CLS advice nobody asked for

Awesome people occasionally reach out to ask me about the US State Department’s Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) program. I participated in CLS Korean in 2016, and I still find myself learning from the experiences I had in Gwangju all those years ago (and that’s with four additional years of living in Korea and several visits in between).

This year’s CLS cohort is getting started now or so, so I thought I would write up a couple of tips for making the most of the program that I’ve collected and shared over the years.

1. Contribute ideas for activities to do with your language partner, because they may run out of them before long. Your outsider perspective might generate interesting adventures like visiting a family with young kids or sneaking into a college lecture.
2. Embrace a Zen attitude with respect to the language policy. Understand that some cohort members may need space to process new experiences and cultural differences in English; this doesn’t mean they are not getting the most of the program. Language acquisition doesn’t have to be your only goal. (Context: CLS is famously an immersion-based program and requires participants to sign a language pledge saying that they won’t use English for the duration or the program. In retrospect, I was too much of a stickler about it.)
3. Identify and recognize your own stress responses and consider how they may contribute to or ameliorate the stress experienced by others. This is especially true for “elder” CLS participants (grad students and up), whom younger participants tend to see as role models in adapting to unforeseen challenges.
4. Buy an umbrella in Korea and thank me later.

And please email me if you are on CLS this year and have any stories to share! I still have a few posts around from my CLS days, but nothing profound.

Is using a thesaurus cheating?

I remember taking mild offense when my middle school language arts teacher introduced our class to the thesaurus. I thought, if I let the thesaurus choose my words for me, then is it even my writing anymore? This seems like a flaw in my temperament: I always regard technology with suspicion when it threatens to supplant human creativity.

Inevitably, as I progressed through high school and college, I made peace with the thesaurus, and now I rely on it. A typical use case would be: “What’s that word that means deferential but like, in an obnoxious way?” I plug the obvious profanity into Merriam-Webster and it hands me back obsequious. I’ve trained myself not to regard it as a creative failure if I accept this sort of help. After all, it’s not like the thesaurus tells me which word to use; it just brings it forth from the tip of my tongue.

OK, so this post had to be about generative AI, right? After a few years of watching the world use and abuse large language models, I’m beginning to find ways to accept an LLM’s assistance without feeling like I’ve outsourced my creative process. Mostly, I use LLM chat as a better search engine. For example, one of my first questions was “Is there a NumPy built-in that does this?” with a quick example. The machine pointed me immediately to numpy.unravel_index(), which was exactly what I needed. It would have taken me much longer to get to the same answer with Google.

Sometimes, I have tried more involved discussions with the chatbot to improve my understanding of a technical concept. In lengthy conversations, I try to put a lot of thought into my questions. I ask the LLM to check my assumptions, issue corrections, and supply keywords I can look up in an official reference—but never to generate code, text, or ideas. (Sometimes it does that anyway, which I find highly annoying.)

“We use tools to embody their virtues,” writes Fernando Borretti. I guess I value authenticity or craftsmanship—my fingerprints on the finished product—more highly than laying down as much code or text as I can in a fixed amount of time. This value judgment (and it really is just that) precludes more aggressive uses of LLM tech that, yes, might make me more productive in the short term. I’ll own that tradeoff. When it comes to new technology, we often speak of “early” and “late” adopters—as though tech literacy means no more than finding the smooth part of a hype wave. My goal is to adopt tools not on the basis of urgent marketing or the fear of being left behind, but because I can use that tool to make myself smarter.

My poorly automated Kubuntu setup

The target audience for this post is myself. I recently set up a new (old) laptop and tried to bring it to parity with my main Kubuntu workstation in as few steps as possible, which turned out to be … a lot of steps, most of them manual. I wanted to document the full process and see if I can find worthwhile opportunities for automation.

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Still playing guitar like piano

I still play the guitar like a piano. It’s most obvious when I try to play along with the lead guitar part in a recording of a two-guitar band. Often, the lead guitar just has a simple single-note riff or triads in the upper register, but I cannot resist the impulse to insert bass notes in the “left hand” (often grabbing them with my thumb). It doesn’t feel like a complete part without them.

Of course, there is already a bass in the recording, so playing in this way does not add any value, and comes at the cost of less fluidity in the actual guitar melody. I am trying to discpline myself to double lead guitar parts exactly, but it’s hard to break the habit of embellishment.

Another way my piano training interferes with playing guitar is an instinctual aversion to the capo. On the piano, if you want to play a song in a different key, you play it in a different key. (Actually, a lot of keyboards have a transposition feature, but using it is frowned upon.) But a guitar capo is sometimes musically necessary access open chord voicings in flat keys.

My pianist problem is that when I play the guitar with a capo, I can never decide whether to think in the transposed or concert key. The open chord voicings certainly are easiest to remember in the transposed key, but as soon as I need to play a melody higher on the neck, it’s like the capo isn’t there, and I have to think in concert key to make any sense of it. Most often, I just get really confused and put away the capo.

First impressions after moving to Tennessee

• Honey, baby, etc.
• Even young people have the accent. This surprised me because I thought that regional accents were slowly melting away thanks to mass media. In Korea, kids may have picked up a few regionalisms from family, but for the most part they spoke like the video game streamers they watched on YouTube. In Tennessee, you can hear an accent even in young toddlers.
• Frequency of conversations with strangers is somewhat higher than on the coasts, but more noticeable is the length and depth of the conversations. I spoke for five minutes with a guy in the elevator and we kept having to stick our arms in the door to reopen it. We finally stopped talking when the elevator starting beeping at us and forced the door closed. Didn’t even find out his name.
• Haven’t heard any cool aphorisms like “it’s all grist for the mill” yet, but my ears are open.