Jeffers' 2023-2024 French, Hindi, German log

[jeffers]

New year, new log. Which counts for this year but not next. For a long time my language learning rhythm has followed the routine of the Super Challenge, 4 months off then 20 months of the Super Challenge. For better or worse, it's something to work with. During the challenge months I have put most of my effort into SC tasks, and during the 4 months between I have always intended to work on things like grammar and vocabulary, but as often as not the months have been spent ignoring my language studies.

In all of the past Super Challenges, I have focused on French but still never finished the reading challenge. This time I intend to focus on my main three together, and sign up for a half challenge in each of them. So I hope to spend at least some of the next four months polishing my Hindi and German so I will be ready to dive into extensive reading and listening. Or should I say "semi-extensive", since I will be working on half challenges? In any case, the basic plan is to work on Assimil for both Hindi and German, with the priority going to Hindi. I am currently on lesson 24/55 of Hindi, and I hope to complete a passive wave before May. In the German book I am on lesson 29/100, but I expect to spend less time with German study, so perhaps I can make a goal to get somewhere between lessons 40-50. Both books are written in French, so I'll keep my French active by studying them.

I'm also already forming vague ideas of what I'll use to tackle the Super Challenges when the time comes. For German, I will continue with the Dino Lernt Deutsch series of easy readers, as well as the audiobooks of the same for the film half. I may also continue to work on the German Easy Reader series, and get into the intermediate volumes. These are more boring, but they come with free audio so that's a bonus. As you can see, I'm not considering myself ready for any "real" German, at least not at first. Netflix does have several interesting looking German series, as well as the new version of All Quiet on the Western Front, so chances are I will watch some of them. For Hindi I have my eye on my stack of Tintins which were recently translated (all within the past decade or so). The film portion of the challenge has always been easy with the large number of Bollywood films available on streaming services (as well as my DVD collection), but now there are also a bunch of Hindi series on my Netflix watch list. I've been trying to find a good Hindi podcast. There aren't many, but I think I've found a good podcast series on BBC Hindi, each episode of which discusses some historical event for 25-30 minutes. Finally, the French half challenge should be simplicity itself, as I will just pick up Harry Potter 4 where I left off (around 60% complete).

So there's the latest plan. Flexible, achievable, and enough to keep me learning and improving.

Progress so far? I picked Assimil Hindi up at lesson 20 on the 26th, so I'm doing okay to be in the middle of lesson 24 now. However, it's been holidays, so I can expect progress to slow down once school starts back up in a couple of days!

[jeffers]

Reserved for planning, etc.

[jeffers]

I haven't made much "progress" so far, in terms of chapters of Assimil completed, but I have spent a lot of time revising the audio for both the Hindi and the German courses. Partly it was out of laziness, partly eyesight issues (I now need reading glasses to manage an Assimil book, but often can't find the buggers when I need them!), and partly because I actually wanted to get the previous lessons refreshed in my head. I still would like to complete a pass through both books before the Super Challenge start date, which would require completing one chapter of either book almost every day... there are just over 90 days left and between the two books I have 83 chapters left. It might be a tall order, but I'm going to see how it goes to just keep pushing forward in the courses. If there are any bits that I'm not really getting, I can always go through the books again later!


Sitrep:
Assimil Hindi: Lesson 28/55
Assimil German: Lesson 29/100

[jeffers]

With the relaunch of the 6 Week Challenge, I decided to take yesterday off and start working on my Assimil books in earnest today. The plan is that I will work on both every day, completing 1 chapter of Assimil German each (=most) evenings, and 1 chapter of Assimil Hindi over 2 days. I always knew the Assimil Hindi chapters were longer, but I always put that down to the fact they're teaching the script. However, now I'm doing two Assimil books in parallel, I've realized that the Hindi chapters have almost twice as much content as well. The audio files are nearly twice as long on average, and whereas the German book has 5 translation exercises and 5 fill in the blank exercises, the Hindi book as 10 of each. On top of that, the grammar notes in the Hindi book are a lot longer and a lot more technical. The Hindi book also has a lot more cultural notes, such as about weddings, which makes sense for the needs of the French market. I like the fact that the Hindi book's texts are centred around a common story, a French and a Russian student of Hindi in Delhi. I'm not sure why other Assimil books haven't used a common thread in the texts.

