@hikari how do i pick a book for picking up a language

serious question btw

@whitequark oh, that's a great question, and i'm honestly not sure i can immediately answer it. is there a particular language you're interested in learning?

@hikari it used to be german, mainly because i like how it sounds

but these days i feel like it might just not be warranted with the very few useful hours a day i have due to fibro

@whitequark oh, interesting. i feel like i'd struggle to really recommend good resources for self-directed study, but i personally have a great affection for that language and would love to answer questions about it, if you ever have them

@hikari idk i mean i could just use german to talk to you or something. probably more useful than resources per se

@hikari honestly: I love buying books, there have been periods lately books were the ONLY media I would pay for

I shy away from textbooks because that name implies to me
- bound in a space inefficient way
- instead of fucking telling you what you need to know tells you 60%-80% and leaves the last bit as a sort of Socratic riddle as "exercises"
- writing is dense yet ungainly

The exception is collegiate history textbooks, which for some reason seem to have none of these issues including binding

@hikari I feel like every time I've bought a (technical/science) book I've mostly regretted it. The cheap books are too surface level or have poor formatting/no visual aids, textbooks are allergic to providing exercise answers in context if they're used anywhere near a school.

@hikari I'm curious to see if there will be more attempts to bring textbooks into a new medium to help address this; there have been a few attempts in the maths / graphics worlds (e.g. Interactive Linear Algebra and the Graphics Codex), but authoring seems too difficult as a whole, and it's not clear what form that would take for other fields

@philpax feels like there's a gap here. we actually had these magical tools for creating interactive content: "adobe flash", "adobe director" and so on. but they're all functionally dead if not actually literally so.