Tag Archives: apps

Appapalooza

Posted on April 11, 2026 by rachelmankowitz

            I had to give up my subscription to the Simply Sing app because my phone overheated each time I used the app, and by the end I couldn’t even get through a whole song without the app shutting itself down. Some days, when it didn’t heat up as quickly, I was able to get 10 or 15 minutes of practice done and discover new songs and feel like my friends were singing with me, but that was rare. Most of the time I would use the app for a few minutes and have to take a break for fifteen minutes while the phone cooled down and then I’d get another two or three minutes of practice before having to let it rest again. I ended up spending most of my practice time doing vocal exercises on YouTube, so the fifteen dollars a month I was spending on the app seemed like a waste. But the app was the thing that made sure I practiced every day, or at least felt guilty on the days when I didn’t practice, and I was afraid that without it all of my slow but steady progress would come to a halt.

“You could have spent that money on chicken treats. Harrumph.”

So, I went looking for another app. I tried a lot of them: apps that focused on ear training (being able to hear and name a note), apps that emphasized karaoke (with most of the songs hidden behind a paywall), and apps that focused on vocal exercises or music theory or breathing. I ended up deciding to splurge ($4) on a month’s subscription to the KHansenMusic vocal exercises app, even though most of her fabulous exercises are available on YouTube, because it felt like a way to pay her back for watching so many of her videos for free, and because the app organizes lessons based on specific goals, like vocal recovery, smoothing out the break between chest and head voice, extending your range, or building resonance.             Then I went back to YouTube and created yet another playlist full of the songs I’d been practicing on the Simply Sing app, plus a hundred more, with the lyrics onscreen to help me along. YouTube doesn’t check my pitch accuracy the way the Simply Sing app did, but it’s free and has thousands of songs to choose from, so it’s good enough for now.

            The biggest lesson I’ve learned from all of this is, though, is that apps are a really good way to learn basic material and build new habits. Ideally, I’d have an app for each of my life goals and be able to check in on my progress in each one for a few minutes each day. There could be an app to coach me through each writing project, and an app for sending my work out to agents and editors, and an app to help me organize all of my doctors’ appointments and maybe an app to keep an eye on Tzipporah’s chicken treat intake. There’s something really encouraging about the (false) sense that someone is keeping track of my progress and cares where I’m struggling in my learning process. Recently, I saw a video on Facebook where these two guys said they realized they were addicted to their phones, so they created an app to help them reduce their screentime. I couldn’t tell if they were trying for irony or just lucking into it, but the message resonated anyway: sometimes you have to create an addiction to overcome an addiction. The most successful apps help people achieve something they really care about by leveraging their need for social approval and quick rewards to create long term habits.

            I haven’t found all of the apps I need in order to create the perfect life for myself, yet, but I could never have imagined things like Duolingo or YouTube when I was a kid saving up my allowance to pay for one Olivia Newton John album, so you never know. My hope is that educators and therapists (and doctors and whoever else) will figure out how to create and use these apps to help people learn the basic and boring things they don’t want to have to repeat a hundred times a day, and then they’ll be able to spend their valuable time focusing on the hard work that requires human interaction. That’s what should happen, but I’m afraid people will just use AI indiscriminately, for everything, and, of course, robots will take over the world and then humans will eventually get fed up and rebel and have to destroy everything and start over from scratch. Which is just a ridiculous waste of time and energy that could be better spent learning more languages on Duolingo. Just saying.

“If you find an app that makes humans make sense, send it my way.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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The Water Sorting Puzzle

Posted on July 9, 2022 by rachelmankowitz

            When I use the Duolingo app on my phone, since I refuse to pay for the premium version, I see a lot of ads. Some are for local furniture stores, some are for Duolingo Plus (the paid version), some are for other language learning apps, but a lot are for games. There’s one where you have to put pieces of a “wooden” puzzle together, and one where the fat king gets in all kinds of danger and his life depends on you moving little icons around on the screen, and then there are all of the different versions of water sorting puzzles; some use test tubes, some use bottles, or vases, some even use colored balls instead of water, which is not the same at all. There’s something unreasonably peaceful, and satisfying, about watching water pour from one bottle to another, until all of the blues are with the blues and all of the greens are with the greens. I found myself watching the water sorting game ads all the way through to the end, instead of dropping my phone and looking for something else to do for those thirty seconds.

“Play with me!”

            And a few weeks ago, after the Duolingo tournament had raised my stress level into infinity instead of the app’s usual calming effect, I gave in and downloaded one of the water sorting games.

