on Brettcajun's blog
on Brettcajun's blog, you seem like a person I'd like to get to know. I tuhoght what you said was right on the money, much as I still love Brettcajun and his blog. I can't get over how many people think that, regardless of how obviously inappropriate it would be for a US President to try to influence the outcome of a state Supreme Court decision, it’s amazing to me how many gay people are upset that just four months into ANYBODY'S Presidential admin that gay rights would even be on the radar yet, let alone this one with all its unprecedented clusterflock of problems left by Obama’s incompetent predecessor. Last time I checked, a President is elected for a four year term to accomplish his or her goals, not four and a half months. I wouldn't talk impeachment just yet.And yes, Bill Clinton did bring up the right of gays to serve openly in the military right off the bat when he took office in 1992, and it was a disaster for him. He was successfully prostrated by the right wing, and had to retreat into Don't Ask, Don't Tell , which I've heard over and over by many gay people was a huge failing on Pres. Clinton's part. I'm sure, besides the obvious problems Obama has had to deal with since January 20th, that Obama took Clinton's early office missteps into account on this and other matters. There is a time and place for legislation to be effective, and this ain't it for a Federal stands on gay rights.Regarding Hillary's recent stand in favor of gay rights in the state department, she was appointed by, and reports to Pres. Obama. As the article that Brett linked in his post points out, Hillary's promulgation on gay rights is the de facto official Obama position on the subject, so in effect Obama has made some progress for gay rights already through his appointee. Hillary isn’t operating completely on her own agenda. Her efforts on this are absolutely in accord with the Obama doctrine.Anyway, it was SO refreshing to read your comments and know that there are other gay people out there who actually get it. I live in Orange County, California, which is a lovely, lovely place, but not because of the politics. I’m constantly getting into scrapes with my fellow gay friends out here because of my political views, which were formed in the Washington D.C. area where I grew up. But I chose to live here because after going to college here, I learned to love it so, in spite of the political landscape. I will continue to make a stand based on logic and realistic expectations. Orange County politics have changed for the better in over the years I have lived here (since 1990), and they continue to do so, but it will probably always be more conservative than liberal. I can stand that as long as I have my Coffee Klatch of like-minded friends. I would have emailed you this instead of writing it as a comment, but didn't see an email link.
2) I read about your method, and it seems my own experience overlaps with yours by 70 percent, 大概.I am experimenting with learning foreign languages by reading frequent word entries in a monolingual dictionary for foreign learners (most European languages at least are well provided with those).I do not try to remember them actively (with a flash card program or some such gimmick those I would consider inferior as the format does not allow for multiple senses and tons of examples easily).I just read the dict like one could read a book an exciting book, which I do not need to break from (all explanations are within).WHY? to break from the frequency cage THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PRINCIPLE here.Most common words cover largish parts of texts (e.g. 2000 could come to 80% for non-specific texts ) therefore if one tries to acquire new vocabulary from reading, as is often suggested, one has to fight against the frequency conspiracy words beyond the first 2000 will come up after thousands of frequent words, and only in one of their senses.By reading a dictionary you beat the Frequency Conspiracy against you you are presented with all meanings, in correct contexts and collocations, in examples drawn from natural corpora.You save enormous amounts of time by not trying to get vocabulary from reading.THEREFORE reading a dict becomes one's major method of language acquisition.As dictionaries do not come with soundtracks, I read them in my own internal voice, at this stage.This remains almost my sole practice until I acquire PASSIVELY 2000-3000-4000 话.THERE IS ANOTHER MAJOR REASON for this: there is no known human intellectual ability, perhaps, in which passive skills would not cover areas several times as extensive as those in which one's active skills are manifested. Language is no exception.It is utmost stupidity in all language courses to demand that new vocabulary and grammar would be remembered and used, all of it, immediately upon learning. NO! get yourself presented with 2, 5 times more of correct language first.It coincidentally avoids being crushed by excruciating effort, as just reading' a self-explanatory text, which a monolingual dictionary is, is pleasure, not painThen I switch to (一) correcting how the lang sounds, 和 (b) to activating my knowledge.(一) comes as a Harry Potter book in the target language (there are few if any without translations) accompanied by an actor reading the full text (是, best actors have been hired and produced audio versions of those).With say 3000 至 4000 thousand words passively in my head already (took me about 1 month of reading Robert dictionaries for my French about 2 hrs per day), it's a pleasure, not a toil.The froggy actor (在 3/4 the full speed, modern digital recorders can slow it down without actually distorting the tone of the voice or making it unnatural) is buzzing in my ear, I stop the recording at each and every sentence making sure it registers in my head, and so it goes on. All properly said, 同 100% native intonation and ways to convey emotions etc as the actor performs with gusto on the audiobook version I have.This sentence-by-sentence reading/listening is different from just watching some Potter-based movies with rewritten dialogues.And the next stage is ACTIVATING this all.第一 by rereading already studied chapters, then by retelling them to myself in my head, then by starting to write all kinds of opinions, micro-essays, or doing scenes suggested by regular textbooks only now, when those have long fell below my level of knowledge.THEN and only then it would be listening to radio/TV (i.e. recognition of unknown language) it is useless to try to recognize speech when you have no idea what those words and/or idioms meanGRAMMAR is something that I go on very lightly, it's actually not as important as many, many examples of words in correctly constructed sentences picked from language corpora, i.e. 100% natural native speech which are supplied by the monolingual learner's dictionaries P.P.S. If you are interested, I could recommend you a couple of dictionaries for learning Russian for reading.One is based on the Longman Activator , i.e. contains about 600 thematic, notional categories written as dictionary entries, good for just reading The other one is mimics the famous Collins COBUILD definitions style and covers about 7000 most frequent Russian words (which are marked in bands, so one could pick the first 2000 , or the next band to, 说, 3000 或 5000 and so on).Both can be found on the NET
