Cèid Donn's French and Gaelic SC thread

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galaxyrocker
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Re: Cèid Donn's French and Gaelic SC thread

Postby galaxyrocker » Sat Jul 20, 2019 2:35 am

Finally, someone who agrees with my opinion of DL! It's a shame all the kickback I get whenever I try to express anything like that. Similarly when I try to explain why we need more original works in Irish, instead of just translating from English. It's quite frustrating, but there's unfortunately a loud, vocal crowd (often based in Dublin) who love symbolic victories such as DL and pretending that having a language without a living literary culture is just fine, instead of investing in those who produce original works and materials (ones often much better than DL could provide) for the language. It's quite frustrating that it happens this way, and that so many people think of Duolingo as the "savior" of minority languages.
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Cèid Donn
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Re: Cèid Donn's French and Gaelic SC thread

Postby Cèid Donn » Sat Jul 20, 2019 9:12 pm

Yeah, I see what you're saying, although the whole building literacy issue is a present hurdle for both the Irish and Scottish Gaelic communities (and Manx too) where we have people learning and using the language but aren't reading in it very much, if at all. And it's one of those situations that will only get addressed properly by the speaking and teaching/learning community itself, because people outside the community really have no idea what is lacking and what is needed. It's just a much more complex issue than, "Hey, let's publish more books in X language!" I mean, we have a lot of people writing in Gaelic right now--but there are still a lot of speakers and learners who just aren't reading in Gaelic, and the reasons why differ between age groups and between L1 and L2 speakers and so on. So absolutely, I agree that advocacy, materials and educational approaches that can address this problem have to come from within the community, because they are the only ones who see and understand what is happening here. Clearly, once you understand the difficulty of language revitalization on this level, you start to see how inflated and ridiculous all the claims that Duolingo is helping "save" endangered languages really are.

And given how limited support for these languages is, it can cost us when support ends up being diverted to other places, like to a big tech company that has no real investment in the community. :| I get the appeal of having the language available via apps. But convenience via big tech companies isn't always the best route, especially with lesser studied languages that will eventually require the learner to engage with the speaking community and the media that community produces if they want to advance in that language. You can only make it convenient for learners so far, and if your app doesn't support deeper learning (which is the major failing of most languages apps right now) many learners will feel like that language is a dead-end and lose interest. To point out the obvious, that is no one's definition of language revitalization. :roll:

Additionally Duolingo's format wasn't designed with much forethought about how to adapt it to languages with very different grammar and syntax, or even scripts, from English, and the result has been very unfortunate for many language courses on there. And even when contributors succeed in adapting Duoling's format, there are other problems. The only reason the Welsh course is as good as it is, is because the course contributors went in with a solid plan based on Welsh learning materials for adult learners already used in the Welsh community. But because Welsh isn't important to Duolingo--it's not the most popular course there nor is it a language that their partner Pearson cares about--the course has suffered technical glitches and bugs that Duolingo staff never seem to get around to fixing. So it's like even if people do a good job at making a course for a language like that on Duolingo, the course ends up suffering nonetheless because that language will never matter as much to Duolingo Inc as it does to the community.

I tried for quite a while on Duolingo to explain to people who were interested in Scottish Gaelic that they would be doing more good for themselves and for Gaelic if they supported and used free quality resources like those available on LearnGaelic.net rather than demand Duolingo drop a Gaelic course in their lap for them. I don't feel that I was very successful. Preaching to the wrong crowd, I guess. :? Cue an appropriate Buster Keaton gif:

Image

***

I survived this week and its hellish heat. The weatherfolk on my TV promise me it will get cooler next week, but they said that about this week, so it all seems like lies right now. :evil: But no writing in my TLs this week, aside from a few social media posts and a few false starts in my journals.


French Films SC : 101 / 100 -- 9162 minutes (+355 minutes)

  • Autobiographie d'une Courgette (livre audio), juste la première moitié - 165 minutes
  • Royal (livre audio), parties 4-6 - 139 minutes
  • Free Rein (French audio), 2 episodes - 51 minutes

    One SC complete! :D I will of course continue with it and record what i watch/listen to here until the challenge's official end.

