Coldrainwater's Log

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coldrainwater
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Re: Coldrainwater's German Log

Postby coldrainwater » Wed Oct 27, 2021 3:07 pm

german2k01 wrote:Did you use a translation tool? How did you go about it? Typically, how many hours did you spend finishing one book reading in this way? Thanks.

Yes, I currently use LF Aligner to align sentences before importing them to Anki. Back then, I used Youalign for the same purpose. The main reason I switched is that Youalign limits the input file size and LF Aligner does not. I use Calibre to get the text that feeds into the sentence aligner. My suggestion is to start with .epub if you can, then convert to text, but it can likely be done starting with nearly any format. Prior to importing to the aligner, I chop off any prologues or endnotes from the text so that both languages show the same material.

For Sanderson, they all aligned quite easily as I recall. That should generally be the case for original contemporary works where there is only one translation (into or out of German). Occasionally you will find the sentences get a bit off track (in that the German may be ahead or behind several sentences), but they tend to right themselves pretty quickly and it wasn't too big of an issue for me.

I don't know how many hours it took to read each book, but from Anki, I know that I routinely read more than 1000 sentences per day. Sanderson's sentences tend to be shorter and more digestible than most and I believe I spent a solid 3-5 hours per day reading.
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Re: Coldrainwater's German Log

Postby coldrainwater » Thu Nov 04, 2021 6:42 am

Wikipedia as a source of reading material

In the last week or so, I focused on reading Wikipedia as a new twist to expanding reading knowledge. It has been a good decision overall, in particular for broadening the scope of what I consume and getting a high volume of new and challenging material. One of the first and toughest text entries that I read through intensively was the main article covering the Erster Weltkrieg. It took me three days to wade through that one, but I am glad I did as it was quite enjoyable and I learned a great deal.

I also dug my heels into the Dreißigjähriger Krieg and read it top to bottom. They get bonus points for employing a defenestration to initiate the war. From the time period, Peter Hagendorf's digital - Tagebuch eines Söldners is well-preserved and was an interesting find. The link takes you to a digital version of the text. Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus, one of my favourite books so far in German was also mentioned explicitly. The most confusing part of that article is that I am not familiar enough with the characters yet to appreciate the full story. I know I will need multiple passes no matter which approach I take, so that is no surprise.

Based on what I have saved under Beobachtungsliste, I have seen about 75 articles so far. There are ample ways to go about finding articles to read. One that shows promise and that I plan to check out is the list of Lesenwerte Artikel. Another, perhaps the more compact option is to use something like Wikipedia nach Themen. My own personal TBR grows by the day, so there is no shortage of material.

Today, I finished reading Geschichte Deutschlands. The article started out quite well and I was more or less afloat with interest and engagement. Then I made the mistake of tackling the rather bloated and dense section on contemporary politics while short on sleep and distracted by stressful work demands. That quickly degenerated into a disaster saved only by long pauses and embarrassingly large chunks of translation. I regrouped after going on a long run and finished, pretending the original debacle had never occurred.

Intensive Reading Notes

While it is fresh on my mind, I should note that Wikipedia is a good source for taking a close examination at some of the problems faced when learning to read German. The articles above showcase quite a few different complex sentence structures, some that I don't even recall having reviewed in my brief stint in grammar study. That may be partly due to wide-ranging topics and partly due to employing a multitude of authors.

There is a good opportunity to practice picking apart sentences at a leisurely pace. The stories told are interesting, but they won't run completely away from you and have significantly less dialogue. I have picked up quite a bit of vocabulary stemming from heavy and multifaceted use of German orthographic conventions as well the tendency to chain many complex terms consecutively. In the latter case, I notice that I can absorb a certain number of those, but that the damage tends to be cumulative and I may simply run out of intellectual gas before I actually reach the end of the sentence.

At that juncture, I then backtrack and start picking the sentence apart using different techniques and identifying the location of comprehensible chunks of information (notating collocation placement as well as breaks that are not punctuated explicitly) and backing into acceptable meaning.

Getting a sense of where those collocation breaks occur is perhaps the most useful thing I have done to improve orientation and avoid getting totally lost. The more complex the sentence, the more likely I am to be off base when I construct meaning and the more likely I will need to verify by on the spot translation. That plus using Transover for individual brain farts and new vocabulary lookups more or less allows me to get through most constructs, even if the overall pace and process makes for a slow grind.
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Re: Coldrainwater's German Log

Postby german2k01 » Thu Nov 04, 2021 10:13 am

I am very well aware of your reading statistics. My question is when reading articles on Wikipedia in terms of % usage, how often do you need to look up the meaning of new words. In other words, what is the usage of using a dictionary, quite minimal at best I am presuming?

