Brun Ugle makes plans and then ignores them – diary of an easily distracted tortoise 2017 (ES, DE, FI, EO, JA, NO)

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Re: Brun Ugle makes plans and then ignores them – diary of an easily distracted tortoise 2017 (ES, DE, FI, EO, JA, NO)

Postby Elenia » Sun Apr 23, 2017 8:48 am

I've almost caught up to you on Clozemaster for Finnish/English! Yay!

(I'm 100% certain my stats are much worse than yours though!)
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Brun Ugle
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Re: Brun Ugle makes plans and then ignores them – diary of an easily distracted tortoise 2017 (ES, DE, FI, EO, JA, NO)

Postby Brun Ugle » Sun Apr 23, 2017 9:19 am

Elenia wrote:I've almost caught up to you on Clozemaster for Finnish/English! Yay!

(I'm 100% certain my stats are much worse than yours though!)


I'm not so sure how well those stats really work. I think there must be a bug somewhere because I see cathrynm has something like 20 000 points overall for the week, but when I look at the leaderboard for Finnish, she has about 38 000 points for Finnish for the week. :?: :?: :?: How can she have more points for Finnish than combined?
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Re: Brun Ugle makes plans and then ignores them – diary of an easily distracted tortoise 2017 (ES, DE, FI, EO, JA, NO)

Postby Elenia » Mon Apr 24, 2017 7:29 am

Brun Ugle wrote:
Elenia wrote:I've almost caught up to you on Clozemaster for Finnish/English! Yay!

(I'm 100% certain my stats are much worse than yours though!)


I'm not so sure how well those stats really work. I think there must be a bug somewhere because I see cathrynm has something like 20 000 points overall for the week, but when I look at the leaderboard for Finnish, she has about 38 000 points for Finnish for the week. :?: :?: :?: How can she have more points for Finnish than combined?


Very strange. Of course now the week has reset, so we will never know her secret. But she is already on 1,396 points! Maybe it is just speed and a love for Finnish?
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Re: Brun Ugle makes plans and then ignores them – diary of an easily distracted tortoise 2017 (ES, DE, FI, EO, JA, NO)

Postby Brun Ugle » Mon Apr 24, 2017 11:52 am

Elenia wrote:
Brun Ugle wrote:
Elenia wrote:I've almost caught up to you on Clozemaster for Finnish/English! Yay!

(I'm 100% certain my stats are much worse than yours though!)


I'm not so sure how well those stats really work. I think there must be a bug somewhere because I see cathrynm has something like 20 000 points overall for the week, but when I look at the leaderboard for Finnish, she has about 38 000 points for Finnish for the week. :?: :?: :?: How can she have more points for Finnish than combined?


Very strange. Of course now the week has reset, so we will never know her secret. But she is already on 1,396 points! Maybe it is just speed and a love for Finnish?

I'm sure she loves Finnish. I wasn't questioning that, but rather Clozemaster's ability to add since it showed her having more points in Finnish than in total.
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Re: Brun Ugle makes plans and then ignores them – diary of an easily distracted tortoise 2017 (ES, DE, FI, EO, JA, NO)

Postby Brun Ugle » Sun Apr 30, 2017 7:16 pm

It’s been a while since I last wrote a real update, in part because I haven’t done much for a while. This past week I even took a break from Duolingo and Clozemaster because of my back hurting so much. But I’m feeling a bit better, sort of, and the 6WC begins tomorrow, so maybe I’ll get back on track.

It’s now less than a month until I leave for the Gathering and I’m alternating between being very excited to go and to see everyone again and being very nervous and stressed about traveling. I’m also a little disappointed that I didn’t really get a lot done this year and I will once again be going as a “polynot” rather than a polyglot. Maybe next year….

