mistersys

Howdy.

I'm currently working on learning Spanish. I moved to Puerto Rico (I'm a SE contractor) and am studying using a variety of resources including memrize, Quizlet & various books & PDFs. Not a big fan of Duolingo, I've used it extensively in the past.

Usually when I start learning something new, I get an idea of how it could be taught better. Looking for feedback on this idea.

It feels like the way to break past the beginner plateau is reading immersion. However, it's very difficult to find easy to read stories for a beginner.

My little sister learned to read by using Bob Books. The stories started with simple sentences like "Bob has a broom", "Jill hit bob", "Bob was angry". Gradually, they introduced more complicated stories.

The idea:

Build a Spanish learning course that's centered around introducing core glue-vocabulary and grammatical structures, then provides stories & comprehension quizzes written in Spanish for the language learner to reinforce the lessons. Vocab & grammar is first introduced, then used in the stories.

Users can click on words if they don't remember them, and they'll be automatically added to their vocab study deck (based on spaced-repetition).

Gradually, the stories & comprehension quizzes will get more complicated as more grammar structures & vocab is introduced.

If there's a course out there that's like this, LMK. This seems like it would be way more effective & motivating than studying random generated sentences & phrases out of context like duolingo.

I'm looking for feedback, and potentially a spanish-speaker that would be interested in helping me write stories & structure the course. Ty!

My roommate recently tested positive for Covid-19, and as I'm writing this I'm experiencing uncomfortable symptoms, I definitely have it as well, but awaiting the results from my own Covid-19 test.

The unfortunate thing is that, after months of playing it safe, we hosted a party for < 10 people at our home just before my roommate started experiencing symptoms. Obviously we feel terrible about this now, and it's hard to say if one of us got Covid before or at the party.

We immediately contacted all of our friends and anyone we came into contact with in the last week, but it struck me that there's no "So now you've got Covid" literature, instruction or recommendations sent from the testing site. All that was sent was a couple of sentences telling us that the test was positive, and there was only a small chance that it was a false positive.

It made me realize that our government truly is handling this terribly, and so much suffering could have been avoided if an adult in the room stood up and created a program to educate people on contacting those that came into contact with you, what to expect, how long to stay in quarantine, etc.

Obviously we googled these answers, but it seems a bit naive that everyone will just find accurate answers via Google, or will even actively seek out education.

Anyway, I don't mean to shift the blame away from our mistake of hosting the party or not requesting that everyone get a Covid-19 test before the party. However, we could learn from governments that actually take this seriously.