151–160 of 164 posts
Mine is minor... I started doing my own yard at 42. I've hated doing yard work forever - I've always outsourced it. Then the guy I used started being unreliable. Got a used lawnmower and other tools - it has been such a fulfilling adventure! Plus I'm saving $300/month. Looking into developing some gardening skills next!
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How are you finding your progress on Spanish and piano? How are you learning it — private one on on instruction or self study?
Spanish is going quite well in year two. Year one was basically worthless. I didn’t really know how to learn the language and made a ton of mistakes. First, I spent the first few months studying grammar rules and learning words but didn’t do much speaking because I felt I didn’t have a good “baseline” Second, once I realized speaking was important, I went all in... did 1 hour a day voice calls for 2 months. This ende…
I've been learning mandarin for a couple of months and I do something similar.
My girlfriend can speak it so what I do is speak mandarin during our suppertime every day and I have google translate beside me. If there are words I can't say and want to remember later, I star the translation and add it to an Anki deck later on.
I haven't really figured out a lightway way to capture problems with forming whole sentences, though. It kind of breaks the flow the conversation too much if I'm writing down whole sentences.
Do you capture only problems with remembering specific words or also problems with forming whole sentences?
Mine is minor... I started doing my own yard at 42. I've hated doing yard work forever - I've always outsourced it. Then the guy I used started being unreliable. Got a used lawnmower and other tools - it has been such a fulfilling adventure! Plus I'm saving $300/month. Looking into developing some gardening skills next!
I took the same path. Started doing all the organic lawn treatment. My yard is one of the most beautiful without all the toxic chemicals.
I've always thought it's important to learn something significant in each decade of life. In my 20s I started teaching and doing long-distance bicycling trips. In my 30s I moved from NYC to Alaska, and started doing mountain rescue work. In my 40s I started writing and learned to drive a boat on the ocean. That was intimidating in a fishing town, where it feels like everyone else has known how to drive a boat since t…
Question. It is normal to say drive a boat? My father was a sea captain for his entire life and never used the word drive. I also grew up around fishermen and being onboard when they were in port,them like my dad used the word steer or captain.
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You are very interesting! How did you decide what you wanted to do at each juncture?
When I finished undergrad I started teaching middle school, and after two years of teaching I finally had a summer off with zero obligations. I had read A Walk Across America , about a guy who walked across the US. It sounded fascinating but it took him several years. So I settled on biking, because you can get all the way across the US on a bike in a summer. I did that a couple times, and then spent a year living on…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Walk_Across_America
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Jenkins_(travel_author...
Learned a human language few years ago by moving to another country. Learned "competitive" pistol shooting over the last 2 years by signing up for training. Learned to ride a motorcycle this year by lots of driving with friends. Will learn to hunt next year by signing up for training and going hunting with friends. Contemplating learning another language next year by theoretical study and spending time with people who speak the language natively.
Not really have a "let's learn something every year" list or plan, it just happens that I stumble upon something that's unknown to me, have the resources to learn it and do it (I find it hard to not finish tasks I started...).