Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

[Iversen]

I have now signed up for the upcoming gathering , but I'm not going to do any lectures and and may spend most of my time at the language tables or visiting museums and the zoo and neighbouring towns. When I don't have anything to say my willingness to listen goes steeply downhill.

Apart from that I am in the process of restarting my usual language learning activities. For instance I listened to a couple of hours of youtube videos about psychology and psychiatrics in Spanish yesterday (plus half a dozen videos about paleontology in English, including the long and intriguing story about critters that looked like crocs but weren't), and I have reworked a couple of bilingual texts about neutron stars and magnetars and magnetism in general in Czech and read some more Old Norse prose from Wimmer's Læsebog (the tale about Rolf Krake, who may or may not have been a historical person). This morning I made the maps for my Mada tour, so now the registration process for that experience has been successfully terminated.

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[jeff_lindqvist]

I have now signed up for the upcoming gathering ( ... )

I had almost forgotten that the event was still ... alive.

[Iversen]

In 2019 (just before corona) I had proposed a lecture in Portuguese about translation in language learning, and it was not accepted - one of the reasons being that somebody couldn't guess what I would say about the topic and somebody else hadn't understood what I said about Yamnayas etc. the year before. So I went to Bratislava, but spent my time visiting zoological gardens there and in Eastern Czechia. And I skipped the years in Terezin, but noticed one smart invention: 'language tables'. In the town where I lived until 2022 the main library had a language café where you never knew who came, but I got the chance to use some of my languages. Corona killed off that initiative, but I hope the promised language tables at the gathering can provide something like the same kind of entertainment. Else I'll just visit museums and zoos in the Western half of Czechia and forget about the event. As for the lectures: I don't intend ever again to do a lot of work and then get a kick in the face, and that also means that I'll try not to attend any lectures at the event - except if the topic is matter-of-fact bordering on scientific, interesting and if possible provided in one of my target languages. At the congress in Budapest I went to too many lectures because there weren't as many sideline activities, but the gatherings ought to have those things - and if not then I won't be there the next time.

By the way: this time you are asked about your languages already when you do the registration. I didn't write any languages, but was tempted to write "Germanic and Romance and maybe a few more ". But frankly: who cares?

I was away on a 2½ day trip this weekend due to a meeting in my travellers' club, so no study activity there (just five museums and two zoos and a couple of supermarkets plus the meeting that caused it all). But yesterday evening I read roughly the first half of a Brazilian magazine from 2002 named Terra.

POR: A revista contém vários artigos interessantes, incluindo um sobre o grande e bem abastecido aquário da cidade italiana de Gênova. Passei várias vezes pela cidade em viagens interrail, mas não achei que houvesse nada de interessante para ver. O aquário mudou isso, mas infelizmente não vou lá depois de 2003. Espero uma visita de retorno. Outro artigo fala dos sadhus indios, ou seja, homens santos que abandonaram a “corrida desenfreada” ('rat race')– e menciona um problema, nomeadamente os golpistas que se cobrem de cinzas e merda e se fazem de santos para atrair dinheiro dos turistas. Há também artigos sobre assuntos brasileiros, incluindo um parque nacional criado por Kubitschek de 6.250 km2 (Chapada dos Veadeiros), depois reduzido para 600 km2, mas agora ampliado novamente para 2.410 km2. E os colonos que agora têm fazendas com gado etc. na região estão zangados...

EN: I'll add a few words about on of my recent hobbies: making 'museum drawings'. I made four new ones just in this weekend, and there are still many museums out there! In the beginning I used the drawing remedies provided for small kids and oddballs like me, but mostly they only had this activity during the school holidays and not all museums had them. Or some had activities, but not any that appealed to me (no clay please). So now I bring along a plastic bag with coloured ballpoint pens and pencils plus paper and a pocket-size writing pad so that I can do my drawings anywhere. When I show them to the attendants and others at the museums they are mostly flabbergasted, and that's fun . But I'm aware that the chances of having them shown publicly in earnest at the same museums are pretty much nil (except in those cases where there is a dedicated place for visitor contributions before they are thrown out), and especially with the drawings from art museums it may also be a problem that I have included my own renderings of some of the exhibited artworks - but I can put the drawings on a wall in my own home where they are well hidden and almost nobody can take offense at them.

