Learning Strategies

Recent Posts - page 48

• Support your local restaurants! (Tavolo and more…)

  By ljd42 on April 9, 2020

  

  Your local restaurants need your help! As you know, they operate on small profit margins, and the current prohibition on eat-in dining can destroy many a restaurant. So we’re trying to order take-out and delivery locally whenever possible. Last night… Read More ›

• Seán Mac an tSíthigh tells the story of Boston’s Irish.

  By ljd42 on April 7, 2020

  

  How do you pronounce “Seán Mac an tSíthigh”? Don’t ask me. I’ve been attempting to learn something about the Irish language, but the spelling and pronunciation are daunting, as I suggested in a post I wrote a couple of months… Read More ›

• Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother

  By ljd42 on April 5, 2020

  

  Picture this: You’re Barry Sonnenfeld, a high-school junior, on a date with a classmate at a Madison Square Garden “Woodstock Reunion” concert. And just as Jimi Hendrix is about to come on, you hear an announcement over the loudspeaker: ”Barry… Read More ›

• Social distancing: a simple geometry problem

  By ljd42 on April 3, 2020

  

  I am told that these signs are appearing around San Francisco — thank you, Doug Marquis! — offering either an open-ended or a traditional problem to give your math students. Pick one: What do you notice? How far is the… Read More ›

• William practices social distancing…

  By ljd42 on April 2, 2020

  

  … by sitting half on, half off, on his kitty couch. He doesn’t fit if he stretches out.  

• Takeout from Tavolo to support social distancing

  By ljd42 on April 1, 2020

  

  See the pix. Delicious dinner from Tavolo — at least two days’ worth: mussels (which somehow disappeared before I could photograph them), shrimp scampi, lamb ragout, 4-cheese pizza, flourless chocolate cake!

• The Panda of Death

  By ljd42 on March 31, 2020

  

  “Three murders? For a cozy? Isn’t that a lot?” Yes, three murders in one cozy. I guess that’s a lot.  This self-referential quote is from Betty Webb’s latest, The Panda of Death. And yes, it’s a cozy, but I read it anyway,… Read More ›

• Contagion

  By ljd42 on March 29, 2020

  

  If you haven’t seen it — or even if you have — this is the time to watch Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 movie, Contagion. (Or maybe it’s the time not to watch it, if you worry that it’s going to trigger you.) As you may… Read More ›

• Arabic — its sounds and its writing system — plus some related issues

  By ljd42 on March 27, 2020

  

  “They speak Arabic in Iran, Pakistan, and Xinjiang, right?” No, that’s wrong. “OK, what I meant is that they write Farsi, Urdu, and Uyghur in the Arabic script. That’s right, isn’t it?” That’s closer, but still not right. We need… Read More ›

• Tavolo again

  By ljd42 on March 25, 2020

  

  Another take-out dinner from Tavolo last night, to aid our neighborhood friends in this time of social distancing: meatball appetizer, chitarra carbonara, chicken parm. All was delicious; we helped ourselves as we helped our friends!

• Keeping the Faith: Is it a Jewish film?

  By ljd42 on March 24, 2020

  

  A priest and a rabbi walk into a bar on St. Patrick’s Day…. Yes, it sounds like the beginning of too many jokes. But in this case it’s the opening scene of a movie, Keeping the Faith. As a romcom, it’s not… Read More ›

• Zia Gianna

  By ljd42 on March 22, 2020

  

  Take-out lasagna portions from Zia Gianna last night: one slice of meat sauce with peas, one with spinach, gooey cheese with both of course. Warning: these are not only delicious but also huge! Barbara and I together ate less than… Read More ›

• No social distancing?

  By ljd42 on March 20, 2020

  

  Apparently they don’t understand about social distancing.

• Which non-Anglophone countries speak English most fluently?

  By ljd42 on March 19, 2020

  

  I’ve known lots of non-native speakers of English who speak English fluently. Some of these are friends of mine, some are friends of my family, some were my classmates, some are my students. But is there any pattern to the… Read More ›

• A Very Stable Genius

  By ljd42 on March 18, 2020

  

  As you know, the U.S. is currently being led by “a very stable genius,” as our dear leader calls himself. I finally finished reading A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America, written by two Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters from… Read More ›

• Unorthodox Quarantine Bonus

  By ljd42 on March 16, 2020

  

  I was trying to avoid writing anything about the novel coronavirus or COVID-19, because that’s of course what everyone is talking about. But, sitting here in self-semiquarantine, I have just listened to a special 16-minute bonus episode of the Unorthodox… Read More ›

• Don’t Believe a Word!

  By ljd42 on March 15, 2020

  

  Do you want to get a serious look at linguistics from an author who writes clearly for a general audience? If so, read David Shariatmadari’s Don’t Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth about Language. When I say it’s for a general audience, you… Read More ›

• Which states have you visited?

  By ljd42 on March 13, 2020

  I’m not quite sure why this has been going around the Internet, but people are understandably reluctant to travel right now, so maybe it’s a good time for a visual representation of where you’ve been (USA only, unfortunately). Link is… Read More ›

• The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols

  By ljd42 on March 12, 2020

  

  The perennial Sherlock Holmes strikes again! Nicholas Meyer, author of the famous The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, follows that up with another Holmes pastiche, this time with much more serious content: debunking the antisemitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion…. Read More ›

• Quidditch in Yiddish, etc

  By ljd42 on March 11, 2020

  

  Surely you want to read the Harry Potter books in their new Yiddish translation, don’t you? “But I don’t read Yiddish!” you exclaim. That’s admittedly a handicap. But you can make some progress by sounding out the Hebrew letters (with… Read More ›

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