I think I had three or four tutors, but one in particular I stuck with for about 18 months straight.
hatchet
joined 1 year ago
I did italki for around 2 years between the stints when I lived in Japan, and I found that it improved my comfort level with speaking dramatically. My tutor did not provide me with highly structured lessons; each weekly conversation was simply free dialogue, so it really was just to exercise my speaking muscle, rather than rigorously learn vocabulary or grammar structures.
If you are in a spot where you feel like your passive vocabulary is significantly larger than your active vocabulary, it might be worth giving it a try. I would describe my experience with italki as mostly positive, and I have recommended it to my friends.
Yeah, it's showing up on my hot feed too. I just noticed another 2+ year old post up there as well...
(This post: https://lemmy.ml/post/85539)
I'm definitely a huge fan of all of the work that Proton is doing in the privacy space, I just have some slight reservations about having all of my services—email, calendar, drive, passwords, VPN—all from the same company. So, for now, I won't be moving over to Proton Pass, but I will be paying attention to its performance.
I'm not quite sure I fully understand the question, but would implementing the Default trait work?
Otherwise, I've used Arbitrary in tests before, maybe that's what you're looking for?
It was forgettable.
As much as I prefer other distributions over it, I am grateful for everything that Ubuntu has done to grow the Linux userbase.
You can do a credit/debit system, which is basically a form of escrow, or you can use a little fancier solution, like Superfluid, which is technically still an escrow, but they just have some nice APIs around it.
I've used Nord, Sapphire, and Catppuccin over the years, and I would recommend trying all of them.
You have to strike a balance between fun and effective. I wouldn't recommend doing things that make you miserable, but also don't only use study methods that are "fun."
As for the titular question, if reading the cards is still a slog for you, try:
- Making shorter cards. I do full sentence mining for my studying, so I'll sometimes end up with kind of long Anki cards. I think there are some purists out there who believe you should be able to go through your Anki cards super fast. I don't care, and I'm fine with a little more ponderous pace, since I go through my cards on the train, which gives me like an hour or so. However, if reading the cards is difficult and taking too much time, try making shorter cards. Short sentences, or even single-word cards. If the kana are still a struggle to read fluidly, probably stick with kana-only cards, and then move up to kanji with furigana, and then without the furigana.
- I don't really practice my accent and somehow ended up with a passable accent. Luck of the draw, I guess. What I do practice is cadence: being able to speak at a natural and consistent rate. Anki cards are actually really good for this in my experience: you can just tap out the morae and whisper the words to yourself.
- Try reading through longer texts you haven't read before. This will stretch the muscle of sight reading.
I would generally recommend reading the cards aloud (or at least under your breath). Japanese pronunciation is not very difficult, so any mistakes you have will probably just be in pitch-accent, and imo it's better to be able to pronounce words almost correctly than not be able to pronounce words at all.
I just bought a new wallet that has a coin pouch because I use cash (and coins) so frequently.
Even if I disagree with a political faction often, I'm perfectly willing to show support when I do agree. It's the honest thing to do.