Romane

I finally figured out how to get myself to read in other languages:  chicklit. books I’d probably be a little self-conscious to be seen reading in public in english.

I’ve tried reading in German before, of course, but always chose ‘literature’-  tried to read things by Hesse or Nietzche or the like and never got anywhere (it’s hard for us english-speakers to keep a 20 line sentence in active processing memory.)

but these books have english-length sentences.  and contemporary, useful vocabulary.

(yay for used bookstores with foreign language sections.)

I like having such a concrete measure for my learning.   When I started reading “Für Jede Lösung, ein Problem” each page took 5-10 minutes.  Now, halfway through, I probably read at about a quarter speed of my english reading.  (you know, that’s really an estimate.  maybe I should be more scientific.) I don’t look things up anymore, unless it’s a very specific noun vocabulary item.  And while much of the descriptive vocabulary is new, and I can only guess at, the story is very vivid, entertaining, and easy to follow.  It’s because, on some level, a bunch of the vocabulary has begun assimilation-  for example, while I probably couldn’t produce some word independently in speaking, I recognize its meaning sufficiently to read faster.

Our public library appears to have only literature level books in french, unfortunately, though after taking a look at them, I’m determined to find some chicklit-level french books. That’s the funny thing about romance languages.  One can read them without being able to speak.

(yeah, and nowhere near being able to read like that in arabic.  or thai.  the alphabet processing bit just slows everything down.)

artisanal living

I understand, in theory, the way to really make money.  Invent something and manufacture it-  meaning- hire someone else to actually produce the goods and handle distribution.  This approach to making money doesn’t have much of a limit beyond the potential market size.

Or, invent something digital and build it, usually with the help of venture funding.

basically, invent something and then remove your personal body self and time from the process of building and distribution.

The artisanal approach is limited-  by working hours in the day.  Artisanal manufacturing; whether it’s bread or pottery or handmade clothing-  isn’t very scalable.  If you are good at developing the market, products can sell for multiples the price of a mass-produced item, but even there one will find limits.  For instance-  local market.  Big cities support higher prices than small cities.

I’m always amused by how differently people view the prices in my shop:  people from Boston or New York will say “wow, your prices are so low!”  and people from maine will whisper to each other “this stuff is really pricey…”

I actually, honestly, think my pricing is very low for what the product is.  I’m probably just not so great at finding the market. :)

One thing that has happened over the past year is that my online sales are far better than my retail sales.  Now I like having retail store some of the time.  It’s certainly taught me good things about fit and body types, watching different shaped people try on garments.

but, the introvert in me often doesn’t want to deal with strangers-  even if they are nice and friendly, which everyone is.  I don’t love making small talk.  I’ve answered the question “do you make these things?”  a thousand times now. And, you know what, the sewing machines aren’t for show.

We’ve laughed about how to add signage to the front door explaining my sales approach.  In addition to the ‘hours by chance or appointment’ might it make sense to add:

“I’m working here.  I won’t bother you as you browse, and please don’t bother me unless you need help. If you want to buy something, that’s lovely, but I certainly won’t pressure you, or even say anything more than hello, unless I’m in a (rare) outgoing mood. And please don’t be offended, it’s not you.  I just don’t like making small talk. – the taciturn garmenter.”

I’ve tried quite a few approaches to selling in the years since I’ve been making clothing.  some work dramatically better than others, no surprise.  Right now selling on etsy.com works the best.

And I’ve also, quite consciously, made the choice to produce artisanal clothing.  When I started my business, I had visions of growing it, manufacturing via sewing contractors, having employees, etc.  And I tried those things, and found, simply, they didn’t suit my personality.  I actually LIKE making things, by hand.  And I DISLIKE managing people, managing external production, and, the thought of selling via tradeshows makes me cringe.

So, were I to desire to grow this business, I’d need to find someone else to at least do some of the stuff I like doing, and I’d have to spend more time doing things I dislike. Can I reframe this somehow? what am I missing?

currently

when life is in upheaval, I’m disinclined to post anything.  And actually, this trends through the rest of my work as well.  I work best, and most creatively, when my personal life has a comfortable status quo. hence the dearth of updates in the past couple months.

We have this tendency to think of, and admire the artist-type who thrives on disruption, manic bursts of productively, and such.  there may be that type out there, but it’s not me.

I realize more and more, especially running an art gallery, how little I personally have in common with artist-types, despite having similar skillsets.  I schedule my work.  I rarely work more than 8 hours per day.  I work in balance-  tending to do a little of all my regular type tasks in a day. I resent it when something occurs that interrupts the workflow I’ve planned out for myself.

I’ve always been this way.  Never pulled all nighters in college (for school, at least. I stayed up all night plenty.)   Had a strong sense that if a project was due in a month, I’d better work on it a little every week.  And did that.

