Tristano's log 2017: Wanderland in the Netherlusts

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Tristano
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Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=5141
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Re: Tristano's log 2017: wanderlust in the Netherlands

Postby Tristano » Fri May 26, 2017 9:23 pm

Clozemaster made my wanderlust dreams come true. It's the app I would have built if I had enough time and competence.

I spent the last days using it in tandem with Duolingo and Memrise (2000 most common words) for a week more or less to learn some Romanian for a sort of a personal crack the code challenge (that is actually one of the aspects I enjoy the most about learning languages). The meaning is: I want to try to approach an intermediate level in the passive skills in the shortest time possible so that I can use native resources and let the language take care of herself. I know, Assimil would be much better than Duolingo for the purpose.

Then I tried to listen to an episode of a podcast of România în direct and I could actually understand the meaning of what has been said! Yes there is obviously a big cheating component because it's a romance language and I speak already three of them of which one natively, but I did this test one year ago and I could understand only some word here and there. Romanian is very divergent with an important Slavic component and getting to learn very divergent words and non Latin derived words of very frequent use does the trick beautifully.

I of course tried levels from other languages I never studied before in a significant way. These are my findings, in order of perceived difficulty (disclaimer: I test only with the multi choice, never with typing):

- Portuguese (from Italian): too easy. When I decide I want to learn it I will use native resources right away like I did with Spanish.

- German (from Dutch): after Portuguese the easiest (for me) language that I tried, having strong overlaps with Dutch. When I will feel like to do it, I can repeat my Romanian challenge.

- Esperanto (from English): this language looks to me more difficult than Romanian to understand without any previous study with my current background.

- Icelandic (from English) it looks somewhat familiar to me. I could guess half of the words.

- Polish (from French): nothing that can make any sense to me. It looks alien.

I'm going to keep faith and go through Pimsleur Hebrew 3 despite the boredom, then I will decide what to do with it. In the meantime I'm trying to remember that I can understand more languages than only English and use them during the day (otherwise why did I learn them in first instance?).
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Re: Tristano's log 2017: wanderlust in the Netherlands

Postby rdearman » Fri May 26, 2017 9:29 pm

Tristano wrote:then I will decide what to do with it. In the meantime I'm trying to remember that I can understand more languages than only English and use them during the day (otherwise why did I learn them in first instance?).


This made me chuckle. That is the sort of thing which occurs to me on occasion as well.
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Re: Tristano's log 2017: wanderlust in the Netherlands

Postby reineke » Fri May 26, 2017 10:54 pm

Tristano wrote:
I'm going to keep faith and go through Pimsleur Hebrew 3 despite the boredom, then I will decide what to do with it.


That will leave you with the grand total of three blintzes that you'll need to freeze and save for later. Decide now. Or don't. It's just Pimsleur, after all. In the meantime you can share some easy recipes. :D
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Tristano
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Re: Tristano's log 2017: wanderlust in the Netherlands

Postby Tristano » Sat May 27, 2017 5:51 am

https://www.meilleurduchef.com/fr/recet ... ienne.html

Et voilà. Made yesterday. My girlfriend didn't like it (her fault lol, it was like it was supposed to be).
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Re: Tristano's log 2017: wanderlust in the Netherlands

Postby Tristano » Mon May 29, 2017 7:14 am

Stamattina, come tutti i lunedì, ho accompagnato la mia ragazza in stazione e successivamente guidato quei cinque/dieci minuti in più per raggiungere l'ufficio in cui lavoro. Ho approfittato di quei pochi minuti per praticare un po' il mio ebraico con Pimsleur. Premessa: a causa della festa dell'assunzione, non guido per andare al lavoro sin da mercoledì scorso. Risultato: ho dimenticato praticamente tutto ciò che ho studiato nell'ultima settimana. Questa è stata la classica goccia che ha fatto traboccare il vaso. La noia ed il dolore fisico che provo quando studio con Pimsleur unita alle difficoltà a mantenere le motivazioni a studiare questa lingua mi ha fatto prendere una dolorosa decisione: basta Pimsleur (con questa lingua). Mi ha aiutato finora e ho raggiunto risultati (pochi), ora è tempo di muovere verso qualcosa di diverso. Diventasse chiaro che non dipende dal metodo ma da me stesso, potrei prendere una decisione più drastica. Ora ho deciso di dare una possibilità a HebrewPod101. Vediamo. Quanto meno è molto meno noioso di Pimsleur, ma efficace? Questo non lo so.
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J'ai commencé a douter si j'ai completement oublié le Français ou si un peu je me le rappelle.
Bien sûr, ma grammair n'est pas excellent et mon vocabulaire est un peu italianisé. C'est pour ça que pendant le dernière jours j'ai (re)commencé á utiliser des resources en français, comme pour example la recette que j'ai partager dans mon dernière post ou quelques podcasts. Une autre resource que je trouve trés interessant c'est le canal Youtube de Louis Yagera. Louis partage des vidéos qui d'habitude parlent de développement personnel ou de méditation. Je trouve en particulier son méditations guidées très relaxants et parfait à écouter avant de dormir.
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Mijn Spaans eist ook wat aandacht en ik heb daarom ook en paar video's hier en daar bekeken, vooral wanneer ik aan mijn kindje voeding geef. Dat is een perfect moment om youtube videos naar mijn chromecast te casten. Ik mag zeggen dat mijn luistering vrij goed is en dat ik supersnel spraken zonder problemen kan volgen, indrukwekkend! Wat ik echt moet verbeteren is lezen van moeilijk romansen en de grammatica. Maar wanneer vind ik de tijd om dat te doen?
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En el mismo tiempo estoy estudiando un poco de rumano. Este idioma me parece interesante y me acuerdo que haces dos o tres años yo tenía el idea de estudiar todas las lenguas eslavas empezando con el rumano y despues continuando con otros idiomas y para ultimo el ruso. No lo he echo en aquel tiempo pero puede ser que esta vez... mmmuhwhahahaha. No, serio, no lo se. Pero suena como una idea genial.
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As you can see my grammar is bad in all my languages :twisted:
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Tristano
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Re: Tristano's log 2017: Wanderland in the Netherlusts