My second question in regards to listening to 100 audiobooks is, do you take the duration of the audiobook into account? For instance, "The Idiot" in German is 36 hours long. Do you consider it one audiobook or 3 audiobooks when totaling the amount? Usually, an audiobook is 10 hours long. Thanks
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Re: Coldrainwater's German Log

Postby jackb » Thu Nov 04, 2021 1:44 pm

They get bonus points for employing a defenestration to initiate the war.


It's all fun and games until there's a defenestration.

I recently started reading Wikipedia everyday too and it is surprisingly fun. To mix it up, I start on the main page. I usually find something interesting in the Éphéméride (on this day) section to go into detail. They are different per language which adds a bit of a twist. For today, the French page has the discovery of le tombeau de Toutânkhamon, but the Spanish or German doesn't.
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Re: Coldrainwater's German Log

Postby AllSubNoDub » Thu Nov 04, 2021 5:26 pm

How are you maintaining your Spanish? I wonder if bi-directional translation De<>Es would be helpful (for both languages), even if just for a few minutes a day.

And yes, German Wikipedia is amazing. Thank you for the "by Subject" and "Articles worth Reading" pages, which provide a nice bird's eye overview. I hadn't thought about that (even though it seems like common sense).
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Re: Coldrainwater's German Log

Postby coldrainwater » Thu Nov 04, 2021 6:33 pm

german2k01 wrote:I am very well aware of your reading statistics. My question is when reading articles on Wikipedia in terms of % usage, how often do you need to look up the meaning of new words. In other words, what is the usage of using a dictionary, quite minimal at best I am presuming?

My second question in regards to listening to 100 audiobooks is, do you take the duration of the audiobook into account? For instance, "The Idiot" in German is 36 hours long. Do you consider it one audiobook or 3 audiobooks when totaling the amount? Usually, an audiobook is 10 hours long. Thanks


I use Transover with Wikipedia and set the hover interval at around 100 milliseconds. That prevents me from needing to actually abandon the page while reading and minimizes slow dictionary retrievals. I am actually gunning for articles that are hard for me to read and that make me work to construct meaning. That explains why I specifically highlighted only 3/75 articles. Many of the shorter articles just aren't that complex. On the harder articles, some of the work involves quests to deepen my understanding of individual word meanings, but the bulk of it is much more contextual, if not less intense. I stop frequently because I am teaching myself the subject matter as well as learning the language. I am learning personage as well as holistically grasping setting and historical context as best I can for a first pass. I may also need to process abstract math from time to time (I am rusty but have the background to engage). There are plenty of Wikipedia terms on each page that I often bookmark or read the popup summary information on as well (time permitting) and I am not counting those as vocabulary words unless they are uber important.

If I had to estimate, I have probably come across at least a couple hundred words out of the 75 articles I have read that I thought needed special attention and that will have carryover to future reading. I suspect that I am letting an even higher number be absorbed by natural repetition. That is far more than I had hoped for, so I consider it an amply rich experience in that respect to the point that I currently would not have any reason to seek more per unit time (make hay when the sun shines). I subjectively judge the quality and usefulness of terms I find to be quite high and I suspect they will form a sort of core vocabulary addition for reading non-fiction work in the relevant academic disciplines that I chose going forward.

With respect to your second question, I don't directly take audiobook duration into account. That said, on average, I suspect the books were often 6-10 hours, though some longer and shorter books would have been included. I would have considered The Idiot as one big book. I recall listening to at least 20 books from Episodes Nationales (Pérez Galdós) and really enjoying the first ten. If I had been tracking that via spreadsheet, they would have just been simple database entries with the hour total and word/page count as separate columns. Then doing something like defining a book as 6 hours of listening would have been no more than a few quick lines of SQL code in a query, assuming I had an ad-hoc need to analyze it like that. When tracking you want all of your core data captured at the detail level whenever feasible. Anything that aggregates like what a book is defined as can be trivially computed later and would not need to be captured initially.
Last edited by coldrainwater on Thu Nov 04, 2021 7:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Coldrainwater's German Log

Postby coldrainwater » Thu Nov 04, 2021 7:38 pm

AllSubNoDub wrote:How are you maintaining your Spanish? I wonder if bi-directional translation De<>Es would be helpful (for both languages), even if just for a few minutes a day.