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This weekends production.jpg

[jeff_lindqvist]

In 2019 (just before corona) I had proposed a lecture in Portuguese about translation in language learning, and it was not accepted - one of the reasons being that somebody couldn't guess what I would say about the topic and somebody else hadn't understood what I said about Yamnayas etc. the year before.

Ah, I remember. I felt your pain back then, and still do. This being said, I managed to find a few (at least a handful) interesting topics this year. But I don't travel anymore. Hey, I barely go out of town.

[Iversen]

Since I returned from Madagascar I have spent time on my photo collection and my garden, and I have also done a bit of inland tourism (with the result that I now have produced even more 'museum drawings') - and all these things will continue to rob my time. The kinds of language study that has suffered most are pure grammar studies and studies of bilingual study texts, and the languages that have suffered most were my weaker ones. On the other hand I have been able to listen to Youtube videos in Germanic and ROmance language while I worked at my computer (and watched TV without sound), and I have done my usual goodnight readings. However today it rained until noon, and I couldn't see any excuse NOT to do a bit of studying. So I spent at least three hours copying/studying/trying-to-understand a number of Czech texts about science (from the collection that also contains the magnetar and magnetism texts which I have mentioned earlier), and then I did wordlists afterwards with the new words.

Czech is a strange language: where else can you find words with three circonflex accents? Like bêêznê (from bêêzny)? And why then strew them above both vowels and consonants? They write rings over u's, but why only there? So partly because of the confusing accents I am loath to start writing in the language, but it should be within reach to learn to understand written texts - at least if the topic is something I'm familiar with. The typical pattern is that everything runs smoothly for a time, and then you suddenly run into a machine gun volley of totally incomprehensible words in a row. Like in the sentence "Gravitace přirodní jev, který se projevuje jako vzájemné přitažlivy působeni (interakci)": I know that gravitation is, end "jev" is just a pehnomenon of some kind while "který" is a pronoun. So far no problems. "Projevuje" must be a form of a "projevovat" verb, and in the context it can't have anything to do with projects, but according to the translation (into Romanian) it means something like 'to manifest itself'. OK, fair enough - but then that gravitation happens to manifest itself as gasp-ouch-incomprehensible-whatthe hellisthisstuff, and even though I have a decent translation to help me I need to check the dictionary which is 4 cm thick and weights 500 grams. So reading Czech is not something you can take lightly - it needs concentration. But it is definitely an attainable goal to learn to understand Wikipedia articles about science. Novels, well - but that's not my goal.

As for Youtube videos and goodnight reading: the Portuguese language turned out to be one of the more important ones, partly because I have read an article in the Brasilian magazine "Terra" about Norway (which is a faraway and exotic destination for them), but also because I have watched first a couple of videos about the history of Portugal and then one about a particular battle, the one at Aljubarrota. In the general history there is one fact that shines, namely that the wise king Dinis didn't murder the templars when the French king and the pope decided to get rid of them - he let them switch to a newly formed order named after Christ himself. And that meant that he could keep the riches and skills and determination of those monks for his country. The famous Henriques o Navegador, who was the leading figure behind the naval expansion and the Portuguese golden age, was actually the leader of that order for some time. But a military disaster at Ceuta and (later) the introduction of the unholy inquisition eventually broke the impetus.

As for the battle at Aljubarrota: some years before the Portuguese king Fernando had died leaving only a daughter Beatriz who had been married to the Castilian king Juan - bad bad bad! - who in 1385 invaded Portugal with an army of 31,000 and the clear aim to grab to Portuguese crown for himself. However the Portuguese had now also got a king named John (João de Aviz), later called 'o Bom', the good one'), - allegedly by request of Nuno Freire de Andrade, a Galician Grand Master of - guess what! - the Order of Christ, and after a two-year interregnum João was crowned king of Portugal and Algarve. And with some assistance from 500 English longbow veterans from Agincourt João's far smaller army totally routed the Spanish invaders and killed some 5000 of them . Without that victory there wouldn't have been a Portuguese country today.