            There’s no productivity excuse for playing this game; I’m not learning a new language or important scientific principles, but the game is actually the embodiment of some lessons I keep thinking I’ve learned, and keep having to relearn: one, that it’s okay to fail, as long as you keep trying (the game lets you retry the same puzzle until you’ve mastered it, without penalty); and two, sometimes, in order to reach your stated goal you have to take a circuitous route, because there will be barriers in your way that you can’t foresee.

“I love to run in circles!”

            The goal of the water sorting game is to move the sections of colored water from one bottle to another until each bottle holds only one color of water, and you get two empty bottles to help you sort, because you can only pour purple onto purple or green onto green, but any color can be poured into an empty bottle. And the strategy that works for you in one puzzle rarely works in the next one, so that time after time I have to relearn that even if my goal is to get all of the purples into one test tube, I’ll still have to deal with the reds and greens and yellows in the way.

            So, for example, if I want to write the sequel to Yeshiva Girl, which I’ve been trying to do for a very, very long time, I have to accept that there will be more barriers to overcome, and that I won’t always (or even usually) know what they will be ahead of time. I’ll need to try new things, again, and again, again, and if I continue to fail, I may have to start over from the beginning with a blank page. But starting over doesn’t mean I’m failing, it means I’m learning, and inevitably, I will find a way forward.

            There’s a variation of the water sorting game where you can’t see the color of the water below the top section of each bottle until you move the top section away and the next color is revealed, and therefore you cannot plan ahead. I love this variation because it frees me up to accept my blindness, and to accept that I won’t know everything that will be coming my way, and therefore I can take a deep breath and know that I can’t be expected to plan and strategize, and it’s okay to just take it one step at a time, and see what happens.

“One step at a time, huh?”

            I still go to Duolingo every day to work on my languages, and I haven’t fallen into a deep hole wherein all I do all day long is sort colored water instead of writing or getting chores done, yet, but each time I take time out to play the game, I feel like my brain waves are untangling and relaxing back into place, or finding new and better configurations that can help me work through the knots in my actual life with a little more patience.

“I hate patience.”

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

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Using Yousician

Posted on September 14, 2019 by rachelmankowitz

 

I came across a music learning app called Yousician during my adventures with Duolingo (the language learning app). Yousician has a free version, with lots of ads, just like Duolingo, so I decided to try it out and see if it would help me make more progress with learning to play my ukulele.

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The first few lessons on the app were too easy, because I’d done the heavy lifting of learning the beginner stuff on my own, but now I’m getting to tasks that are harder for me to do – like switching from string to string or chord to chord quickly enough to keep up with the song. When I was working with my lesson books, I could play each song at whatever speed I liked, but Yousician is strict about timing, so I started to miss notes, a lot of them. Then I discovered the option to practice at slower speeds, until I could build up to regular speed without making so many mistakes. It kind of feels like doing musical aerobics, and I need to do it, because on my own I wouldn’t push myself enough. I was never, ever, going to buy a metronome. I still have metronome nightmares from my childhood piano lessons. That tick tock, tick tock thing is sinister!

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It really is obnoxious.

One of the other difficulties for me on the Yousician app is that instead of using musical notation, they use a form of tablature, telling me which fret to play, on which string, but not naming the note or giving the note a time value, like half or quarter note. It’s taking me a while to get used to this new system, and I still make sure to practice with my lesson books regularly, so I won’t lose the progress I’ve already made.

The Yousician exercises remind me of the first video game I ever had, for my brother’s TRS 80, called Typing Tutor. I loved to play it over and over, building speed and high scores, though I’m not sure it ever improved my overall typing ability. I became an expert at manipulating the ASDF keys, but how many essays are written with only four letters? Especially those four?

I’m still uneasy with the ukulele, just like I was with the guitar, and the piano. I’d like to believe that the ukulele and I will be good friends eventually, but we’re still getting used to each other’s quirks and limitations. I keep expecting the instrument to tell me all of its secrets, and suddenly make music, without much help from me. It’s possible that I have unreasonable expectations.

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“You? Unreasonable expectations? Never.”

The dogs have accepted the Yousician app with the same long suffering patience as they accepted the ukulele practice overall, though it does wake them up sometimes from their naps and remind them that they really need to pee. They think I need another app to teach me how to take them for more walks each day, and to stop doing so many uninteresting things that prevent me from giving them all of the attention, and all of the chicken, they want. I don’t know, though. I think they do a good enough job teaching me how to do their bidding as it is.

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“Chicken treats?”

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I have mind control powers. Look into my eyes.

 

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Amazon page and consider ordering the Kindle or Paperback version (or both!) of Yeshiva Girl. And if you feel called to write a review of the book on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Izzy. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. Izzy’s father then sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, as if she’s the one who needs to be fixed. Izzy, in pain and looking for people she can trust, finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?

 

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