9 months of Chinese to go

Duolingo has changed its interface. Instead of letting you decide for yourself when to go back and do another run through a lesson, it now has a single path through where it will decide when you get your spaced repetition. The spacing is much shorter, and I'm now running into a something I've seen people complaining about before, where one starts just memorizing the practice sentences rather than really processing the language.

A bigger problems is that more differences are emerging between what Duolingo and HelloChinese are teaching me. They've had a few different words for the same things before now, and after consulting some online dictionaries it looks like Duolingo's vocabulary is more Taiwanese, where HelloChinese is more mainland Chinese (not surprising as it turns out to be based on mainland China's tests for foreign-language students). But now I've seen a couple of notable differences in allowed grammar. Maybe those are just regional differences too, but I think as a newbie I need to stick to one grammatical model, and it's mainland Chinese I need to understand, so HelloChinese it is.

The time I've been using at lunch to practice on Duolingo, I can use to start exploring the other features of HelloChinese, or trying to find videos to watch to practice hearing Chinese. Today I went to YouTube, typed in 科幻大会 (science fiction convention), and found that the only relevant content was about the Chengdu Worldcon itself. Just 科幻 (science fiction) got me to this channel, which specializes in talking way too fast over sfnal footage. I have no idea if it's doing movie synopses or parody videos or what. But after watching one and understanding practically nothing it was saying, I did somehow pick up that 飞船 might mean spaceship (confirmed later at Wiktionary). So I learned something after all! But I still have a very long way to go.

Meanwhile in crypto

Bloomberg has lately tightened up its paywall so you can't read anything without registering, which means I can't just link you all to Monday's Money Stuff where the author confronts the cosmic horror of the balance sheet of the big recently collapsed crypto exchange. So instead, here is an extended excerpt:

( Behind a cut to protect your sanity )

That's before he even gets to the paragraph he says drove him insane, regarding some alleged assets which are basically imaginary, and before the column gets around to the mundane question of where all the customers' money actually went.

Anyway, subscribe to Money Stuff, it's free and there's lots more where that came from. Also a lot of Twitter content lately, for those interested in that.