So, what have I done these past few weeks? I’ve basically ignored Finnish, Japanese and Esperanto except for a bit of Clozemaster. I’ve toyed a little with German, finishing my review of the first half of FSI, making very slow progress on Duolingo, and watching a bit of Kommissar Rex. Mostly, I’ve been concentrating on Spanish, but even there, I’ve been lazy. I joined the April vocabulary challenge, but dropped out halfway because none of the Memrise courses seem to suit me anymore. However, after dropping out, I was inspired to make my own personal Memrise course based on things I’ve been reading and vocabulary lists my tutor has given me. I do find Memrise fun and somewhat useful for learning vocabulary, so with my own list, it should be great. I’m trying to make one for German too, but I’m having a little more trouble organizing it. Other than that, I’ve been having occasional Spanish lessons with a tutor via Skype, doing a bit of LWT, and watching Aquí no hay quien viva. It is really an excellent comedy. I’ll have to watch it again sometime when my Spanish is better. I understand most of it, but there are still some parts I miss, and there are probably a number of jokes that go over my head even when I do understand all the words. But I do get enough of them that I usually end up laughing several times during every episode. And I love the characters.

I’ve selected Japanese as my target language for the 6WC. I really should work on it, before it disappears from my brain forever. Also, my great nephew is going to Japan for a year or more, and I can’t let him beat me. So, I need to make plans for how to work on Japanese. I have plans for all my other languages. For Spanish, I’ve got my vocabulary list, GLOSS, GdUdE, LWT, tutoring, TV and some audiobooks. For German, I have FSI, GLOSS, Duolingo, my grammar workbook, maybe LWT, TV and audiobooks. For Finnish, I will probably leave Assimil for a while and work on FSI and I might try some of the video courses on YouTube. I probably won’t do anything in Esperanto, except maybe a podcast or two. So, what should I do for Japanese? I can continue reviewing my textbook and the kanji, but what else? I should probably try to cram some vocabulary and work on listening. I always struggled with listening in Japanese.
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Re: Brun Ugle makes plans and then ignores them – diary of an easily distracted tortoise 2017 (ES, DE, FI, EO, JA, NO)

Postby Stelle » Sun Apr 30, 2017 8:30 pm

Which podcasts do you listen to in Esperanto?

J and I were sort of throwing around the idea of moving to Japan for a few years. I don't think it's going to happen just yet, but all of a sudden Japanese is on my radar. You know, when I first started out at htlal, I did NOT have wanderlust. I thought that I would have one or two target languages and just stick to them. I blame that forum and this one for infecting me with the bug. :lol:
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Re: Brun Ugle makes plans and then ignores them – diary of an easily distracted tortoise 2017 (ES, DE, FI, EO, JA, NO)

Postby Brun Ugle » Mon May 01, 2017 6:00 am

Stelle wrote:Which podcasts do you listen to in Esperanto?

J and I were sort of throwing around the idea of moving to Japan for a few years. I don't think it's going to happen just yet, but all of a sudden Japanese is on my radar. You know, when I first started out at htlal, I did NOT have wanderlust. I thought that I would have one or two target languages and just stick to them. I blame that forum and this one for infecting me with the bug. :lol:

I've been listening to these occasionally. It's kind of educational. They have a new topic every week and they tell you all about it, sometimes with the help of guests.

Language forums are dangerous like that, but I've always had wanderlust. So I guess I can only blame myself.
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Re: Brun Ugle makes plans and then ignores them – diary of an easily distracted tortoise 2017 (ES, DE, FI, EO, JA, NO)

Postby Stelle » Mon May 01, 2017 10:41 am

Thank you! That looks interesting!
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Re: Brun Ugle makes plans and then ignores them – diary of an easily distracted tortoise 2017 (ES, DE, FI, EO, JA, NO)

Postby Brun Ugle » Mon May 08, 2017 2:38 pm

The 6WC has started again, but I’m still being lazy. Part of the problem is my difficulty sleeping. I feel like everything would be wonderful if only I could get some sleep. Since I’m tired, a lot of the activities I’ve been doing are ones that don’t take a lot of effort, like watching TV and listening to audiobooks. I found loads of audiobooks in Spanish and German on YouTube and downloaded a few to listen to while walking. Unfortunately, my back is acting up and is causing my hamstrings to feel like they’re too short and sometimes making my knees go wonky, so I had to give up walking in the hills again for now, but I’m going to the doctor tomorrow. Hopefully a physical therapist will be able to sort my back out, and then I’ll be able to take long walks with Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie.

