There was one weird agreement. During WW1, the Pope declared that a Christmas ceasefire should happen. Obviously, the Pope has no such power in these matters and the diplomats around the world failed to turn the Popes wish into any real ceasefire.

But then, a bit of Christmas magic happened. It turns out that WW1 soldier conditions were so shit, that many soldiers wanted to go against orders and proceed with the Christmas ceasefire anyway.

Legend has it that soldiers picked Still Nacht (aka: Silent Night), it being one of the few bilingual Christmas Carols. If both sides in the trenches started to sing the song, you knew it was safe to partake in the ceasefire, allegedly with another confirmation of Oh Come All Ye Faithful (another Christmas carol).

This all proves one thing. It’s not the leaders or diplomats that really matter per se with ceasefires. It’s the soldiers at the bottom. If they refuse to shoot, then the ceasefire will happen. With orders, or (in the Christmas miracle…) sometimes AGAINST orders.

Thank you. English was indeed turned off for some crazy reason.

I did check for Undetermined before making this topic… But I forgot to scroll down also check English lol.

It looks like everything is working again.

Further weaknesses identified:

Although I “know” A1 stuff such as every pronoun (nominative, genative, accusative, and dativ), I’m “slow” to come up with some of them. (ihr vs ihm vs ihn vs ihnen). I’ve decided that adding these as one-way Anki cards is my best chance to drill.

Although I can count to numbers up to 1-million in German, I’m also slow at it. So slow in fact, that reading the time (ex: 13:45) in a sentence interrupts me and forces me to start over. Its not sufficient to “merely” be able to read numbers, you must read them with such speed and accuracy that your thought process is not interrupted. Especially when working on harder grammar (ex: verb-last subordinate clauses, seperable verbs, dativ vs accusative details, etc. etc.).

The solution is just more Anki. Speaking practice identifies weaknesses, but its drills that can remove those weaknesses with more precision / speed than wholesale speaking practice.

EDIT: Speaking of Anki… with my focus on speed recently, I’ve pushed my average time from 11s per card down to 5s per card. It does require more focus though to go through the cards this quickly… but I’m better able to work with larger volumes of cards now.

A bit of a bumer note: the USA Snowstorm is forcing me and my teacher to meet over Zoom. It will be so much worse than usual, but better than nothing.

Heterogenous scheduler support for big.LITTLE CPUs seems like a big deal to me, especially with the Advent of P+E core Intel’s.

A few weeks of in person tutoring has shown me exactly what my weaknesses are and what I really have to work on. Alas, it feels like a step back rather than a step forward, but I know this is mostly a psychological issue.

Learning about weaknesses is more important. I’m probably making more real progress than my psychology believes.

I’ve explicitly enrolled for classes because I knew my speaking skills sucked. They still suck but now I know the problem. More importantly, I’ve learned the importance of trying to form sentences of my own accord.

To correct this issue, I’ve been advised to start talking to myself (!!!) in German… and start trying to think in complete sentences, etc. etc. You cannot learn sentence construction and conjugation with paper work or exercises, you have to just make sentences over and over again.

A few weeks ago, this would have been impossible. I didn’t know enough vocabulary to talk to myself. But now… I can. With help from Wiktionary and other English-German dictionaries.

I shared some of the children songs with Learning German discord, and some B1-ish people were talking about how some of those songs felt challenging. So indeed, children songs can vary from A1 through B1, don’t be discouraged by the kid nature, some truly are more advanced than they look.

I did accomplish a new feat this past week. Upon listening to 99 Luftballoons, I suddenly realized how none of the lyrics-rhymes work in English. Then I realized that I knew this because I’m actually beginning to learn the German lyrics (to the point where I can sing some of the simpler lyrics: like the 1st verse while it’s still slow).

In particular was my sudden realization that it’s neun-und-neun…zig Luftballoons. (She has a bit of a pause in German before saying -zig). Plus all the nearby words that rhyme with zig/sich/Ich/mich/dich/veillicht . This absolutely cannot and never will work in English, it’s something that can only be appreciated in German.

So I did accomplish a new listening feat. It may have been an entire lifetime of listening to 99 Luftballoons, but now suddenly I’m truly beginning to understand it.

I’ll probably spend the next month working on vocabulary so that I can truly learn 99 Luftballoons. (I finished the vocab practice with Lagtrain German cover by Jinja, but it’s grammar is too difficult for me to comprehend even if I know the individual words).

Lemmy.world is my ‘main’ name. I’ve made a secondary lemmy.ca account when Lemmy.world once had some technical issues a few years ago. So lemmy.ca is still me but I don’t check it often at all!

Well that’s the funny part now isn’t it?

Increasingly, the investors are other AI companies. NVidia, Microsoft, Facebook. Be it directly (ie: Microsoft buying half of OpenAI), or indirectly (Special Purpose Vehicle creates a new Data center and Facebook pays to be an owner of that and then the Datacenter pays Facebook for AI or some shit).

From people? No.

From AI. AI companies have seemingly infinite money (not really but investor sentiment is huge and investors are happy giving more and more money to AI). And banks are willing to lend money to AI. And there’s new financial instruments (special purpose vehicle) allowing even more money to come out of investors.

I’m finally able to listen and comprehend some of the Kinderlieder I’ve been working on for a month. I’ve been branching out to other learning material. There really isn’t much in the A1 level. A lot of stuff on Spotify is A2+.

I started trying some practical listening exercises however, and I’m just not quick enough with listening. No where close to the necessary speed. Reading / writing can be taken much slower, meaning I can do far more complex reading/writing than I could ever hope to accomplish with listening/speaking.

I’ll continue my +10 words/day (aka: +20 cards/day) with Anki but its become clear that listening and speaking are the weakest points of myself. I’ve decided that I need to log into “Learning German Discord” more often, both as listening practice and speaking practice. My writing is still awful though, I’m barely able to compose a sentence (let alone speak complete sentences). But both speaking and writing are separate skills (even if somewhat related). So it makes sense to practice both.

Today I was only able to respond with 2 or 3 word phrases to anything in an actual discussion. But its also literally the first time I’ve ever tried speaking in German, so it makes sense as a starting point.