mattgirod.com

The New Place

mattgirod — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:39:22 +0000

Half the size but in much better condition

Green is the theme

The newly purchased rack to hold a microwave, a slightly larger oven, a rice cooker, a water boiler, some pots and pans, some food, and some stuff I need to give away

Beautiful wallpaper detail

A Needed Vacation

mattgirod — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:00:01 +0000

Clear Lake, Oregon, USA

What would happen if…

mattgirod — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 01:18:49 +0000

I ‘ve had my Yahoo mail account in the Korean language for the past six months or so. Today, I decided to use the translate function in the Google Chrome browser to see how well it would translate to English. “Pretty good”, I thought. In fact, it felt so much nicer. It was butter. I forgot how nice it was to read so smoothly through my email pages.

Instant Coffee

mattgirod — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:26:11 +0000

The most common form of coffee that I see.

Instant coffee in Korea is everywhere. It’s ubiquitous I would say. Businesses have instant coffee dispenser machines. And everywhere else there are single size packets of instant coffee mix. These coffee mixes I see contain instant coffee, nondairy creamer, and sugar. The flavor, for me, is good. The problem is that its too sweet for my taste. My friend saw me trying to separate the coffee and sugar with a fork. She laughed and showed me the right way.

The coffee rests at the top (the green part of the package) the cream and then sugar below that. If you pinch about halfway down the package or even a little lower and then pour into your cup you can get all the coffee, some of the cream, and barely any sugar. It works well.

This time of the year ice coffee is popular. The ice coffee mixes come in a similar package. I haven’t tried the trick but I would assume it would works the same. It would be great test because the ice coffee mixes are even sweeter.

Moving along again

mattgirod — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:07:20 +0000

It’s been two weeks since the new goal was set. I finally brought down the amount of Anki card reviews to zero and even learned 30 new sentences. I didn’t intend to finish up the reviews, and didn’t even think about learning new sentences. But I was on a roll and I couldn’t stop. I also added 2000 cards with audio.

Two More Common Questions

mattgirod — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 02:52:41 +0000

Here are two more questions to add to the common questions/statements list.

What’s your sign?
무슨 띠 세요?
What’s your blood type?
혈액 형이 뭐예요?

SRS Observation

mattgirod — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 05:09:51 +0000

OK, back to Anki SRS.

Doing SRS reps for several months, I’ve noticed some patterns with those cards that fail repeatedly. -no sticky in the brainy. For me it usually comes down to these four reasons.

The card is way too hard because the sentence is too long or has many new patterns or words.
I don’t see new words or words often enough in multiple contexts.
The words are hard to pronounce or sound weird to my ears.
The words or patterns look like other words or patterns.

This is how I solve them.

Delete the card. Ahh, that feels good. I never have to see that card again.
Find more sentences with that word in it.
Use rhinospike.com to get the correct pronunciation then repeat out loud and often.
Suspend all cards with words that have look the same but have a different meaning. Once the card is nailed down, reintroduce the suspended cards.