zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

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zenmonkey
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2528
Joined: Sun Jul 26, 2015 7:21 pm
Location: California, Germany and France
Languages: Spanish, English, French trilingual - German (B2/C1) on/off study: Persian, Hebrew, Tibetan, Setswana.
Some knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Ladino, Yiddish ...
Want to tackle Tzotzil, Nahuatl
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=859
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Wed May 17, 2017 10:19 pm

And today's German worksheet - a Wikipedia text kicked my butt - but hey, lots of vocabulary to learn!!

IMG_4223.JPG
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zenmonkey
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2528
Joined: Sun Jul 26, 2015 7:21 pm
Location: California, Germany and France
Languages: Spanish, English, French trilingual - German (B2/C1) on/off study: Persian, Hebrew, Tibetan, Setswana.
Some knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Ladino, Yiddish ...
Want to tackle Tzotzil, Nahuatl
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Hebrew

Postby zenmonkey » Thu May 18, 2017 8:53 pm

Today, I doubled up on italki lessons and did one in the morning and one in the evening, just catching up on last weeks focus on German. This was certainly not the best way to learn - morning lesson was like having cotton in my mouth. It's like I lost everything (well, and getting 5 hrs of sleep ...).

I've also noticed that I'm terrible at following up on my homework because b the time I get to it, I've forgotten what I needed to do, even when I've taken notes. So, today I spend a little more time thinking about what I need to do. Noting it here as my log for the week.

Hebrew this week

- Practice reading from a child’s book
- Complete an exercise sheet
- Pronouns and adjective endings
- modal verbs
- sentence drills with vocab
- roots on verbs, verb endings

[tags: #tagLangHE]
Last edited by zenmonkey on Fri Jan 11, 2019 4:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby PeterMollenburg » Fri May 19, 2017 8:29 am

zenmonkey wrote:
Elenia wrote:I hope the test went well!


Thanks, I hope so too!


Me too! ;)
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zenmonkey
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2528
Joined: Sun Jul 26, 2015 7:21 pm
Location: California, Germany and France
Languages: Spanish, English, French trilingual - German (B2/C1) on/off study: Persian, Hebrew, Tibetan, Setswana.
Some knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Ladino, Yiddish ...
Want to tackle Tzotzil, Nahuatl
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Fri May 19, 2017 7:48 pm

So, finished my first children's book in Hebrew. Hello, Hello, Father.
It repetitive and I've dropped it into Anki.
That was extremely slow to create 20 cards.

Intent is to use this to work on reading mostly. Some of the text has nikkud but mostly I stayed without and have both print and cursive cards.

But the slowness of entering these cards is really figuring out the transliteration - using forvo and my notes from my lesson, I got that done. But creating transliteration is extremely slow, I hope to be able to have cards in the near future that don't need that.
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zenmonkey
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Posts: 2528
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Some knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Ladino, Yiddish ...
Want to tackle Tzotzil, Nahuatl
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Mon May 22, 2017 6:01 am

Yesterday was 2.5 hours of Kack & Sachgeschichten podcast - on Starship Trooper! Global understanding was excellent, while here and there words still escape me. Enough that if I don't provide some minimum amount of focus it just becomes background noise.

Curious thing the night before, as I was going to bed I couldn't turn off my inner German voice - my entire falling asleep process occurred in German. Well, that is good. Now, why is it that even my inner voice has a French accent I need to work on? :lol:
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zenmonkey
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Languages: Spanish, English, French trilingual - German (B2/C1) on/off study: Persian, Hebrew, Tibetan, Setswana.
Some knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Ladino, Yiddish ...
Want to tackle Tzotzil, Nahuatl
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Wed May 24, 2017 11:02 pm

Despite the best intent, this was certainly not a week where I got everything I wanted to do in Hebrew done. Tomorrow morning is my lesson and once again, I find myself finishing off homework with half a heart the night before. I've been carrying a tension headache for a few days and that kills motivation. I was able to, early in the week, to put the entire children's story into Anki, but then I didn't review it more than once.

However, German has been a little more active - I started with a new DE/EN tandem partner, we do 20 min of each language and frankly - I was hoping my German would be more fluid. Clearly I need to do this more often, and these partners are free. Maybe I'll add one or two. He's a young man finishing high school and I'm pretty sure we will not be working together for a very long time. Not sure we have that much to talk about in the long term - especially since he seemed a little depressed about his Abitur...

