Okay, some growing pains getting into the blogging groove… I was going to post earlier about how impressed I am with the Language Immersion for Chrome plugin for the Google Chrome browser, but I wanted to include a screenshot, and I let that hold me up (which is a bit goofy since I take and send screenshots contsantly for work).

What’s nice about this is:

It’s passive – I turned it on once and now, on all of my machines with Chrome, it’s just feeding me Heebs constantly. It’ll just keep going until I turn it off. Okay, I admit, I have occasionally turned it off, but only temporarily.

It’s already content I’m interested in – I don’t have to go searching for a Hebrew article that may or may not be “up my alley”.

It’s doesn’t slow me down that much, and I find myself actually using it, even at work.

The cons:

It’s not like struggling through a whole article in Hebrew. I’m not deluding myself into thinking this is a replacement for that.

It’s not available on my iPhone, on which I do a lot of web browsing during my commute.

Still, it’s quite cool. You can download Language Immersion for Google Chrome here.

So, what else is going on? Oh, I’ve got a Language Exchange buddy, which I’m pretty psyched about. Seems cool… from another part of the country, another culture… feels good to expand outside of my Modi’in Anglo bubble. We’ve texted a few times and spoke on Skype once, and it was promising. I did speak pretty much entirely in English, cuz I was driving and couldn’t concentrate, but it’s a start… he seems like a great guy.

My “gingi” two year old Adin broke my keyboard, so for a couple weeks we were stuck with an English-only keyboard at my home machine. That’s been replaced and I now have a brand spankin’ new English/Hebrew/Arabic keyboard 🙂

Regarding vocabulary learning, in an earlier post I mentioned the flash card iPhone app Quizlet, but despite lots of Hebrew word lists, Quizlet has a major limitation: I cannot mark flash cards that give me trouble. In other words, if I try studying a list of 100 flash cards, and I find that I know 80 of them already, I cannot mark the 20 that I want to keep studying. So that sucks… in such an example I don’t want to waste time dealing with 80 words I already know!

So I’ve discovered the flash card system that people rave about: Anki. Anki is based on “spaced repetition”, and it does just what I wanted Quizlet to do. For each flashcard, once it shows the answer I choose “Again”, “Good”, or “Easy”.

“Again” = the card will be repeated in about 1 minute

“Good” = the card will be repeated in about 10 minutes

“Easy” = the card will be repeated in about 4 days

Right now in Anki I’m working on the free flash card deck 100 Basic Hebrew Phrases from Teach Me Hebrew.

My conundrum with Anki is that almost every version of it is free, but the official iPhone app is $25. That seems a bit unfair. Also, the web version, when accessed from my iPhone, doesn’t play audio (perhaps it plays audio via Flash?). So I’m looking at various alternatives before shelling out the cash. Check back and I’ll let you know what I find out.

Before signing off I’ll give a shout out to my mom, Margie Sinclair, whose birthday is today (May 25). Happy Birthday Mom! Luv, Adam