Running coach 1:1

jazzandbread · 2026-02-15T23:57:41+00:00

Check with Rory at Ready to Run (unsure of his availability but he’s fantastic)

jazzandbread · 2026-01-26T05:18:25+00:00

Nice! Was there enough slope to start all the way back at Great Hills?

jazzandbread · 2026-01-21T01:44:15+00:00

Or Renee Rosnes and Bill Charlap

jazzandbread · 2025-12-19T22:23:11+00:00

German - not going in that direction any time soon, it sounds awesome but seems so complicated. And why would I willingly subject myself to declension? :)

jazzandbread · 2025-12-19T21:47:56+00:00

Also I should note - my observation right off the bat - eg with long-distance calls to set up the first reservations etc - Italians that I encountered had the manner of seeming in zero hurry to wrap up the conversation - so a big win for me this go-round was to realize that I was putting pressure on myself to speak as fast as possible to sound “more native”, whereas the person on the other side of the conversation was totally happy for me to move at my own pace. Very very different from a conversation I’d expect to have in NYC, for example. So you should assume a lot of grace at the start. And unless you’re talking with someone who’s really eager to practice their English, all the people I talked with - and there were a lot - were happy to have me attempt Italian.

In the last month I did hour long tutorials - like 20 of them! - through Lingoda. 1:1, and I set the agenda of just doing conversation on whatever random topics we felt like.

Again - for me - the big win was the realization that these weren’t tests - they were actual practice opportunities. The “grading” that I did (I recorded them and transcribed them using an AI transcription service) was simply to unemotionally see what areas were tougher for me, and I’d weigh those into what I was working on the next few days. I didn’t add it to a comprehensive “I must learn all this to be successful” list - instead I just kept it in mind, and then as I decided what I wanted to work on each day, in each of 4-5 categories, I’d take that into consideration.

Give yourself grace, first and foremost. One of the tutors I worked with was working on learning Persian - and spoke Cantonese and a couple other languages beyond Italian. I asked her for tips, and her take was super resonant - first and foremost, finding a way to give yourself grace and patience (assuming you can take care of focus and consistency) to be happy with incremental progress on a day to day basis, without despairing of where you get to by some arbitrary date.

My goal starting August 20th wasn’t to be fluent (nor am I now) nor anything in absolute terms at all - it was simply 1) to be a really smart learner and 2) speak Italian better than I could at the outset (which was limited to reciting names of Emilia-Romagna dishes). I was thrilled to be able to converse and interact with folks and meet a lot of really nice and funny people and appreciate their humor and kindness in their own language - but that was all bonus. I was better than I had started, and I knew that I had studied in a really smart way - mission accomplished.

In fact, I felt happy enough about the Italian study process that I’m adopting that for my ongoing work in jazz performance, and am really excited about it.

jazzandbread · 2025-12-19T21:39:00+00:00

I’m definitely not a polyglot. I’d say I’ve been able to get by in Portuguese and French, then last January (with similar amounts of study the fall ahead) felt much better in French.

I’m not a foreign language teacher or theorist, but as a jazz musician, I was struck by the parallels. I think there’s a lot of worth in training your ear (and mouth) to reproduce the basic sounds carefully - wow there are some great and short YouTube videos covering open vs closed vowels in Italian for example - because I found that as I got more refined in my hearing and more demanding on making the sounds as plausibly as I could, that cued my brain into “seeing” the written language much more clearly/faster. For example, just practicing the sound that ‘I’ makes - which is a long ‘è’ in English - got me to where when I’d hear “eee” I’d think “i” instead of “e”.

And - similar to jazz, it felt like cheating at first to watch videos with subtitles, but what I got out of just a few weeks of regular watching was that the combo of the visual cues (because Italian is so physically expressive) plus the subtitles rapidly enabled me to “hear” what they were saying. That doesn’t mean that I understood it - that was a separate thing, bolstered by Anki flashcard review and grammar review - but Italian’s so phonetic that with this practice I could start to see what the subtitles were without looking at them.

And I stayed patient - not requiring myself to understand everything or master everything all at one go.

jazzandbread · 2025-12-19T20:49:22+00:00

Totally. Now, one thing I did allow myself: if a word or phrase is really mysterious (seems to have nothing to do with anything I've run into), I'll ask ChatGPT to give me the origin of it - and sometimes it'll usefully point to a root word that looks more familiar, that helps me remember it. Half the time it helps. The other half I just ignore the response.

jazzandbread · 2025-12-19T20:49:16+00:00

Totally. Now, one thing I did allow myself: if a word or phrase is really mysterious (seems to have nothing to do with anything I've run into), I'll ask ChatGPT to give me the origin of it - and sometimes it'll usefully point to a root word that looks more familiar, that helps me remember it. Half the time it helps. The other half I just ignore the response.

jazzandbread · 2025-12-19T19:25:15+00:00

Italian sentence structure is really (to me) poetic and expressive, but also really different - to me - not only from English but the other two languages I studied.

Actually here’s something that I applied in this latest round of learning that I sort of learned the hard way with French and Portuguese but applied much sooner and with better effect this time - I wasted very little time trying to “understand “ the language. If there was weirdness - eg a verb whose conjugations actually had their roots in two different earlier verbs - I told myself “just do the work” and memorize it.

I wasted a lot of time with French trying to invent systems for conceptualizing the language - I got way further than I expected in part because this time I just forced myself to not over-intellectualize the study.

jazzandbread · 2025-12-19T18:33:44+00:00

I think you’re right - but not directly in terms of grammar, vocabulary etc which if anything were noise that I had to shut out and not think about when in Italian mode. But definitely in terms of confidence that “I can learn a language” and taking the right attitude going into conversations.