My 3rd daughter has been accepted into both language programs she applied for and we finally agreed on the English / Euro baccalaureate program - German one seemed good too, but this way she gets to work on a weaker language. Although I have reserves about the program one should focus on. After all, hitting your strengths in the Bac exams opens more doors. But she's focused enough that I think she'll do well on this. She'll be taking French, English as L1, German as L2 and has asked for Spanish as her L3 option. And once again complained that her Spanish is weak because I don't spend enough time on it with her. Meanwhile, her younger sister insists that she does not want to learn Spanish but wants Italian (to be different).

And we had a little German practice as she called me and asked to go see a movie and sleep over at a friend's house all in German. I wish my German was as fluid as hers. Kids!

So, I'm in France this week, taking care of the girls and brought a whole slew of language stuff but since I've been busy and also programming my brain has been in English. That's one of the issues I have - I do computational models in my mind in English. Maybe I should try to program in German. Hmmm, Sprachaktivitätsverfolger just doesn't really fit as an app name. SpAkVe?
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zenmonkey
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Posts: 2528
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Location: California, Germany and France
Languages: Spanish, English, French trilingual - German (B2/C1) on/off study: Persian, Hebrew, Tibetan, Setswana.
Some knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Ladino, Yiddish ...
Want to tackle Tzotzil, Nahuatl
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Sat May 27, 2017 8:02 pm

Got to the bookstore and picked up a few books ... and not shown a cheap Basque travel guide. There where also old copies of ASSIMIL Spanish and English (the brown ones, I sort of regret not picking up).

IMG_4254.JPG


My youngest daughter was singing in English today - she's in a chorus and these are songs they've memorised without really learning the meaning of a lot of words. This brute memorisation is interesting since it is only learning the sounds, which she has down perfect without meaning. She's A2-B1 in English. So today we worked on the meaning - in about 10 minutes she'd learned the meaning of about 30 words and can use them within the song structures. So perhaps the effort to internalise meaning is easier one phonemic structures are there. Anyway, it was interesting to watch.
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zenmonkey
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Posts: 2528
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Languages: Spanish, English, French trilingual - German (B2/C1) on/off study: Persian, Hebrew, Tibetan, Setswana.
Some knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Ladino, Yiddish ...
Want to tackle Tzotzil, Nahuatl
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German podcast / Hebrew and wanderlust

Postby zenmonkey » Mon May 29, 2017 2:52 pm

This living abroad stuff isn't always cake and cookies. I am stressed out about administrative stuff and must deal with the tax office, electric company, the owner of my apartment and most of that is in German. Good practice but stressful enough that I avoid it and that causes problems.

Successes and failures. Today, I needed to get a new work access badge and, in the process, we switched to English (I could have asked to stay in German, I didn't) because our conversation went off the expected path and I didn't catch the details of what I was being told. I took that as a failure for the day.

I'm a bit stressed, under-sleeping and feel particularly disorganized in my learning and general planning. Need to get back on top of a few things.

German

Listening to podcasts these last days, status:

Native Material

- Kack & Sachgeschichten - enough understanding to follow - some slang / common register speech. But not really enjoyable enough that I want to spend 2hr+ per subject. Gah!

- Geoaudio - really like this podcast but I can't follow it!! Maybe 80%-90% understanding? But the parts that I fail to understand seem to be the pivots of meaning. While I can't seem to find the audio script easily, the author may or may not have additional material on the web. Probably good for intensive study.
For example, I'm going to follow up with this material from the same author as the Rio Magdalena podcast. https://michaelstuhrenberg.files.wordpr ... umbien.pdf


- Tatort - Radio theatre like I love. Criminal stories, very engaging, with lots of different accents, voices and a bit of slang. Rather tough content still with a slightly higher level of understanding than Geoaudio.

Learning Material
- dw.com all tags deutsch - C1/c2 material that comes close to native level (sometimes spoken a little slowly) with lots of interviews. Definitely not a piece of cake. And I am going to go back and use this 'learning focused' material because, despite what people might state, not all learning material is so artificial or facile that it limits learning. This is definitely as close to native level input as possible, while still assuring transcripts, vocab lists. It's perfect for intensive work.

http://www.dw.com/de/deutsch-lernen/all ... sch/s-9214

Hebrew

I need to work on some basic sentence structures and drills. So I downloaded the FSI course and started going through the initial lessons to identify some drills I want to do and key pivot sentences to memorize. Wrote about a dozen cards (real paper cards!!) and decided that I'm going to keep these on the English/Hebrew pronunciation primarily (with Hebrew script under the pronunciation) as these should be internalized for production. They'll probably end up in an Anki deck eventually but I like learning them from paper. I want to rethink this so that I have some early facilitated output so that all those helper sentences (Please repeat / I don't understand / How do you say ...? / etc...) are part of my early learning. Giving credit where credit is due, the discussion on Tim Ferris had me re-formalize what I want to focus in this early learning or better yet, that I was letting the material I had drive the process rather than what *I* wanted to focus on.

