Friday, December 7, 2012

Learning Walks, And Extreme Thicketing

Often I go on "learning walks." That is, I'll take a long walk with either my Polish flash cards, or my little Android tablet on which I have installed Anki (actually, the program on the tablet is AnkiDroid, the Android version...I'm using the latest beta apk version from here).  Tonight I walked around for about two hours and knocked out about 400 flash cards in that time on Anki.  I pretty much just use the tablet for language study and that's the only reason I got it.

The other night I tried something different.  I took a list of the hardest words that have been plaguing me lately, and went for an arduous slog through waist-high brush and thick grass for about half an hour.  I was fighting my way through a thicket of both words and flora.  I figured that this would be a somewhat homeopathic approach.  Maybe it was effective.  But it was highly unpleasant.  I ended up back at home with all kinds of sticks and burrs embedded in my shoes, socks and pants.   Then I spent the next half hour picking them all out. Maybe I'd really learn a lot if I dragged myself through a huge patch of nettle and poison ivy.  Guess I'm just all in for education...who knows--maybe I'll go thicketing again at some point.

1 comment:

  1. I see now why you are known as Stuart the Maniac.

    ReplyDelete