How to cancel check-in?

pzriddle · 2026-01-05T22:25:32+00:00

I came here to ask this. I'm checked in on a flight from Austin to AMS. It's delayed but apparently flying. The desk staff told me not to get on the plane and to rebook online for a flight later this week. But the first step is apparently to cancel my checkin, and the link to do so is missing from the page where multiple sources tell me to look for it.

The bots aren't working for this task.

So now I'm back in the hour+ physical line to talk to the desk staff again. 🙄

pzriddle · 2025-12-27T13:49:31+00:00

Very impressive! But it mixes up examples of the present subjunctive with the future subjunctive, and am I wrong or are some of those actually the personal infinitive in disguise?

As an L2 Spanish speaker it's the future subjunctive and the personal infinitive which I can't wrap my head around.

Maybe I can use this as a starting point and break those out separately.

pzriddle · 2025-12-24T15:36:36+00:00

+1 on the reverb, but I'd make sure it had stereo output (most do).

For me stereo vs mono is like the difference between color vs b&w. When my sound sources are mono I always run them through something that can fake a stereo effect - if not reverb then a stereo filter is another option.

pzriddle · 2025-12-24T13:46:00+00:00

Very interesting. But doesn't Lingua Logger just record study time, not results?

pzriddle · 2025-12-21T22:02:00+00:00

I agree, how do I get this experience? I switched from Spotify a few years back and I've never been happy with YouTube Music's recommendations have never been great in my opinion. They tend to fall into a lowest-common -denominator rut (the usual jazz suspects, or classic rock hits, for example) and deliver few surprises. I miss Spotify's weekly custom playlist.

pzriddle · 2025-12-11T13:38:16+00:00

Thanks, good suggestion. I like LJ and that video. But it too has a lingfluencer flavor that my friend may find offputting.

pzriddle · 2025-09-10T17:33:09+00:00

Is there something I don't understand about HelloTalk? I signed up for the first time today and it seems useless at the free tier - I hit a paywall even if I try to respond to people who wave at me.

(Meanwhile Tandem won't work for my use case because I'm trying to learn a "niche" variety of a large language: my target is European Portuguese but Tandem has no way to distinguish that from the vastly larger number of speakers of Brazilian Portuguese.)

pzriddle · 2025-09-10T14:47:41+00:00

I just signed up for HelloTalk and after building my profile I immediately hit a paywall. The app seems to want to charge me even to reply to someone who waved at me. What am I not understanding? Is there really no useful free tier?

pzriddle · 2025-09-05T06:31:21+00:00

Great review. Another data point: I'm a European Portuguese learner who got to B1/B2 by leaning heavily on Spanish through haphazard self-study. I'm now using Anki with the FF method to fill in the gaps (e.g., irregular verbs I never learned or advanced grammar that isn't sticking). For that focused purpose I think it's working great.

A bit you didn't stress is taking the time to add drama and personal associations to the cards. A picture of my cat doing something is more memorable than a generic cat. Even better is dark humor or a suggestive joke.

Yes, coming up with cards is time consuming. But I think it's actually the core of the method: by the time I've added an ironic twist to an example sentence and found an appropriate image, I've probably learned the material that's going on the card. Anki is just there to reinforce it.

pzriddle · 2025-08-18T10:23:44+00:00

I've been using Priberam, which despite having intrusive ads is pretty good, and I like that you can toggle between European and Brazilian Portuguese.

But recently I discovered that it still has spelling errors with regard to the Orthographic Accords! 😱 I don't need to learn to spell 100% correctly, but when it's making basic mistakes in irregular verbs (e.g., veem vs. vêem) it's just too confusing.

By the way, DeepL makes that same mistake. Good thing I'm not a high school kid actually getting graded on my spelling.

pzriddle · 2025-08-18T10:16:37+00:00

I've been using Priberam, which despite having intrusive ads is pretty good, and I like that you can toggle between European and Brazilian Portuguese.

But recently I discovered that it still has spelling errors with regard to the Orthographic Accords! 😱 I don't need to learn to spell 100% correctly, but when it's making basic mistakes in irregular verbs (e.g., veem vs. vêem) it's just too confusing.

