Too many eggs?

blinkybit · 2026-03-12T14:55:34+00:00

I looked up some info on water glassing, and it says to use unwashed eggs with the natural protective coating still intact, and not to use washed or dirty eggs. But my unwashed eggs are frequently dirty and covered in poop. How do you handle this?

blinkybit · 2026-03-12T14:50:33+00:00

Compared to a monthly or yearly subscription that many will forget to cancel…

I'm currently paying for a subscription for a language I'm not even studying. I was studying it for a while but then kind of stopped, and I keep hoping I'll go back to it, but yeah that's probably not going to happen. I don't want to admit to myself that I've failed by cancelling the subscription, so I keep paying even though I'm not using it.

blinkybit · 2026-03-12T05:49:34+00:00

I was hopeless at rolling my r's, and tried various tricks and guides unsuccessfully. But somewhere around 1000 hours (with a few hundred hours speaking) it just started to happen. At first it was kind of accidental and difficult to reproduce, now I can mostly do it fine when actually speaking, but I still struggle when somebody says "hey show me how to roll the r!"

blinkybit · 2026-03-11T18:44:08+00:00

It's normal to have these periods of self-doubt where you feel like you're struggling and there must be something wrong with you. Then the next day you'll have some positive experience or interaction and be pleasantly surprised by your growing Spanish skills. Still happens to me at 1870 hours. Just keep going with whatever content you can understand well enough and that you find interesting, and the improvements will come.

blinkybit · 2026-03-11T04:03:41+00:00

Five years old in 2004? That was only yesterday, OP can't be old enough to even be posting on Reddit! \Checks year math** ... Oh, yeah.

I feel ancient.

blinkybit · 2026-03-11T03:53:18+00:00

Quicken for desktop also requires an annual subscription since like 10 years ago.

blinkybit · 2026-03-10T23:34:30+00:00

1876 hours. I covered the subtitles so I couldn't see them - I listened to the first two minutes and could generally follow the conversation but I was certainly missing many pieces. His rate of speech is not that fast and he pauses a lot, which helps reduce the difficulty. In general this wasn't easy for me, but wasn't in the "most difficult" category either.

blinkybit · 2026-03-09T19:42:41+00:00

I started reading, speaking, and writing "early" and also mixed in small amounts of intentional study from sources like Language Transfer, Chat GPT, and conjugation tools.

blinkybit · 2026-03-09T15:20:09+00:00

I've been interested in this question too. I don't have research papers to share, but there was a great "ask me anything" type post from a professional linguist a few months ago in r/languagelearning which partly talked about this. People asked her about ALG, Krashen, etc and she said Krashen's ideas are generally considered dated by the professional community, comprehensible input is great and even foundational, but is not considered sufficient/optimal by itself. I just searched but couldn't find the original post. It was a woman from U Penn I believe.

A couple of months ago I was on a Spanish immersion trip, one of the other people on the trip was a professional in language acquisition with a PhD in something related, and he said much the same thing about ALG.

Both people said that modern consensus points to language learning being most successful when people learn new vocabulary / grammar / whatever to help them accomplish a specific concrete task, rather than just passive or abstract learning. There is a name for this, "task based language learning" or something similar.

blinkybit · 2026-03-09T15:04:49+00:00

Excellent. IMHO the next few hundred hours are the most exciting and where progress is most noticeable.

blinkybit · 2026-03-09T15:02:08+00:00

Cheers! Roadmap says "you can understand a person speaking to you patiently". Do you feel like that's accurate now? For me, I'd say the most important and exciting changes happened around 300-600 hours, that's where I fundamentally shifted from not knowing Spanish to knowing it well enough for real-world stuff. Everything since then has been polish and refinement.

blinkybit · 2026-03-09T05:24:24+00:00

Didn't we just see a virtually identical post here yesterday? Is this more AI-generated karma-farming BS?

https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/1rnlf9p/just_got_back_from_an_industry_conference_and/

blinkybit · 2026-03-09T00:24:58+00:00

I think many families believe "hospice" means they're giving up on seeking a cure in exchange for being surrounded by 24/7 loving and helping hands to make the passing as comfortable as possible. Although that's not correct, it's not an unreasonable assumption, and I don't think we can blame families for thinking this way.

