Nothing in particular

[krait]

I have many things to post about - Utena rewatch, Duolingo, Dragon Cave - and yet somehow haven't posted about any of them. Oops?

I did recently discover the nirvana_in_fire community, though, which seems to be pretty active, so if any of my NiF friends haven't seen it yet, stop in!

Comments

[adrianners]

Glad it's not just me, then! Guess I'll go back to cobbling something together from other web sources. My school does offer undergrad Russian classes, but my advisor will order a hit on me if I register for anything but dissertation research hours.

I gave the Japanese lessons a shot for practice a couple days ago, and they're so impressive by comparison. Though yeah, it's slow as hell, probably to make you join Plus for the unlimited test-outs. I particularly loved that the questions let me use alternative word orders and more concise phrasing, like letting me drop "watashi no" when the "my" was already implied. Most of the sentences also felt pretty natural, not the stilted "Kore wa inu de wa arimasen. Kore wa neko desu" from my old textbooks.

A couple minor gripes: 1. My placement test put me right by the end of the course, but the lessons are still using polite grammar exclusively. It did not mark my answers correct if the buttons let me construct a phrase using familiar forms. 2. They ought to add an option for "write it from scratch" questions for users with Japanese-enabled keyboards. There's a big fluency gap between solving a sentence puzzle and being able to construct a sentence independently. Also I need way more practice with the JPN keyboard on my phone.