French Books SC : 79 / 100 -- 3938 pages (+56 pages)

  • Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, tome 2 - 56 pages

Gaelic Films SC : 44 / 100 -- 3923 minutes (+330 minutes)

  • Guthan nan Eilean Series 2: Outdoors on You Tube -- 90 minutes
  • Other Gaelic language media on You Tube and LearnGaelic -- 114 minutes total
  • Còco is Crùbagan (leabhar-èìsteachd--ath-èisteachd) - 126 minutes

Gaelic Books SC : 44 / 100 -- 2210 pages (+163 pages)

  • 4 more litrichean ann an Leabhar nan Litrichean - 4 pages
  • Na Sgeirean Dubha - 159 pages

Spanish Films Half-SC : 21 / 50 -- 1880 minutes (+605 minutes)

  • Deadline, the 1952 film with Humphrey Bogart, (dubbed in Spanish) - 87 minutes
  • Ladron Que Roba a Ladron, the 1943 Mexican original - 92 minutes
  • El Llanero Solitario (The Lone Ranger, dubbed for Mexican TV), 4 episodes - 96 minutes
  • Noticiero Univision (national news, on TV) x 2 - 60 minutes
  • Noticiero 26 El Paso (local news, on TV) x 3 - 90 minutes
  • Por amar sin ley - 3 episodes - 180 minutes

Spanish Books Half-SC : 0 / 50

    Honestly haven't done anything this week with reading in Spanish. :oops:
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Cèid Donn
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Re: Cèid Donn's French and Gaelic SC thread

Postby Cèid Donn » Tue Jul 23, 2019 6:10 pm

Well, good news and bad news. The first good news is that today in the first day in about 3 months where the temperature should stay below 90F.

The other good news is I got my court date postponed for at least a year. Bad news is I had to hire a pricey (for me) lawyer to get that, which adds to my financial woes. But for the immediate future, this is a great relief, because I'm smart enough to know I can't represent myself in court for the case like this and expect the outcome to be in my favor and without a lawyer willing to take my case for what I am able to pay, I was really stressing out about it.

The other bad news is I am having to spend a lot of my energy at the present moment on dealing with legal paperwork that my lawyer needs returned to him ASAP. So it'll be another week of reduced study time. But on the bright side, I should be done with all this paperwork by tomorrow or by Thursday, the cosmos willing, so I will have the weekend free to do the Language Jam! :geek:

I have done a little prep with Yoruba, which is my LangJam language. The phonology is a little challenging. It's a tone language, somewhere between Navajo and Vietnamese on my personal, entirely subjective scale of tone languages. Also, I've spent a bit of time listening to Yoruba drummers, because there's a deep connection because their language and their music, somewhat similar to Gaelic music tradition. I'm looking forward to learning more. It should be a fun change of pace.
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Cèid Donn
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Re: Cèid Donn's French and Gaelic SC thread

Postby Cèid Donn » Fri Jul 26, 2019 3:25 pm

Well, the LangJam has begun, so I opened up the LangJam Discord to find...someone having a tantrum and ultimately quitting the LangJam because they got Scottish Gaelic and OMG it's so hard, look at that spelling and grammar, it's so "foreign." :roll: With everything else in my life, I just don't need this. But of course, I try be nice by suggesting a good resource that I personally have used and try to steer them away from Memrise, which is not a good place to start with Gaelic by the way, and they ignore me and continue with their tantrum. I'm not sure what other people expect in this life, but if you aren't willing to be open to something very new, why are you even trying to learn another language? And how is Gaelic that much harder than almost any of the other languages for this LangJam (which include Northern Sami, Mari, Navajo, Kurmanji, Yoruba, Nepali and Ainu among others)? Ugh, people. They just makes me so tired.

