u/TooLateForMeTF

Riffed off of Anti-Chef's 3 Pizzas One Fool video, with the focaccia crust recipe borrowed from Claire Saffitz.

All I can say is, yum. Picture does not do a good job of showing how tall the thing is, though.

IDK if this is the right subreddit, but:

I have a knit dress that has this matching knit belt that ties in the front in a cute bow. I like the width of the belt, and it's really cute when it lays flat, but it always wants to fold itself in half, especially around the waist and in back.

I was about to go iron it flat, but won't it just happen again? Is there anything I can do to make it stay flat?

Las letras de la cancion Tu falta de querer, por Mon Laferte, dice:

>Ven
Y cuéntame la verdad
Ten piedad
Y dime por qué

Y mi pregunta es sobre la palabra "ten". Se ve como una forma de "tener", pero no sé en cual conjugation podría ser.

Made with Processing 4.0. I was bored.

I know the Standard CI Wisdom: don't translate, just understand.

And I get it. There's times when that happens, and it's pretty cool.

But I think it's just as clear that we don't get to that point immediately. What seems to be far more universal for us L2 learners, is a habit of mentally translating what we're hearing.

What if there were a way to leverage that translation so that it actually benefits your long-term fluency?

I never set out to intentionally leverage any such benefit. Indeed, it is only recently as I've added speaking and text-chatting in Spanish to my daily practice, that I've even noticed the existence of this benefit.

And it all has to do with glosses.

What's a gloss, you ask? It's kind of like a non-fluent, halfway-translation between two languages, where you preserve the structure of the source language but render it with the vocabulary of the destination language. A fluent translation would use both the structure and vocabulary of the destination language, but a gloss only goes half way.

For us English-speaking learners of Spanish, that would be translations that preserve the structure of Spanish while rendering it with English words.

To make clear the difference between a gloss and a translation, here's a couple of sentences from a random DS intermediate video:

Spanish: "Y por qué estoy abajo de la tierra?"

Gloss: "And for what I-am below of the earth?"

Translation: "Why am I underground?"

Spanish: "Ingles, por que Japonais por ahora no hablo"

Gloss: "English, for that Japanese for now not I-speak."

Translation: "English, because for now I don't speak Japanese."

The gloss really is a word-for-word translation. Or at least as best you can, because a single word in Spanish is often multiple words in English, and sometimes vice versa.

(Incidentally, this is why IMO watching Spanish content with English subtitles is more harmful than useful: there is too much distance between the fully-translated subtitle and what the Spanish speaker said. Especially where idioms are concerned. Full-translation subtitles hide too much of the Spanish from you, and give you a much harder job of matching up anything you heard to its actual meaning.)

When I started doing DS, I'll admit, I glossed my way through most videos, most of the time. I felt bad about it, because I knew I wasn't supposed to be translating, but I couldn't help it. In the beginning, it was really the only way that I knew how to extract meaning out of it. I'd keep up a running commentary in my head that was the word-for-word gloss of what I was hearing

These days, 500+ hours later, I don't really do that anymore. It isn't necessary. Now, I'm at a point where "don't translate, just understand" is something I can more or less do.

But having started speaking (and writing) to other people, wow has that habitual glossing turned out to be beneficial! Because what all that glossing unexpectedly did for me was get me very used to the patterns of Spanish. Spanish word-order can be extremely different to English, but I'm used to the pattern of things like "X below of the Y" (i.e. "abajo de") having the meaning that it does. I don't have to wrestle with the general shape of the sentence I want to say. Muttering my way through tens of thousands of glosses in however-many DS videos was actually me practicing Spanish word order without even knowing that's what I was doing.

Speaking is still very mentally taxing. I'm running that three-step process in reverse. I mentally take my English thought, rearrange it into a Spanish-structured gloss, and from there put the individual words in Spanish. It's not so bad when I'm texting with people on Tandem or whatever, because there's more time to think, but the same process largely applies.

Am I bad for doing this? No, I don't think so. At any rate, I don't feel bad about it like I used to feel about translating in my head. Because I know that in the same way that sufficient practice made translating give way to understanding on the listening end, so too sufficient practice will get me to where I "don't translate, just speak."

But in the meantime? I am glad to have glosses as a tool at my disposal. At least with them, I can eat the elephant in two bites instead of just one.

Recipe is from this classic YouTube video. Big sausage pizza on the left, little vegetarian one for my daughter on the right.

I love this deep-dish pizza recipe. It's f*cking delicious. But in our house, we don't call it deep-dish pizza.

The first time I made this recipe (which must be 8 years ago now, according to the video's posting date), my kids were in grade school. My daughter was 11 years old. She knew what pizza was, of course, but we'd never had this before, so she asks me "what's deep dish pizza?"

I explained about how you make it in a big skillet, and all the layers of cheese and meat and so forth (she wasn't a vegetarian back then), and when I was done, she said "Oh. so it's pizza pot pie." And I did kind of a double-take, and said "yeah, that's exactly what it is."

So at our house, it's called Pizza Pot Pie. As it should be. If you don't like it, come at me. That is a hill I will die on.

Y'all liked my strawberry cake a few weeks ago. Here's a similar one, but with more effort on decorating the top. These are mango, plum, and kiwi hearts. My kiddo was coming home from college for the summer, and I wanted her to know how much she is loved.

The bread is a fairly unremarkable no-knead recipe, but it came out pretty so I figured I'd share. Here's the recipe for the bread if you wanna try:

375g all purpose flour (though bread flour would also be fine)

350ml water, warm but not so hot you can't hold your finger in it

1tsp instant dry yeast

1tsp salt

Mix dry ingredients in a large bowl, then incorporate the water until there are no pockets of dry flour and you have a shaggy, wet dough. Cover and let rest for about 2 hours. Do a few lift-and-fold moves to stretch the gluten, and let the dough rise another hour. Turn out of the bowl and shape your loaf. There's a zillion ways to do that, all of which are better seen than described. If you never have, here's a reasonable video, though note that the dough in that video looks a bit drier than the one in this recipe. If you don't have a bench scraper, that's fine; dust everything (including your countertop) with flour and just use your hands. Put your shaped loaf on a piece of parchment paper and let it proof in a warm place another 30 minutes. While the loaf is proofing, put your baking stone in your oven and heat to 200C / 400F. Dust your loaf with more flour, slash in whatever pattern you like, and put it in the oven. Use the parchment paper to move the loaf around, and leave it on the paper while it bakes. A pizza peel is really handy for both putting it in and removing the loaf after baking. Bake for 30 minutes. Allow to cool on a wire rack at least 1 hour before slicing.

I'm not gonna try to put in a recipe for the cake. If you want it, it's in the Cooks Illustrated magazine's 200th issue. I will say that it's mighty good, though...