I haven’t cracked open a non-English book in weeks, including Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook. I haven’t done any practice with my Anki decks either. The truth is, I was on the verge of language burnout, and then I had to work a billion hours to finish my dissertation. Brain fried.

And so I’ve been lazy.

Though this doesn’t mean I haven’t been getting worthy language practice, as it turns out.

My husband and I have been watching Code Geass. Japanese audio, English subtitles. Each episode is a little over 20 minutes long and we finished Episode 20 today. I’ve already noticed some improvement in my Japanese comprehension even with this small amount of semi-immersion.

And then I read How to Learn Spanish for Lazy People on Spanish Only:

5 Reasons Lazy People Are Better Language Learners

1. They generally don’t worry all too much.
2. They don’t use textbooks.
3. Instead, they use native materials.
4. They have all the time of the world to get massive amounts of input well before ever speaking a word.
5. When they eventually speak it’s again stress-free, aiming to get their point across (which, miracally often goes without making loads of mistakes and/or pauses).

It made me feel even better about my laziness.

Because to be honest, I hate doing SRS. I hate being glued to my dictionary. I hate being all systematic and angsty about my language progress. And trying to study three different languages every day is a good way to make your brain all ‘splody.

So I’m going to relax. Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook is going on hiatus (and frankly, I was starting to run out of the funny phrases anyways).

For Japanese and Spanish, my new goal is to watch 1000 hours of TV in each language before I attempt any more formal study. For the time being, I’ve decided that subtitles in Japanese are ok, as I’m basically starting from nothing here. If I use subtitles on the Spanish TV, they must be in Spanish.

I’ve already gotten my 1000 hours of native-speed Chinese audio, so I will start reading through the massive collection of children’s books I have. Once I get through all of those (without systematically mining them for vocabulary), I’ll re-evaluate where I am.

Here’s where I am so far, going as far back as my Spanish movie-watching week (during which I also snuck in a viewing of Spirited Away):

Japanese: 9.4/1000 hours

Spanish: 7.8/1000 hours

I stumbled across this website while perusing one of favorite etymology websites. Growing up and attending Chinese school, we saw pictographs that eventually became the written characters today. However, after looking at some of the archaic written Chinese, I’m not convinced they weren’t written by preschoolers.

Take for example, 高 gao1, which means “tall”. Here are the historic writing samples.

Is it just me or do a lot of them look like houses?

In any case, I still fail to see the connection between many words and their associated meanings.

*The website classifies characters by time in history with “Seal” characters being the most recent (not counting modern Chinese) and “Oracle” characters as the oldest.

Have you seen The Onion lately?

A screenshot for posterity’s sake:

Make sure you check out the store too.

Here are the Chinese items from the news ticker:

起來, 各位中華民族的移民子弟! 收回你的命运!
反抗時刻即將到達, 各位在位做好準備.
重要目標已選擇, 時間不久了.

Translation after the jump.

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