Back to my random thoughts about the 6WC, in addition to textbook work I plan to spend time on listening and shadowing while commuting, walking the dog, etc, and I'll probably do some things like Duolingo and Linguno during spare moments I get during the day. My focus language for the 6wc is Hindi, but in fact I will likely spend as much time on German. Theoretically I could complete 42 chapters of German and 21 chapters of Hindi in the 6wc. "Aber es gibt einen Unterschied zwischen theoretisch und praktisch."

This morning I shadowed the first 16 chapters of Assimil Hindi while driving to work, and did some Duolingo German (first time in a couple of years!)

[tastyonions]

Assimil's modern Greek course has a common thread of a few friends taking a vacation to visit the χωριό (village) of one of their grandparents.

[jeffers]

So far my plan for the 6WC is working well, although it's only been four days! As planned I've completed half a lesson of Assimil Hindi each day (usually soon after coming home from work), and a full chapter of Assimil German later (usually at bed time). For both languages my Assimil work goes something like this:

• Listen to the audio a few times (usually done earlier on, like while walking the dog).
• Listen a couple times while reading along
• Read the text once through (usually out loud), occasionally checking unknown words against the French translation on the right
• Read through the text, reading the grammar notes as I go (this is generaly the end of the first session for Hindi)
• Listen through the audio, eyes closed, listen again while following the written text
• Work on the translation exercises, then the fill in the blanks
• Listen a couple more times, and shadow while reading at least a couple of times

My textbook session are taking between 25-35 minutes, not counting audio reviews I'm doing at other times. This isn't a formula I follow exactly every session, but I tend to do more or less the same thing each time. At other times in the day I've also been reviewing the audio of past lessons, and where possible doing my best to shadow them. I can shadow pretty well for the first 20 lessons or so of each course, but it starts getting messy after that. I sort of think that the lessons I can shadow easily are the ones I have finally mastered.

The important question isn't finishing the books, but getting better at the languages. It's too soon to say for sure, but it feels like I'm making actual progress, and I'm wanting to keep going.

Sitrep:
Assimil Hindi: Lesson 30/55 (halfway through 31)
Assimil German: Lesson 34/100 (I'll do 35, the grammar review, later tonight)

[jeffers]

So far, so good. I've studied every day and I'm pretty much meeting my goals for both the 6WC and the pre-SC period.

Hindi
Although I have been learning Hindi on and off since 1977, it's the trickiest of the main languages I study. The Assimil textbook is also very grammatically dense compared to other Assimil books I've used. So far I have worked on the textbook every single day, but some chapters are needing 3 days to finish instead of 2. I have been tempted several times to go back and do a review of the past 7 chapters or something, but I'm sticking with my decision to keep moving forward to try to finish the book before May. The thought that's keeping me from getting frustrated about what's not fully sinking in is that once I'm heavily into reading for the Super Challenge the most important structures will come up again and again. I'm hoping that when that happens I'll be prompted to find the appropriate section of the textbook to review the grammar I'm coming across in the wild. And of course I plan to do a "thorough" run through Assimil Hindi some time in the future, including the mythical active wave.

My weekday habit has been to review Assimil Hindi audio during my commute home (40 minutes or so), often shadowing out loud when possible. Then sometime in the evening I work on the textbook for a half hour or so. I'm currently working on lesson 34/55, which is further than I ever got before, so some of it is quite new to me.

German
I'm finding German easier going than the Hindi, although I'm still on chapters I studied last time I tried to work on Assimil German (during the first Covid lockdown). The one thing that's bothering me is I've just done the chapters on Datives and started the section on Genetives, and it was the cases that stopped me making progress before. With this in mind, I searched Memrise for "german cases" and found two decks, one of which I started on Wednesday or Thursday. So far it has only defined the terms (lesson 1) and then gave cards defining some of the prepositions. I'm hoping it will then have cards practicing the prepositions with a variety of cases. I did take one evening off from textbook work, in favour of drinking rum instead.

