Miscellaneous

My method of learning a new (natural) language in 5 points

Posted on 2022-05-10 by admin 1 Comment

1. A habit is better than a burst

I am a strong believer in building good habits. My approach to language learning (and also fitness) is that it’s better to do a little every day, than a lot just once. A corollary is that it’s easier when you add your language learning to your day-to-day life. For me, that means doing Duolingo exercises when I’m waiting for the train, listening to music in German or Spanish when I work, watching Netflix with my target language subtitles, or subscribing on reddit to /r/ich_iel.

Doing just 5 minutes of Duolingo daily for a year is better than an intensive hour-a-day with a teacher for just one week and then stopping because it’s not sustainable. I know Duolingo may not have the best exercises, or the best memorization or the best X. Duolingo is really great at helping me maintaining a habit, it’s one of the few times where all the annoying gamification and social proof methods are working for us instead of against us. Use it!

2. Listening to music

I love working with music. I love driving with music – although recently I’ve been listening to podcasts as well. Listening to music in your target language is very effective because once you get a song stuck in your head you get the memorization of the words and their pronunciation for free.

Imagine for a second your some music that you loved as a kid, in your own language – now imagine that in your target language there are some bands that you could have loved as a kid growing up – if only you were part of that culture. There is so much really great music that we are not listening to only because we are not exposed to it. So as an added bonus when you listen to music you also get exposure to a new culture, and a new world that so far has likely been hidden away from you, in plain sight.

If you are interested here is my German playlist: spotify, youtube, and my Spanish playlist: spotify, youtube.

(note for the German listeners: I started with Rammstein, I listen to a lot more besides that, these are only the first songs there)

3. Reading

I love reading, always have. To advance in German, I started with Duolingo stories, and as soon as I could, I started reading books. But not just any books. The first book in German I read was Roald Dahl’s “Der Zauberfinger” (The Magic Finger). It’s only 40 pages or so!

I then advanced with Roald Dahl’s books, then I read “Emil und die Detektive” (by Erich Kästner), then to “Die unendliche Geschichte” (The Neverending Story) by Michael Ende, then “Momo”, and then to proper sci fi – “Artemis” by Andy Weir. Since then I’ve read more adult books.

When starting, the trick is to get easy books that are still interesting for you to read. Later on, the trick is to find a book that is a real page turner in a genre that you like, so that with the help of the plot you overcome the difficult language and your own slow speed.

4. ITalki

For my previous previous birthday, I decided to gift myself with knowing German. One of the ways I did that, was paying for Italki lessons. ITalki is a great platform for online language lessons, which could be formal test preparations, or just an easygoing conversation. The trick here is to find a teach you have great chemistry with. I tried 5 teachers until I found Marie Kleefman who I just had great fun talking to.

I strongly recommend doing something like italki. Tandem might also work for you – that means, finding someone who wants to learn your native language, and then doing some kind of free exchange. I decided to start with italki when I was already pretty advanced, but you could start earlier if you wanted.

5. Taking it easy

I don’t know if you need a language for work, or for another purpose. I just wanted to know another language. Don’t stress too much about it! Don’t force yourself if you’re not enjoying it, instead try doing the things you love to do anyway – only do them in your target language.

My best feeling of victory came when I travelled with my wife to Vienna, and she saw me speak German in some Coffee shop. Before that, I had many small achievements – finishing the Duolingo course, finishing the first book, etc.

Find your own moments of achievements. Celebrate them. You deserve it. Have fun learning your language!

Please share your own tips here in the comments :)

Teaching my son to h̵a̵c̵k̵ win at Mastermind

Posted on 2022-01-16 by admin 1 Comment

Recently my 4.5 year old son started playing “Mastermind”. This is a game where one player picks a 4 color code, and the other player has to guess it. After each guess, the first player lets the guesser know for how many colors both the color and position were correct, and how many only the color was correct and the position was wrong.

In our box game the code pins can be blue, red, green, yellow, orange or cyan, and there are special black and white pins – black is used to indicate a correct guess (color and position), and white indicates an almost correct guess (only color).

So my son wanted to play with me, and just like any proper troll dad, I started to progressively teach him new techniques.

Guessing effectively

Let’s say you’re the guesser. What would be an effective way to guess the code? My son would try some random colors, and based on the information he received, would try a second guess. When it was my turn to guess – my first guess was all red. Let’s say I got one pin right, because if not I would just move on to the next color. My second guess was one pin red and the rest blue. In each guess I would try to place the first red pin in the correct position while adding the most information about a second correct pin, and so on.

After a couple games like this, we switched and my son was the guesser, and he quickly tried the new technique and we moved on.

Making the code harder v1

So I asked my son if he wanted me to make it an impossible challenge. He said yes. I asked him if I’m allowed to use all the colors. He said yes. So I used black and white (the guess response pins) as my code. After going through all the colors and not being able to get any correct guesses he gave up and looked at my code, and was angry as I expected. Cue a few games where we played with the new setup, and he learned to use the new technique.

Making the code harder v2

Then, as the code picker, I again asked if he wanted me to make it an impossible challenge. He again said yes. So I picked a code with two missing pins, as “missing” or “transparent” can also be considered a color. Same as before, after a few guesses he gave up and looked at the code all frustrated, but afterwards he was happy with the new technique.

Playing it by ear

After the previous technique I was the guesser and my son was very pleased with all the new options of making the code harder (essentially having added 3 new colors – black white and empty). So he picked a code that he thought was going to stump me – 4 missing pins. I knew he would use the missing pins, so after he set the code I lightly tapped the game board with my fingers while thinking. Since tapping the game board made no sound – I immediately knew the code had no pins and got it in one guess. Afterwards I explained what I did and after trying together we saw that with finger tapping we could differentiate between 4, 3 and 2 missing pins. Nice!

Counting cards

For the next game my son picked some code, I think it was 3 colored pins and one missing. I told him I was going to guess it much faster using a trick. So before he set the code – I saw the game box held 10 of each of the colored pins. As soon as he set the code, I just counted the number of missing pins from the box, and knew exactly which pins where in the code, just not the their order. My son was sufficiently impressed, but in subsequent games asked me not to use that cheat again.

Aftermath

My son learned several important lessons:

His dad is a troll dad
You can win more if you think outside the box
Breaking the rules is sometimes ok, depending on the game

Postscript

Knuth has a very nice algorithm for solving this game, however, the goal of playing with my son was not this kind of optimization, at least not this time.
Yes, this is similar to the Wordle craze that’s going around, but it’s unrelated. My son picked up Mastermind after he got it as a Hanukka Present.

Moving to a new server

Posted on 2010-12-08 by lorg Leave a Comment

I moved the blog to a new server, and a new wordpress install.

It will take me some time to get everything back in order, but once I finish it, I’m going to get back to writing regularly. Stay tuned!