Being Practical in the Zombie Apocalypse

Nothing will teach you what is really important in life quite as fast as the zombie apocalypse. Will you trade a 2-carat diamond ring for a box of crackers and a bottle of water? Of course you will! The choice is easy. Cute shoes with a two-inch heel, or running shoes? The importance placed on the superficial will melt away and practicality will replace it. 

Racism and sexism become something you can't afford. If someone is reliable and a good fighter, you are risking your own safety by alienating them. 

Waste will come to a halt. You may think of all the water you wasted by taking long showers and leaving the faucet on while you brush your teeth. All resources will become precious.

The very wealthy would be at a real disadvantage. If your experience in solving problems is limited to throwing money at them, you will either have to learn new skills quickly or die. It's when you really understand that people function best in a community, even a small one, and that your rational self-interest and copy of Atlas Shrugged isn't going to protect you long enough to do a dramatic reading of the "This Is John Galt Speaking" speech. 

Edgar Quisenberry, a character in Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon, committed suicide because he had built his life around being superior because of money. When money became worthless, so did he. When he understood that money only had the illusion of value, and that illusion had been stripped away by the bombs, he had nothing to offer. His only weapon had been the control of money, and when it was gone, it was revealed just how soft he was. In the zombie apocalypse, knowing how to mix concrete will be a more valuable skill than understanding banking transactions. 

The zombie apocalypse really teaches you the difference between what you need and what you want. It may be a harsh way to learn a lesson, but it's effective. 

What Makes A Historian

When someone follows me on twitter, I do them the courtesy of looking at their page to see if I might be interested in following back. Sometimes, I'm truly grateful. Not long ago, historian John Fea followed me, and I followed him because of something in his profile: "trying to bring good historical content to twitter." There is plenty of historical BS available, because many people decide on what to accept as truth based on which claim supports what they want to believe. 

That brings me to the point of this post: I don't think most people know what a historian is. I read "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan and "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene, but I don't consider myself to be an astrophysicist. People understand the difference between a scientist, a science writer, and someone who read a couple of popular science books. The same difference applies to history, but anyone who writes a popular history book is considered to be a historian and many people claim to be historians because they watch The History Channel. There are history textbooks that aren't written by historians, although no one would hire someone to write a math textbook based on their credentials as an English teacher. Being a historian isn't about knowing historical facts, but about knowing how to research history. The study of history advances at the college level, in the same way that a PhD program in chemistry is different than taking high school chemistry. 

Having a degree in history is a start, but it isn't a guarantee. Bill O'Reilly has a bachelor of arts degree in history, yet he wrote a book about the historical Jesus that said Jesus came to lower taxes, and his book about Lincoln was so inaccurate that Ford's Theater decided not to sell it. Ideologues make terrible historians. Look for people who are trusted enough in their subject to be employed by a respected university, who do peer reviewed work, and who are not named Niall Ferguson. A person with a history degree who bypasses peer review to publish direct to the public may be doing it because their research won't stand up to scrutiny by people who know sh*t from shinola. 

Also be suspicious of books that are written by someone with the right credentials, but are outside of the author's area of expertise. I recently read "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari, which claims to be a history that stretches from the Big Bang to the present. No one can specialize in that. It reads like something that was intended to sell to people who occupy a wide range of echo chambers. That is great for sales, and five years after it was published it is still #1 on Amazon in the category of History of Civilization and Culture. 

Expertise matters. A journalist who reads a few books about Lincoln and then writes their own book is not a historian. Journalists have the advantage of being far easier to read than most academics, but there are legitimate historians who do a good job of communicating to non-academics. 

Learning a Language on a Budget

For a long time I wanted to learn a second language, but I was never motivated enough to keep going. One of my college degrees was in history, which makes it almost inexcusable to be monolingual. If you have to read a translation of a primary source, it's not primary. Since I live in Colorado, Spanish was the obvious choice. There are a lot of Spanish speakers in Denver, and there are more jobs available if you are Spanish/English bilingual (typically with a bilingual bonus wage). The problem was that I avoid talking to people in any language, and money isn't high on the list of things that motivate me. Then one day someone mentioned to me the possibility of learning French, and that did it. The first thing to come to mind wasn't having to talk to people, but being able to read some of the best writers and philosophers. 

There are a lot of free resources, and some are not really worth the time. The Denver Public Library Research Center once offered free access to Rosetta Stone in Spanish/English and English/Spanish, but that works on the assumption that you'll intuitively understand why you say things the way you do rather than explaining the grammar. The commercials say you'll learn your second language the way you learned your first, but after years of learning do you really want to speak like you're six years old? In addition, it's expensive unless you can get it through your library. I'm not giving Rosetta Stone a high recommendation. 

The library got rid of that and replaced it with Mango Languages. It has a lot of advantages. For starters, instead of the choice of one language, there are 71, including Pirate. If you want to learn French, you have a choice between the way it's spoken in France and the way it is spoken in Canada. It starts mostly with travel language, but that's not a terrible way to start and as you practice it explains the grammar and gives some cultural information. I used Mango Languages for some basic Turkish. You can also check out movies, and either set them to English/French subtitles or French/English subtitles. Your tax dollars are paying for the library whether you use it or not, so you should take advantage.