Below the fortress and monastery of the Christ-order at Tomar, which I visited in 2018 in spite of some rather high temperatures.

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[Iversen]

I have been listening to quite a lot of Youtube in different languages, and yesterday I stumbled into Italian. On the front page Youtube had decided to surprise me - maybe because I have watched too many videos about autism and aspergers and lucid dreaming and obscure things like that, and then it proposed a video in Italian that told about a book named "Troppo intelligente per essere felice ". And now I'm slightly annoyed that it thinks that I'm sad just because I look for videos in several languages about a gamut of weird topics. OK, I watched the beginning of that video and after that I was subjected to an avalanche of videos in Italian about people who think they (or their kids) are smarter than their neighbours (which may actually be the truth, but the dummies are more likely to believe it - the socalled Dunning effect). But I ended up watching instead a Spanish video about the Visigoths in Spain with just one man sitting in a chair or walking around for an hour, speaking clearly and tranquilly about an almost forgotten period.

SP: Durante la historia tardíva del Imperio Romano Occidental, sus ejércitos estaban formados principalmente por "bárbaros", incluidos godos que habían huido de los hunos (mientras que otros godos se unieron a los ejércitos de Attila). Cuando un emperador singolarmente inepto (Honorio) no cumplió un acuerdo de remuneración, los godos bajo Alarico saquearon la ciudad de Roma en 410. Pero el emperador era sentado en Rávena y se mostró del tutto indifferente a quanto sia accaduto a Roma. Sin embargo, el episodio coloreó la visión de los valientes y magnánimos godos, porque fueron sacerdotes y monjes en Roma quienes escribieron la historia.

Cuando el Imperio Romano Occidental colapsó unos años más tarde (476), Italia terminó siendo gobernada por los ostrogodos bajo Teodorico el Grande, mientras que los visigodos se trasladaron a España. Aquí gobernaron hasta que los musulmanes llegaron desde el sur, es decir, aproximadamente entre el 476 y 711. Lo extraño es que hayan dejado sorprendentemente pocos rastros. En la mezquita de Córdoba se puede ver a través de una ventana en el suelo los restos de un edificio gótico: es lo único gótico que he visto en España fuera de los museos. Los godos tampoco intentaron hacer que la población local cambiara su idioma (a diferencia de los repugnantes y bárbaros romanos), y si Wulfila no hubiera traducido la Biblia, no habríamos conocido hoy el idioma gotico - salvo qualche nome di luoghi e persone.

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Speaking about old Germanic languages:

IC: Góða nótt-lesturinn minn í gær var lestrarbók Wimmers og las ég meðal annars Vaþruðnismál. Óðinn segir Frigg konu sinni að hann vilji leita til hins vitra risa Vaþruðnis til að sjá hver þeirra þekki mest. Frigg segist betur stanna hann heima, en Odin fer, dulbúinn sem gamall eineygður flakkari (Gagnhradr) - og baráttan er jöfn, til þess Óðinn spyr hvað það var, sem hann hvíslaði í eyra á dauðum syni hans Baldur áður en líkið var brennt - og það veit aðeins Óðinn sjálfur. Svó bjargaði Óðinn naumlega sæmd sinni og gat laumast kömmustulegur heim til Friggu. Ég las líka um sjáorrustuna við Svold í árið 1000 sem Noregskonungur Olav Tryggvason tapaði. Svold var væntanlega einhvers staðar á strönd Mecklenburg-Vorpommerns, en enginn veit Í dag nákvæmlega hvar.

