2024.08.21 The Red Room 100% Complete

2024.08.21 — The Red Room🎉 100% complete 🎉

Satire that largely still applies to this day. Although, there were some parts that were hard to follow either because of lack of relevance or writing structure. Easy to skim through those though. The afterward by Peter Graves really helps with understanding the book too.

Gonna say ⭐⭐⭐

I do like to understand my books and obtain some guidance from them. Hence the 3/5. Still def worth the read especially if the reader has any interest in Sweden and/or Stockholm.

started these books today 💖

2024.09.15 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Wonderfully written from an incredibly interesting POV. Here is one of my favorite passages:

I did not read super consistently, so i also didnt read as quickly as i wouldve liked lol. Been going through a lot. First book i finished since coming home from Sweden too. [13 days.]

2024.09.02 — Took a break from reading yesterday (for whatever reason) and started this book today. 20 pages in ans I love it so much. I was craving some Korean/Korean-American POV book, and while this is still mostly set in North Korea, she is South Korean, and first generation immigrant to the US, so we get to see that POV.

Takeaways:

phonology - get a different "mouth feel" for each language up front, imo, practice sounds/pronunciation and also some echo and record practice.

different places - physically study the two different languages in different places (hmm not my desk, i want that to remain neutral, mayyybe the car for one language of podcasts, but...hmm library Korean? cafe Swedish? idk maybe not the library bc i don't want to worry about talking, but they do have study rooms, ill think about my places...)

when thinking/studying one language, don't bother thinking up the same word in the other language you are studying (suppression). It's fine if you know it in both languages off the bat, but if not, this is just an opportunity to practice keeping the languages separate.

2024.08.09 — 📚 How to Win Every Argument Complete! 🎉

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I think this is a solid and humorous reference book on fallacies. There were only a couple I had trouble wrapping my head around. The book completely trashed my economics degree (economics as an orthodox subject) in all the best ways. I was also inspired while reading - either to discredit modern "arguments" or to use the fallacies, like repetition, to actually reinforce facts.

[Started ~2024.07.25, and took a break to finish the Korea book, so 15 days since starting]

Memorizing Short Texts To Learn Your Foreign Language Faster

Magnetic Memory Method - How to Memorize With A Memory Palace

Memorizing Short Texts To Learn Your Foreign Language Faster

This tip will help you pick up foreign language vocabulary fast ... assuming you're using Memory Palaces, that is ...

I suspected this after reading Poet Sarrior and see my svenska-smell active learning post, and i have just felt with my last two sessions the "feeling" of the lang and being able to pull from the memorizes passages and manipulate them how i want. maybe even recall needed material in conversation (to be tested, but i had a feeling this method would help even that).

This article talks more about the method. Some parts i kinda just skimmed, but yeah.