Anyhow, I made a study plan for Yoruba for the weekend and my main goals are simply to acquire some basic vocabulary and grammar and memorize some basic sentences--basically give myself something to come back to if I should continue studying Yoruba down the line, which is likely. I don't usually make very detailed study plans because I'm bad at sticking to them long-term. But this is just for 3 days and I wanted to make sure I still left myself plenty of time to work on my regular TLs for the 365 Day challenge and my SCs. Most importantly, for my Spanish SC, I absolutely must make time for tonight's season finale of Por Amar sin Ley on Univision. Granted, I have only seen a handful of episodes so I don't completely understand what is going on but, you guys, this show is just...well, this :lol: :



Besides, I have to stay the course with my regular TLs because I have having so much wanderlust right now and some of those language resources hoarders doing the LangJam are being a bad influence on me. Faroese, Sami, Darija, Occitan, Catalan, Javanese, Japanese. So many languages, so little time. :|
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Cèid Donn
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Re: Cèid Donn's French and Gaelic SC thread

Postby Cèid Donn » Mon Jul 29, 2019 3:28 am

Even though it's not quite midnight here, I've concluded my LangJam with Yoruba. Sadly I did not get as much done as I had hoped for 2 reasons: first, for most of today and yesterday I've been dealing with nausea, fatigue and other uncomfortable symptoms of heat exhaustion, and second, Yoruba's vocabulary is very unfamiliar, lacking any connection to any language I've studied so far save for a few Arabic loanwords that are hard to recognize as loanwords due to them conforming to Yoruba phonology. But overall I got a taste of Yoruba and I really like it a lot. Grammatically, it's very straightforward--SVO, no gender, very little inflection, just 2 noun cases (compare that to Bantu languages!)--but its phonology kind of makes up for that. :lol: Not only is Yoruba phonology a bit challenging, with its tones, nasals and labial–velar stops, it's a little tricky to learn to type and write in. I would like to continue with Yoruba, but given the health problems I am having with the heat this summer, I may not be able to work in time for it before autumn this year. I already need to cut back on my regular study load. :x

I looked over at Instagram to see what other LangJam learners were posting and quickly felt very inadequate from all the pics of people's very neat notes done in very neat handwriting. My notes are basically words, phrases and sentences jumbled together, scribbled down hastily in my sad dysgraphic handwriting, often without any English beyond a header at the top of the page to help me quickly locate topics, because I find it better to make myself remember why I wrote something down (which I can about 85-90% of the time). At most, I might underline or circle or asterisk something to help jog my memory, but beyond that, my notebooks are chaos. :oops:

I did manage to keep up with my 365 Day Challenge and do some stuff for my French and Spanish SC. But I didn't do anything for Gaelic besides Clozemaster and after a weekend of knowing other people were studying it (as it was one of this LangJam's languages) I really miss it. But for now, I'm going to go take a cold shower, drink some iced herbal tea and finish my current French audiobook (Autobiographie d'une Courgette) while lying under some fans.
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Cèid Donn
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Re: Cèid Donn's French and Gaelic SC thread

Postby Cèid Donn » Thu Aug 01, 2019 3:27 am

So far, this week has been pretty shambolic. I've kept up with Clozemaster, my 365 Day challenge and getting in some videos/audiobooks/TV and a little reading for my SCs, but I just don't feel very focused. I'm trying to write every day, although I've cut back to one writing entry a day for 6 days of the week, but what i'm writing seems sub-par for me. To be fair though, it's still way too hot, I'm still dealing with mild degrees of heat exhaustion, I still not sleeping or eating well and to top it all off, I'm wanderlusting like crazy. Latest wanderlust language: Romanian. I was bored last night and watched an old Langfocus video on Romance languages and when Paul mentioned Romanian, I was like, "I should learn some Romanian!" :lol: :roll:

Since I'm struggling to focus on my language studies, I decided to work on organization--getting my language resources better organized, my notebooks and textbooks all better sorted and just tidying up my study area more. This is something helpful for my studies that I can do while my mental state is not up for actually studying. :P And as I do this, I'm making a list of things I've started at some point but still would like to finish that I could work on little by little over a longer period of time, like my Spanish grammar workbook, Assimil Le Breton and Yann Gerven's Breton grammar lessons, my Intermediate Welsh workbook, Colloquial Yoruba, Colloquial Swedish, Colloquial Russian, my textbooks for Navajo, Faroese and Hawaiian, my Japanese N5 workbook, and maybe even start working on the Peace Corps Moroccan Arabic textbook, since it doesn't require me to be proficient in Arabic script (which is the main reason I keep putting off this language). It sounds like a lot--and it is--but my idea is to give myself a day or two out of the week to do a little work on some of these projects, maybe even keep a progress chart to help keep me focused, sort of like unlocking achievements in a video game (and I'm a gamer, so that psychologically appeals to me :geek:). I just want to feel little less sad about all these things I started over the years but didn't finish. Since I feel I've made a lot of good progress with French and Gaelic, as well as seeing some positive results from doing my Spanish half-SC ( which I were talk about in more detail when I update my SC progress later on), I feel like I've earned the right, so to speak, to go back and do a little work on all these other languages that I've pushed aside.