The first one that I used for French was Coffee Break French from Radio Lingua. They have free podcasts that are typically 15-20 minutes, with 40 lessons per level. If you want to add on to the free podcasts, you can buy the PDFs of each lesson or get them five at a time for Kindle. They also sell bonus audio lessons for each podcast where the instructor leads you through a practice session of what you learned in the main podcast. I bought the whole thing, but I would recommend at least getting the PDFs. You can listen to the podcasts while doing things like driving or shopping, so you don't even have to free up time. They have four levels each of French and Spanish (since it's from the other side of the pond it's Spain Spanish, not Mexico), and they've more recently added German and Italian. If you do two lessons a week, you can be through the advanced level in just over a year.

My other most commonly used resource is Memrise, which is also free and has more languages than you can shake a stick at, including sign language and constructed languages like Klingon and Na'vi (the one from the movie Avatar). The most common languages have good starter classes that will have you using basic phrases and vocabulary, with pointers to explain the grammar. It spaces out your review for you so that you spend less time reviewing and can get extra practice if you forget. They have a points system so you can compete with other learners, but while it can be a motivator, it can also be a trap. Some people get wrapped up in getting fast points and they repeat the same beginner vocabulary in multiple-choice test courses. The best approach is to use phrase courses to learn the grammar, and then add on with specialized vocabulary builder courses. When you know how sentences are constructed, you will remember the vocabulary more easily. If you're in the medical field, you can focus on medical vocabulary. If you're in technology, there are courses for that. They have a premium level that you can buy, but you can use the courses for free without that. Some people complain that it's not good for learning grammar, which was true at one time. Now that there are solid beginner and intermediate courses, it's not true any longer. One word of warning: anyone can make courses and let other people use them. That's both the good news and the bad news. It means that there are a lot of options to direct your learning in the way that's most beneficial, but it also means a lot of people who are still learning are making courses with errors in them. Look for courses created by teachers for their students/classes, or look up the words and check spelling and meaning. A lot of English words have multiple meanings, but different words for those meanings in another language. That's why phrases are better, but you can learn individual word lists as long as you're sure of exactly what they mean. In addition to learning a language, they have courses in arts and literature, science, music theory, and technology. When you want to take a break from your language course, you can learn some astronomy or the command line. I'm thinking of learning Morse code in case of the zombie apocalypse.

I tried Duolingo, which is also a good place to start. The only reason that I didn't stay with it is that I had other resources doing the same thing for me. They've recently added many languages, so it's worth checking out. Both Duolingo and Memrise are available either online or as an app. 

When I was learning basic Turkish, I got the Pimsleur level one course from the library. The audio starts you on learning small and building up and is really good for getting the pronunciation, but you're not supposed to use printed materials with it. I didn't use the French version because with reading as my primary goal, it would have been of limited value. 

If you prefer the textbook approach, the University of Texas has an online textbook complete with mp3 files for help with pronunciation. I've used this for additional help understanding certain points of grammar. 

Another free resource that has been very valuable to me is my friend in Quebec. Friends are also free. Go get your own. Sometimes you can find people in another country who want to learn English, and you can help and motivate each other. 

If no one wants to be your friend, you can probably find meet up groups in your area where people meet regularly at a restaurant to eat and talk. I joined Alliance Française de Denver, which costs me $45 for an annual membership. They have lectures, meetings, movie nights, book clubs, and a great library. They have a lot of different courses (which are not free), depending on whether you're an adult, child, individual, or group learner. 

If you are more interested in talking to people than reading, you're going to need to find people who will let you practice on them. You're going to make mistakes and they are going to correct you. Making mistakes is the fastest way to learn, but most people are so afraid of making them that they stay silent. Get over it, it's the best thing you can do for yourself.

There are good online dictionaries like Linguee and Word Reference. They are both available in several languages. If you're going to buy a dictionary, get one that you can use as a doorstop. You'll outgrow a small dictionary fairly quickly. 

If you're on facebook or twitter, load up your feed with your new language. Choose things that make you want to read them, and get the Google browser. You can use auto-translate and mouse over the text to go back and forth between the translation and the original. You can also get dual language books for reading practice. If you have a Kindle, get a Kindle dictionary in your new language and choose any book that interests you. Sci-fi, mystery, dirty books, it doesn't matter as long as you're reading. If you come across a word you don't know, you can select it and the dictionary will display the translation. Choose a book written within the last 100 years so that you don't speak like you time-traveled from the 1600's. (I can't stress how important that is with Turkish. They switched alphabets in the early 1900s, so if you go too far back you'll get nowhere.)

Music is also good for remembering language. My favorite in French is Kells, but heavy metal growl music isn't great for pronunciation. Transparent blogs sometimes publish a link to a song with the original and translated language. This one by Manau is catchy. If you like Céline Dion, she has a lot of French songs that you can find with both French and English on YouTube. 

One last bit of advice is to write by hand whenever possible. Writing is better for your memory than typing. Typing just doesn't have the same connection with your brain. I noticed when I was typing for other people that I could type papers without actually reading them, but you have to think about forming the letters as you write.