Scopist Studying Progress (5 months)

15 Jul, 2025

I made this excel progress sheet for myself because when you can't have "number go up" naturally you need "color go up" and that color should be rainbow-order or else the 8-year-old in me will scream. (When you're bored as a kid, arranging color pencils in rainbow order is a pretty good time waster.)

I started like midway of January so it's been like 6 months now. And well, I'm definitely not as far along as I thought I would be. Part of this is because I don't trust my memory so I'm making a ton of Anki cards and studying those every day to retain what I've learned (I hope). Another part of this is just that the organization of both the grammar book and the course I'm using kind of sucks.

I've exchanged messages with another graduate of this course briefly and she said that while she liked the course and the book, she had to give up on sending messages with corrections to the the course over typos and the like because they just wouldn't get fixed. Indeed, for a course that claims to be working a lot with grammar and punctuation, there are a lot of strange little mistakes here and there that evidently show a lack of perfectionism. Maybe that's comforting, in a way. It is also confusing and grates my gears.

This is also similar for online proofreading courses from what I've sampled. Though I may have perfectionism disorder, in the real world all you honestly need is "good enough." I'm very bad at telling where the "good enough" bar is and I get really hung up when I feel like I don't understand something. I'm kind of dreading the punctuation exam when I actually get there because some things are differences in opinion and the book and the course (not written by the same people) occasionally disagree on some things. But supposedly the course preferences should take precedent... except for the fact that they have exponentially examples because they expect you to read the grammar book. Woe!!!!

For a course that also wants you to read the grammar book, the sections are not aligned and do not progress in tandem. This is another reason why I bothered to make this excel sheet, because how else am I supposed to keep track of what to read and practice next?

...And that's not even getting into how the workbook that's partnered with the grammar book hops around the sections like crazy.

I fundamentally do not understand the logic to which all 3 of these things (book, workbook, course) decided to organize their stuff. For instance, I went ahead and just read through all of the "Parts of Speech" that for some reason is basically slotted way near the end of all 3 things. Yet some of that stuff was literally required to even begin to understand grammar. What on earth is the reasoning here? Is it that they expect most people to simply throw themselves into sentence practice rather than build their understanding from the ground up, so they think it's fine to just put fundamental terms way later in order to keep these chaotic beings from getting bored? ¹

The grammar book Bad Grammar / Good Punctuation also insists on doing two different things at once: teaching you rules, and also being a reference guide. As such, it reserves the right to randomly throw rules in from another section because grammar can't be silo'd. For someone who is trying to learn things in order, this is also another reason for dismay. I cannot stop thinking that if I were to organize this I would do it differently and make sure that every example was related to only the chronological past sections that you would've seen if you were working through them in order. And then I would have round-up practice sections that would then test everything up to that point, thereby catching all the stray practice sentences before that couldn't be slotted simply into 1 section. And then I would just have another reference section that would have all of the rules together for quick lookup. That would be the place to have the threads cross when necessary.

Instead, I had to make this spreadsheet. Despite my best efforts in trying to arrange it to fit the logic of the actual Scoping Course in a way that would allow for nice linear progression, I've already jumped around to learn some stuff about quotation marks to make the stuff in the question mark section make sense. I also went ahead and read the parts of speech because this book kept saying stuff like "predicate nominative" and expecting the average English speaker to immediately understand what that was. Again... What order does any of this stuff actually expect you to work through?

I suffer. And continue moving very slowly. I learned how to use the cloze function in Anki for this. (In college, I was oblivious and just typed everything out by hand for Japanese class since it wasn't like the English was going to be repeated on the Japanese side.)

Also in my desperation for a reference sheet that makes sense + has rules that I can immediately understand as the answer key for my Anki cards, I've started making grammar equations. I don't even math well, but I'm borrowing their symbols to explain what is going on visually.

This is what it currently looks like, though everything after the first page is still subject to change.

I like to think that if I wrote a grammar book (I would never because I'm not a linguist) I would include these little fun equations and people would be like, oohhh, that makes so much sense and this is so cool I get it now :), but I think that is probably just me deluding myself into thinking that the way I process things is easily understood and/or useful for other people.

Anyway, my current goal is to finish this first grammar section by the end of the year and to take the exam in December. We'll see whether that happens, lol. Given my speed I don't really have much hope. I think this is one of the reasons why having an actual teacher in a classroom to bombard with questions is more efficient.

#life-logging