Of course, with my current work, much of which is a form of production, it’s not possible work in a bout of inspiration against deadline.  Or, it’s a bad idea and quality would be sacrificed.  I know, to within 10 minutes or so, how long any garment will take to construct-  and if I’m constructing it to complete an order, this means quality is the most important element.  And there’s a limit to how much quality sewing I can do in a week.

So it’s all scheduled.

This is not incomparable to learning other things, I think. Repetition for an hour a day per week is more effective than seven hours in one day. One of the awesome benefits of having handwork as a job is the opportunity to listen to stuff-  i.e. languages.

Right now I’ve been doing:

1. arabic-  via podcasts, library pimsleur, internet, and class.  ……….1-3 hours per day.

2. french – movies and library pimsleur, +  a  little deutsch welle in french.  I took french in grades 5-9-  so this is sort of a relearning project. I’ve a tendency to be pleasantly surprised by my comprehension, and then every time I try to speak it comes out in german. ………….. 30 minutes per day.

3. german-  inactive state.  I just listen to an hour or so of deutsch welle per day, until the news starts to repeat.  My news comprehension has gone up, though no doubt my speaking has declined, since I haven’t been.     ……………..1 hour per day, plus if I write in a journal, I use german.

4.  thai…I’m working a little on the SRS database I made, and updating all the entries with tones (yes, the tone is incorporated into the thai script, but I’m not good at deciphering the tonal aspect).  I really sort of skipped over the tones learning, except what I could get through osmosis. During the 6 months actively studying thai, built an SRS database with 3600 entries-  so my vocab was decent (not anymore)  but my speaking was terrible.  again, the problem with trying to learn a language separate from other speakers. ………..30 min to 1 hour per day.

So far, the only language confusion comes between french and german.  thai and arabic are so significantly different from the european languages and each other that they seem to be stored differently.   Thai has tones, no gender, no conjugations, and is mostly mono-syllabic.  Arabic conjugates on both the beginning and end of verbs, is all gendered, has dual and more-than-dual plural, and has a whole bunch of sounds that english speakers tend to ignore.

I’m quite curious about this whole bit regarding how second languages are stored & retrieved prior to fluency, and then even post fluency, or even post bilingual.

initial observations on arabic

well, the alphabet is pretty straightforward, and it uses spacing between words :) !

Here’s what I knew about arabic prior to last week:

1. it’s considered one of the most difficult languages for english speakers to learn, along with japanese, mandarin, cantonese, and korean. (aprox 2200 hours expected to reach speaking/reading proficiency-  not fluency.) (here’s the list, I can’t find the original source from FSI.)

2. there’s a whole bunch of dialects, to the point where some have suggested that the differences between regional dialects are comparable to the differences between german and dutch. i.e.-  they sound alike, but aren’t mutually interpretable.

Otherwise, I didn’t know much.

by the way, in the list mentioned in #1, thai is considered twice as easy to reach proficiency in, at 1100 hours, and german is at 750 hours.

My personal experience was that thai was several times more difficult than German.  I think this is because of the abundance of language resources for learning german, as well as the prevalence of people in this area fluent in both english and german.

According to a US census document from 2004, only 110 people in maine speak thai natively, about half of those are proficient in english.  and, I’m a little shy-  heading over to the local thai restaurant and asking if there was anyone who wanted to speak with me was too challenging…

the thai alphabet is quite a bit more complicated than the arabic one:  twice as many characters, all tonal, and the handling of vowels is less-standardized than in arabic. tonal pronunciation is really challenging as well, and especially, it’s hard to stop using native english tonality. imagine trying to ask a question without raising your voice at the end.

arabic uses the same voice raising question indicator as english.

thai doesn’t have much complexity in the way of cases, conjugation, or tenses.  It has a whole world of cultural nuances that would be really difficult to grasp without immersion, but the grammar and sentence structures are pretty simple.

arabic has some serious pronunciation challenges-  a couple of the letters are just sounds english speakers aren’t used to making-  (for examples, click on the letters that look like غ and ذ )

arabic also has conjugated verbs, and gendered phrasing throughout (I haven’t gotten a handle on this, so more later.)

I’m going to *try* to learn Modern Standard Arabic with a focus on North-African dialect-  however, I’m not sure how great the resources will be for the latter half.  According to what I’ve read, MSA is understood by all arabic speakers, but in real life, people speak colloquial dialects.  I’d like to, at some point, visit Morocco.  Luckily, Arabic Pod 101 does seem to focus on Moroccan arabic, and has a great one dollar deal that allows you to download hundreds of lessons.

