Mapleleaf's branching log

[MapleLeaf]

It's hard to say if I'm a native speaker, literally. I was born without hearing and had to learn to speak English. I got a cochlear implant some ten years ago and am learning the sounds of English and how to associate them with the written form of English, which is challenging as English spelling has a tenuous relationship to pronunciation. I've gone from 0 percent recognition to what I think is about 50 percent; someday I'll go back for my hearing comprehension tests to see if that's so. I've found spoken English challenging: even the simplest questions as 'what is a syllable' and 'do these two words rhyme' have complicated answers.

I'm curious about writing systems. My library has a display showing 'welcome' in many different languages and I want to identify each writing system. Japanese has a complicated system, with hiragana, katakana, and kanji. I've tried to get the jist of it, but I have not understood what is meant by 'reading' so I'm trying to see if WaniKani can explain it to me. So far it's shown me several symbols which it categories as radical, kanji, or vocabulary. It appears that a radical is a component of a symbol; a kanji is a single symbol which may have multiple readings categorized as on'yomi, kun'yomi, and nanori; a vocabulary term consists of a single or more kanji combined with zero or more hiragana and has a single reading which can be different from the kanji. Some kanji have the same reading, which might be the equivalent of homophones, e.g. 三 (three) and 山 (mountain) have the same reading (さん, or san), although mountain can also have やま, or yama. I'm confused when I see a sentence with 山 (mountain) in it since I don't know which, san or yama, is used when speaking the sentence. Wanikani has several paragraphs discussing this aspect, and I'm slowly digesting it.

[MapleLeaf]

Synesthesia, where senses (often color) are experienced with words; I wonder how that interacts with multiple languages

I have the most common kind of synesthesia, where color is associated with letters and numbers. Over Christmas I was grilled pretty heavily on how-does-that-work-for-foreign-languages-then by someone who just learned I have synesthesia, so I can provide one data point!

Thank you for this data point. That's very interesting! Have you heard of the Stroop effect? (link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect ) I am curious how it interacts with your synthesia.

[MapleLeaf]

What I did in January:

• English:
  
  • read and listened to 113 Voice of America Special English articles for a total of 601 minutes (10 hours),
  • read and listened to Red Rising by Pierce Brown for 960 minutes (16 hours).
• French:
  
  • Watched the movie Top Hat with french captions. Very old movies often have short, simple sentences so they are easy to follow. New vocabulary and idioms: gifle (a slap in the face); ça sent le roussi (there's trouble brewing); dans le pétrin (literally in a dough trough, idiomically as in a fix).
  • Watched the movie Raya and the Last Dragon with french audio and captions. This movie was originally created in English, and the French translation left a nickname untranslated as 'Undercut'. There seems to be no particular French translation for that hairstyle.
  • On the last day of the month, hurriedly selected a short book to read in order to make my goal of a book a month. The book turned out to be Le Cosmohaute Oublié by Marie-Andrée and Daniel Mativat; the story of a cosmonaut who lives alone for years in a space station after earth abandons him. It had a lot of new vocabulary, such as 'parasites' (static) and 'soucoupette' (flying saucer). The aliens speak in French, but with no spaces, making it challenging to parse.
• Spanish:
  
  • Reviewed sentences in Duolingo, which drilled me on verb tenses: imperative; future and past tenses. The verbs with a root change are particularly challenging. I think I'm nearly 40% of the way through this course, and I'd like to finish it this year.
  • Drilled for a few days on a few different conjunction websites, and discovered that the preterite (past tense) for ir (to go) and ser (to be) is the same. I scored 10/40 in Spanish present and preterite tenses on verbly, so I clearly need more practice.
  • Finished Unit 2 of Spanish on Mango Languages. I'd like to finish it this year, also.
  • Learned that the verb 'to laugh' is reflexive in Spanish (se rier) although it's not in French (rire). Which verbs are reflexive (reflexology?) is still a mystery to me.
• Japanese:
  
  • Tried out Wanikani, and got confused. It seems to teach 'radicals' (components of characters) with English names, Kanji (individual characters), and Vocabulary (a combination of one or more Kanji plus more Kanji or hiragana). The same character can be all three, with different names/meanings. The website does a lot of color coding in a schema of blue-pinks, and I'm trying to figure out how meaningful the color coding is.
  • Read Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton, an autobiography of a English speaker who, on a whim, took an English teaching position in Japan, and stayed for years learning and, in her words, falling in love with, the Japanese language and becoming a literary translator. Each chapter is titled with an 'onomatopoeic' Japanese phrase such as 'min-min', the sound of air screaming, to 'jin-jin', the sound of being touched for the first time. The author uses the term 'onomatopoeic' but I think a better term is 'reduplication'. Examples in English are boo-boo, no-no, yum-yum. I found a useful discussion at https://english.stackexchange.com/quest ... -of-two-sy .
  • The author in the above book used Slime Forest Adventure as a way to learn the Japanese characters, so I tried it out for a few hours. It's timed, the slimes focused only on katagana, and I couldn't figure out how to get them to use hiragana. The slimes also had characters I have not seen anywhere else, such as 'vu' (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%83%B4), and required different romani such as dzu instead of zu. After the slimes took all my gold several times, I decided to drill in less adventurous but more straightforward places such as https://drlingua.com/japanese/games/kana-bento/ and https://realkana.com/katakana/ . Eventually I'll come back to show these slimes I've finally learned these characters and rescue the princess!
• In other areas:
  