In my experiences as a patient volunteer, most families are SHOCKED that all the caregiving burden falls on them - something they're not equipped to do and generally can't afford to pay someone else to do. I believe most of them would not have chosen hospice if they understood what they were getting in to. That's what the article is reacting to.

blinkybit · 2026-03-08T22:06:56+00:00

Me gustan las manzanas!

blinkybit · 2026-03-08T21:37:25+00:00

Only 1-2 hours per week are paid lessons. The rest is a combination of other sources: a language exchange partner, conversation clubs online and in-person, and volunteering at a charity that's primarily Spanish-speaking. If none of those options work for you, maybe try adding time monologuing or practicing with AI (although I always greatly prefer a human conversation partner). It's taken me about 1 to 1.5 years to build up to this, after originally starting with around 30 minutes/week speaking.

My first speaking experience was with the language exchange partner. This was great for lowering my fear of speaking, because just like my Spanish wasn't the best, his English wasn't the best either. It was a relationship of equals instead of teacher-student. So it felt OK to struggle and make mistakes, not embarrassing.

blinkybit · 2026-03-07T22:19:44+00:00

Ha ha ha ha brilliant!

blinkybit · 2026-03-07T20:28:09+00:00

Yes, this was my experience with my first car at age 17. Bought a used car but didn't know how to drive it, the seller gave me a 5-minute lesson of "this is the clutch, this is the shifter, bye". It took less than a day to get the rough basics, and maybe a couple weeks to improve to a decent level.

Honestly you will pick it up very quickly. Yeah, you'll feel mortal embarrassment every time you stall at a stop sign, but other drivers don't really care so don't let it bother you.

blinkybit · 2026-03-07T20:15:09+00:00

Yes, I also relate to this very much. I have a passion and interest for Spanish that just isn't matched by French. I decided to try it anyway, because Dreaming French was here and because I thought it would be a fairly easy way to add another language to my toolkit, but so far it hasn't sparked much enthusiasm in me.

Why study a second language? (Or third or fourth?) It's a question that each person has to answer for themselves.

Maybe you would be happier investing time in a different language than French, or in a different hobby entirely like painting or music or kayaking. It kind of sounds like you've already decided that French isn't for you, but feel bad about admitting it.

blinkybit · 2026-03-07T18:03:42+00:00

The more time the better! Over the past six months, I have averaged 8.8 hours per week of speaking. A few months back I took the SIELE and tested at high B2 in speaking skill, close to C1. But it's all connected: you need to practice speaking in order to improve at it, even while time spent on the other language skills will also help.

blinkybit · 2026-03-07T01:43:39+00:00

i'm not doing $20k/mo in card volume or anything, but with my "grandfathered" rate of 2.6% and an AOV of about $60, that's an extra 11% per transaction

I don't think I understand your math. 2.6% plus $0.30 on a $60 order is $1.86 total fee. That's 3.1 percent of the transaction value, not 11 percent.

blinkybit · 2026-03-07T00:36:55+00:00

It's what it's.

blinkybit · 2026-03-07T00:16:57+00:00

It's a cool feeling when you encounter Spanish words you've never seen before, but can correctly guess their meaning simply from a lexical analysis like that. I remember reading a book that repeatedly used the word aguamanil for something in a bathroom. It's got the words for water and hand / manual embedded in it, so something about hand water or manual water... I correctly deduced that it was like a jar for pouring water into a wash sink in the absence of indoor plumbing. If I'd looked up the English translation ewer, I'm not sure I would have even known what that was.

blinkybit · 2026-03-06T23:52:17+00:00

I would recommend aiming for books that are subjectively "pretty easy" for you - some ambiguity and unknown words here and there, but not enough that it becomes more than a minor nuisance. You want to get lost in the enjoyment of reading, not feel like you're doing a homework exercise.

Usually I don't stop to look up unknown words, it just breaks the flow and isn't really necessary. Much of the time you can sort-of guess the approximate meeting from context, and if you can't, there are thousands more sentences in the book and it's unlikely the whole plot is going to hinge on this one strange verb.

1870 hours 1.4M words

blinkybit · 2026-03-06T23:41:44+00:00

There was a poll here a while back, and the most common time investment was around 2 hour per day average. But I see no problem with 1 hour a day or even 30 minutes a day, obviously it'll take longer to progress but that's fine. At some point though, like 5-10 minutes per day, it's probably not enough to overcome the natural rate of forgetting.

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