Hmmmm....

Well, what happened?

I did actually collect something like an average of 3 or 4 words or phrases a day (30 in 8 days) on the Nexus BUT I didn't blog them.

First thing is I found it very difficult to get wireless access on the Nexus at times when I could think, reflect and 'blog'. Basically, this is a technical/cost issue. I didn't want to be paying 'roaming' data costs and for one reason or another I couldn't connect to the various wireless networks available to me in the evening, after the kids were asleep, which is basically when I had time.

More, interestingly, I didn't feel an urgency to 'blog'. Usually I wanted more time to investigate meaning and try and build up my understanding or research pronunciation before posting my thoughts publicly. Now that I do have wireless and I'm less intensively being on holiday I will be trying to research a bit more the stuff I did add to my vocab list and eventually blogging it.

So, what worked? The reminders going off on the phone were quite useful little prompts to reflect on the language I had hears, seen or need and add it to the list BUT they often went off at the wrong times. This  partly because of the difficulty of predicting routine on holiday. Might have been helpful to set up a motion related filter (if moving probably not a good time to prompt to add something to the vocab list!).

Camera was really useful for capturing written language in signs and also the situations/settings associated with other language experiences. I also felt audio recording would have been helpful on many occasions but rarely had the nerve to ask people to repeat what they had said so I could catch it better, let alone ask whether I could record them ;-) Thinking about it though I could probably have made more use of the more competent French speaking friends and family that were often to hand and recorded them. Continuous passive audio capture would have been really useful for all those moments when I kind of got what was meant but couldn't remember or separate out all the words.

What would have been really useful for all those times I wanted to investigate the day's words and phrasesa little more ? Well, if I had had offline resources on the phone, at least a bilingual dictionary and something for pronunciation...