Downloading audio from YouTube isn’t as easy as it used to be. There is probably a program to do it, but I’m always a bit nervous about trying new programs, especially when the websites for such programs are usually covered in flashing ads all saying “click here to download” and it’s hard to find the real download button. I used to use KeepVid which also has those kinds of ads, but I’m used to it, so I know where to click. Unfortunately, the free version no longer allows you to download just the audio. In the end, I downloaded them as videos using KeepVid and then converted them to mp3 in Audacity, but that required two add-ons also from sites covered in “download here” ads. It’s also a rather slow process with three steps instead of one.

One of the audiobooks I found was a German version of “Sense and Sensibility” and I’m using it for LR. I have the e-book in English and I managed to find it in German too. There seem to be two German translations, so I had to use the look-in-book feature to read the first page or two while listening to the audiobook to make sure I had the right version. Of course the version I wanted was the more expensive one, but I eventually managed to find it very cheaply on iBooks. I’m not sure why I didn’t look there first. I’ve only listened to about an hour so far, but it’s very cozy as I enjoy Jane Austen. I’m looking forward to listening to the rest, and even doing it several times alternating between languages. I’m starting by reading English and listening to German. I think this could be a difficult book to start with for anyone not used to German, but my level seems to be sufficient to handle it. The problem is that both German and Jane Austen tend towards a lot of longish sentences, but the order of the clauses is often different. So you have to look at the English with a sort of wide view and not let yourself get sucked in to actually reading it, but just “take in” the sentence as a whole.

I’ve been concentrating mostly on Spanish in my push towards fluency. I’m trying to cram in a lot of vocabulary and also do a bit of writing and speaking every day. I’m way behind on the Output Challenge (that’s what happens when you take a two month break), but I’m back on board now and it’s going well. It’s a bit exhausting though, so the rest of my languages are more or less in maintenance or slow-learning mode. I still do a bit in most of them on most days, but it’s often minimal, and Esperanto I’ve been ignoring altogether. Esperanto is a little scary because it’s so easy that it just seems to take over my brain like a virus or a weed, choking out all the other languages.

I’ve been using the app Strides, recommended on Spoonary’s log, and it’s great. I had been using the website recommended by Cavesa (I can’t remember the name), and it was a very nice program, except that it didn’t agree with my computer and would make things freeze up or cause other problems whenever I had the page open. Anyway, according to this app, I need to write some 176 words per day, but I usually write over 200 when I first get started, so it shouldn’t be a problem, especially since it will probably get much easier with time. Speaking is harder, but it’s already getting easier. I’m supposed to do about 12.3 minutes per day, and I just blather on until I pass the 13 minute mark at least. In the beginning, half of that time was me saying “umm,” but part of that was my self-consciousness about recording myself. Now that I’m starting to get over that, it’s getting much easier and I can sometimes talk fluently for a couple minutes at a time before getting stuck and I usually can get myself unstuck again more quickly.

I’ve also been chatting with a tutor once or twice a week. Right now we just chat freely, but I might try building a little more structure into the lessons once I gain a bit more confidence and fluency. He’s very nice and fun to talk to and doesn’t charge much, so he’s perfect for this stage of my language-learning.
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Re: Brun Ugle makes plans and then ignores them – diary of an easily distracted tortoise 2017 (ES, DE, FI, EO, JA, NO)

Postby Brun Ugle » Sun May 21, 2017 11:39 am

I knew I wouldn’t do well on the 6WC this time around, and that I wouldn’t be able to do much once I got to Bratislava, but my times dropped much sooner than I’d expected. I unexpectedly found myself buried under a pile of paperwork and stress these past couple of weeks. It’s kind of bad timing because of the Gathering coming up, but on the other hand, being so stressed out with paperwork meant that I didn’t have enough stress left over to stress about the trip….. until now. Now I’m getting very stressed. I hate traveling. I love traveling, but I hate it. When is somebody going to invent the transporter beam?

