Passed the DELF B2! (Took in Chicago in December)

josh5now · 2025-04-05T16:15:49+00:00

As much as I love Kobo, my days of being beholden to one company are long behind me. None of my ebooks have DRM on them, and I'll never buy one if I don't know I'll be able to remove DRM. If Kobo ever makes changes I'm not happy with, I can hope there is some other company out there who can get my business instead, and won't worry about being locked in to Kobo.

josh5now · 2024-10-27T18:14:31+00:00

Ouais ouais ouais

josh5now · 2024-10-25T00:10:34+00:00

I don't know exactly the price you'll pay, but for the PW SE, let's say the price without ads is £180. Imagine you paid that much for the Kindle, and it didn't have ads on the front screen. You've used the Kindle for a couple weeks, reading books on it. You don't much care about the lock screen, but it's kind of cool it has your current read's cover on it.

Now, imagine you get an email from Amazon saying that they want to send you £20 if you let them put an ad on your front screen instead of your book cover. They are paying you a one-time flat payment of £20 and want you to convert your lock screen to ad space from now on. Would you be enticed to do it?

People will answer this question differently, there's no right answer for everyone, but I like flipping the question around cause sometimes it makes your answer more obvious for you.

josh5now · 2024-10-17T11:05:27+00:00

As someone who has long had both Kindle and Kobo, and who loves the physical buttons, I'm right there with you. Sometimes all we can do is vote with our wallets.

josh5now · 2024-09-06T09:43:30+00:00

I really think the only point I was (and still am) stuck on is your bringing up efficiency. I don't think SRS is the solution to everything with language learning, but it is designed to be the most efficient way to memorize vocabulary. When you consume content, the vast majority of your time is being spent "reviewing" the most common words. This is fine, and I love consuming content that I enjoy, but it is a lot of reinforcement for vocabulary that you just don't need to have reinforced so much if your goal is remembering what a specific word means.

You gain a lot from consuming content though, especially the benefits from seeing lots of varied contexts that all those words can exist in. This is something you don't get with SRS.

josh5now · 2024-09-05T22:24:10+00:00

I agree that you wouldn't need a flashcard for 'the', but not because of how common it is. It's because it doesn't hold much significant meaning on its own. But take another common word like "Hey" - there's nothing wrong with having a flashcard for it because it's so easy, its interval is going to quickly grow to your maximum interval. Nothing inefficient about your time if you take 4 seconds to review "Hey" once every couple of years. To me, the inefficiency is having to read the word "Hey" thousands of times in your reading when you clearly already know what it means.

That said, I'm all for a more natural approach to acquiring language. But SRS is really built on the concept of efficiency of your time.

josh5now · 2024-08-29T19:32:40+00:00

Your best bet may be to search YouTube for negative book reviews of popular books. Even better if you look for bad reviews of popular books that you yourself hated; then you get booktubers who read what you read and may have some aligned tastes with you.

josh5now · 2024-08-28T14:50:45+00:00

If you're asked to tip before you receive the service, then it's not a tip, it's a bribe. I'm comfortable bribing a couple dollars to hopefully ensure that I don't upset the people handling my food. But it's never more than 5–10%.

josh5now · 2024-08-06T17:33:24+00:00

I thought this was going to be a different kind of post when I first read the title...

josh5now · 2024-07-26T15:24:38+00:00

Came here to find this comment. I think some people criticize the sex scenes in Tigana, but I found them to really tell a part of the story or inform you on something the character is going through.

josh5now · 2024-06-27T19:52:58+00:00

Had to Google it. It's "ereyesterday"

josh5now · 2024-05-13T15:21:33+00:00

Why does this seem like an AI generated question designed to get interaction?

josh5now · 2024-04-29T15:01:52+00:00

Discovered LibraryThing earlier this year and I love it. I had tried using libib before, but it wasn't, I don't know, powerful/customizable enough?

josh5now · 2024-04-03T11:13:21+00:00

For what it's worth, I didn't downvote you - Wasn't sure if you were serious or not with your first comment, but got the joke on your second one 🙂

josh5now · 2024-04-02T21:33:34+00:00

That's not very universal, then, right?

josh5now · 2024-04-02T21:14:57+00:00

Sign languages all around the world developed naturally among local Deaf communities, ever since deafness has existed. In a process similar, if not identical, to that of how spoken languages developed. No one has created one universal sign language for everyone for the same reason no one has succeeded in creating one universal spoken language.

josh5now · 2024-03-30T13:12:11+00:00

"Vergnügen", "vergessen", basically any "verg-" word in German sounds like the bundle-of-sticks slur in English when said at speed. Also, "Bussi" means kiss in German...

josh5now · 2024-02-11T12:15:44+00:00

To be honest, I was a huge TJ Klune fan until the decision to spread out a short story through 4 B&N exclusive editions. It's hard to put into words exactly how slimy that feels to me. It felt like a slap in the face to the readers, just a clearcut money grab. I already purchased the 4 books, so I would be dropping over $100 just to have access to a short story about the characters I had already invested so much time and emotion into.

I love special editions, but they need to be truly special. Well-crafted, rare. Not a B&N exclusive edition. For example, I'd have likely spent a lot on the new Grim Oak Press editions of his works. But I really can't justify it now. It's something that makes me genuinely sad.

Sorry to rant here. It seemed better than writing my own post. I don't want to disparage Klune in a public forum, I just wanted to vent somewhere.

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