Apart from that I have also watched other videos, including one in Italiano which claimed that smartness could be tested by showing texts that had been (IT) maltrattati in vari modi (specchiato, esposto allo scambio di lettere ecc.), ma non più di quanto io potessi leggerli. E in questo momento sto guardando un video sugli antichi abitanti di Sardegna che costruirono i misteriosi nuraghi (lessi infatti un libro su questo topico alcuni mesi fa e lo ho menzionato anche in questo log). E sì, avrei dovuto scrivere questa tirata in sardo, ma se neanche gli isolani non lo fanno allora nemmeno io lo faró. Povera lingua sarda! La morte si avvicina!

[LingoPhil]

Update (feb 02, 2016): I have made a log thread here on LLORG called "Iversen's Guide to Learning Languages (version 3b)", which as the title says contains a revised version of the guide I published at HTLAL. The whole guide has now been uploaded (118 pages in MSWord), but unfortunately that also means that it will sink like a stone down the list over active threads because there won't be added new chapters to it. You are always welcome to make comments about it (and point out errors or weak points), but please use this thread to do so.

Hi Iversen,

Hope you are well.

I recently enjoyed reading your 'Guide to Learn Lanaguages (Version 3b)' aswell as many of the posts in this thread. Your wordlist and text copying approach to language learning is very interesting! If I may ask a few clarifying questions as I'm keen to also adopt the approach in my French studies:

1. Is my understanding correct that word lists and text copying are your primary activity when learning a language? That is, you would dedicate most of your time to these activites when trying to improve in a language? I note from your posts that you also watch a considerable amount of content on youtube as a more extensive form of study.

2. How many words might you collect for wordlists during say, one hour of text copying? For example, do you aim for 20 or 30 new words per day?

3. Do you ever do the text copying exercise on long texts, such as novels, over the course of a few weeks? Or do you prefer taking short sections from Wikipedia articles and completing them in the space of one to three hours?

4. Do you find the text copying and word lists a productive exercise as you become advanced in a language? I plan to take the C1 french exam this year but feel there is still much vocabularly and grammar nuances I am lacking, so think the exercises you have described sound useful for filling this gap.

5. I note from your posts your interest in psychology. Would you say you enter a 'flow state' when doing the text copying method? At work, I spend my day at the computer and while I have used Anki with great success in the past for language learning, I'm particularly interested in your method as means to pass some quality study time away from screens.

Thank you for all of your advice here on the forum and I look forward to reading your future posts

Go raibh míle maith agat

[Iversen]

Hi Iversen,
Hope you are well.
I recently enjoyed reading your 'Guide to Learn Lanaguages (Version 3b)' aswell as many of the posts in this thread. Your wordlist and text copying approach to language learning is very interesting! If I may ask a few clarifying questions as I'm keen to also adopt the approach in my French studies:

Hi, I'm well and hope you are too.

1) When I have started a new language I need to learn the sounds well enough to hear the language resonate in my head when I read text, and I need to study enough grammar in order to compile my own overview and write it down on 2-3 green sheets - - but apart from that it is probably true that word lists and text 'copying' are my most time consuming activities in the beginning. It should however be pointed out that 'copying' isn't just copying: it is a way to force myself to to slow down so much that I can make sure that I understand everything, including the idioms and the syntax. However from the moment I can read text reasonably comfortably (maybe from a bilingual text, but even better without) I add some extensive reading, including my goodnight reading, and even later I start to watch Youtube videos. OK, in some languages Youtube can provide subtitles, but in those I where I still have problems it typically can't.

2) I write wordlists on folded A4 pages (because they are easier to manage that way), and on such a folded page I can write three triple columns with around 30 words in each - so I would normally do either 100 or 200 words in one session. If I get them as new words from things I have studied I may need to fill up the ranks to fill a whole page, but . I don't really like to leave a half-page half-empty. And some days I have done wordlists in several languages, and then I will do more words all in all. But there is one situation where I don't follow these rules: I have a silly 30 language project, where I just make two triple-columns in each language - and then I might do that for half a dozen languages in a row (i.e. roughly sixty words times the number of languages).