The weather here has been amazing, so even when I’m not busy or stressed, I haven’t felt like doing anything. Usually early May is cold and damp, but we’ve had a lot of sun this year. We had so much sun, that it was actually warm on the 17th of May (our national holiday). Usually everyone stands outside shivering in their national costumes or best clothes to watch the parades and listen to the speeches, but this year we perfectly comfortable even in short sleeves. We have two parades here. The first is the children’s parade in the morning. All the children are lined up by school and grade and parade around the town in their best clothes. Then there are speeches, games and food at the main school. In the afternoon is the people’s parade and it always seems like half the town is in the parade and the other half is watching. The parade was led by two policemen and then come the flagbearers with the Norwegian flag, the Steinkjer township flag and the Saami flag. Then the town marching band came after that and then came just about every imaginable group and organization in town. The first group was a bunch of refugees holding up signs that judging from the quality of the Norwegian, they’d made themselves. We understood the sentiment though, even if the grammar and spelling were a bit off. The signs were to thank Norway for welcoming them, and they marched waving Norwegian flags and shouting “Hurra!” with very careful and slightly exaggerated pronunciation. I remember one May a few years ago when I was volunteering in the Red Cross’ Norwegian training program, one of the ladies there was teaching a group of immigrants how to properly shout “Hurra” with the correct u sound and the stress on the second syllable. A lot of people from the Middle East and Northern Africa seem to have trouble with Norwegian vowels and pronounce the u as o. And with that and stressing the wrong syllable, they sometimes end up shouting “Hora” (whore), which gives quite a different tone to the parade. :lol: Anyway, they managed to pronounce it correctly and got lots of cheers from the audience. After them, came dozens of sports teams and clubs, both children’s and adults’. I can’t even remember them all, but there were several football (soccer) teams, handball, skiing, a karate club, gymnastics, and possibly some others I’m forgetting. Then there was some sort of theater group in costume and then the local university, which was a big hit with the kids because they had several people in animal costumes. I imagine the cow represented the animal husbandry class, but I’m not really sure why they had a camel. I can’t remember who came next, but there were other bands, the Red Cross, some other clubs and at the end all the graduating students in their overalls. In Norway, the graduating students celebrate their high school graduation from 1 May to 17 of May with two and a half weeks of partying and silliness. It all ends on the 17th of May with the parade. The little kids love that part of the parade because the graduates always have cards that they exchange with each other and for some reason, little kids love to collect them and the graduates throw their remaining cards to the little kids at the parade. It was the best 17th of May parade I’ve ever seen, mostly because it’s the first time the weather has been so nice. It was sunny and warm the whole day. Usually it’s cloudy, cold and windy at the very least and frequently there is rain, snow flurries or even hail. Of course, Norwegians don’t let a little thing like weather stop them, but it is nice with sun once in a while.

Now that I’ve distracted you with tales of Norway, maybe you won’t notice how little I’ve studied this week. I’ve hardly done any serious studying. In fact, I’ve even ignored things like Clozemaster and LWT, which I’d been having so much fun with before. I haven’t even been doing Duolingo or Memrise every day like I was. I did however watch a few videos in Spanish, listen to some audiobooks in Spanish and German, and listen-read “Sense and Sensibility” with German audio and English text (I’ll do German-German soon). I haven’t had any Skype sessions for over a week now, but I have managed to keep up working on my Output Challenge most days, so I’m pleased with that. I’m still way behind, but I’ve already gotten so much better at it, that I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to catch up eventually. The first writings and recordings were almost painful, but now it’s kind of fun. It’s working so well for improving my fluency in Spanish, that I’m planning to try doing the same thing in German too to a lesser extent, but I’ll wait until I get home again before I start.
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