Plaid over jeans and ankle boots is a simple casual formula that I thought would adapt nicely for a working Friday with my new plaid blazer (thrifted last summer).
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| From greaterthanrubies.net |
I think this blazer is a bit on the short side for wearing with jeans/pants, but I thought it looked just fine with a column of black underneath. It just makes my legs look longer than usual, which isn't a bad thing.
*Black/grey/red plaid blazer (thrifted, Fashion Bug), $9.99/wear+
Black long-sleeved T (Walmart), $0.83/wear
Black jeans (thrifted, NYDJ), $2.14/wear
Black ankle boots by Sam Edelman, $3.33/wear
Grey sweater scarf (Target), $6.00/wear
Outfit total: $22.29/wear
The mostly-neutral color scheme will make this a very versatile addition to my wardrobe. I played it uncharacteristically muted today, with black and grey, to let the jacket stand out (as in the inspiration photo), but I expect to be using it in more colorful outfits to come.
In other news...My office mate's husband has never studied a foreign language, but because they have been talking about wanting to take a vacation in Italy, he picked up a language CD he thought might be helpful if he listened to it in the car (for example). The CD claims to help you learn the language naturally like children learn. What the CD does is list a long string of unrelated Italian words for the listener to repeat. That's it. This is possibly the worst language learning technique of all time. I was like, Well, I guess if you want to learn to "speak Italian," you can learn like the first several words on this CD so that when you are in Italy, you can go into a restaurant or wherever and just say these words to someone. You don't know what they mean, and they won't go together thematically or grammatically, but you will be speaking Italian [words].
Robert and I did this together in Spanish and came up with something like: "Gato trabajar bano vamanos piso dos dientes basura conejo adios verde." And for Tam, I will add "miercoles," our favorite Spanish word to appear on a sandwich purchased at the airport/on an airplane. I think every airport sandwich has "miercoles" on it, which must mean "airport sandwich" in Spanish.
Kids learn languages naturally by having crazy-amazing brain plasticity for language learning and by encountering phrases and sentences in a physical and social context. I think that putting a kid by himself in a big box (like a car) and then having a loudspeaker recite a series of words in a language would not result in the kid learning the language. Indeed, it sounds like the control group protocol of a developmental psychology experiment that is too unethical for anyone to let you do it.
What's the most unhelpful language learning technique you have heard of/encountered/tried?
4 comments:
I'm glad you got "conejo" in there.
A friend of mine had a high school teacher with a really bad Texan drawl. I think even if you learned it perfectly, no one could understand you, which would be super frustrating.
My high school teacher started with having no reading or writing, but by then I was used to thinking in terms of letters. You'd think that in Spanish that wouldn't be much of a problem, but after my friend and I had been misspelling things in our heads and in notes to each other for so long, we had to re-learn the spelling and really the whole look of many words. Starting with "Ola!" which turns out to need a starting "h."
Of course then there's the problem of learning American Sign Language at Deaf schools where they forbid the use of ASL (wha?) and so you have to sneak learn it from your classmates when no one's looking.
That tape might be worse than all of those. But I've also heard of people deliberately teaching wrong words to people they didn't like, which is probably even worse.
The bad Texan drawl...it's amazing how often the things I thought were just jokes on King of the Hill are actually true.
The idea of not teaching the spelling to high school students is bizarre. Thanks for making me re-learn everything I thought I knew, Teach.
Who are these asshats deliberately teaching the wrong words? Well, maybe the targets of their wrath were asking for it...
Or maybe it was practical jokesters. Can't remember.
In any case, that definitely qualifies as unhelpful!
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