Coldrainwater's Log

[coldrainwater]

I have a short bundle of updates. First off, I love needles. Mid-week I managed to update my left shoulder with the latest and greatest booster available. 24 hours of stiffness alongside localized soreness spread to various parts of my body and was a general pain in the neck. I hope the immunity spreads in like fashion but lasts substantially longer.

Русский
On the language front, and in thinking up ways to bring a distant but interesting language a bit closer, I came up with the plan to pick an opaque language for handling low-level daily computing tasks. After some experimenting, I ended up going with Russian and the Cyrillic alphabet. Here is what my experience has been like over the last few weeks or so:

The first Russian computing terms I learned were Копировать (copy) and Вставить (paste), very shortly followed by набирать (type). I spent a few days working from keybr.com until I could reliably touch-type well enough using the Cyrillic alphabet to translate unknown terms. I engaged in enough pronunciation work to muddle my way through roughly a quarter of the words I see and am slowly adding to that. I have often found myself fatigued in the middle of a given word and sometimes abandon the effort mid-parse. Thus far I have the operating system (Windows), web browser, email, my iPad and a few more apps in Russian. The browser and operating system have been the two most helpful since many other services take their cues from one or the other. My smartphone is in French so I have at least one major tool fully in my current TL. Common placement of objects on the screen makes it so that I normally do not need to do lookups. However, curiosity often gets the better of me and I end up typing out some longer phrases where making a WAG just wouldn't work. The other day, I configured Outlook to always offer translation for any incoming message, which I have already used a few times when I want something a bit more substantial to puzzle through.

Ideas are a dime a dozen, so I will continue to report more based on what I actually do with this over time. Nevertheless, the idea seems to have persistence in my routine and has been both fun and rewarding. The vast majority of my study time has been devoted to French, which will warrant a longer and separate update. However, I have managed a reasonable cadence reading about 20 pages of German per day from Harrisons Innere Medizin. I never know quite which topic I will get so it may be a wise choice not to do the reading right before dinner. Healthy and appetite are meant to collocate. That book is so long that I should probably take a break from it and vary my German reading. French work is already helping with that as the language of instruction is sometimes in German for me. Finally, I normally participate in the 30:30 challenge but am going to opt out this month since I have my hands full with onboarding French and I also haven't prepared anything. The challenge served as the catalyst for my current TL, and in doing so, provided more benefits than expected.

[coldrainwater]

Français

Here is what I have been up to with French lately:

Listening through all units of FSI netted me roughly 80 hours of practice in total. Working with the PDF in hand continued to be a saving grace. As a direct follow-up, I enjoyed a brief time with Assimil, reading through all lessons in order, notes first, followed by the dialogue. To round it off, I spent about a day on the grammar section provided at the back. I have the audio but haven't settled down for long enough to give it a proper listen. Moreover, both my ears have been occupied by foreign service content to their general betterment.

Langenscheidt seems to never miss on quality and I read their Grundwortschatz cover to cover purely for the sentence reading practice. What caught my interest initially was the visual presentation offered in perfect parallel text format. It happened to also be thematic, which gave me the odd feeling of working with a visual dictionary minus the images. Helpful, but not without a tinge of boredom. Next up, PMP was selected (by me as I haven't anyone else to blame) as a follow-up grammar review. In my usual studious fashion, I avoided completing any exercises. To its credit, the book was well-written and the content solid overall. However, I found it to be information sparse and overburdened by English. The immersion scale didn't quite balance for me. In the end, I was able to pick out quite a few helpful grammar nuggets but not without diligent effort.

I am already feeling an inclination toward diving into native content despite having earmarked September and October for coursework. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. My app work has generally done a version of the screech and halt and I have every bit as much enthusiasm as always for writing and speaking practice (namely, next to none). This simplifies planning. A forgotten mention from last month on my part is the bulktranslator web app. I had fun dabbling and seeing how specific text of my choosing looks in many languages of interest simultaneously.

Completed

• French FSI Basic Volume II (listen-read)
• Assimil French 1998 (read-only)
• Langenscheidt Grundwortschatz Französisch (sentence reading)
• Practice Makes Perfect: French All-in-One (grammar review)

[MorkTheFiddle]

In Allied Mr. Pitt plays a Canadian, I suppose to explain his bad French accent. There is indeed a fair amount of French in the movie.
Thanks for the links to Weil, one of the clearest of writers, and the daring Louÿs.

[coldrainwater]

In Allied Mr. Pitt plays a Canadian, I suppose to explain his bad French accent. There is indeed a fair amount of French in the movie.
Thanks for the links to Weil, one of the clearest of writers, and the daring Louÿs.

Hi Mork. I think this comment may have originally been destined for Dave's log but it looks like he found it all the same. Small world.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Yes, my fault, though I'm blaming ajax.