Another thing I've been thinking about lately is the polyglot Kató Lomb and her approach to self-learning languages. Her approach was typically to learn one language at a time, and while I agree that's very effective approach, it's not one I want to do, because I get burnt out very quickly. But I find that a lot of other aspects of her approach parallel my own approach that I've cultivated over many years-- be persistent, don't worry about perfection, read a lot and widely, don't use methods or tools that take the joy out of learning for you and find ways to enjoy your TL. And despite feeling very scattered mentally this week, this helped me realized that I'm a lot better at this than I often give myself credit. I mean, I'm growing in confidence with using Spanish and Irish online, so now I can post on social media with relative ease in 4 languages, not counting English, and I felt really good about how, when I sat down to work on Yoruba for this past weekend's LangJam, I was able to very quickly assess what aspects of Yoruba would be easy for me and what would require more work, and thus was able to have a very clear path in my mind on how I could progress in Yoruba to a level I'd like to be at. I see these as important milestones for myself. It's OK if other people aren't impressed with me--like Lomb, I'm very self-sufficient and don't rely a lot on the approval of others in my self-learning--but sometimes when you're your own fiercely independent self-learning juggernaut, you focus a lot on what you need to be working on now and what you need to work on next, and you forget to take the time to stop and give yourself credit for the work you've done so far. I think I needed to do that this week. :mrgreen:

Going to end with posting this song, one of my favorites by Raphaël, whose music a number of years ago helped motivate to me to take up French again after getting so frustrated with it I swore I would quit it forever. :P

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Re: Cèid Donn's French and Gaelic SC thread

Postby Cèid Donn » Sun Aug 04, 2019 7:39 pm

There was a white supremacy-motivated mass shooting in my city yesterday. That is not intended to be political, just the facts about what I'm dealing with. I wasn't there when it happened, but I am dealing with the ripple effects of it in my community and very likely, I will be dealing with such ripple effects for all the foreseeable future. My mental and emotional state right now is not good, but I am OK, all things considering. There are a lot things right now that are very uncertain, including what I will have to deal with when I return to work later this month, and this ultimately will impact my language studies. Thankfully I should be able to continue them, just at a much less intensive pace than I usually do.

I had intended to do a full SC update today but that's not happening. I just am not in the right frame of mind right now. At the present moment my language studies are a coping mechanism for me, to help me focus on something that's not simply despair or rage, and that's all I want to deal with right now.
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Re: Cèid Donn's French and Gaelic SC thread

Postby Cèid Donn » Tue Aug 06, 2019 11:53 pm

Signed up for 6WC (part-time) for Russian against my better judgement. When I was sorting through my old resources I came across all these resources I have for Russian, including a number of which I paid good money for, and got the itch again. :roll:

Main resources I'll be using:

Apps:
Drops (free content only)
Clozemaster
EDIT 8/16: adding Decks.

You Tube:
Easy Russian (Easy Languages)
Be Fluent in Russian

Audio courses:
50Languages Book2
Earworms: Russian 1 & 2
Teach Yourself Russian Conversation

Textbooks:
Teach Yourself Russian Grammar
Teach Yourself Russian
Colloquial Russian 1 & 2

I'm a false beginner with Russian and I did not have a very easy time with it the first time around, which was, jezuz, 5 years ago, maybe? I'd have to dig through my old TAC threads at Unilang to confirm that, which I don't have the energy for. I'm actually finding it a little more accessible this time, so we'll see how I do.

I am continuing with my SCs and the 365 challenges as well. Anything else, I'll do if I feel up for it.

