708

These days I write only when I have something to say. As a general principle that is ideal. However, from the standpoint of a keystone habit, it is not. So I’m thinking about stopping up the gap.

I’ve a couple of options. One is Amachan. It’s a Japanese series that ran on morning TV 15 minutes at a time. There are about 150 episodes—plenty to keep me busy.

The other is a horror-story podcast. It would be cool to transcribe—correcting the automatically generated Japanese text. 

The point is to engage in regular activity of my choice. Keystone habit.

707

In 1953 Vicars Bell published On Learning the English Tongue. And in 2018, I read it. Of course, some aspects of the book are dated, but overall it is relevant. I found it a surprisingly good read.

Elsewhere I shall post a summary. I find that the book and its ideas fit well within the literacy and numeracy embedding rant that I’m working on. There’s valuable material that I can use to refute some of the assumptions that underlie ‘modern’ educational theory.

I visited the Wikipedia article on VicarsBell and corrected the category in which this book was entered.

706

Sadly, suddenly, I realized yesterday that I’ve been wasting my time.

I was updating a post on The Play-fool Tongue that I’d originally written 2 years ago. I was filled, then, with the enthusiasm of learning quickly and simultaneously a bunch of languages. How easy it seemed at the time!

I still believe that, but I got side-tracked. For most of the time since, my focus has been more upon convincing others, proving my ideas, figuring out programmes that would suit others.

I should have done my own thing. I naively assumed that others would leap at the self-evident opportunity. 

705

The most exciting thing language-wise that happened to me yesterday was not correcting my wife’s confusion between Steve Kaufmann and Steven Krashen—she thought they were one and the same person—but the discovery of this cool video.

At first I thought it was a channel. It looked as if someone was doing what I had been wanting to do. However, it was only a one-off.

Still, I’ll be able to use it. And also, I’ve just realized, it leaves the door open for me. Not only that, it provides—outside of that door—a vista that indicates the destination. 

704

Who would have thought it—that I’d get something of value from a book by Dan Brown? And yet that is the case.

In Deception Point, on the 29^th page I read that someone works as a gister. Gisting is data reduction, distilling the essence of complex texts into concise briefs. Well, that’s something that I do, or have done, with respect to the information surrounding language acquisition.

I’ll point that out in the unit standard which I’m working on. I’ve glossed over so much material that there’s no way for me to accurately reference where my ideas all originate.