doesn’t it depend on the kind of slavers … 
what does brave think?
Yeah, it seems like you’re meant to be miserable at all times 
I dunno… Is one of those slavers a yandere? 
what if it was like birb slavers… or lizardy people … I have forgotten his name now …
A yandere pigeon slaver… 
3 Likes
@shuly in case you didn’t see it
been quiet here…
was out for a week traveling around playing radio and whatnot but also got in some photography - these are just photos of the back of the camera but a normal color and ir+blue of a birb at mono lake with mongo zoom (after playing radio)
obviously crap and need to get them out of the camera and do the post but BIRBs!
and I already posted the sheepsies to pem pems log
and a really bad cell phone pic of birb
they were happily munching on bugs
Aww, american robins
Yeah, been some weird few months. But summer holidays starting very soon, which I hope will improve my mood 
Long time no see.
I’ve been back on WaniKani. At the speed I’m going, I hope to reach level 25 before year’s end.
I have also enquired about starting Chinese classes. They’re offered at my local university at a discounted price, and I’ve also always been interested in China/Chinese… So why not. I like to complicate my life.
Let’s see if it will confuse my brain if I’m studying both languages at the same time. I’m curious to see what will happen 
Good morning fellow sufferers!
WaniKani is going alright. I’m trying to lower my Apprentice count before starting new lessons.
Today will be my first Chinese lesson! Been excited for it for a week. I got a new fancy notebook
I liked this one because it has thicker-than-usual paper; the idea was that I would be using inky pens for character writing, so there’s minimal bleed-through. And honesty, it just feels nice to caress
I also opened some pens for the occasion, that I had been keeping in their packaging for ages.
My mum saw them all, and was like, “Why are you taking with you 700 pens???!”
Oh, mother. You wouldn’t understand 
Finally, I’m a manga protagonist!
Just wanted to come vent a bit about my first Chinese lesson yesterday (I should really change this thread’s name to ‘Bravefoot’s Japanese And Chinese Study Journal’… Anyways)
So overall I liked it, BUT:
- Holy maccheroni. I enter the classroom, greet the teacher, do some more awkward greetings with the students that were already there, sit down, and see that the teacher had kindly done printouts for each of us. I pick it up and look at it and am slammed with…
The teacher goes off on a tangent saying many things, and I’m there nodding like I totally get it, and I’m totally fine. Then for a whole half an hour I worried I had somehow gone to the wrong class level… But no, I was indeed in the Complete Beginners class.
Ah. Alright, then.
As an educator myself, I was surprised at just how bothered I was by the way the first lesson went. If it were me, I would have done a nice presentation briefly introducing China (like an icebreaker going, “Everyone, tell us your name and say one thing that comes to mind when you think of ‘China’!”). Then another introduction into the history of the Chinese language: it uses a different ‘alphabet’ from latin, this is how it started in the past (examples of oracle bone script), it uses both semantic and phonetic functions, compound words, etc etc…
THEN, learn some absolute basic words like “I”, “You”, “He/She”, “Teacher”, “Book”, etc… And then how to introduce ourselves (“Hello. I am Bravefoot. I am Italian.”).
But no. For some reason I felt inundated with these rows of characters before the absolute basics and background history/information.
I wasn’t too overwhelmed thanks to my Japanese knowledge (thankfully a lot is shared between the two languages), but it still felt uncomfortable, and I also felt sorry for anyone that didn’t have any experience at all with east asian languages…
I just checked, and Lesson 2 will have the whole, “Hello, I am Bravefoot” stuff being covered. Why that wasn’t in Lesson 1, I have no idea… Anyways, these textbook writers are the experts, I guess…
- The teacher, bless her, was lovely. But I’m gonna be brutally honest and say her English was pretty bad. It was hard to understand her, AND she found it hard understanding us. I stopped trying to ask questions when I realised (and I think the rest did, too). I really appreciate her work and effort, but I feel like especially for a Beginner’s class, your English needs to be decent because it’s the only language you can communicate with your students…
Anyways, even though this sounded mostly negative, I still enjoyed it (I am addicted to learning languages). I guess these HSK-based courses are mainly to get people to become conversational in Chinese as fast as possible, instead of a more comprehensive and in-depth learning?
At £6 a lesson, it’s pretty much a steal. I can use them to practise speaking, and have a native speaker help when needed…
P.S. Oh, and she had gotten us all a little お守りfor good luck in our studies 
immersion… 
must stop thinking in birb engrish and think in birb chinese
There’s a couple different schools of thought for this where some people think it’s best to start from basics and learn in pieces that can be put together and others favor a full immersion approach from the beginning. I think it makes more sense to learn using a common lingua franca like English to explain simple things because there is kind of a pre-introductory level where if you don’t understand any of the language you’ll just get tired of it. Immersive approaches to learning do work over long periods of exposure but it’s hard to get any grasp of what’s happening as a complete beginner. Even knowing some Japanese I think I’d be mostly lost in a Chinese course. I can only imagine the learning barrier if it’s completely foreign. I’m not a teacher but it’s got to be frustrating if no one understands what you’re saying to the class.
More like full-on drowning 
Immersion certainly did wonders for me with English, but I knew some basics at the time… Plus, I think immersion by living in China proper would be a LOT more useful than ‘immersion’ once a week as a language Chinese language class in England instead…? 
Anyways, looking forward to Lesson 2 where we’ll get to actually learn the basics 
I’ve asked for the textbook PDF so I can do some reading in advance ^v^
flap those wings harder
Ugh 
gonna have to improve that endurance at some point
don’t wanna leave anyone disappointed 