3) I never copy long texts. Text 'copying' (I prefer the word 'studying') is time consuming because it also entails grammar studies, vocabulary lookups and maybe some hyperliteral translating, and therefore it's an intensive study reserved for short texts - typically one or two half printed pages per session. If i'm up for more I would prefer to switch to another language or another text instead of continuing with the same one.

4) Text copying/studying is by definition an exercise for the passive version of a language. To activate a language I would typically start to write short texts and think short and fragmentary thoughts in the language, which over time can be made longer and more 'life-like. Translation exercises from your base language into the target language could also support the activation process by showing where you have your weaknesses. The problem is that you may end up spending all your time on a few isolated problem sequences instead of learning to spew out language snippets like a water hose. Retranslation (where you first translate something in the target language to some other language and then back again) could be a way to avoid this problem because you then get all the problem passages served with their solutions on a silver platter.

I don't do text copies or wordlists in my best languages because I aldeady can read hem, and in these languages it would be more relevant to collect idioms than single words. However I do get some words from studies of specific topics - like animal names in English and Latin from my cladistic studies. And I may compile lists with such words. I also get some training in these languages by using then for translations in my bilingual printouts and as base language in wordlists, and that seems to be enough.

5) Well, psychology. Actually I'm more interested in natural sciences (like for instance paleontology or cosmology) and in history than in psycholoy. When I have mentioned it so often in recent times the reason is that Youtube tends to offer videos about topics about which you already have watched something - and then I just watched some of them and the software served me even more of the same kind. Within the realm of psychology I'm most in tune with things that can be measured - and I find psychoanalysis and the run-of-the-mill type feel-good therapies both boring and unscientific and irrelevant for me personally.

5½: I have of course read about flow states (zen etc.), but can't say that I experience them. OK, if I do wordlists then things may glide easier after 10-15 minutes (as if my brain accepts its fate and just lets me do my thing), but if I really had been in a flow state I could probably not have a TV set running without sound and a computer with music running at the same time.

I plan to take the C1 french exam this year but feel there is still much vocabularly and grammar nuances I am lacking, so think the exercises you have described sound useful for filling this gap.

Go raibh míle maith agat

Good luck. I hope you can use some of the techniques I have described, but you never know before you have tried. And oh yes,Irish (bad bad conscience!). Gabh mo leithscéal as gan freagra i nGaeilge. I regret that I haven't got time to polish my embryonic Irish, but right now I find that my time is better spent on a series of Slavic languages. But once in a while I do take up Irish again and spend some time on it - and I still find it extremely interesting from a linguistic point of view.

[Iversen]

I have been buzzing around from museum to museum the last couple of weeks, and yesterday I visited three places near the Danish-German border: first Oldemorstoften (great-grandma's estate), whose collectins show the original house and in another building collections highlighting customs and border control. The most ridiculous exhibit here was a couple of boxes where people could jump out of their car and post a list over things they intended to smuggle across the border - on my drawing I have added some spiderwebs (right side) to indicate that I doubt that anyone actually used those boxes. To the left is the originally house whose Germanophile owner left it when the area fell to Denmark after the pleciscite in 1920. Afte that I visited Frøstruplejren, which served as a milder version of a German concentration camp during the occupation - and afterwards as prison for local nazis and collaborators (including the leader of NDSAP, Frits Clausen, who was angry because he didn't get better treatment than his fellow prisoners). And finally I crossed the border to visit the Industriemuseum in Kupfermühle, a northerly suburb to Flensburg - and here the language of course was German. And they liked my drawing so much that they photographed it.

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So I was rather tired when I got home, and I went to bed aleady around 11 o'clock, which gave me lots of time to read goodnight stuff.

EO: Unue mi finis la aprilan numeron de la revuo Esperanto de UEA - kiu ne estas la plej fascina legaĵo sur la tero...