Edit: because I don't like micro-cataloging my every minute of study nor have the time and energy to do so, my 6WC total will only reflect my Russian studies for that particular challenge. I won't be including my studies for my other languages in what I tweet to the 6WC bot.

***

EDIT: 8/12 - overdue SC update
EDIT: 8/16 - For now I'm going to just update this by adding recently completed material instead of making a new post

EDIT: 8/25: I've registered with the Language Challenge bot on Twitter and will be using that (provided it continues working) to log my SC progress instead of this log.

French Films SC : 113 / 100 -- 10206 minutes (+750 minutes)

  • Autobiographie d'une Courgette (livre audio), la seconde moitié - 182 minutes
  • Free Rein (French audio), 4 episodes - 112 minutes

    8/20:
  • Dark, season 2 (French audio) - 456 minutes

French Books SC : 93 / 100 -- 4672 pages (+724 pages)

  • Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, tome 2 - 360 pages
  • Autobiographie d'une Courgette - 254 pages

    8/17:
  • Le joueur d'échecs - 0 pages counted (I suspect I double-counted about 50-60 pages for Le comte de Monte-Cristo in my SC total. so to offset that, I am not adding the 57 pages of this book to the total.)

    8/23:
  • Un aller simple - 120 pages

Gaelic Films SC : 65 / 100 -- 5897 minutes (+1783 minutes)

  • Various Gaelic language media on You Tube, Soundcloud and LearnGaelic -- 145 minutes total

    8/16:
  • Air Mo Chuairt, 3 episodes - 90 minutes
  • Aithris Na Maidne, 5 epsiodes - 450 minutes

    8/17:
  • Spòrs na Seachdain, 3 episodes -180 minutes
  • Fearan do Ghaisgich, 1 episode -30 minutes

    8/20
  • Aithris Na Maidne, 2 epsiodes - 180 minutes
  • Spòrs na Seachdain, 2.5 episodes - 150 minutes
  • Various Gaelic language media on LearnGaelic and Stòrlann - 35 minutes

    8/23
  • Air Mo Chuairt, 3 episodes - 90 minutes
  • Aithris Na Maidne, 3 epsiodes - 270 minutes
  • Various Guthan nan Eilean videos on You Tube - 45 minutes

    8/24
  • Spòrs na Seachdain, 1 episodes - 60 minutes
  • Eadar Dà Shaoghal, 3 episodes - 90 minutes
  • Peadar a' Bruidhinn Gàidhlig (delightful audiobook of 5 of Beatrix Potter's books in Gaelic :D ) - 58 minutes

Gaelic Books SC : 51 / 100 -- 2556 pages (+495 pages)

  • 9 more litrichean ann an Leabhar nan Litrichean - 9 pages
  • Tocasaid 'Ain Tuirca - 140 pages

    8/20:
  • 6 more litrichean ann an Leabhar nan Litrichean - 6 pages
  • Eilean an Iomhais - 260 pages

    8/23
  • Cairteal gu Meadhan-latha - 80 pages

Spanish Films Half-SC : 54 / 50 -- 4882 minutes (+3048 minutes)

  • El Llanero Solitario (The Lone Ranger, dubbed for Mexican TV), 6 episodes - 129 minutes
  • Noticiero Univision (national news, on TV) x 9 - 270 minutes
  • Noticiero 26 El Paso (local news, on TV) x 10 - 300 minutes
  • Por amar sin ley , 5 episodes - 225 minutes
  • Sin miedo a la verdad, 8 episodes - 432 minutes
  • Liga MX football - 315 minutes

    8/16:
  • Noticiero Univision (national news, on TV) x 4 - 120 minutes
  • Noticiero 26 El Paso (local news, on TV) x 4 - 120 minutes
  • Sin miedo a la verdad, 2 episodes - 108 minutes
  • Liga MX football - 240 minutes

    8/17:
  • Noticiero Univision (national news, on TV) x 1 - 30 minutes
  • Noticiero 26 El Paso (local news, on TV) x 2 - 60 minutes
  • Sin miedo a la verdad, 1 episodes - 54 minutes
  • Liga MX football - 105 minutes

    8/20
  • Noticiero Univision (national news, on TV) x 1 - 30 minutes
  • Noticiero 26 El Paso (local news, on TV) x 1 - 30 minutes
  • Por amar sin ley , 3 episodes - 135 minutes

