orange diary

Even though it's only the 3rd or 4th day to learn German, I'm wondering if I can acquire German because it's very difficult for me.
Some words look similar to English words, so vocabulary itself may not so a big problem (of course, it depends on the words because English has two origins: German and Latin).
German has three types of "the" - der, die, das - and they may conjugate (?) differently depending on how they are used (as a subject, object, etc.) and what is the verb in case of being used as an object.

According to some people's blog, you can gradually understand what distinguishes der, die, and das.
Is it true???
I hope such time will come to me, too (soon if possible).

I expected I can learn German only by Rosetta Stone, but it may be better to buy some textbooks, at least one which summarizes the grammars and one which tells the pronunciation.
Hmmm... I'd find good ones after returning to Japan even though actually I want them as soon as possible.
For some reasons, I'd like to acquire German as much as possible by the end of March.

I often go to coffee shops for doing some work in the morning (almost everyday!!), but actually I may prefer going to a cafe at night.
Not busy that much unlike in the morning, I can relax sitting a good chair :)

We've scheduled to go to a coffee shop tonight, even 4-5 days ago.
Coming back a bit early (like 6pm) and having dinner at home, we drove to a nearby shopping mall - our destination is a Starbucks in a bookstore of the shopping mall.
Unexpectedly, the Starbucks was a bit crowded but we could get our seats (good chairs!).

It was an ideal atmosphere - everyone was leisurely doing what they wanna do although some people seemed to be working with their laptop.
Actually I also brought my laptop with me, but eventually didn't use it because I can't get my works out of my head once I opened my laptop.

Unfortunately I ended up being unable to relax that much even though I was just reading a book I'd like to read.
Probably, I couldn't release myself from pressures of a lot of tasks...
Better than not going there, I guess, though.

When I'm crazily busy, I wonder why there are only 7 days a week and only 24 hours a day.
If there were more days in a week, more hours in a day, I would be able to do more things, both what I have to do and what I'd like to do.
But, it's impossible to add days or hours, so a possible way is to have more time in a pseudo way, that is, to reduce sleeping hours.

But, as a friend said, "When you're busy, you should sleep *more* than usual to work efficiently," reducing sleeping times may not be practical.
It may work for short time, but I may end up harming my health and the convalescence would be a big overhead.
Eventually, "More haste, less speed."

I'm now super busy, but considering that I once even forgot to have lunch when I was a Ph.D. candidate (in the second year? At around 2pm, I found that I hadn't eaten yet, which was definitely shocking for me!!), still the current busyness would be not the most terrible in my life so far.

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I know some people can work very very powerfully with little sleep.
How can they work like that?
It may be their inborn ability?
I know, sufficient sleeping time may vary depending on the persons.
But, if it's not inborn stuff, I'd like to know how I can reduce sleeping time in a healthy way!!

As I offered to check a student's thesis, unexpectedly I was asked to debug his program.
Precisely, he didn't ask me to "debug" it together with him, but eventually the thing was like that.

He is trying to solve an ILP problem he formulated and wrote the formulas as a model of an ILP solver.
But, for some constraints, he can't get a solution (infeasible) even though he knew that there exists at least one solution.

We eventually did the Skype meeting (or Skype "debugging"?) for about 3 hours, during which we each struggled to fix the problem while sometimes discussing what can be the cause of the errors, etc.
But, we couldn't fix it today.

The deadline of the thesis is approaching.
I hope he can solve the problem as soon as possible.

By the way, why don't students try to test their programs with simple inputs?
From the beginning, many students use a large input set right after writing a program and say, "something is wrong".
Why don't they doubt the correctness of their code more???
It's a matter of experience? or just a matter of characteristics??

About a week ago, I purchased "Rosetta Stone: German, Level 1-3" at Amazon.com.
And, as I installed it yesterday, I used it for the first time - yes! the first German lesson!!
It's completely the first time to learn German, except for some easy words (like greeting) I remembered during a private trip 3-4 years ago.

Rosetta Stone's motto is "language shower" - learners learn the language only in the language they're learning.
So, in my case, no Japanese or English explanation about the German grammars and vocabularies at all.
The learners need to understand those things only by the repeated training and pictures which illustrate the sentences and words.

Because it's the first time for me to learn a language which has masculine and feminine, it is a bit complicated.
I hope I can get accustomed to it as soon as possible.

By the way, the price of Rosetta Stone is much lower in US than in Japan.
Why? The price in Japan is that before the Japanese yen becomes this strong?
I wondered if all things may be in English as installing Rosetta Stone I purchased here, but the instructions and displays are all in Japanese, except for the lessons, that is, no difference for installing it.
Then, why don't we purchase other language versions here???
We may purchase Korean and Spanish, too :P