learning – Sidewalk Face

Get Yourself a Superpower in One Easy Step!

March 21, 2022March 21, 2022by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl12 Comments

BACKSTORY

I am in love with learning French through Duolingo, which is an app on my phone. As I wrote in an earlier post, I absolutely dreaded the prospect of studying a language. In my imagination, it was right up there with taking an accounting class on Saturday morning and then spending Saturday night tackling calculus. Boring and super hard. That’s what I thought.

I can’t stress this enough or you won’t understand how BIZARRE it is to me that the thing I currently want to do the most, even more than make art, is practice my French. What is going on?!

Everybody is different and I don’t want to sound preachy, but I am going to do a quick sales pitch for this. If you are someone who always thought it would be cool to know another language but was too scared to try, you might want to get the Duolingo app.

The way it teaches you is like a game. There is almost no reading. I mean obviously you are using your eyeballs to look at words, but you aren’t readying about language, you are playing games that put it in your head. It’s fun.

Late last night my nearly 18-year kid was letting me snuggle them on the couch while they fell asleep. As you can imagine, this is not as common as it used to be, so I was taking advantage. I quietly whispered every French phrase I could recall. I did this for a full ten minutes! That’s how much French I have learned in 48 days! That’s nuts buckets! C’est des seaux de noix!

SUPERPOWER PART

You know how in Harry Potter they go to Hogwarts and learn “how” to do magic. This is exactly like that except you can actually do magic, not just wave a $13 plastic wand around. You spend 15 minutes a day and all of sudden you can say: Hi Paul, how are you doing? For real, in a way that Paul can actually understand.

While looking for a song in Spotify this morning, a promotion appeared for a French singer and I could read the French title of his album! * I couldn’t do that last year. This is a real power; I can use this to understand the world more. Holy Cow!

I learned about it from my kid who has been studying Arabic for over 600 days straight. That’s a much harder language. They had to learn the alphabet before they could learn any words. I’m not ready for that kind of challenge yet. But we are having fun talking about language. We talk about what’s similar, what’s different. Many languages are gendered, meaning words are assigned male or female. Different cultures use “the” in different ways. Noticing these differences helps me see how fluid language is. In English we ask How are you? In French they ask, How is it going? In English you say, I like chocolate. In French it’s, I like the chocolate.

There is not just one way to get meaning across. I love analyzing things and this gives my brain so much to chew on. If I was a dog, analysis would be the bone I love to chew. So, a double win for me!

FINAL PITCH

Being on the app doesn’t feel like work. It doesn’t feel difficult. It’s pleasurable, like relaxing with a video game. The difference is that you are relaxing AND gaining something useful.

It may not be for everyone, but I wanted to at least let you know it’s out there. And if it takes you as long to be converted from the time of first exposure as it took me then you should be starting to learn German, Polish, Swahili, Mandarin or Hindi in about 550 days.

*The album is Fils De Joie (Sons of Joy) by multi-media artist Stromae. The video is quite a spectacle!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7Z2tgJo8Hg&t=236s

SIDEWALK FACE 116

This is a very early Sidewalk Face. I’d been making them less than six months when I posted him to Instagram. I still remember seeing the white paint meant to designate a stop sign boundary, as in, stop your car before driving over this line. Right away I was like, that looks like an animal hat with ears, I need to put a face in that space.

Early on I was picking up everything I saw and had a robust beer bottle cap collection that I lugged around on every dog walk. I thought I knew the origin of these eyes (Michelob and Saffire) but after googling every conceivable descriptive permutation, I can’t find a pic of either of them on the world wide web. Anyone know what beverages they come from? The thing I remember becoming conscious of when I started this project is that people discard a lot of cigarettes and bottle caps.

Now I don’t carry much with me but maybe I should start doing that again. Every choice leads to a different outcome.

Striving to Be Better, Technology

Make it Fun and Make it Happen

March 3, 2022by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl10 Comments

Imagine you had seen people dancing and you really liked it. It looked like they were having a lot of fun and you wanted to try dancing yourself, but you weren’t sure how to do it, you didn’t know any moves. You mostly just wanted to be able to participate, like get on the dance floor at a wedding with a bunch of friends. But the only method you could find was a ballet academy where you would be learning rigorous technique for years before anything like actual dancing started happening. Just endless preparation for an unforgiving graded contest on a stage. It was too hard, and the outcome was scary, you didn’t want to perform a highly choreographed dance in front of a lot of people who were mostly concerned with your mistakes. You gave up and decided dancing was awesome but clearly for other people.

Then you found a mobile app that taught you really easy and simple little dance moves. It was set to the beat, and you were dancing right away. Nothing fancy or impressive, but music was playing, and you were moving. Wow! You thought! I didn’t know it could be this simple. It was so fun you couldn’t stop. You wanted to practice your new moves all the time, and so you did. Practicing and dancing were the same.

That’s me and language learning. The app is Duolingo.

I have been learning French on the Duolingo App for 40 straight days! What? That is not possible.

Oui and there is more, I am loving it! I am obsessed!

You might think that’s normal, but it is not. It’s like walking outside and seeing the sky filled with flying pigs.