    8/23
  • Noticiero Univision (national news, on TV) x 3 - 90 minutes
  • Noticiero 26 El Paso (local news, on TV) x 3 - 90 minutes
  • Por amar sin ley , 2 episodes - 90 minutes
  • One Day at a Time (Spanish audio), 2 episodes - 60 minutes

Spanish Books Half-SC : 17 / 50 -- 850 pages

  • Metro 2033 - 632 pages

    8/16:
  • Ficciones (Jorge Luis Borges) - 218 pages
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Note from an educator and former ESL/test skills tutor: Any learner, including self-learners, can use the CEFR for self-assessment. The CEFR is for helping learners progress and not for gatekeeping and bullying.

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Cèid Donn
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Re: Cèid Donn's French and Gaelic SC thread

Postby Cèid Donn » Tue Sep 03, 2019 4:07 am

Clozemaster added the Cloze-Collection feature to smaller courses, like all the Celtic languages, which allows you to create collections of your own sentences. So yesterday I started making my own collection for Gaelic. I made it public today so anyone who is signed up for the Gaelic course can access it via the dashboard for that course. It's only 50 sentences so far, but I hope to add a lot more--my short-term goal is to add 50 more, but my long-term goal is expand my collection to 400-500 sentences, and adding those sentences to Tatoeba in the hopes some of them will get added to the main course at some point in the future (my expectations are not at all high here, however, as it seems Clozemaster is very slow to update anything).

Two things I'm not completely thrilled about with the current state of this feature is 1) the points you score doing these sentences are not added to your overall score for that course and 2) you have play those sentences separately--there is not option to mix them in with the main course. I understand why they did that, to keep the leaderboards fair, but it doesn't really encourage people to use this feature, either with their own collections or ones other people have made. This is why I'll eventually try adding my sentences to Tatoeba. It's not that I think my content is super awesome (although I have so far put a decent amount of work into making useful and correct sentences that aren't simply ripped word-for-word from other sources). The Gaelic course does suffer from a lack of sentences over all, as well a variety of grammar and vocabulary. Overall it's not that challenging for a learner at my level. It could use more sentences and aside from one other person I know who's doing the course and has created sentences on Tatoeba, no one else is stepping up to add more Gaelic sentences to Tatoeba for Clozemaster to consider.

Anyhow, it is surprisingly time consuming to make sentences for this sort of thing, and it'd be nice if my time and effort eventually helped other learners one way or another.

One issue with taking on this new project is it's really eating up my study time. Currently I'm doing 19 courses for 11 TLs on Clozemaster. Some of those courses are the same TL but from a different source language for a bit of laddering, which has been helpful. I started doing the laddering thing with multiple course before I got a paid sub, so I could use the listening feature multiple times for French, Spanish, Swedish and German each day (the free version of the site only lets you use the listening feature for 10 sentences per course every 24 hours). Since signing up for the sub, I deleted a few of those laddering courses and have been managing the rest by rotating which ones I focus on day by day.

Nonetheless, I really think I need to cut back on the laddering courses. In addition to doing so much Clozemaster every day is starting to aggravate my old hand injuries, it's taking too much time even to do the minimum to keep my streaks in all these course (besides, the multiple French courses in particular are starting to bore me so I think it'd be better to just concentrate on one of those for now). Since doing the Cloze-Collection for Gaelic is probably a more constructive use of my time right now, I'll pick out a handful of course I'll stop doing tomorrow. I won't delete them though because that would remove those scores from my overall score and I worked too hard to get into the top 200 on the All-Time leaderboard for that. :mrgreen:

Other news is my 6 Week Challenge with Russian is going well. I'm not going to finish this 6WC at B1, but I am getting the hand of listening to slowly spoken Russian and I have started reading easy texts for beginners. However, I have spent exactly zero minutes working on learning the Russian keyboard again--all my notes are handwritten and I've been just doing multiple choice on Clozemaster. I'm on the fence whether I should re-learn the standard Russian keyboard again (I never really mastered it before, despite the fancy keyboard stickers and hours of typing practice) or just learn how to use the phonetic keyboard. I'm strongly leaning toward the latter.

