Viewing profile — cblum

+1 to using it as opportunity to listen to a podcast. I consider it some of my best podcast listening time. Somehow I’m more tuned in when doing house chores vs. trying to just sit…

To add a bit more to this: AJATT (all Japanese all the time) later evolved into MIA (mass input approach), which then became Refold. The gist of those methods is mass input + creat…

Pimsleur is awful for Mandarin. I wish I hadn’t wasted my time on it.

Can you elaborate on that? Sounds really interesting. I grew up in a place you could call “rural South America” (specifically in a rural border town between Brazil and Uruguay) and…

> FSAs are insane, conceptually. Indeed. I don’t understand why they cant just make medical expenses tax-deductible up to a certain amount. The effect would be the same. Why do I n…

Somewhat kinda related: I grew up in a Brazilian town that borders one of our many Spanish-speaking neighbors. We used to make fun of the folks across the border for pronouncing pi…

FWIW, I’m not in NYC, but I’m in general a “ban the cars” type and have a wife and kid. We’re intentionally raising the kid in the city because we believe it’s a richer cultural en…

This reminds me that when I was a kid, I read an Uncle Scrooge story where a cruise ship of his runs aground and he sends Donald to run it as a new kind of hotel. I carried that in…

What’s the work culture there like? Is it more relaxed than in North America or Western Europe?

On a related note, I don’t know how Apple has managed to mess up so badly the idea of storing your own information like address, phone number, etc. Every time I’ve moved, for month…

Very sorry for your loss. I lost my dad almost 13 years ago and my mom 4 years ago, much earlier than I though I’d lose either of them. The initial intensity of the grief you’re fe…

> Parking apps are worse than parking meters. I generally agree, but I’ve had a great experience with one of those. I just wish they all did the same streamlined thing this one par…

Other than the Bible, that would be Dune and Starship Troopers. I can't really put my finger on how specifically they influenced me, but I often find myself recalling scenes and qu…

I'm learning Chinese characters following Heisig's method. I use to create mnemonics when those are not provided in the book, since I have a hard time coming up with my own. Turns …

I'm not a native English speaker, but that's what it guessed. Over the years, starting in my late teens (I'm in my late 30s now), I've put TONS of effort into sounding like a nativ…

I’ve read it all recently and I felt like the later described utopia was also a kind of dystopia, very Brave New World like (or at least the seed for a BNW-like dystopia). I kept w…

Dune. So many thought-provoking quotes throughout the books, especially the first one. This one pops up in my head often, many years after having first read the book: "Think you of…

> My plan is to keep chugging through and get to HSK 6 studying after my newborn infant arrives in 2 months, though I don't know if I can keep up the 10 hours a week I'm currently …

> there are lots of people who take it way too far I wrote in another comment that that’s exactly my issue. I can easily spend hours, days, weeks even just tweaking my card templat…

I too find it wild when people do it at a beginner stage. Back when I was learning English during my school years, I only started seriously watching native content after I already …

The trouble with ChatGPT is that it can produce wonky sentences sometimes, and as a learner it can be hard to validate that. Most of the time it’s great though, just need to be cau…

I use Anki but oh did I have to learn to discipline myself. Anki’s extreme flexibility coupled with an engineer’s mind had me spending whole stretches of days or even weeks just tw…

I see, I didn’t know about Argentina. I grew up in a border town bordering Uruguay and over there I’d definitely see folks carrying their personal thermos and cuia. But I would see…