And yes, German Wikipedia is amazing. Thank you for the "by Subject" and "Articles worth Reading" pages, which provide a nice bird's eye overview. I hadn't thought about that (even though it seems like common sense).


This is an interesting question. I faced a part of this head-on very early in my German studies. As you might imagine, coming off of three years of successful Spanish study, my motivation to use Spanish was very high indeed. After some direct experimenting, what I ended up deciding is that it is head and shoulders better to pair English with German than to try to pair Spanish against German in my case. Bidirectional translation does sound like a good and useful maintenance idea, but it is not one I have implemented. I am also still attracted to consuming several ES/DE dictionaries but haven't done so since it would not benefit my German studies much now. I believe if I went for bidirectional translation, I would still initially choose EN/DE + DE/EN since I would want to analyze the similarities in English sentence structure more than Spanish, even though both routes would work strictly speaking. To elaborate:

I looked at quite a few varieties of Spanish-oriented German learning materials and enjoyed them all with the often-expressed idea of bootstrapping. However, one and all, they seemed very much directed at Spanish natives. I could see all the various points they were referring to and that they wanted to highlight for German learning. However, nearly all of them were very far off the mark, given my native English upbringing. Importantly, they also tended to miss the boat entirely when trying to find pain points for me. Using English fit like a hand shoe from day one.

When it comes to maintenance, I am actually ignoring both English and Spanish almost entirely. With English, I am giving up more advanced studies in favor of undertaking similar studies using German with the idea of pursuing a second education and creating a sort of independent cognitive sphere around those advanced studies (or in the case of entertainment, exploring new genres).

With Spanish, it is whole nine yards. Today, I very much view Spanish as a spoken language, a language of travel and a language for exploring culture and interacting. My views while learning it were much more comprehensive and some of the advanced reading and listening that I originally planned to use Spanish with can be covered by German. I am unclear as to how far I will take German writing and speaking and that is why Spanish clarified so readily as a spoken and written language. My concept of Spanish maintenance is tied to an evolved idea of the future taking into account German abilities as I am able to develop them.

Tasks handled in German may not need to be handled in Spanish and vice-versa, forming a relatively compact concept of targeted language maintenance. German is far more difficult for me on most levels than Spanish, so even if I want to maintain Spanish, the time devoted to it would be a minuscule percentage of my study time. Even today, drop me in a Spanish culture cold, and I am 110% more confident than I am with my current German abilities, even after taking 2.5 years off Spanish. It is not even a close comparison. Some of it is a moot point in that I await the re-opening of the world before I engage in the type of travel that would drop me square in the middle of Veintemundos (living in USA, I can typically get to Spanish speaking countries via much shorter flights, far easier than getting to Europe).

Spanish cognates helped me learn initially and also have a massive impact as I slowly go about forgetting. On that downhill slide, cognates still help me maintain the capacity to intuitively form words in Spanish accurately and on the fly, which is a big deal with respect to revival around speaking and writing. Due to covid, I lost my normal in-office opportunity to speak Spanish, but when I have had the chance, I was able to speak basic conversational Spanish without any major issues. Likewise with writing via chat. I believe when I go back to Spanish, it can and will be a targeted move, which will make the maintenance plan easy to construct. For the record, I have not run into anyone in Houston capable of forming a complete German sentence. If they could do so, they certainly did not advertise it and I rarely if ever catch a thick German accent. So where I currently live, my ideas around maintenance make sense to me.
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Re: Coldrainwater's German Log

Postby AllSubNoDub » Fri Nov 05, 2021 1:09 am

coldrainwater wrote:Spanish cognates helped me learn initially and also have a massive impact as I slowly go about forgetting. On that downhill slide, cognates still help me maintain the capacity to intuitively form words in Spanish accurately and on the fly, which is a big deal with respect to revival around speaking and writing. Due to covid, I lost my normal in-office opportunity to speak Spanish, but when I have had the chance, I was able to speak basic conversational Spanish without any major issues. Likewise with writing via chat. I believe when I go back to Spanish, it can and will be a targeted move, which will make the maintenance plan easy to construct. For the record, I have not run into anyone in Houston capable of forming a complete German sentence. If they could do so, they certainly did not advertise it and I rarely if ever catch a thick German accent. So where I currently live, my ideas around maintenance make sense to me.

