M2M Day 159: I’m a week behind
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For April, my goal is to hold a 30-minute conversation in Hebrew on the future of technology.
Today went perfectly.
I rolled out of bed and onto a 30-minute Skype Hebrew lesson (today’s topic was “the future of inequality”).
After a mid-day interlude of listening to the entire “The Martian” audiobook for a second time, walking along San Francisco’s Embarcadero, grabbing a burger at the Ferry Building’s farmers market, stopping by the Union Square Apple Store to play, working out, and making some electronic music in the park, I eventually ended up back at my apartment, where I wrote one of this month’s eleven Hebrew monologues.
Even with the new structure in place, writing these Hebrew monologues is still a lot of work: Rather than just translating my ideas directly into Hebrew, I instead try to express everything in words I already know, or words that are heavily related to words I already know (Hebrew has a very explicit root system).
Since my vocabulary is minimal, this wordsmithing effort requires significant brainpower. As I’m writing, I also need to decide whether or not to adopt new words (For example, today, I decided to learn the phrase for “genetic engineering”).
Anyway, I signed up for this, so I’m happily willing to contribute the brainpower necessary to complete the remaining ten monologues. The problem is… I wish I started this whole process one week ago, at the beginning of the month. Instead, I floundered around a bit, thinking I could just randomly walk my way into Hebrew proficiency.
Nevertheless, I can’t go back in time, and part of this learning process is figuring out the learning process anyway, so this week hasn’t been completely wasted. Still, I feel like I’m just starting, and I’ve already burned through 25% of my time.
Hopefully, I can finish all the monologues in the next two weeks, leaving the final week to put it all together.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