My Super Challenges are coming along well enough. Even though the 6WC has taken some time away from them, I'm still working away at them steadily. I was pleased to learn recently that BBC has redone some features on their website and now have un-geoblocked a lot of the Radio nan Gàidheal content as well as lengthened the duration many programs are available for streaming. This has allowed me to listen to Gaelic programs nearly every day, so my Gaelic Film SC is no longer in such a sad state. I'm also very happy that I am close to completing my French Reading Super Challenge, so much so that I can't decide what to read for the last 170 or so pages I still need. :P For Spanish, I currently have a stack of books from our local library to read. Right now I'm reading La Transformación by Kafka, because hey, I have read it before (in English and German) and the library had it. Our local library's Spanish collection leans heavily towards Spanish translations of English or other titles, because that's largely what their Spanish readers want, so I have make do with whatever they have (they do allow library users to request books for the library to purchase, but then it's waiting game and I need stuff to read now!). Other books I checked out on this past visit are El Alquimista (which I've read in English), La Quinta Estación (The Fifth Season) by NK Jemisin (I've read this in the original English) and Zoro by Isabel Allende.
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Note from an educator and former ESL/test skills tutor: Any learner, including self-learners, can use the CEFR for self-assessment. The CEFR is for helping learners progress and not for gatekeeping and bullying.

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Cèid Donn
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Posts: 513
Joined: Thu Nov 15, 2018 10:48 pm
Languages: en-us (n); français, gàidhlig, gaeilge, cymraeg, brezhoneg, español
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Re: Cèid Donn's French and Gaelic SC thread

Postby Cèid Donn » Tue Sep 10, 2019 7:10 pm

If I understand this correctly, tomorrow in the last day of this 6WC, and honestly I'm ready for it to end. I'm not bored with Russian, but I am bored with my current routine with it--that is, whatever routine I have managed to stick to.

I'm deathly tired of Drops, and will be glad to um, drop it entirely. :lol: I'm still not very happy with recent changes to the Memrise app which I use for my Decks courses, in particular the constant begging for money and that simple fact that the app screen doesn't lock, so for a sickly disabled person like myself who needs to spend more time than most in a reclined position, having the app flip to landscape from portrait at the slightest jostle is super irritating. I mention the latter issue on the Memrise/Decks forum a couple of months back and at least 2 updates have rolled out since, so I doubt they will fix this issue (or feature) any time soon. Nonetheless, I intend to finish the Russian Decks course I started, cursing the Memrise app all the way, I am sure.

While my progress with Russian over this 6WC isn't anything to brag about, I'm quite pleased with it. I only got through the first 4 units of Colloquial Russian, but given that CR isn't exactly the easiest text to use, I think that's really quite good. The best thing to come out of this, in terms of any future progress with Russian for me, is that my listening ability is now far better than I had hoped at the start of this 6WC, and thanks to my improved ability to hear and recall how Russian words sound, I can read Russian Cyrillic script with significantly less dependence on thinking of how the words transliterate into Latin script. For most sounds, I can recognize them as they are written in Cyrillic although there are a handful I still need work on. I will be continuing the Clozemaster course, so I will continue to practice that with its listening mode.

I'll take a break from CR for a bit, but I will stick to my beginner Russian stories and the Slow Russian podcast. Aside from Decks and Clozemaster, I don't think I'll been working on Russian more than once a week, because I need to get back to my SC reading, as well as doing more Irish, Welsh and especially Breton. In fact, I think I'll do Breton for the next 6WC. As much as I hope to do get back to Yoruba, start with Darija or even do more Russian in the near future, my Breton's hurting too much and I need to just bite the bullet and do the work.

As for my Cloze-Collection for Gaelic, I only added 13 more sentences this past weekend. Friday my family needed me to do way too many things for them and then on Saturday I was not feeling well and ended up sleeping for most of the day. I'm not short of good and authoritative material to draw from for new sentences, it's just a matter of having both enough time and enough energy for it.
4 x
Note from an educator and former ESL/test skills tutor: Any learner, including self-learners, can use the CEFR for self-assessment. The CEFR is for helping learners progress and not for gatekeeping and bullying.


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