insert transition]

One of the problems with reading French (provided one has the intent of learning it), is that it is quite different from spoken French. I don't mean the ritual sterilization applied in the process of writing, making regular sentences like "I, like, TOtally don't get this stuff, I mean what the F!" into cleanly-packaged PuTTy-approved "I don't understand this at all. Praise Jesus." I mean that when you pick up your first French book, you start seeing all the verbs you just drilled in a tense you've never encountered during your sheltered prancing outside the reading rainbow: the simple past tense. Put down the book and simple past vanishes from your vocabulary. Pick it up and your regular slightly-more-complicated past tense gathers dust in the corner, except in occasional phrases of dialogue. Most non-triumphant.

Albright Knot:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

Fishing lines. Learning these knots is getting less interesting by the day...

The Consequences of Knowing English

I feel like I haven't done anything productive in days, the 30 day trial aside. Yuan Yuan has her English tour guide test coming up, English being the key word, and so my days are full of palaces and halls and walls, all dressed in creative spelling in grammar. She'll read a few pages in her book and try to boil it down to a few paragraphs. Then I read those paragraphs, unscramble the grammar, which is encrypted with something that would make SHA-1 blush, and scrap all the words I think she doesn't know, replacing them with the words "has," "with," or simply deleting them. Thus something like "the hall features the unparalleled Wall Of Communist Righteousness, which consists of several frames in which Chairman Mao disembowels the Great Dragon with his purple scepter," becomes "the hall has the Wall of Communist Righteousness which has some photos of Chairman Mao killing a dragon." Then Yuan Yuan files away the finished version to its rightful spot on the floor and proceeds to put the next item on her tour guide menu through a similar process. Nothing is ever reread, which baffles me slightly as it doesn't follow any test-taking strategy I've encountered in the Gamma Quadrant.

In any case, I spend my day between studying French--which I'm doing a few hours per day the last few days--and translating materials from Yuan Yuan's dialect of English to my own. It's a rough life. No one ever tells you when you're single: "dude, forget it, that girl's going to make you learn all about Beijing's tourist spots." But no worries, the test is just 10 days away.

Today's knot, the square knot:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

Just one step different from the granny knot, the one most people use to tie their shoelaces. Although I guess some people use the square knot without realizing it.

Yuan Yuan's English pronunciation of the day:
frodo (feudal) society

Okay, time to go draw...

They should have progress bars available as titles

Still on track as of yesterday. The real test will be Saturday and Sunday when I have class most of the day and am forced to do pushups at my student's houses to avoid killing myself in the evening. It's hard to fit pushup sets into my schedule as my mom has inculcated all these health-nut rules into my head: don't exercise for an hour after you eat, don't watch TV while you sleep, pull down your pants before you sit down on the toilet, etc. And I'm not so sure what constitutes a meal. Does a bag full of candy count? Or is that not digested, just sweated out...that must how the Blue Man Group preps for their shows.

I have noticed a few benefits already of this new lifestyle. I can wear far less clothes in the room because the pushups keep me warm for long after each set. If I space them out just right, I can probably heat the room more effectively than the fake Chinese heater with its fake heat.

Yesterday's knot, the bowline:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

Not too difficult for magic hands.

Today's, the slip knot:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

Even easier than yesterday's. But I browsed pictures of the more advanced knots and I'm feeling in equal parts confident and screwed. Does beginner's luck restart for each new knot?

French is going smoothly. It's also producing lots of feelings I haven't had in a while. During today's hour, I looked over about a million vocabulary words and realized that I know none of them, which made me feel very Bill-and-Ted-esque. Then I felt excited, as in: "I'm going to know all these words...some day!" Then I felt motivated to study. Then I felt nerdy for feeling motivated to study. Then I felt excited about feeling nerdy as there's very little opportunity to be nerdy in China; people here prefer eating, and when they're not doing that--drinking. Then I felt nostalgic for MIT, where nerdism is both church and state. Then I felt guilty for living in the past. Then I ate some candy and felt the mini-heartattacks coursing through my teeth. Then I had to go to class.

Oh yea, drawing. Went OK yesterday, time passed a bit faster than the day before, but the results are still very disappointing. It's hard for me to draw what I see instead of what I know. I see a bowl, I know it's made of circles and I have to struggle to draw the squished ellipses instead. Hmm, maybe I should just draw all round objects from head on. "Excuse me sir, can you sit with the top of your head facing me?"

Superyesterday

1 superday down, 29 to go. Yesterday I had to hustle a bit since I only committed to the supertrial in the late afternoon and still had 160 pushups to go at 10:30PM. But it all happened, even the drawing, which was as torturous as I'd expected. It was truly a moment of wisdom when I chose 20 minutes over half an hour. I might still be in a coma if I'd chosen the second.

Yesterday's knot was the figure 8:


image borrowed from animatedknots.com

It's pretty easy to do, unless you're attempting to replicate it from a set of written directions and a single poorly cropped picture, which half the how-to's on the internet seem to think is enough. The people who wrote them must know how to tie their own shoelaces or something. Luckily for those of us whose mommies still fly in red-eye to tie ours in the morning, I found animatedknots.com which shows pictures for all the steps.

The French studying went pretty smoothly. Months ago I downloaded every pirated book on French grammar and vocabulary on this side of the galaxy and yesterday I blazed at 5mph through one of them. The memorization part of my brain is having trouble getting off the couch after its nearly year long respite, but that's what 30 day trials are for, getting your potatoes off the couch and onto the treadmill.

Which leaves...the blog. No big problems there, except that getting on Blogger is a nightmare with the Great Firewall of China. My browser needs some bandaids and a shower.

Yuan Yuan learns English, phrase(s) of the day:
"Oh no! We almost finished that toothbrush." Translation: we're almost out of toothbrushes.

Yuan Yuan's creative spelling of the day:
"Dystrus." If you can guess what the intended word is, you deserve the Nobel Luck Prize.

Answer: "dynasty." When Yuan Yuan defied the odds and pronounced it exactly right, I was more proud of her than shocked at her epic violation of the rules of spelling.