I generally review and/or shadow the Assimil audio during my morning commute (also 40 minutes or so). The German is much easier for me to shadow than the Hindi. Today I found my old CD set of Michel Thomas German, and I'm tempted to work through in the morning instead. I'm leaning against it for now, since the audio review are a crucial part of Assimil being effective for me. Maybe later then.

Progress
I'm quite happy with my progress so far, and I am on track to complete both books as planned. However, wanderlust is trying to get my attention. I am started to get excited for my SC reading, and part of me wants to go ahead and start now. On the one hand, there might be nothing wrong with that, but on the other hand I know from experience that my daily Assimil work would start to fade into the background. So for now I'm planning to stay the course and keep the reward of easier reading come May as my motivation.

Sitrep:
Assimil Hindi: Lesson 33/55 (halfway through 34)
Assimil German: Lesson 40/100 (I'll do 41 later tonight)

[jeffers]

Just a brief mid-week update here.

I was using a Memrise deck to work on German cases, which started well but after the first lesson (definitions of things like subject, accusative, etc), unfortunately after that it was just vocabulary cards of some nous, some verbs and a bunch of prepositions without anything about cases. I realized that the course probably was going to be using these words for example sentences practicing cases, but in fact the rest of the course is just more vocab. I guess whoever made the course never finished it. So I found another course on cases which does what it says on the tin: it's a mix of sentences, definitions, and cards of case endings. The course is here: https://app.memrise.com/community/course/68265/cases-7/.

I am beginning to find the speaking on the Hindi course to be too quick. Last night I was working on shadowing lesson 34, reading aloud from the textbook while listening to the audio, and I found I had to keep a finger on the pause button and stop between almost every sentence in order to keep up. This is a good thing, I suppose, because it's challenging my speaking and reading pace. I will continue to do this sort of shadowing for every new lesson, using the pause button as needed, and when I have time I should probably work backwards through the lessons re-doing this for completed lessons. This is one of those cases where, if it feels like a workout it's probably doing me some good. Just as long as I don't expect perfection and give up in frustration!

[jeffers]

Things have come up this week which means I haven't done any textbook work for the past two days. Wednesday I spent the evening doing tech support for my wife who lost a file on her laptop. Then Thursday I had parents' evening at my school. I brought my Hindi text, thinking I would work on the chapter in the hour between the end of lessons and the start of appointments, but I was just too tired. Next week I have two days where I'll be out all day, so that's another two days I won't be doing textbook work. No big deal though, I have more than enough time to meet my goals by the end of April.

Regarding the tech support, sadly we didn't find the file, and my wife had to make her presentation all over again. But going through my backup hard drive I did find a lot of old Hindi materials that I wanted for the Super Challenge, so that's one job out of the way! Which has kicked my thinking about SC into focus. I've been meaning to sketch out some of my reading and watching/listening plans, so here goes:

Hindi reading (There's a lot here, so I'll stick with just Hindi for today).

Assimil One of the first things I think I will do is a full read-through of Assimil Hindi, for review and to get the SC ball rolling.

Children's books I have a load of children's books which Pritham Books had made free to download during lockdown, 175 books, all with levels from 1 to 4. I have read all of the level 1 books, but will probably start off with them just to get the ball rolling. Most of them count for 2-3 pages following the SC rules for children's books (each 5 pages with text counts as 1 page). In addition I have a bunch of physical children's books that I collected when I lived in India, and I might try and see if I can move them all to "read". I also have a few Karadi Tales children's books for which I have the audio.

Comics I have a near-complete collection of Tintin in Hindi, which are relatively recent translations. I've only read 2-3 of them, and I plan to try to read the lot during this SC. I also have Asterix the Gaul, which is an even more recent translation. I'll be looking for more Asterix translations, if there are any. I'm really pleased that these big comic series have had Hindi translations in the past couple of decades. There are mythical tales of a single Asterix comic that was translated in the 80s, but I was never able to find a copy, not even online. I also have a handful of Amar Chitra Katha comics where I have both the Hindi and the English editions. These comics are quite interesting versions of Indian legends, mythology and history, and I read them avidly in English when I was a child.

