Polyglot goals

I placed an online order this morning for some groceries to be delivered home. The earliest time slot they had was 7-8pm, so I chose that. Four hours later, they called me to check if anyone was home (no one was). What is the point of having delivery times when you’re not even going to stick to them?!? 🙄🤪 Although having said that, a delivery turnaround of four hours from placing my order to their delivering it is pretty damn good! And even though no one is home, HK is a safe enough place (let’s forget about the douchebags for a second here…) where I can ask them to leave the order by our front door and be pretty confident that no one will take off with it. So it was all good, but still! 🤪

I went to the library again today and borrowed yet another book. I have seven books out on loan at the moment, greedy much?!? 😆 Maybe it’d be a better idea if I actually just finished one book at a time and then moved on to the next book… But nooo, I’ll just be a greedy guts instead! 🤪

Because I’ve already started winding down for the year, with N’s brother in town and all, I thought I’d spend a bit more time on my language learning over the next few weeks. Four out of my seven books are actually foreign language related, so maybe I can work my way specifically through these ones over the coming weeks. Polyglot goals, here I come! 🤓

Time with family

N’s brother arrived in HK this morning. He got next to no sleep on the plane, and didn’t take a nap throughout the entire day. I don’t know how he lasted for that long 😱

I went to Uniqlo and bought some more winter gear for N, who’s flying back to Japan tomorrow to face some more of their colder winter. It’s still quite mild in HK, thankfully, so I’d like this to last for as long as possible – preferably for the next 3 months! 🤣🤣

And then in the evening, we took his brother out for a celebratory birthday dinner at this Japanese-Brazilian fusion place at Central. They had the most interesting dishes – e.g. fried banana with crab meat! How bizarro is that?! But they somehow made it work and it was surprisingly really nice! 😋 I would definitely go back there again 👍

I get excited about the weirdest of things

I unintentionally found the link between hentai (warning: graphic drawing in the Wikipedia link here) and its equivalent word in Chinese. Don’t ask me how I managed to find that connection 🤪 But anyway, the point of me mentioning it is because I get very excited when one language helps me improve in the other 👍

It’s times like this when I feel like tackling both languages at the same time 😂 I won’t, though. If I were to choose a second language to tackle alongside Chinese, I’d choose something closer to English, like Spanish or French, so at least I have English as a bit of a crutch to help me learn the language. With the Asian languages, you have no such crutch 😫 So I think I’ll stick to one Asian language at a time 🤓

N’s brother is on his way to HK and lands at ridiculous o’clock tomorrow morning. Another flight to track, always so exciting 😊

A much better use of my time and energy

There was a police-approved protest today, so I stayed close to home, in case the douches decided to break off from the approved path and wreak havoc somewhere. I think they eventually did, of course 🙄 But I’m minimising my exposure to all of it, as I’ve mentioned in recent posts, so I don’t actually know any of the detail. I’m going with the saying, ignorance is bliss. Let’s see how long I can hold out not reading any articles on it… 🤔

Speaking of the protests, I stumbled across this tour, which I thought was a rather novel idea… https://hongkongfreetours.com/hk-protest-tour/

It sorta makes me want to join it 🤪 If anyone does go on it, please do let me know what you thought of it! 😄

But no. I am staying away from all this sh1t. It’s just too annoying and depressing, and not worth the energy. So I just went somewhere nearby for a quick lunch, ran some errands, and then headed to the gym for a little while. A much better use of my time and energy, I say! 😄

And N flew back from Japan today, so I tracked some of his flight back as well 🤓

It was quite a productive day! 👍

Building back up and starting to wind down

I decided to go to Din Tai Fung today. I haven’t been there in a while, and so I thought I’d go back today. I’m never disappointed whenever I go there. Their standard is sooo consistent it’s unbelievable. The place runs like a machine 👍

I then just wandered around the shopping district that is Causeway Bay. The last few times we’ve gone there on the weekend it’s been eerily quiet. But today, it felt like the buzz is on its way back, with the crowds already building back up again, and it was getting harder to walk through the shops and on the footpaths. Maybe things are slowly getting back to normal in this city. Maybe… 🤷‍♀️

And then in the evening, I watched a holiday movie The Princess Switch, feeling like getting into the Christmas spirit 🎄 They had some actors from the UK in the movie, which of course reminded me of Downton Abbey 😊 So now I’m thinking of watching Downton Abbey the movie tomorrow. Maybe I can watch a few more movies over the next few weeks, as we start winding down to Christmas and New Year 😌

Not entirely a complete waste of time 😉

The other day I mentioned one of my biggest time wasters: for some people it’s Facebook or Instagram, for me, it’s reading up on information about the HK protests 🤪 Now it all wasn’t a complete waste of time, as I have read up on a lot of things about China and HK in the process, and educated myself as well. But I have also wasted a lot of time reading western propaganda on the protests, wasting both valuable time and energy 😒

Another time waster of mine is watching polyglot videos on YouTube 😄 In particular, tips on how to improve my language learning to become as proficient as I can possibly be. I wonder, if all the time I spent watching these polyglot videos I dedicated to actual language learning, how much further along in the language I would actually be now 🤔

Anyway, one of the tips one of these polyglots mentioned is to not get discouraged when you feel like you’re not improving. Just keep pushing through it, continue practising and making sure you’re consolidating all the knowledge that you currently have in the language, making sure that your foundations are really solid and getting all of it really internalised.

I really like this tip because I know exactly what he’s talking about. So rather than learning new grammar points or actively learning new vocab, I am trying to focus on my fluency and being able to communicate with the limited number of words and sentence structures that I do know. Because even the relatively simple sentence, “Would you like to go to the park this afternoon?” can then be changed to numerous other combinations:

Would you like to go to a cafe tomorrow?

I’d like to go to the zoo.

I’d like to drink a cup of coffee.

Would you like to watch a movie tonight?

My sister wants to go shopping in the city later today.

My level of Chinese is now much more advanced than this, but even these sentences still take me a second or two to construct – ie they’re not fully internalised yet. And as an adult, I don’t know just how internalised I can get these sentences to be, but I’m going to keep persevering. Surely all this perseverance is helping to build stronger connections in the brain, right?!? 🤓

So I guess my time wasters aren’t entirely a complete waste of time…! 😉

Precautions

A few weeks ago, I took a photo of the Christmas decorations that were being put up in one of the shopping malls here, excited to see what display they’ll have this year once they unveil it, when we get closer to Christmas.

Christmas decorations being put up in early November. I was getting excited to see the unveiling 😊

I walked through the same mall today to discover that they’ve decided to completely take down these decorations, and that area is now just one big empty space, just keeping the tinsel around the glass railings on the floor above, to show some sign that we are now in the Christmas season. Oh, and they’ve also added security guards in the area too where there was none previously. There was never any need for them before 😔

I suspect they are minimising the chances of the rioters doing something similar to what they did to another mall recently:

https://youtu.be/YxZUNXkT5s0

Sighhh… And I’ve heard of one other mall that has also taken similar precautions. This is so sad 😞