I see. You have obviously calculated this into your plans. I did not have the foresight to do so when I went off to college and essentially dropped German cold (and later Spanish, which I was learning much less intensively) in favor of taking extra coursework. I wish I had done something.

Dr. Arguelles's recent video on scriptorium has made me rethink my maintenance plans going forward and prompted my original question. IIRC, he seems to think ~10 minutes a day of scriptorium is an excellent maintenance routine per language (his example for Spanish was taking down Borges, which is probably both interesting and dense enough to make it an enjoyable yet worthwhile pursuit). I would assume there's some pretty strong Pareto Principle going on there. I mentioned bi-directional translation because of the "2 birds, 1 stone" effect. FWIW, I did not find speaking Spanish nearly enough to maintain it, though these were typically very short, repetitive interactions.

I can see what you mean with Spanish vs. German, as once you get over the initial hurdle in Spanish you find yourself in a vast sea of cognates. German is almost the exact complement: basic, everyday vocabulary will have English cognates (Handschuh for instance ;) ), but that crutch falls away quickly at the higher registers. So if you were to "forget" one then bring it back, I guess Spanish would probably be the logical choice.

I have read the entirety of your Spanish logs and found them amazingly useful and motivational. As I climb that mountain myself, it would pain me to see another slide down.
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Re: Coldrainwater's German Log

Postby coldrainwater » Fri Nov 05, 2021 4:12 am

AllSubNoDub wrote:I see. You have obviously calculated this into your plans. I did not have the foresight to do so when I went off to college and essentially dropped German cold (and later Spanish, which I was learning much less intensively) in favor of taking extra coursework. I wish I had done something.

Dr. Arguelles's recent video on scriptorium has made me rethink my maintenance plans going forward and prompted my original question. IIRC, he seems to think ~10 minutes a day of scriptorium is an excellent maintenance routine per language (his example for Spanish was taking down Borges, which is probably both interesting and dense enough to make it an enjoyable yet worthwhile pursuit). I would assume there's some pretty strong Pareto Principle going on there. I mentioned bi-directional translation because of the "2 birds, 1 stone" effect. FWIW, I did not find speaking Spanish nearly enough to maintain it, though these were typically very short, repetitive interactions.

I can see what you mean with Spanish vs. German, as once you get over the initial hurdle in Spanish you find yourself in a vast sea of cognates. German is almost the exact complement: basic, everyday vocabulary will have English cognates (Handschuh for instance ;) ), but that crutch falls away quickly at the higher registers. So if you were to "forget" one then bring it back, I guess Spanish would probably be the logical choice.

I have read the entirety of your Spanish logs and found them amazingly useful and motivational. As I climb that mountain myself, it would pain me to see another slide down.

Thanks for mentioning the recent video. Before Dr. Arguelles made the introductory comparison, when I saw the topic scriptorium, I was already thinking, 'ah, that reminds me to incorporate shadowing into my German training'. So I already fell into the most common bucket he mentioned, overplaying shadowing and underestimating scriptorium. My recent work with LR seemed to prompt output of some common phrases mainly via mimicry and I couldn't help but make the possible connection to shadowing as a very viable addition to the technique. The ideas around scriptorium seem very compelling and some of what I am currently doing while reading intensively would benefit by taking into account what he does with scriptorium (mainly around the careful analysis piece implemented in whatever way I find most helpful).

As I left off Spanish, my partners told me that the two areas needing improvement were first grammar while speaking and secondarily pronunciation. Another idea from my side on maintenance is to actually go directly to improving my own weak points (grammar/pronunciation) and let the rest take care of itself. If I were to add a second language back in like Spanish, it would feel better to me to work towards building a new stronger skill in that language than to work towards maintenance of the old (vocab/reading was overpowered, grammar/pronunciation too weak). That might be especially true if I chose to maintain for only a few minutes per day. I use that argument to justify the continued use of Anki (that it only takes a few minutes per day) so could logically use it again for maintenance of a second language.

Borges sounds literally perfect for scriptorium. I remember when I looked at Ficciones in English, I recognized just how complex it really was and how interesting it would be to come back later on when I was likely to be able to piece together more of the references included (and hopefully also had more exposure to the relevant literature, religious references etc).

