I’m fifty. My wife is 49, her friends and my life long friends are around the same age and they definitely include a few grandmas. In 2023 fifty does not look like fifty did when I was a teen. The amount of smoking hot women in their fifties that pass for later thirties and early forties is incredibly high.
EDIT: Case in point, Marisa Tomei as Aunt May. Why Aunt May ever looked like an octogenarian is beyond me.
My coworkers write me “hi, do you have 5 min?” without telling me what it is because they know I would drop what I’m doing and directly focus on the new task. (It’s how I am, and they know how to deal with it). With a little hi… they give me the option to say “sure, lets talk in 10 min” and finish what I’m doing.
But even “hi do you have 5 minutes” is more than I get from one team. I get “hi” and then they wait for my reply before anything else. If I don’t reply right away, nothing, silence.
First: Find easier comprehensible input material. The whole point is to learn new words by guessing their meaning based on context. It aint gonna work if you don’t know enough words to even understand the context. So, content meant for natives will be quite far along your journey. Start first with comprehensible input content meant for learners. And if even that is too difficult, go back to studying the words and grammatical structures that your textbook tells you to.
Second: At least in my experience, there’s no easy way around doing a shitton of flashcard/sentence mining. Set aside time in your weekly (preferably daily) routine to just spam the fuck out of Anki / q*izlet / whatever other app you use and commit to it religiously. Practice makes perfect. Don’t slack off and tell yourself that you’re “not motivated”. Force yourself to study even if you don’t want to. Motivation is a finite resource, Discipline is renewable. Soon enough, you will find that it gets easier and easier to stay motivated. That is the essence of discipline. And, as a bonus, discipline is a universal skill: if you get better at motivating yourself in the context of learning a new language, you will also notice improvements in other areas of your life. Many people start learning a foreign language specifically to train their discipline.
Third: Only do n+1 sentence mining. That means, only make flash cards out of sentences that have only one word or construct that you don’t already know. And if most of the sentences you encounter have more than that, it’s a sign that you have to take a step back and learn the basic vocab sets that your textbook gives you before moving on to comprehensible input and sentence mining.
Fourth: As Stephen Covey said, take time to sharpen the saw. That means put some effort into researching different learning techniques that work for you. Otherwise, you’ll just be wasting time on ineffective strategies. The previous advice I gave may not apply to you specifically, so it’s best to do your own research.
This is a little random but I just gotta get it off my chest lmao.
The other day I walked into a small restroom at school and saw two there was one stall left open. I couldn’t see inside the stall, as it was parallel to the doorway I was standing in. Anyway, I walked over to the stall and nearly ran into the guy who was standing there peeing with the door open. Of course, the guy heard me approach and looked over his shoulder at me like I had two heads, and I retreated, embarrassed.
Anyway, if that guy is reading this, I’m sorry lol. Believe me, it won’t happen again. You’ve instilled a deep fear in me and I will forever approach bathroom stalls slowly and carefully, leaning forward just enough as I approach to see if anyone is lurking inside. It won’t happen again. It won’t.
I did this to help get over weed-induced anxiety. Smoked a bit at uni, started getting bad anxiety most times, so I stopped smoking. Whenever I felt weird while sober (dizzy, spaced out, over-caffeinated), it Pavlov’d me into getting anxiety. Staring into the mirror and getting that weird dissociation gave me a controllable environment to get used to strange perceptual shifts.
I see this on askreddit all the time, “I realized I was the one reaching out, so I decided to let them initiate the conversation. We haven’t talked in years”.
memes
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.