  • Looked at polylogger (https://polylogger.com). Interesting concept of tracking time in various language-learning activities, but I think this would duplicate my tracking in a spreadsheet, and also I like to track metrics other than time.
  • Looked at Ted Talks which at first seemed promising as a source of videos since it had a filter for other languages, but it turns out that the videos are not dubbed or produced in any language except English; the filter is for translated transcripts. The sad part is that I realized this after 5 minutes into a video.
  • Completed the Ancient Greek course on Mango. Short, but it gives an idea of the language. I learned about the story of Arion, a bard who had an adventure at sea; ancient Greek had a single word for 'throwing out overboard'. I also learned that conjunctions, when joining phrases, do not necessarily have to remain between the two phrases; ancient Greek puts the conjunction after the first word of the second phrase. I also recognized the word 'dolphin' in ancient Greek; it turns out the etymology of dolphin in English goes all the way back to ancient Greek. Arion seems to have been used a few times, so I'm including a link to the right legend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arion .
  • Tried out EWA, a language learning app, but it was incompatible with my requirements since it used uncaptioned videos with a lot of ambient noise.
  • Watched a few episodes of the Great Courses Language and the Mind by Spencer D. Kelly. One anecdote from the professor: he started to learn Japanese because he was married to a Japanese-speaker. When he saw her talking to another Japanese speaker, he went over to introduce himself as the husband of his wife. But although it was a short sentence, he got a vowel wrong, and introduced himself as the prisoner of his wife.
  • Tried to chat on a French channel for a board game site but the only thing I saw were requests for a site with more French players or translations of the help files.
  • Tried to read the help files for the same board game site, but the page I was trying to figure out had been 'google translated' from German, and was incomprehensible in English.
  • Tried out ChatGPT and tried to get it to tell me how its name is pronounced. It says 'Chat G P T', but when I ask it to make poems involving its name, it rhymes ChatGPT with day or doubt. I haven't yet gotten it to rhyme its name with T (tee).

[CaroleR]

[*] Tried out ChatGPT and tried to get it to tell me how its name is pronounced. It says 'Chat G P T', but when I ask it to make poems involving its name, it rhymes ChatGPT with day or doubt. I haven't yet gotten it to rhyme its name with T (tee)

Don't try to pronounce GPT in French. You'll be saying "j'ai pété" On the other hand, T does rhyme with day in French.

[MapleLeaf]

What I did in February:

It was a light month language wise, during which I kept up few of my 2023 resolutions except to do something language-wise each day.

• English:
  
  • Read and listened to 81 articles on Voice of America Special English for a total of 428 minutes (7 hours).
  • Read and listened to an audiobook for 505 minutes (8 hours).
• French:
  
  • Listened to two sessions on aioPop for a total of 6 minutes. I am a little confused with aioPop's embedded mp3 player; I don't understand what the infinity symbol and the circular arrows mean.
  • Listened to a 3-minute children's audiobook.
  • Did not read a French book for February; I left it too late to complete for that month. I am attempting to start this monthly goal earlier for March. Selecting a book took a while, as it required reading the first page of several novels. I've finally settled on one. It had only two sentences with 35 words on the first page, but 3 of these words were new to me and had three verbs in the subjunctive tense, so it's already challenging. I learned an idiom: 'à la queue leu leu' (in single file). The 'leu leu' part puzzled me, and I went off on an etymology search to discover its origins in 'Old French leu ('wolf')'.
• Spanish:
  
  • Kept up daily practice with Duolingo.
  • Chatted with a Spanish speaker on a game forum; I made verb tense mistakes but the Spanish speaker assured me I would improve if I keep practicing.
• In other areas:
  
  • Went to a used book sale and found many books in many languages; I found it difficult to tell apart novels in Spanish from those in Portuguese; the copyright page and the blurbs do not clarify which language the book is in; I finally found two novels printed in Spain, both translated likely from English, although the copyright page doesn't say. I looked up how to tell Portuguese from Spanish and found Portuguese doesn't use ñ, so I flipped through the books and found a very low usage of año, niño, or mañana, but finally found that letter. Also, I found a German reader published 1920 which uses the Schwabacher font, which I have great difficulty reading. In relation to this, I found I have to carefully select graphic novels in French since some use fonts that I also have difficulty reading. I wonder if there's an app to convert or interpret fonts?
  • Watched Murdoch Mysteries season 14 which had an episode involving a constructed language, Solresol, based on having 7 symbols that can be expressed as 7 musical notes, 7 colors, or the numbers 1 to 7. It turns out to be an existing constructed language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solresol . Sidosi dore (I am learning).
  • Watched the series The Great Courses: The Celtic World by Professor Jennifer Paxton. It discussed the grouping of Celtic languages into P-Celtic and Q-Celtic, based on their status of regaining (or not) the p sound after it had been lost.
  • Tried out Koine Greek on Mango. It uses bible quotations. The format didn't allow an easy comparison with the Ancient Greek course, but I got a sense that the usage of articles differs.