My dentist is retiring. I got a text message today announcing this from his office. Which reminded me that I’m overdue for a checkup and clean. So I immediately phoned the office to book in for one, but they informed me that there were no appointments free until after his retirement at the end of November. The hygienist is still going to be working there but a new dentist will start and take over the practise in December. So I won’t get to see the old dentist again. I’ve been going there for many years now and really liked his work. Hopefully the new dentist will be as good.
In language learning, Duolingo has decided that it’s going to block my progress in learning vocabulary and grammar until I master katakana. I have to complete 25 lessons just on memorising katakana before it will let me continue with the vocabulary exercises. Which is annoying, as I suspect my vocab and grammar will decay a bit before I can resume.
I did all of the hiragana memory exercises, but they haven’t really stuck with me, unfortunately. So I’ve now also started using Anki flashcards to learn the hiragana characters properly. So Im currently memorising both hiragana and katakana at the same time. And trying to do it quickly so I can get back to the vocabulary exercises.
Also today I marked one of the university image processing assignments. This was a very interesting one that is very different from the usual object recognition or image segmentation stuff that most students attempt. This team decided to try generating images, namely camouflage patches to match various photograph scenes. They implemented a generative adversarial network, with the generator using a neural network to produce candidate camouflage image patches, and the discriminator attempting to detect the patches when overlaid over the original landscape source image. The goal of the generator is to produce patches that the discriminator can’t detect. Their results looked pretty impressive. They mainly get marked on the layout and writing of their report, so it’s not all about performance.
Scully was a bit off-colour today, not eating her breakfast or any treats at all during the day. She wanted to go out a few times to eat grass, and eventually threw up late in the afternoon. After which she hungrily ate her food and wanted more, so she seems better now.
New content today:
I did some Duolingo for Japanese, but I found it not too-well suited for me, for various reasons. I did four years of Japanese classes in the local adult education centre, though, so Duolingo was just a helper. The class moved to only online this autumn, having been a hybrid class for the last three and a half years, and I realized I don’t want to spend my free time in an online meeting, so I dropped that.
The kanas were a bit difficult in the beginning, though I have learned hiragana first in the upper secondary decades ago – we had some Japanese classes available. I also did a year of Japanese classes in the university a bit later.
I used a teacher app on my phone to learn the hiragana again, and to learn katakana which I had never really learned. I still struggle a bit with katakana, however, as it’s not so often used in the texts I read. I think the Duolingo idea is that you can use both alphabets to progress, and I think learning the kanas is a good idea, though of course somewhat demanding.
Now I have kind of an issue with kanji, or rather, I should figure out a structured way to learn them instead of haphazardly trying to remember them.
I got a book with some stories in both Japanese and English, meant for language learners and I’ve been slowly reading it. The local library had similar books and I am going to borrow them, too. I’m also re-reading the books we had in the class I was in.
Anyway, have fun learning Japanese! I like it because it’s so different from other languages I can speak, though the writing system is somewhat difficult to master. At least nowadays typing is easier and you don’t need to learn how to write all the kanji by hand.