[coldrainwater]

FR (a path of mischief)

Whichever path my French studies take in the coming months, I should note (and in good faith) that I started firmly down a path of reason. Circa midmonth, I made a close bilingual reading of two Gutenberg selections, namely, Discours de la méthode and Meditationes de prima philosophia, both quite rational in content and both courtesy of René Descartes. I preferred his initial vulgar work, candid and written originally in French which included something of his formative experiences and life plans, very much in his own words. To his credit, he didn't need a massive tome to get his point across and was cautious at a time when caution was warranted (is it ever not?).

Just this past week, I enjoyed more than a week of vacation time, carefully calculated to extend all the way to October's end. Such a short period of idle time and I have already veered quite far from the path of reason and away from the light. Normally, when I seek dark counsel, I go looking for a devil in a quiet pond. It turns out they can be found in many other abodes as well and my next two reads just happened to include L'homme qui a vu le diable by Gaston Leroux and L'abomination de Dunwich by H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft is well-known to me but this was my first time with Leroux's work. Thoughts: Money is evermore a vulgar affair, but life as a 19th-century player might not have been half bad. I can say both were fantastic and possessed just the qualities I had hoped to find.

As a side note, even the most bumbling of detective work (mine) can't help but link Gaston to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, both with respect to time and genre. A lover of one might appreciate the other.

Technique (how I read the above)

I read all three books above using Anki (FR-EN). That is typically how I read my initial books in a new language. My reasoning includes flexibility and a desire to be able to read easily while running or otherwise on the go. It also reduces strain since I need only see up to one sentence at a time while permitting me to be alternately as lazy or analytical as I want. On cloudy days (of the mental variety), I can read the English first, making the TL quite straightforward. Roughly one sentence at a time in flashcard format works very well for that purpose and hence has been worth the upfront admin work. I would estimate, on account of my pickiness, it takes about a half hour of work to prepare each book. Explaining the technique briefly may help those who enjoy experimenting a bit with texts in parallel. I made the following mods/improvements this time around:

• Start with .epub
• Convert to text using Calibre
• Split text by sentence (using simple find/replace)
• Split longer sentences by clause if they still appear too long
• Save as .xlsx (since that is what Google Translate takes)
• Upload .xlsx document to Google Translate
• Import result to Anki (FR-EN)
• I am then free to read, run and generally move about without losing my place

Notes on technique:

There are a few nice features going this route. No programming is needed so it can be implemented by almost anyone. Using Google Translate has its downsides (explained in other threads), but overall it was very nice to be sure I had an easy and perfectly aligned line-by-line translation. The quality of the translation was less important since I mainly use it to prevent needing to do lookups and to maintain reading flow. When using aligners in the past, I have had occasional issues with out-of-kilter sentences (not to mention having many super-long sentences, which seem to run on and run counter to my goals). I strongly considered writing the flip side of the card in German but realized quickly that having a major difference in word order and grammar made using it as a reference unnecessarily complex. I was highly tempted to go for Spanish though, which I think would have worked out quite well. Likewise with something like PT or IT for extra challenge and some exposure to new TLs.

[MorkTheFiddle]

FR (a path of mischief)

[*]Split text by sentence (using simple find/replace)

Just to be clear, I assume you find and replace periods, exclamation marks and question marks with paragraph markers.

[coldrainwater]

Just to be clear, I assume you find and replace periods, exclamation marks and question marks with paragraph markers.

Hi Mork. For this step, since I am in a Windows environment, I insert a new line character after each period, exclamation and question mark. The example below should show the exact operation for exclamations. Notepad++ is my text editor of choice. Note that I select 'Extended' under search mode so that it recognizes '\r\n' as a newline and then I would select 'Replace All' to handle the entire file at once. If needed, I also trim excess spaces off the front and end of each line after replacing them to clean up the result visually. I also remove any completely empty lines (using the built-in notepad++ line operation by the same name under the edit menu).

As a separate side note, with a plug-in called 'Code Alignment', notepad++ can also be used to help create a normal parallel text (left-right aligned). In my example, it would involve aligning by the tab character (\t). After some pagination work and a print-to-PDF, you have something that can look rather professional created mainly by a modest open-source notepad++ app with assistance from Google.


So if I start with:

Code: Select all

First sentence.  Interjection! Where did all the time go? Final sentence.

After all three replaces, I get:

Code: Select all

First sentence.
Interjection!
Where did it all the time go?
Final sentence.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Yes, notepad++ frequently comes in useful.

[frenchfish55]

Patience is a quality defined by its reward. -Steven Erikson, Malazan Book of the Fallen



As you might have gathered from the quote above, I have since picked up a new magic book, expressly Die Gärten des Mondes by Steven Erikson. Collaborators from the wikilink below were quite complementary. I am drawn to long epic tales, and this one is easily capable of outstripping a super challenge. With Erikson, storyline, prose and world are all significantly more complex compared to Sanderson's Stormlight Archives. This time, I am mapping English to German in parallel text, again straying far from normal Anki use. I suspect the series may need to be read in multiple languages or formats Malazan Book of the Fallen - Wiki

Hello where did you find german parallel texts?