Readers The Routledge Intermediate Hindi Reader is one I've used for past Super Challenges, but I've only gotten about halfway through it in the past. What I did in the past was to read a chapter, underlining unknown words, then look up those words and read it again. Then I put the unknown vocab into Anki, studied it and read the chapter another 3-4 times before moving on. I plan to start it from the beginning and complete all of the readings this time. It is a pretty good book, but the vast majority of the book are notes, vocab lists and exercises, and most of the acutal readings are 2-4 pages long. I have the audio files, and will use them for film portion of the challenge. I might also use them to work on shadowing at some point. Another reader I have is the Intermediate Hindi Reader by Usha Jain. This looks like an excellent volume, but the readings are definitely more difficult than the Routledge reader, so this is a lower priority. I'd also like to have a look at the Hindi Newspaper Reader, but again that will be lower priority.

Novels On a previous SC I read a Ruskin Bond novel translated into Hindi, and although it was difficult it was quite satisfying. I have since purchased a few more of his novels on Kindle, as well as the audiobook on Audible. I'd definitely like to read at least one of them (these ones are a fair bit longer than the one I read before).

TV Scripts Thanks to Language Reactor, I can download subtitle files for Netflix series and send them to my Kindle. I have tried this with the scripts for all episodes of Guns and Gulaabs (= Guns and Roses), and it looks it will work well. I am really grateful to Netfilx that when they make series in other languages they make the effort to provide subtitles for the native language. The problem with subtitle files is they don't have any stage directions or any other context, so a lot of it makes little sense without the visual. I think what I will do is watch an episode once (not sure yet with or without English subtitles), and then sit down and read the script through 2-3 times before watching the episode again. If this works well with Guns and Gulaabs, there are several other Hindi series on Netflix I'll tackle afterwards. Although I'm keen to start this soonish, I probably won't tackle the scripts until at least a couple months into the SC, just because of the likely difficulty of the language. I also have a set of PDFs of a script for the classic film Sholay, which some university professor made for his students I believe. I've seen the film many times, so this should be relatively easy to read.

Hindi Films

Films Obviously, I will probably watch several actual films in Hindi, it's one of the things I like to do. I still have a bunch on DVD and Netflix has an okay selection.

Audiobooks I have some books on Audible, but I think I will only listen to these after I've read the novel. I also have a handful of audiobooks for children's books.

TV Series Netflix has several which look interesting to me, starting with Guns and Gulaabs. Since I want to be reading in parallel with watching, these will probably have to wait a couple months (summer holidays would be a good time to start).

Cartoons I know there are some Peppa Pig episodes in Hindi on YouTube (sadly, none on Netflix). Especially early in the challenge, this would be a good use of my time.

Podcasts I haven't found many Hindi podcasts, but these are great to listen to on my commute or while taking long walks, so I need to find some that I want to dig into.


A Plan (क्योंकि... क्यों नहीं?)

Month 1-- Assimil read-through, read a bunch of the Pritham children's books. Maybe start with the comics. For the film challenge, I might do some listen-throughs of Assimil, listen to some of the children's book audio files, and of course watch a film or two. Occasional episodes of Peppa Pig might be nice as well over the first few months.
Months 2-3-- more children's books, comics and get going with the Routledge Reader for both reading and audio. I'm tentatively planning to try to complete the reader during these two months.
Month 4- August, summer holidays, and we have no plans to go anywhere, so this is probably the time to seriously kick-start watching and reading Guns and Gulaabs. I will tentatively plan to go through all 8 episodes over the month. I'll see how that goes and then decide how to tackle other Netflix series. Meanwhile, I'll continue to work on the children's books and read a Tintin or three.
Months 5-8-- I hope to finish the year much as I hope to do over the summer, watching Netflix series and reading the scripts, and reading Tintin. Before the end of the year I hope to have finished with the Routledge Reader and moved onto the Newspaper Reader.

