Welcome again to everybody. Make yourselves at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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I am in a bit of a slump and I am just spending my days just playing games and watching vids (no visible job opportunities besides one that would be a horrible option and no college, plus I have debt).
I’ve found it helps a lot to be overly kind to myself during those times. Treat yourself like you would a friend who’s going through that. As much as it sucks, under capitalism it’s a totally normal situation to be in and there’s a lot of us out there experiencing the same thing - you aren’t alone. I’m in a similar spot myself.
Thanks for the advice. It is difficult to do what you suggest however, because I have some self-esteem issues and I feel a lot of guilt over things I did and did not do.
That’s very understandable 🫂
That’s the worst. Nagging debt takes the F out of funemployment.
Funemployment? What is that?
Back in my birth country we used to get a few months of unemployment insurance payouts after losing a job. You’d get paid almost as much as you’d take home when working and all you had to do was confirm you didn’t have a job. We called that period “funemployment”
I do not think America has that lol (and I never had a job in the first place).
Knitting doesn’t need to be expensive and fills the same “play games and watch videos and zone out for a bit” space for me
Hmm, knitting seems interesting (though I do not have any of the tools so I would have to ask parents for it), even if it is not something I am interested in right now. Maybe I could take on some other type of project…
Well, knitting needles and cotton is pretty cheap usually if you want to look into it. Plenty of free recipies on Ravelry.
I have been trying to read instead of just playing video games and watching YouTube videos.
If you find a game where you don’t have to do much thinking it can be nice to listen to audio books wile playing games.
I suggest taking on a project, even if it isn’t monetizable and doesn’t mean much of anything. One way to do that if you’re big into games, is to make a mod for a video game; ideally one that has established resources/tutorials for doing so and isn’t getting regular updates that will break what you make, such as Fallout New Vegas.
Anything at all that you can point at and say “I made that” or even “I contributed to making that” (if it’s collaborative) can be a help for motivation, self-esteem, and building confidence in your abilities. And it gives you a goal that can feel more motivating than playing through a video game. Not that there’s anything wrong with games, but since you describe it as a slump, that makes me think you’d especially benefit from having a project that you care about.
Hmm, thanks for the interesting idea, but I have none of the technology, money, or know-how to mod games (maybe I could do something like try to learn a language without burning out in a day). I hope I can come up with some idea soon.
Language learning apps might help with that, depending on the design. Many of them are designed to encourage incremental, daily practice, rather than doing a ton at once. They have their limits for teaching language, but for introductory or casual learning, they can do something.
Except for Duolingo due to controversies, I have heard (they really fell from their past position, huh?)
Indeed. I ranted myself about Duolingo at one point on here lol. Honestly, my biggest reason against them off the top of my head is just that it’s not good pedagogy/teaching. They are popular because they did gamifying well to hook people, they did marketing well, they were early in the market when language apps were just getting started as a thing. But the pedagogy of how they did it is mediocre at best and was largely excusable in the beginning when nobody had a clue how to try to teach a language through a gamified app, but by this point, speaks to capitalism’s interest in cornering a market and then turning it into profit. What little interest they may have had in the pedagogy of it at points is now lost to making money.
The major turning point for me was years ago when they introduced the “health system”, where getting an answer wrong lost a heart, which IIRC recharged each day but could leave you with none left to keep learning that day if you weren’t a paying subscriber. Which is not only not good pedagogy, it’s actively terrible for learning in order to push people to pay up. And it showed me where their priorities were at.
What are some better alternatives to the Duolingo-like apps for learning languages?
Like better ways to learn a language than through an app or better apps?
For the first one, I’m still trying to figure that out myself. Principles that stand out to me are: believing that a language can be your own (as opposed to something you are simply memorizing/borrowing from foreigners) and learning things in context (as opposed to memorizing lists of words in isolation and never putting them into practice). These two together make a strong case for cultural immersion of actually living in a region whose language you want to live, but obviously that’s not an option for a lot of people. There are the traditional methods like learning in classrooms and getting help from tutors, but these may not combine well with low money, low time, or both, which is probably why apps are popular.
For the second one, I don’t really have any single one that I love. I’ve tried many different language apps and consistently run into some kind of issue, whether it’s the cost being too high, or the design having elements I don’t like, or the app creators making changes that (in my view) make it worse to use. That last one happened to me with HelloChinese. I do believe still that it has a lot of good learning material on it, but they changed the UI at some point to make it more like Duolingo’s and literally made it harder for me to get through the lessons as a result because of the attention-grabbing design of the progress bar at the top. I’m probably more sensitive than some when it comes to that though, on account of distractability. I’d still recommend it to people who want to learn Chinese, so long as they can afford the monthly cost.
In general, the best bet is looking for an app that specializes in teaching a single language. Apps that boast of being able to teach you 10-30 languages or whatever, are probably doing a lot of cutting corners, copy/pasting, and might be okay if you’re English learning Spanish or something, but are likely going to suck badly for languages with dramatic differences from your native one.
I’ve also experimented with apps that use AI for conversation practice. One example is TalkMe, which is okay. The catch is apps like that may have the reverse problem that the gamified language course apps have; if you have no familiarity with the language yet, they aren’t giving you much of a foundation to learn on. Whereas an app like HelloChinese tries to give you more of a guided course foundation to work with.
For languages like Chinese or Japanese where you may want to be practicing writing Characters or writing Kanji, there are apps like Skritter (though I don’t like the cost of it myself just for that one thing). More recently, I found something called ScriptPad, which is a pretty cheap one-time purchase for each language version of it you want to have and has practice for that kind of thing. So I got the Chinese version of it and have used it some to practice with writing/vocabulary.