Wayuu/Guajiro

Having accidently picked up a grammar - you know, you go to a bookstore, hang out a bit and bang! You've caught a language like a disease! - I had a slight case of wanderlust, this is also a language related to a German assignment on the Rio Magdalena that I was working on. A sign!

Anyway, the material available on Wayuu / Guajiro seems a bit limited - but rich enough that ... well, it's possibly on my rare languages wanderlust list. No, I just made that up. But given that I have a (very!) short Nahuatl vocabulary and an interest in Huichole ... maybe a third non-European language from Latin America will smolder on a back burner.

Maybe a language for a 6WC? After Hebrew, of course.

Resource lists:

http://www.colombia.sil.org/resources/s ... nguage/guc
https://web.archive.org/web/20080204131 ... dioma.html

[tags: #tagLangHE]
Last edited by zenmonkey on Fri Jan 11, 2019 4:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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User avatar
zenmonkey
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2528
Joined: Sun Jul 26, 2015 7:21 pm
Location: California, Germany and France
Languages: Spanish, English, French trilingual - German (B2/C1) on/off study: Persian, Hebrew, Tibetan, Setswana.
Some knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Ladino, Yiddish ...
Want to tackle Tzotzil, Nahuatl
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=859
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Mon May 29, 2017 10:12 pm

Looks like I found the transcript for the Geo podcast. So if I can find those, that will be good push material.

And I think I'm going to use short progress bar for tracking my status with different material. Maybe I can actually finish something, someday, rather than skipping around with all the material.

Hebrew
● from Scratch
● Assimil
● Living Language
: 52 / 313
: 14 / 85
: 2 / 8
● Podcast 101
● FSI
: 8 / 200
: 6 / 530
: 0 / 100
German
● Lingvist
● Podcast hours
● Books
: 755 / 3000
: 5 / 100
: 2 / 50
● Writing
● Tandem sessions
: 5 / 100
: 1 / 50
: 0 / 100
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User avatar
zenmonkey
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2528
Joined: Sun Jul 26, 2015 7:21 pm
Location: California, Germany and France
Languages: Spanish, English, French trilingual - German (B2/C1) on/off study: Persian, Hebrew, Tibetan, Setswana.
Some knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Ladino, Yiddish ...
Want to tackle Tzotzil, Nahuatl
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=859
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first post after polyglot conference ...

Postby zenmonkey » Mon Jun 05, 2017 5:06 pm

Stolen from the German group thread.

schlaraffenland wrote:For aokoye, prohairesis, any others preparing themselves for a CEFR exam, ... online supplementary exercises at Schubert-Verlag for Erkundungen C1.

Thanks, Schlaraffenland.

I watched the three first episodes from Türkisch für Anfänger as German study on the flight back from the Polyglot meeting. I think that was the first moment of ‘study’ all week. Did speak some German during the meeting but not very often.

Hebrew? Spoke maybe 3-4 sentences. Zero study or contact with it during the conference (last class was Thursday morning). I did eavesdrop on a teacher explaining the characters in Japanese - that was very cool … {…..} resh {….} dalet {….}

So the meeting was fantastic, met some great people, hung out with forum people (these are also part of the former).

I have lots of notes and I’m sure these will pepper my next posts. I did have an excellent discussion with Tim Keeley on his approach for Tamang / Tibetan / Sherpa. Since the material for Tamang or, in my case Ladakhi/Bhoti, is pretty rare it makes sense to approach it laterally within the language family with a language that has much more material available - so it looks like I’ll look into Tibetan first. I’m excited to try to get towards some understanding of this language group that way.

So approaching it from (Western Archaic) Tibetan where a lot more material is available should be possible. Getting enough Tibetan in so that I can then approach Ladakhi while traveling might be possible. I could perhaps get one of my hiking guides to do italki lessons… I’ll need to start a Tibetan resource list I think....
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