Tag: languages

They’ve Gotten Rid of Google Play Music!

November 7, 2020 1 of 8

I’m going on a road trip tomorrow. I’m taking Mila and driving up US 281 to probably Burnet and then back down, hitting all of the state parks on the way. So I’ll have some state park posts later.

Preparing for this, I’m downloading music, a Pimsleur lesson, and audiobooks onto my podcast phone (a Samsung S5 from 2014). And just setting this up is more of an adventure than I though it would be.

Until October, when I started focusing on Pimsleur, I primarily listened to ChinesePod in the car. And I used Google Play Music to play the lessons.

And now Google Play Music is gone. They say I have to use YouTube Music to play things from now on. Will I be able to use YouTube Music on my podcast phone (a Samsung Galaxy 5 that I got in 2014)? Will I be able to find my ChinesePod lessons on YouTube Music if I *can* use YouTube Music on my podcast phone?

Okay, so I downloaded YouTube Music (I was totally expecting Google Play to laugh at me for even trying it), and moved my next ChinesePod lessons into Google Drive. Then I opened Google Drive on my podcast phone and downloaded the files to my phone.

Where are the files in YouTube Music? I found them under Albums -> Device Files.

Welp, I ended up downloading most of them twice, so I have nine podcasts in that directory. Better than zero, I guess.

Great. I closed the app and now I can’t find Albums anymore. Ah-ha! Library -> Albums -> Device Files.

And the files play! And if I delete the extra copies from My Files, it gets rid of the extras. Yay!

Now, let’s get El Ladrón del Rayo sorted out. I need to download the book completely, because my podcast phone doesn’t have an internet connection; I have to use wifi.

Yay! It’s working!

Okay, so I have my Pimsleur lesson (half an hour), five ChinesePod lessons (another two-ish hours), and El Ladrón del Rayo (10.75 hours). Yeah. That should get me through the day. I’m only planning to go as far as Burnet, which is two hours to the north, but there will be some driving around in the state parks that I visit.

I also picked up my travel snacks — “wasabi” peas (they’re actually flavored with horseradish), almonds, Golden Grahams S’Mores bars, Skittles, pop, and water. Also, I’m going to bring dog food and two kinds of dog treats for Mila. I’m going to stop on the way for a Subway with veggies (spinach, green peppers, cucumber, tomato, black olives, and provolone cheese — yum!) Mila will want to eat my snacks, but she can’t have any of my snacks, except for the water. I’m trying to train her out of begging, but it’s going to be a long road.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time! For this one, it’ll be The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Beats Up the Marvel Universe by Ryan North and Erica Henderson. This one was awesome. I love The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. And she really is unbeatable. She wins by befriending the villains. This is a skill that more of us need. This is a skill that *I* need.

The Trials and Travails of A Language Learner

November 1, 2020 4 of 8

Okay, today’s language learning hurdle wasn’t actually too bad from a global standpoint, but it did set my savings back a bit.

As I may have mentioned before, I’m attempting to focus on specific languages for a couple of months at a time. June and July were Spanish, August and September were German, October and November are Chinese, etc.

One of the thing that I’ve been doing is attempting to understand my phone games in each of these languages. Only, when I made my list of languages: Spanish, German, Mandarin, Italian, and Czech, I realized that my games aren’t available in Czech. So I decided to stack Mandarin in my games and Pimsleur Czech in the car and Duolingo Czech.

I put Pimsleur Czech on hold from my library and checked out Pimsleur Lithuanian (because I may qualify for Lithuanian citizenship and so why not?)

Only when I attempted to listen to Pimsleur Lithuanian using my old cell phone and my bluetooth speaker, I missed whole syllables. So eventually I figured out how to get it to come out right, I realized that this is too challenging for something I was doing just to fill in time while I waited for a different challenging language to become available.

So I switched to Pimsleur German and, aside from it being really strangely formal — I mean, they’re inviting each other to their homes for drinks and still calling each other “Sie”? — it mostly just awakened stuff that was already in there somewhere.

After a few days, I checked in on Czech and discovered that I’d missed it. They let me get back in line right behind the person who had it out then and I went back to German and checked in until the other day, when it finally became available again. I tried to listen to it this morning and, remember what happened when I first downloaded Lithuanian? Where I was missing syllables? It’s happening with Czech.

So now I’m racking my brain trying to remember what I did to make Lithuanian work way back a month ago. Hopefully I’ll figure it out pretty soon, because one Pimsleur lesson is $0.60. That’ll go a long way towards bolstering my savings for my modern languages degree.

Well, if all else fails, I can always turn the volume on my phone way, way up and also close my windows. I would very much prefer to get my bluetooth speaker to work, though.

It’s 11 pm now and I need to think about getting to bed. Time change is really not my friend this month. I didn’t get my eight posts in, but just maybe I’ve made my 1,600 word count goal, though. We’ll see once I post my Gratuitous Amazon Link.

The Gratuitous Amazon Link for this post is a goodie — A Deadly Education, by Naomi Novik. It’s a fantasy story about a wizarding school in a world that’s overrun by little evil critters. It’s the first in a series, but it’s also a standalone story all by itself. I’m reading it as part of Jenny Lawson’s Fantastic Strangelings Book Club, and I think it’s my favorite so far.