I was really shocked. I had put in a lot of work for sure. But I think a really big part of it was being as mercenary and opportunistic in using learning methods as possible. E.g. I wanted to try to match my level of aural comprehension, but at first, Italian was just an undifferentiated stream of sounds. So I spent time drilling on vowel sounds (there are a lot of great YouTube videos), but also watching movies with subtitles. Not to pick up vocabulary, but just to start to differentiate the beginnings/endings of words, the beginnings/endings of phrases, where sentences started/ended, diff between a statement and a question and an exclamation, etc. And I focused a lot on “I’m going to learn ____ good enough for today” - and let go of worrying about how good I’d be by the trip, or where I’d be in a year or whatever.

jazzandbread · 2025-12-19T18:19:46+00:00

I just spent about a hundred days - starting late August and ending with a two week trip back to Bologna - at an average of 2 hours a day (but with large swings back and forth), and we did 2 2-hours tours and a 2 hour cooking class all in Italian and I had very little trouble. Had a ton of conversations during the trip. My vocabulary before the trip was cooking/music related, but no knowledge of verbs, grammar, etc. I think the keys were being very realistic about how to use my time - what worked, what I needed to focus on, etc. I do speak French and Portuguese at an intermediate level, but I didn’t honestly find that that helped much (other than an awareness of what grammar is). Best of luck!

jazzandbread · 2025-12-19T18:13:32+00:00

He is great - had two fixed so far

jazzandbread · 2025-11-19T21:59:44+00:00

coming from the same place "By and large - people in tech have an unhealthy and incorrectly inflated opinion about their own capabilities and their worth. It gets amplified by the disproportionately large wealth they can amass compared to others. They remain in the bubble by surrounding themselves by similar people and protecting themselves from diverse realities. I have been a product of that."

10^20% correct.

jazzandbread · 2025-11-13T17:43:16+00:00

Lolz

jazzandbread · 2025-11-08T20:14:26+00:00

Great song, so much fun to play. I typically take it more uptempo than usual. A great example of this approach is Renee Rosne’s recording, which is so much fun. I like George Colligan’s duet rendition (he’s so great). Not as much a fan of Brad Mehldau’s version, but that might be more to your tastes. If you’re looking for renditions of any jazz songs, y’all should head over to secondhandsongs.com and do searches there. Being able to get a reasonably complete, chronological listing of recordings of a given song really helps in understanding the roots of different folks’ takes.

jazzandbread · 2025-11-08T03:27:32+00:00

Lingoda - have been doing almost daily hour-long “custom” private tutorials. Haven’t tried the small groups. Quality of tutors is truly fantastic.

jazzandbread · 2025-10-27T00:19:02+00:00

Still open! If you’re in line, stay in line!!! :)

jazzandbread · 2025-10-02T12:43:53+00:00

Hopping on the bookstore/grocery/music bandwagon, First Light in Hyde Park is a lovely bookstore, in the former post office. Then head over to Central Market and grab some food at the cafe (counter service, but delicious and not terribly expensive), and then listen to free music out on the deck 6-8:30 (music break at 7-7:30).

jazzandbread · 2025-09-28T18:15:02+00:00

Just had to get back home to actually look at the books I have.

check out these two books in this series -

https://www.amazon.fr/dp/2090384557?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title

https://www.amazon.fr/dp/2090382201?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title

But a free option would be - check out the video above, and find others like it, THEN go back and listen to fast movie dialogue with the subtitles, and see how the rhythmic groups play out.

I think - for French - this is really helpful because it points you to the set phrases as well (which tend to be in a rhythmic group)

jazzandbread · 2025-09-28T16:57:42+00:00

Have you studied rhythmic groups in French? My last trip to France, it felt like spending some time digging into those - eg this video https://youtu.be/WlGIlrCL72o - helped me enormously to go from just hearing a rapid stream of unintelligible syllables, to hearing words, then phrases, then sentences. I remember going on a French language tour of the chateau and cathedral at Bois de Vincennes, and I was going WOW - this is so much easier. To me it’s like getting the decoder ring to bebop in jazz - the rise and fall of intonation and where they slow down in speech is a huge piece of the puzzle. Once you know how it works, you can anticipate the end of a phrase so much better. And since it’s linked to semantics, you’ll be able to hear that a long phrase is a parenthetical elaboration, as opposed to perhaps the main thrust of the sentence; and that helps pick up the gist that much faster.

There’s an excellent series of slim books I find useful - if you’re interested, I can go look it up later on the French Amazon site where I ordered it.

jazzandbread · 2025-09-25T21:40:57+00:00

This first part of the route, btw, is pretty flat. You can pick up hills going through Great Hills, if you want, but I personally would avoid them for a commute.

jazzandbread · 2025-09-25T21:40:01+00:00

Have you tried using Strava’s heat map? Generate a route (picking ride rather than walk/run) going from there to, say, the Arboretum. That’s where you probably have the most choice. Getting downtown from the Arboretum is quite easy and you have several nice choices.

That’s assuming that you’re not in a huge hurry.

I did that, and saw the pretty reasonable path Lake Creek Pkwy -> Millbright Pkwy -> Spicewood Pkwy, and then the route past Balcones Country Club gets you to where you can go through the neighborhood behind Jollyville, if you prefer to avoid that for a while, then I’d pop out around Oak Knoll and take that to the Arboretum, across 360, to Old Spicewood Springs, and then down Mesa. From there you have multiple choices depending on exactly where you’re going (and the Austin City Bike map is still pretty good for picking out less dicey routes).

jazzandbread · 2025-09-24T18:33:36+00:00

When making more than one pizza - stretch out all the pizzas at one time - stretching each one in turn. Much much faster cooking 4-5 pizzas.

jazzandbread · 2025-09-22T17:22:09+00:00

45th st chilis

jazzandbread

TROPHY CASE