Postby Tristano » Tue Jun 06, 2017 8:51 am

Until now studying Romanian has been painless and enjoyable.
Romanian looks to me to have the same property of Spanish to be easier to listen to than to read (with French being exactly the opposite).
This language is very interesting, it is partly Italian, partly Latin, partly Slavic with Dacian words and Germanic words.

Very good stuff for my language journey.
Another interesting language looks to be Esperanto. When I try to read Esperanto, despite of its 75% latin based vocabulary, I understand basically nothing. One of the reasons is the present of Slavic vocabulary, which constitutes just the 1% of the language but mostly in words of high frequent usage. The vocabulary though is not the only slavic charateristic present in the language: http://culture.pl/en/article/how-much-p ... -esperanto

These properties make the language being interesting for me in the prospective of facing the Slavic group.

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In a few days I'll go to vacation for a couple of weeks, in my native land. There will be very little study and I will take some time deciding what I want to do with Hebrew. Considering how little I learned so far compared with what I could have differently done, I fear that I know already what I will decide. Although, I had some fun speaking a little Hebrew with my Israeli colleague.
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Tristano
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Re: Tristano's log 2017: Wanderland in the Netherlusts

Postby Tristano » Sat Jun 10, 2017 7:07 am

Traveling to Italy, I did a tussenstop in Germany.
My first German conversation:
"Entschuldigung, ich spreche keine Deutsch aber ich müss bezahlen de benzin." "Nummer drei?" "JA!".

Lovely <3
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Tristano
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Re: Tristano's log 2017: Wanderland in the Netherlusts

Postby Tristano » Wed Jun 21, 2017 4:25 pm

With the holidays almost finished, it's time to review what I'm doing and make new plans.

Romance languages:
- native in Italian, decent in French and Spanish, I understand written and spoken Catalan, I understand good deal of written Portuguese, I'm building my passive skills in Romanian. I have plans of building comprehension in written Latin (very low priority), spoken Portuguese, written Esperanto (as a bridge). Later in my life I will build active skills in Romanian and Portuguese, or I will refresh my active skills of Spanish and French, but only on demand for a travel. I'm currently using clozemaster, Memrise (2000 most used words) and Duolingo for Romanian. I dropped Hebrew (more on that later), so I have an additional slot (in the car) that I will fill by listening to podcasts in Portuguese to build spoken comprehension.

- Germanic languages: decent in English (although my knowledge of the language has many holes I'm basically bilingual and I think and dream almost exclusively in English), building my Dutch, some little knowledge of German, which passive and maybe active skills I will build without hurrying. Plans for Swedish, one between Danish or Norwegian and Icelandic all of them only passively. German will probably be my favorite filler when I want to improve something without starting something new.

- Slavic languages: no knowledge. My plan is to learn Russian and perhaps another one actively and the others passively. Romanian, Esperanto and perhaps Latin will be my prerequisites to start this project.

- Austronesian languages: as soon as I will be done with Romanian I will start Indonesian, as my girlfriend has Indonesian heritage and we want to organize a travel in one or two years there. Malay and other regional Malay based languages will maybe come consequently only in passive form, another couple of more distant languages of the group can possibly come.

- Others: since I prefer to work with families and have a broad range of passive only languages, I will avoid working with totally isolated languages. But you never know. My travels will determine which languages I will study and sometimes a lingua franca will be my choice (example, in Africa I can go well enough with French, English and Dutch, and maybe I will add Swahili, depending of my destination. If I go to South Africa I may consider learning Afrikaans passively and answering in Dutch). I have to stop interrupting ongoing projects (especially when very green) with new languages that are too distant from my repertoire.

Anyway, my Romanian is proceeding steadily and I can read Wikipedia articles about familiar topic without problems and about unfamiliar topics with some trouble. I'm reading a book in Portuguese (1984) without issues. I sometimes watch videos or read articles or books in French and Spanish to keep them fresh. I work in Dutch and watch TV and read articles and sometimes books in it.
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Re: Tristano's log 2017: Wanderland in the Netherlusts

Postby zenmonkey » Wed Jun 21, 2017 9:22 pm

I'm sorry to hear you are dropping Hebrew. Maybe you'll come back to it later.

Portuguese is my on again, off again love. I'm doing a blitz for a while to see if I can activate it again. Sleeping pretty profoundly for the moment.
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Re: Tristano's log 2017: Wanderland in the Netherlusts

Postby Xenops » Wed Jun 21, 2017 11:36 pm

You should learn...Japanese :twisted: It has oodles of native materials, lots of it of freely accessible and easy to find.

I wanted to note that you log title "Wanderland in the Netherlusts" sounds, umm... :oops: But maybe that was intentional. ;)
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