You hit the nail on the head in how you describe German as complementary. When I expect cognates at the higher registers, I am grasping at a crutch that vanishes as I get within reach. I have needed to look up words in English that were trivial in German due to uncommon Latin roots and common/recognizable German etymology. I am just now beginning to fully appreciate how hard and varied German can be at the higher registers. Spanish definitely felt like a vast sea of cognates with the grammar piece as a vast sea of verb conjugations. A massive oversimplification in both respects, but impressions are impressions.

I wish I could claim the maintenance was all planned ahead between German and Spanish, but it is likely more accurate to describe it as seeing where I walk, then laying the concrete. The only thing that was for sure pre-planned from my youth was an interest in life-long learning and a focus on challenging material. I too dropped languages many years ago and only more recently took them back up (Spanish only in high school and only to fill the requirement).

Other thoughts came in very much after I saw what was happening with German. German learning progresses so slowly in comparison that I had ample time to reflect. Learning German is like having a much more powerful lens pointed at the language since it appears to have so many lower levels for me before I unlock new abilities. I notice plenty in German that I perhaps just lept right over in Spanish. The reality of maintaining Spanish may not end up matching the fear of letting it slip, especially if passive skills are strong enough. English supports Spanish day to day via cognates.

On my side, I have to mention that so much of all this discussion comes down to my own personal temperament in that I focus on a single thing and go in with a shogun. Even within German, my wanderlust is mainly within different macro and micro linguistic study areas of the same language. Perhaps my closest comparison would be against prior knowledge in different academic disciplines initially acquired imperfectly. As I get older, I have watched quite a few subjects that I once knew decently slip. Some of them will have to be revived. Even still, I don't think I would have chosen the route of trying to maintain them all and instead would have paid the price of revival once I rediscovered the need.
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Re: Coldrainwater's German Log

Postby coldrainwater » Fri Dec 24, 2021 12:31 pm

My poor neglected log...needs an update. I run a high risk of missing a few chronicles in my journey with such infrequent updates. Since my last entry, quite a bit has happened. I moved to a new apartment about an hour north of my current location, meaning I officially live in Magnolia, TX now rather than Houston. It is hard to put my finger on exactly what makes this apt better than my previous abode, but overall I am much more satisfied now. The biggest factor is a reduction in traffic to tolerable levels. And of course, everything works. I sometimes get the impression that every few years I flee from one apt to another, leaving in my wake a pile of semi-functional appliances.

I watched Youtube and listened to enough lectures and audiobooks to complete the super challenge hour requirement in time. I am not sure if I mentioned it previously but I also finished book nine of ten in the Malazan Book of the Fallen. Youtube on my Android has been a case of the App Strikes Back and tends to crash frequently on initial startup. I will likely preload going forward to eliminate the false starts and ramp up time.

Instead of reading this month, I have invested an inordinate number of hours playing World of Warcraft in German. I tend to get the urge to play starting in November around the cold months. One or two expansions back, I tried it briefly in Spanish but realized my Spanish level was too high to benefit from playing and abandoned the game. With German, it is at just the right spot to play and still feel challenged by the language. That is an advantage to German for me in that I am finding it a harder language with challenge opportunities in a much wider variety of areas.

As it stands, I suspect playing WOW will be like taking one step forward and two steps back. To use it for stronger language progress, I would likely need to supplement additional reading at a minimum. For now, I am happy playing and enjoying the experience even if it doesn't move the language forward this winter.

I plan to travel a bit to visit family this coming week, so my language program may evolve further almost as I type. Reading Wikipedia articles has been mostly lost in the shuffle for now as I find reading books via smartphone/Anki to be more efficient.

The reading I have done has been interesting. With less reading per day, I notice the need for a warm-up much more acutely. Often the first 10+ minutes of reading are purely devoted to getting in gear. I have been reading while training per usual and have been adjusting to a new fitness routine (still able to read in motion as a stated Polyglot fitness challenge goal). After 30 minutes to an hour, I tend to hit an acceptable stride and regain most of my reading ability. When I used to read 3-5 hours per day, this was less noticeable since I almost always felt warmed up going in. Needing a warm-up period has always happened with listening, so it is not exactly a new phenomenon, but it is interesting to see it reflected in real-time in such a replicable manner. Reading from the same book, bit by bit, can help alleviate the warm-up a bit since I keep coming back to the very limited and narrow language space of whichever book I am trudging through. Comparing it to my previous LR experience make this style of reading seem very inefficient.

Happy holidays to all!
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