That's probably as far as I could go with a monty-by-month plan, because I know that things will change. But for the big picture, I'm thinking that by the halfway point I've read all the children's books I can (honestly, I don't actually mind them), and have made good progress with the stack of Tintins and some TV series. For the second half of the SC I plan to leave children's books behind and spend more of my reading time with "serious" material, e.g. the Ruskin Bond novels.

I think I'll wrap this up with a summary list of my tentative reading plans for the first 8 months of the challenge:

• Read-through of Assimil
• Children's books, lots of them
• Tintin, several of them
• Routledge Intermediate Hindi Reader, start to finish
• Guns and Gulaabs, script and watching (note: the script is 139 pages long, at 250 words a page)

[jeffers]

I recently read two reviews of the version of Assimil Hindi I'm using (1996), and together they sum up my feelings about the course. My own main criticism of the course is that the author treated each lesson as a fully separate lesson, and he covers one or two grammar points in detail which then is often not brought up very often in subsequent lessons. Other Assimil courses take several lessons to work through a single concept piece by piece, but this author was treating it like a traditional grammar course in this sense. For this reason I have been getting wanderlust to buy and work on the newer Assimil Hindi course, but I have decided to keep pressing on. The reward will be that the next time I want to work on Hindi lessons for a period of time, I will allow myself to buy the newer course.

Anyway, here are the two reviews, although they won't be of interest to anyone who doesn't study Hindi. First the positive review, which is a repost of a review written by Rupert Snell (author of Teach Yourself Hindi):

Review of 'Assimil Le Hindi sans peine', by Rupert Snell published in the BSOAS (Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 58, No. 3 (1995), p. 624

AKSHAY BAKAYA and ANNIE MONTAUT : Le hindi sans peine (méthode quotidienne) xxxviii, 662 pp. Chennevières-sur-Marne : Assimil, 1994

This is an excellent and practical introduction to colloquial Hindi. The course consists of 55 lessons, each of which opens with a passage of Hindi (in early lessons a conversation, later a prose passage such as an Akbar-Birbal tale), this is followed by inductive grammar notes together with annotations on content, a French translation and a closely literal version showing the original word order. (An audio recording of the Hindi material is mentioned as being available separately, but has not been offered for review.) Two-way translations and cloze exercises drill the newly introduced material. Lexis and register are carefully controlled, and the linguistic contexts generally have a contemporary and realistic tone. A 22-page appendix summarizes the main features of Hindi grammar concisely and comprehensively and the book concludes with a French-Hindi glossary. It is surprising to find no Hindi-French glossary, considering the generous length of the book, and a clumsy nagari font falls short of the otherwise very high quality of the production; but the careful grading of the material and the clarity of linguistic exposition throughout will certainly keep the 'peine' of learning Hindi to a minimum.

Basically, he doesn't say much of substance since he obviously would have skimmed the course for content rather than worked through it. Positively, it definitely gives a broad sweep of the main features of Hindi.

And the negative review:

Assimil is basically a bilingual graded reader with audio and grammar notes. The idea is that by seeing the two languages side by side, you will gain an intuitive feel for how they work due to both a phrase-for-phrase translation (message) and a word-for-word translation (structure). Generally, this works better for languages that are closer together. This book is for French speakers who want to learn Hindi. If you can't read French at an intermediate level, this probably won't be very useful to you.

To start, this book is dense. There are 55 lessons in this book (compared to typical 84-100 of others), but the book is as long as the longest Assimil courses, and it doesn't even have a bidirectional dictionary (French->Hindi, but no Hindi->French).

The book starts with notes about the Devanagari script. Then, you are shown how to draw each letter / vowel sign and that's it. Good luck. Lesson 1 pretty much assumes that you can more or less handle it. Weirdly, it then ends with reading/writing lessons! I have had to more or less piece together how to read/write the script from notes and other books.