FR: .. et apès ça j'ai lu la plupart de "Science et Avenir" de mai 2010, qui est beaucoup plus attractive comme matière de lecture nocturne. Le magazine contient de nombreuses informations sur les progrès technologiques et scientifiques, et on peut parfois se demander ce qui s'est passé depuis 2010. Par exemple, il existe une série d’articles sur les codes secrets, notamment ceux utilisés pour sécuriser les cartes de crédit et accés aux sites sur le web. Et c’était déjà une affaire compliquée à l’époque. Mais une chose n’a pas changé : la naïveté incurable de certaines personnes (d'âges diverses). Le dossier mentionne des jeunes qui échangent leurs mots de passe en signe d’amitié et de confiance. Il ne sert alors à rien d’avoir une protection par mot de passe.

Il existe également de nombreuses annonces brèves, y compris une annonce à voix douce selon laquelle deux physiciens auraient 'prouvé' que le modèle des forces de la nature de Lisi ne fonctionne pas dans le monde réel. J'ai déjà écrit sur ce modèle, mais en bref, il suppose qu'un GROUPE mathématique appelé E8 pourrait rendre compte des quatre forces de la nature et des particules qui les contrôlent. Les miroirs et les symétries montrent déjà dans le modèle standard les liens entre le fort et le faible et la force électromagnétique, mais Lisi pensait que la gravité pouvait être incluse. Et comme aucun modèle alternatif viable n'a encore été proposé, il serait bien triste que son E8 ne soit pas à la hauteur - si c'est en effet le case. C'est donc bien trop peu que de faire référence au fait que deux physiciens affirment que le modèle ne fonctionne pas. Dans ce contexte, il faudrait expliquer exactement où et comment le modèle échoue.

Il est également mentionné comment certains sujets ont vu certaines choses, puis leur cerveau a été scanné pendant qu'ils s'en souvenaient - et bien sûr, les traces mnésiques dans l'hippocampe étaient différentes. Où en sont ces recherches aujourd’hui ?

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[Iversen]

Still not studying languages as assidously as in earlier periods. Instead I'm visiting (and drawing) museums . After I wrote the rant above Friday I went to the West coast of Denmark and only returned late in the afternoon yesterday. I had planned to bring along some study texts for the evenings, but forgot to put them into the car - and that left me with just sudokus and the programs on the telly at my hotel.

GER: Allerdings habe ich „Wer weiß denn so was“ auf Deutsch geschaut, und natürlich gab es auch einige Natursendungen auf Deutsch und eine Gartensendung auf Schwedisch - aber alles in allem nichts Besonderes.

The first day I visited a combined fishery museum and aquarium (with seals) and the local art museum (upper left), Saturday I visited the Frello museum in Varde (bottom right) and the museum Nymindegab (upper right) plus the combined fishery museum and aquarium (no seals) in Hvide Sande ('white sands'), and finally Sunday - when it rained all day long - I visited a homestead museum Karensminde and the Randbøldal museum and finally Give museum (not on the image below) before I turned home. And I still haven't finished the registration process for my photos from this three day trip.

I would like to mention two things from the trip. The first would be to recommend you to look the painter Frello up on the internet (my drawing below quite honestly can't do him justice). He learned his art by making illustrations for books and magazines, and there he acquired his totally stupendous technique, which combined with a sense of humour and a touch of surrealism makes him probably my favorite Danish artist ever. And of course it was a town in far-away Western Jutland that named its museum after him - the haughty art critics from the shady bars in Copenhagen didn't think much of a painter that produced artwork that a drunk chimpanzee with a brush sticking out of its arse couldn't possibly have made.

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The second thing was my near-encounter with some Latin in a restaurant in Hvide Sande - nay, not real Latin, but..

LAT: .. artem spatium vacuum implendum textu in lingua Latina sine sensu semper in typographicum comitatu communi usu erat, sed numquam prius nunc istud in caupona sub piscium vittarum meum vidi..

Fish_and_nonsense-latin.jpg

FR: D'ailleurs ma lecture bonne-nuit hier fut Sciences et Avenir - comme d'habitude, mais je vais écrire un peu plus sur cela quand j'aurai fini lire le magazine.