First 100 Days….
So I thought to myself: “….I have this whole journaling platform that I never use. I also have a video hosting platform that I rarely use. And I have a guitar that I often use. What if I combined the three and made an actual vlog?….”. I’ve always wanted a vlog of my own….
Then with all that in mind, a few weeks back, I declared to myself “100 days!”, a Saitama challenge of sorts. What if I did 100 days of all the stuff I’ve wanted to do? 100 days is a nice manageable number.. It’s a little over 3 months, has a definitive end, and has built in milestones; 25 days, 50 days, 75 days, and done. And above all else, it’s impactful.
So, here’s the first effort: 100 days of Baroque ‘n Bass:
….Just getting started the overall everything is missing some things. I didn’t celebrate the days 25, 50, or 75 and I don’t think I’ll be doing anything for 100. I also Didn’t really focus this. This is just some guy playing guitar. This is just my unmodified and unstructured practice session. I’ve been playing guitar for a while, off and on. Whenever. However. But nothing as concerted as I hope to do moving forward.
Let’s see if I can make this 100 days thing, a thing. And if I can I’ll totally come back around and do R again….But first some fun. July first I start Japanese. ごぞんじませんでしたか？大学には四年まで日本語を勉強しました。
As of this posting I’d just recently passed the mid-point on my 100 day bass guitar challenge I’d decided to start looking forward towards a 100 day Japanese challenge with the mission statement:
“100 days of Anki, Genki 1 & 2 vocabulary, at 2 hours a day”
This’ll be 100-days of flash cards. Not ‘flash cards until anki says I’m done or whatever’. 100-days. 2 hours. Every day.
– No intent of grammar.
– No intent of lengthy/stock phrases.
– Vocabulary only.
I guess it’ll be a bit like the guitar….
So I got some Anki Decks off the internet;
Together totaling 3281 cards.
To get myself warmed up to the idea of flash cards I’ve been taking it easy for the past month or so and doing the Genki 1 deck during the 30 minute bus rides to work. Sometimes that’s 10 minutes of cards, sometimes that’s 20 minutes of cards. All depends on what the app says. Occasionally I’d study during the day. Or maybe on the weekends. While I did cram a bit in the end to meet the arbitrarily set date of the July 1st this deck is mostly 30 minutes a day off and on, and my college retention with just a handful of words that are new from this deck. So this will kinda be like starting from scratch, except not really.
The flash cards won’t be done in a vacuum, I will be doing graded readers, weekly lessons, and the odd youtube video, but the brunt of my effort will be on vocabulary for the duration of the project. A problem with something like this though is that while the guitar has damn near immediate feedback, this has damn near no feedback. There isn’t really a built in dopamine loop for me to lock into. A solid feedback loop actually makes it difficult to go a day without the project, that’s how most addictions start out – before they devolve into physical dependency….Unless that’s how they started out…. Anyway I have found that making graphs and finding ways to chart progress helps. so I suspect I’ll be doing that.