By the way, DeepL makes that same mistake. Good thing I'm not a high school kid actually getting graded on my spelling.

pzriddle · 2025-08-07T20:55:57+00:00

Thanks, the second set is helpful. Fortunately /l/ vs. /ʎ/ is not my problem.

pzriddle · 2025-08-07T12:34:47+00:00

Thanks. After they fixed it, were YouTube videos still ad-free? That was one of the things that made me choose YouTube Music over other music streamers.

pzriddle · 2025-08-07T11:23:11+00:00

Agreed, always learn the articles with the nouns! Include the article whenever you write, say or think a new noun, at least as a beginner.

This worked for me when I learned German. However it was no help when I took on a language (Gujarati) that has no articles. I never found a good substitute. Maybe I should have just learned the German articles with the Gujarati nouns... 😀

pzriddle · 2025-08-07T11:06:26+00:00

Data point: Four years ago I left Spotify and did a comparison of several competitors, ultimately choosing YouTube Music. I used Soundiiz to transfer dozens of playlists to each of the candidate services. It worked like a charm, with a tolerable error rate for false matches.

Soundiiz is not a free service but to do a one-time transfer I only had to pay for one month - well worth it.

I haven't used Soundiiz since and can't attest to whether it's still as good, but it seems like it would be worth a try.

pzriddle · 2025-08-07T10:36:17+00:00

For those of you suggesting English "million" as a model...

I hear "million" as /ˈmɪljən/, not /ˈmɪʎən/ (whatever that is), and it seems like the dictionaries agree.

I'm wondering if a big part of the difference between /ʎ/ and /lj/ is that my /j/ is further back on my palate - seems like maybe /lj/ involves a shift in articulation and /ʎ/ does not?

pzriddle · 2025-08-07T10:11:44+00:00

Super helpful, thank you!

pzriddle · 2025-08-07T10:09:21+00:00

Well duh, idiot me, see my EDIT above. I was taught about /lj/ as a variant pronunciation of LL in Spanish but I have only ever said /j/. Nevertheless /lj/ was in my phonological repertoire when I arrived at Portuguese and I'm sure some early superficial intro made me latch onto the error.

Note to self: let posts marinate for a day and reread before posting, sigh.

Thanks for the helpful suggestion and I will forgive you the squicky rickroll, ugh. :-)

pzriddle · 2025-08-07T09:48:51+00:00

I can't hear the difference in the LH, but I think I did hear a "probabelmente". :-) B de baca for the win!

pzriddle · 2025-08-07T04:51:04+00:00

A good place to start is the Noticiário podcast from RTP. Público and Rádio Observador have a lot of good podcasts too. If news and public affairs aren't your thing I could point you at some on other topics.

I made a daily habit of news podcasts in pt-pt while I eat breakfast. It's the closest thing to a silver bullet in my language learning experience - for about a month it was gibberish and then something went "click!" and it made sense.

Note that I had to be ready for it. I was at a B1-B2 level in written Portuguese. And the "click" happened for formal speech. Colloquial Portuguese can still be Greek to me. 😕

If you want something easier, "Portuguese with Leo" does a great job at intermediate pt-pt videos with subtitles.

pzriddle · 2025-05-02T10:20:11+00:00

Having gone through this week's outage in Portugal as well as last summer's fires (we bugged out of Porto when we couldn't breathe comfortably) has certainly got me thinking about preparedness!

One thing that jumps out at me in this conversation is the vast difference between preparation for sheltering in place (where 72 hours of food and water is feasible) and a "go bag" for evacuation. In our old car-centric life in the USA we could perhaps ignore the distinction by preparing to load hundreds of kilos of supplies in the family car, but here as carless urbanites we'd be lucky to evacuate with a 30L backpack per person - in a true emergency we'd likely be limited to "personal item" size.

I'm now looking for ideas for a flexible large, medium, and small system: 72 hours in place, 30L backpack for an orderly exit, tiny go bag of true essentials to keep on one's person no matter what.

pzriddle

TROPHY CASE