Saturday, 5th October 2024
I lost the passage of time
Just now, I was surprised when my online English conversation lesson ended abruptly.
I had been that engrossed in the conversation.
I take one 30-minute lesson a week.
There is also a 15-minute course, but with 15 minutes I would only be able to say greetings and that would be the end of it.
After 30 minutes, the connection is abruptly cut off.
Usually the tutor says something at the end of the lesson, but this time the lesson really ran out of time in the middle of the conversation.
I have been taking online lessons at my current school since 2021, and I am getting pretty good at speaking.
But I don't have much confidence in my ability to speak with American people because they probably speak much faster.
I need to get used to it.
Before that, I was taking online lessons at a school where I could take lessons from a teacher in the Philippines.
Because of the low labour costs, I signed up for a course that I took every day, but it was physically tough to continue every day.
The teachers I had were not very regular.
One day, one of my Filipino tutors told me that I should study prepositions more.
So I bought a book on prepositions, but even if you learn prepositions alone at random, you won't be able to use them.
You need to know many examples of actual use.
I didn't understand that at the time.
That's why I stopped taking online English conversation lessons once.
However, I forgot why, but I wanted to talk to a native English speaker, so I chose the school I'm at now.
A weekly course is not a heavy financial or physical burden.
I've been talking to my current teacher online every week for about three years now.
I don't use the school's materials because I don't like the school's pre-packaged materials.
I just chat with them and learn the vocabulary that my tutor has carefully selected.
For my C studies, there is a test in the English material where I have to actually write code, which is difficult and I don't understand it at all.
I don't know how to mark the dollar signs.
I guess I could ask the generation AI to tell me this, but that wouldn't help me learn.
So I'm back to reading a slightly difficult book I bought recently, in Japanese.
The book seems to be temporarily out of stock at online bookstores.
I'm lucky I pre-ordered it and bought it.
In the English material, I had to memorise the printf conversion specifications, but in the Japanese book, the d after % is dicimal; d for decimal integer, and so it is easy to remember.
The English online material and the Japanese paper book complement each other, which is quite a good situation.
However, in the Japanese book, the square root calculation using Newton's method is given as an example, which is not easy to get to grips with.
It is partly because the concept is difficult, but I also think that perhaps I need to start over from the fourth grade of primary school arithmetic.
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