For a language as far removed from French as it is, the lessons are incredibly dense. Compared to Assimil's Arabic/Hebrew course (which have very short lessons to begin with), this immediately drops you in with 7 sentences followed by 20 exercises and another 10 exercises for read/writing. It took me hours to finish the first lesson, desperately flipping between the pages back to the script notes just so I could write even a single word. There are transliterations for the text and some of the exercises, but consider the "fill in the blank" exercises that are typical of Assimil. If you can't read/write the script, how are you going to fill in the blank with completed words? The answers are given in Devanagari script, so you can't even check your work unless you can read/write to some degree. *After* the fill in the blank exercises, *then* you get to practice reading and writing single letters. How does that make any sense?

Assimil often has humor, and when it doesn't have humor, it usually has utility, and when it doesn't have utility, it has something else to keep you interested, like cultural notes. When it has none of that, sometimes it is the promise *another* lesson being interesting that keeps you going. Lesson 1 was being thrown into the deep end, but at least I could say "my name is ...." by the end of it. That was about the height of my experience. Everything else has been dull. Many of the lessons are so contrived and so dumb that it sucks out any motivation to slog through loads of exercises about standing on tables, playing cards, or naughty children.

The pedagogy just seems like a mess. By lesson 11, we've "learned" three verb tenses + imperative mood and been exposed the many of the difficult parts of Hindi - noun inflections and post-positions. There is barely any assimilation before the next major part of the language is thrown at you with the expectation that you have mastered everything before it. This is not "sans peine"! Contrast that with Assimil Hebrew where, even at lesson 28, only the present tense has been used but you have a *solid grasp* of the present tense. That "solid grasp" is due to lots of exposure over time (28 days, as it would happen in the case of Assimil Hebrew). In this book, they suggest you dedicate 45m-60m per day, but if it's too hard, then maybe two sessions per lesson. So then, by the end of 11 days (8.5-11h of study), you are expected to know tons of stuff. That just isn't going to happen.

You may say that perhaps I'm not just working hard enough, but I will point you to the cover of the book. "Le Hindi SANS PEINE" (without pain). I paid for a creative but systematic book that breaks down a language into small, comprehensible chunks. I sincerely believe that simply breaking lessons down to more manageable chunks, and of course, adding some fun into them to keep up motivation, could do wonders for this book. It need not be so difficult.

I have learned from this book. I won't say that I haven't, but everything feels like I have an incredibly tenuous grasp over it because the book just doesn't slow down. I'll reconsider my review once I have finished this book, but so far, it's been quite a slog.

I agree with the reviewer that the course is too dense and it is quite a slog. Like this reviewer, I wish the author would have slowed things down a bit, and the lessons could easily have been shortened. Each lesson has a much longer text than other Assimil courses I've used, and there are 10 of each type of exercise instead of the usual 5. The consequence of that would have been less coverage of the language, but that's acceptable for a beginner's course. I disagree with the author about the lack of humour and cultural notes, because the course has quite a bit of both in my opinion, but I suspect the reviewer hasn't gotten far enough in to have seen enough of it. There is quite a bit of culture and history in the stories, and even a fair bit of incisive criticism of Indian politics.

Source: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hindi-S-P-Bakaya-Akshay/dp/B00008CTCM/ref=sr_1_7?crid=17MBDJ9VGPUGP&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.fJ5yhC3JpIXquJPfs9VnPgKUKPNjtr913qZptqbETtCv3Yl8JGjbRonm9oSVfYqAeHVI1Ck_5l4IG2it27FbosLBZRZwfuG405kmyPZkrQ7zeiMOfGD1TXDvZO_HSKpI6OCbBNnRJbjW6YefTs9oChknsJN002xpeJNaD3u3P61gk5VRdFNbPEGt34U7TrXW137R1_wWP_Fb8IoYwy3uipIW4lNYeTlP8NqprTw6Oys.tDIYjkfaU7FOv4UJb1c2v80bdLftssSjzoamFhSEtlI&dib_tag=se&keywords=assimil+hindi&qid=1708615977&sprefix=assimil+hindi%2Caps%2C93&sr=8-7

Anyway, I'm still going and here's my current sitrep:
Assimil Hindi: Lesson 38/55
Assimil German: Lesson 47/100