Again, all initial observations about arabic may be revised as this project continues!

resources for learning arabic are much more widely available than thai. an example of the market for a language is indicated by how many levels pimsleur and rosetta stone will offer.  for instance, french, german, and spanish for english speakers are offered in 3 comprehensive levels by pimsleur.  So is eastern arabic.  Thai gets one level. A pimsleur level is about 16 hours of audio instruction.

and I’ve started using the portland public library system :) – I took out several books on learning arabic right away, and ordered the pimsleur audio through interlibrary loan.

I won’t pay that much again for a system, unless I had some serious time crunch.  I do feel the pimsleur approach worked well for learning german, because of the repetition.  I didn’t like rosetta stone for learning thai.  All the language learned was non practical.  For instance-  would you rather learn to say “the lady walks the big dog” in a foreign language or “hi, how are you, what’s your name.”  Rosetta Stone thai took the former approach, never getting around to conversations.  This might be a peculiarity of the less popular languages, so I wouldn’t assume this is true of french & spanish.

radio update

As I mentioned before, I’ve been listening to a lot of This American Life.  In reverse chronological order.  I just got through 2008, and started on 2007 the other day.

But here’s the really funny thing-  there are definite recurring themes.  and they are not what you’d expect, for the most part.

Through my opinionated personal perception (meaning, I haven’t actually counted) the most common recurring themes from 2011-2008 are:

1. economics

2. police corruption/incompetency (sometimes paired with court injustice)

3. chimps (like, the monkeys)

maybe I will count someday- create a set of links to all the episodes about police corruption, about chimps, etc.  I’m sure somebody else has already identified economics as a pervasive theme.

non-binary

had an interesting realization yesterday:

there are a lot of different ways to fix something.  even machinery is non-binary.

This occurred after I took my juki home serger to Biddeford for Tony to take a look at it.  I thought it was out-of-whack because I couldn’t get it to sew stretchy enough seams, and broke three needles last week.  I knew it was missing a screw on the foot as well.

This machine, despite being a home serger, is kind of complex.    It comes with about ten different presser feet (I’ve only used one) and can do about 40 different types of stitches -  overlocks and coverstitches.  (but since rethreading the machine is time consuming, I only use it as a serger/ overlock.)

Again-  a reason to buy one machine per function if you sew professionally, or even sew a lot.  It’s cheaper all round.

Tony, who had probably never seen that exact type of machine before, but has seen plenty of home sergers, approached fixing it this way:  test, adjust the tension, test, try rethreading it to loosen the tension, test, loosen the tension some more.   The whole process took about fifteen minutes.  He didn’t look at the instruction manuals at all (of course.)  He also didn’t follow the ‘proscribed’ threading diagram, instead rethreading in a way not ‘permitted’ by the diagram and thus loosening the the tension.

I realized as I was leaving-  hey, that’s the same approach I use with sewing.  The are no rule books anymore.

and I realized that’s an element of mastering any field. When we get familiar enough with something, there isn’t a right and wrong way to do anything.  There’s a continuum of ways something can be done, and with enough experience, we can see how the continuum works.

nine sewing machines

Though I only use five of them.

…….


I just got a new machine recently.  I’ve been trying to figure out for a few months what would make my life more efficient.  Mainly, my issues were:  buttonholes & zigzag.

Originally, I thought it would be an industrial zigzag machine, but, of course, they are expensive ($2k) and I’d probably also want  a new stepper motor (~$200) plus installation (~$200.)   And-  I primarily use zigzag on lingerie, which, being short sewing lengths, isn’t be done at high speed anyway.  So the industrial machine seemed not quite worth it.

and then buttonholes.  Mostly for cotton shirts, but sometimes for silk dresses.  I’d love something that just did them perfectly.

I’ve had a viking husquavarna machine for several years now-  purchased for around $500-  which I used for buttonholes, zigzag, and blind hem.  But it sews ‘chokily.’  I don’t know how better to describe it.  Even on light fabrics, it just sews at an uneven speed.  Worse, the reverse button is electronic-  of all the buttons, this one should be huge and manual- and only sort of works.  I have to carefully hold & direct the fabric while making a button hole, to assure that there is enough space between the sides, otherwise they overlap.

And it rattles.  I do not like electronic sewing machines.  They always seem to be overpriced and worse quality.

But, the blind hem feature works decently, so I will be keeping the viking.

On a trip to Tony’s Sewing in Biddeford the other day, picked up a new Janome.  The model isn’t on their website, I guess it was just recently re-released, & Tony described it as a workhorse-  it’s not electronic, can do single step buttonholes-  and is SOLID.   Tony is the most knowledgeable & helpful sewing machine salesperson I’ve ever met – he sells & services industrial machines as well.  So if you are in the market and in Maine-  I would highly recommend visiting his shop.