I have 35 days until I take my CLEP test in English Literature. That
means I have designated 35 different subjects to study on each day:
Beowulf | The Pilgrim's Progress | John Milton | John Donne
| Christopher Marlowe | William Shakespeare | Samuel Pepys |
Alexander Pope | Piers Plowman | 10 Geoffrey Chaucer | Thomas
More | King James Bible | Spencer's The Faerie Queene | Jonathon
Swift | Henry Fielding | Sir Walter Scott | William Blake | The Romantics | Samuel Taylor Coleridge | 20 Daniel
Defoe | Mary Shelley | Jane Austen | Bronte
Sisters | George Eliot | Charles Dickens | Thomas
Hardy | Joseph Conrad | Oscar Wilde | George Bernard Shaw | 30
Rudyard Kipling | E. M. Forster | James Joyce | George
Orwell/Aldous Huxley | Virginia Woolf | Samuel Beckett/Harold
Pinter
I've purposely left out some authors, such as Lewis Carroll, whose
work I am familiar with. Certain subjects may seen too vast to cover in
one day, but those are usually the ones with which I already have a
great familiarity, like Shakespeare and Dickens. The
goal of each day will be to read historical information on the
subject, and as much of the author's major works as I can in one day.
To this end, I am warming to the Public Domain content here, it is
more than useful in some cases.
I also have 35 days until my CLEP test in Spanish Language. Each
day will include reading two chapters of a Spanish textbook, and
focusing on the vocabulary and phrases associated with that concept.
Each concept will be chosen the day before. Tomorrows concept is
Time: Months, days of the week, seasons, time of day, common phrases
to express and request time. In this way I can integrate my
learning of grammar with a familiarity with certain lexical
groupings, which will aid in recall.
I also purchased Love in the Time of Cholera in Spanish, and will
read that during certain times of the day, along with my copy of the
Selected poems of Borges. My strategy is going to
be to employ as many different activities in each day as I can, going
back and forth between Spanish and English Literature in thirty minute
increments. I might start a day listening to Spanish
podcasts, read from a PD text on the
internet, practice with Spanish Flash Cards, read
literary criticism of the subject, listen to Spanish music, etc.
etc. All of this in an attempt to push my point of saturation back,
much the same way that a competitive eater pushes back their point of
nausea. Also, frequent breaks.
Today, I reviewed counting (Side Rant: Youtube has almost no good
videos on counting in Spanish, most of it is videos of people's kids
counting in Spanish. Seriously people, who gives a shit?) and
conjugations of Ser.
Notes to Myself
- Feminine endings: -a, -dad, -ión, -tad, -tud, -ie, -sis, -ez, -triz, -umbre
- Masculine endings: -e, -ma, most everything else.
- Exceptions apply.
- Plural
- Body parts, use the definite article.
- Possessive
- Drop Indefinite Article
- In expressions with con or sin.
- Exclamations starting with ¡Que!