I’ve been telling myself the same story for three decades. It starts like this; Learning a language is excruciating. The action of the story is me successfully avoiding language learning and the moral of the story; To avoid extreme discomfort, don’t learn a language.

It’s bizarre that this has been my stupid story because I admire people who can speak more than one language and I frequently watch tv shows in other languages simply because I enjoy hearing them.

I studied Spanish in high school and went to Spain my senior year, which I remember as a fantastic experience. I signed up for Spanish in college. I remember dreading it, I don’t remember why but I am positive that dread was the correct word for how I felt. I was walking towards the class, which was starting in five minutes and I couldn’t make myself go in. This is totally unprecedented. I never skipped class, I was never late, I always did all my homework on time. I just couldn’t do it and instead went to the registrar and dropped it. That was the end of that.

I don’t recall a trauma around language, but I don’t think the teaching methods were enticing. Mostly just reading, memorizing, and verb conjugating. Lots of staring at lists of words and trying very hard to make myself remember them. Always being more concerned about what I didn’t know then reveling in what I did know.

Duolingo makes it fun. It’s fun because it is easy. It’s like playing a very satisfying video game except instead of the outcome being only the pleasure in the moment, you also start developing a legit real-world superpower. That’s crazy. You are having just as much fun as you would playing a game, but your reward is not make-believe, it’s real. The app has gamified the learning so there are lots of little sticky things that encourage you to spend more time than you expected. Now if you were wasting your time, that might be annoying, but since you are learning another language, it’s brilliant. It’s tricking you into doing what you actually want to do. Yes! That’s exactly what I need!

Merci Duolingo! Je parle Français!

SIDEWALK FACE 1178

Declutter, Humor

If Books Were Toxic, I’d Be Dead

January 5, 2022January 5, 2022by Sidewalk Face at Eagle-Crow-Owl4 Comments

Whenever something triggers me to imagine a truly terrible outcome, suddenly in the hospital, somehow in prison, stranded in a foreign environment, my thoughts always coalesce around a desperate fear I would not have enough books, or heaven forbid, any books. Sometimes I imagine there would be at least one book and I would read it over and over. So, in my mind, though I’m freezing on a remote mountaintop after a small plane crash, my first set of concerns is how many times I can read House of Mirth or the Talented Mr. Ripley before the magic no longer works.

I am addicted to reading. I know I am. There is no public shame because the effects don’t cause problems. Internally, I worry about my supply. It’s the worst feeling to finish the last book of a favorite author knowing I have come to end of the road with that particular escape.

I find reading to be intensely pleasurable. If a favorite book were to go on forever, somehow sustain its structural perfection but never conclude and I could opt to leave my life and read into oblivion, I don’t find that a totally awful thought. And that seems like an awful thought.

Thought reading has given me so much, I am not addicted to the benefits, useful as they may be. I am addicted to the escape. When I am reading, I am not suffering. So simple.

I love to eat and read at the same time. I don’t get to do that too often as I usually eat lunch with my husband and eat dinner with the family. I might do it at breakfast, but I’ve taken to reading off a phone screen, and that’s always subpar, which is good because it’s pretty easy to break away and get back to real life.

I recently had the opportunity to eat lunch alone, my white table bright from a beautiful sunny day, I was having sliced apple with cheese and crackers, another lifelong favorite activity. So yummy! And so easy to clean up. If and when I end up alone, half my calories will come from cheese and crackers. Pair this with a paperback novel and it just can’t get any better.

I have traveled the world through books. I’ve read authors from many countries, translations from their native language. I learned about all sorts of people and all sorts of activities. I cannot imagine who I would be without this wealth of voyeuristic knowledge. On some level, I have lived many lives, been many people, learned the lessons of others tragic choices, walked the cities and shores of foreign lands. So many small details which have never left me.

Did you know that in Mumbai police ply detainees with candy in order to make them thirsty and them deny them water as form of confessional coercion? (Maximum City – Suketu Mehta)

In the same book is a killer who has slept in a single room with his extended family his whole life is afraid to sleep alone.

Being frightening doesn’t make you less afraid.

This is what I remember.

My husband is also a voracious reader. We rarely swap books, though he usually tells me about what he’s reading. His habits are more eclectic yet cohesive then mine. He is a natural historian and reads widely on a variety of intersecting topics. Marianne Faithful’s steamy autobiography next to a collection of Tennessee Williams short stories next to Merlin Sheldrake’s treatise on fungi. I am lucky to live with someone who always has something interesting to share.

Residing in a transient neighborhood of apartments, we both regularly bring home books orphaned to the sidewalk. I see a pile in the distance and feel dread even as I hustle towards it. Our bookcases overflow with books laying horizontal on top of the ones placed properly. Books line the hallways. We frequently rehome them to friends, Goodwill or the library but still more come in the front door than leave though the back.

We have two bedside tables each. Yes, you read that correctly, our bed is flanked by four tables stacked high with books both read and unread. That was not a conscious choice and I can’t see making it on purpose, but I’ve grown fond of my second bedside book table with its foot-high sloppy stacks. I’ve told myself to clean it up because I like things to be tidy, and yet I am facing, right now, in this very moment, that it is a comfort to me, and I want to keep it. At least if I get sick and have to take to my bed, I know I am all set.