This is the first podcast. This top part would be in spanish but my current writing in spanish isn't worth trying to translate this. I'm creating this podcast to help others learn spanish. I hope that plenty of people will be able to use this to practice their spanish.
The audio is created with Google Text-to-Speech API for free using the voice "es-ES-Standard-A". While we will certainly use their other voices, I think this one is pretty good for how cheap it is. The script was written by various authors around the world and given to Wikipedia, where I got it on March 21st, 2024. Spanish Wikipedia is very different from English Wikipedia, so this content is exclusive to Spanish Wikipedia.
If the podcast is too short for you, I heartily recommend checking out El Rey 1360AM which is a local spanish radio station with four hours of daily discussions in spanish by native speakers along with music.
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June 17, 2023
A small project I'm current working on has started, so I thought I'd make a short blog about it.
Let's say that someone made a deck of flash cards for SRS. Assuming you want to use the SRS, you can load the deck and let the software do the work. But what if you don't want to use the SRS?
Read more »Skipping levels in Duolingo after you've already done the test that places you in the level it thinks you should go is quite easy. With three steps and a bit of skill in the language you're learning (or some cheating) you can increase the difficulty of Duolingo to an absurd level.
Step 1: Scroll down the tree and click "Jump Here?"
pt_words-0.1.tgz [sig]
git clone https://www.altsci.com/repo/pt_words.git
Today I release a simple Sunday script building on the distant past. How do you sort a list of words in a language you're learning? The easiest order is the order you originally wrote them down in. The second easiest (and probably one of the best orderings) is random. Random ordering removes biases that a human put in and biases the list to another order. If you order your list randomly each time you read from it, you can remove bias.
This is how I ended up trying to learn kanji last year. It didn't go so well. What's wrong with random ordering of a list of words? It provides a test of one's memory. As my memory is not great, the random ordering does not actually solve the problem of memorization. So how does one memorize words? I had quite a bit of success with WaniKani this winter. I learned 85 kanji (that I had already learned on my own) and 184 words based on those kanji in a few months. What does WaniKani do that I didn't do? 1) WaniKani is an SRS. 2) WaniKani has experts to come up with a good set of data about kanji and vocabulary to cement the meaning and readings.
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