The Notebook

daily additions and repetitions, and my confession to having aspirational clutter

Starting a new chapter can be daunting. The fresh list of vocabulary words, the new grammar. And if you’re using Genki textbooks, they don’t do you any favors with the small type and lack of color.

With this new chapter, I’m trying to be my Most Organized Self and help my teen develop a system to divide up a new chapter. Teaching him how to learn.

Do you already know any of those words? Put a little check by them. How many do we need to learn? Great, we’ve got 4-5 weeks. Let’s divide all those into four equal—ish parts.

I introduced The Daily Notebook, a way to help him be consistent, and break learning this chapter of Japanese into bite-size tidbits. Every day we add one to three words to the notebook, with the intention that we also review the previous five days (or more) of vocab.

Consistency is key, and also our biggest challenge right now.

He might be genetically predisposed to this, as you’ll learn in a few paragraphs.

The Japan Shop has been sending me daily emails, each with a grammar point. I am saving these and soon, will start adding them to the Daily Notebook. The first will be review, and then as we move on, we’ll go slower and see how they match up to Genki.

With Kanji the goal is 2-3 per week, also going in the notebook, but we also use tracing paper inside the Genki book and workbook.

***

How goes it with my Hindi learning?

(enter tired, slightly maniacal laughter)

aren’t they the cutest little flashcards?

In August we moved from Korea to the US and within days of arriving had a lovely combo of altitude sickness and covid. Y’all, it was rough. None of us did any studying for a month. It was ROUGH. I’m just now getting back to Hindi.

The bonus is that now, I have a printer. I’m a visual person and sometimes digital isn’t enough for me—I need the paper! So I can print the lessons and vocab lists.

Also, I came home and realized, as I was decluttering amidst unpacking, that I had TWO sets of pre-printed Hindi vocab flashcards.

No, I’m not joking.

One was DinoLingo, full-color, from when my son was a preschooler and we started Hindi. (He was soon diagnosed with CAS, childhood apraxia of speech, and we went English-only with him.)

One is Hindi In a Flash, 448 preprinted flashcards with the word, a sample sentence, all the bells and whistles.

I have no recollection of buying this, but, it must have been soon after we got married?

There are hoarding genes in my family, and I thought I’d battled them effectively but apparently not, for then, I found a Living Languages Hindi cd set.

If you don’t laugh, you cry, right? I love having all this stuff, but am so embarrassed that 1. I never used them and 2. I forgot I had them.

They became Aspirational Clutter. Things I Should be Using, but Don’t.

So for now, I’ve dusted off the old cd player, pulled out both sets of flashcards, and I’m trying them all out to see what works.

Not gonna lie, the little-kid-focused, full-color picture on the flash card, version, is winning so far.

Why do we assume adults don’t want colors, photos and some visual interest? the Tuttle ‘Hindi in a Flash’ is black and white. No cute photos of a little elephant on the flashcard for elephant.

Don’t think I won’t sit in the coffee shop with those preschooler flashcards. TOTALLY will.

My question now is, how will Living Languages compare to Hindi Pod 101? I’ll let you know. :) I’ve heard Living Languages isn’t “what it used to be” and this is an older version (goodness, at least 12 years old) so…

Update: Just this morning I found my old Rosetta Stone Hindi cd-rom program. Good grief! I’ve tried to load one of the discs into the only computer that still has a dvd-drive and it’s so old, I’m going to have to work some magic to even try to get it to work. As an added bonus, one of the missing Living Language cds was inside the Rosetta Stone box. ????? I know. At the time, I had a toddler. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it.

And here’s the unintended moral of the story—if I’d actually used these programs consistently a decade or so ago, I would already be advanced in Hindi. Instead, they sat in closets, hidden behind other things, unused for so long now they’re bordering on obsolete.

What are you learning or studying as we’re back to school? Any tips, funny anecdotes or experiences? Do you, too, have a stash of learning materials hidden away, as aspirational clutter?