Mista's new perpetual log (currently: Russian and Japanese))

Continue or start your personal language log here, including logs for challenge participants
Mista
Blue Belt
Posts: 608
Joined: Wed May 11, 2016 11:03 pm
Location: Norway
Languages: Norwegian (N), English (QN). Studied Ancient Greek (MA), Linguistics (MA), Latin (BA), German (BA). Italian at A2/B1 level. Learning: French, Japanese, Russian (focus) and various others, like Polish, Spanish, Vietnamese, and anything that comes my way. Also know some Sanskrit (but not the script) and Coptic. Really want to learn Arabic and Amharic.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=7497
x 1459

Re: Mista's new perpetual log (currently French, Russian, Italian)

Postby Mista » Mon Nov 23, 2020 2:13 pm

I finished the book I was reading in German, and have now reached my 5+5 goal for that language. I said earlier that I would switch to either Greek or Icelandic, but I ended up with Italian. The main reason was that I needed to get out of the house and go for a walk, and I had an Italian audiobook ready on Audible. I tried listening to L'amica geniale on audio last SC, but it was too difficult. Now that I've read the first 100 pages of the book, it's much easier. I've also continued reading the book, not with a pen in hand as described earlier, but just reading. I have too much other stuff to read for my exams, starting in two weeks, so I'm trying to make my foreign language reading fill the function of relaxation and bedside reading. It won't work with Sami and Russian, but it's working with German and Italian (no doubt, the choice of books is essential).

Oslo is under second wave Covid restrictions at the moment, and one of the consequences is that the cinemas are closed. It looked like the third international film festival in Oslo would be the third to be cancelled this year, but fortunately, somebody thought that enough is enough and decided to make it digital. This festival, "Films from South", normally has films from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and this year, they have also incorporated the Arabic Film Festival, which was cancelled in March. Although I prefer going to the cinema, this is a lot better than nothing, and on the plus side, it will now be available to everyone throughout Norway. Here's the link, I encourage everyone living in Norway to check it out: https://www.filmfrasor.no/no/
6 x

Mista
Blue Belt
Posts: 608
Joined: Wed May 11, 2016 11:03 pm
Location: Norway
Languages: Norwegian (N), English (QN). Studied Ancient Greek (MA), Linguistics (MA), Latin (BA), German (BA). Italian at A2/B1 level. Learning: French, Japanese, Russian (focus) and various others, like Polish, Spanish, Vietnamese, and anything that comes my way. Also know some Sanskrit (but not the script) and Coptic. Really want to learn Arabic and Amharic.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=7497
x 1459

Re: Mista's new perpetual log (currently French, Russian, Sami, Icelandic and Arabic + summer project Danish. romance la

Postby Mista » Mon Nov 30, 2020 9:59 pm

November Super Challenge update (total numbers)

French
Books: 2532 pages = 50 books
Films: 4274 minutes = 47 films

Took a break from Madame Bovary, now reading Candide (almost finished)

Started the film festival with "La nuit des rois" from Senegal, where a young man is sent to a prison where the inmates rule, and is forced to participate a ritual where he has to tell a story all night, or he will be killed

Ancient Greek
Books: 8 pages

Spanish
Books: 51 pages = 1 book
Films: none

Portuguese
Books: 88 pages = 1.5 books
Films: none

Swedish
Books: 579 pages = 11 books
Films: 1317 minutes = 14 films

Halfway through the audiobook Att inte vilja se, the 4th book in the series

Arabic
Books: none
Films: 285 minutes = 3 films

Watched Let's talk by Marianne Khoury at the film festival. It's a very interesting documentary where she talks to her daughter, her brothers, her uncle (the film maker Yousef Chahine) and her father's sister about her mother and about family relations. Women and marriage is a central theme, and it was also interesting from a linguistic point of view, as there is a lot of code switching going on. At some point, Marianne asks her uncle which language he spoke at home, and he says: "Like everyone in Alexandria: Arabic, French and Italian." I didn't notice any Italian in the film, but there's a lot of switching between French and Arabic, and Marianne herself has a tendency to throw in English words (she studied in London).

English
Books: 2720 pages = 54 books
Films: 2377 minutes = 26 films

Included the online video lectures from my class in the count.

Read Season of Migration to the North bu Tayeb Salih and Augustown by Kei Miller

Icelandic
Books: 170 pages = 3 books
Films: 205 minutes = 2.5 films

Sami
Books: 10 pages
Films: 30 minutes

Russian
Books: 189 pages = 3.5 book
Films: 469 minutes = 5 films

On my third round of Шинель

Danish
Books: 1222 pages = 24 books
Films: 1320 minutes = 14 books

Latin
Books: 23 pages

German
Books: 283 pages = 5 books
Films: 470 minutes = 5 films

Italian
Books: 201 pages = 4 books
Films: 273 minutes = 3 films


Average per day
Books: 38 pages (of 41)
Films: 52 minutes (of 75)[/quote]
5 x

Mista
Blue Belt
Posts: 608
Joined: Wed May 11, 2016 11:03 pm
Location: Norway
Languages: Norwegian (N), English (QN). Studied Ancient Greek (MA), Linguistics (MA), Latin (BA), German (BA). Italian at A2/B1 level. Learning: French, Japanese, Russian (focus) and various others, like Polish, Spanish, Vietnamese, and anything that comes my way. Also know some Sanskrit (but not the script) and Coptic. Really want to learn Arabic and Amharic.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=7497
x 1459

Re: Mista's new perpetual log (currently French, Russian, Italian)

Postby Mista » Fri Dec 11, 2020 11:58 am

I just finished my last exam. This semester started with my grandmother's death, and I never quite got on top of things after that. I'm glad it's finally over.

I'm going home for Christmas in 11 days (and very thankful that we are allowed!). With the situation as it is, we're just going to be my parents, my brother and me. Until then, I'm hoping that my days will look something like this:
- 30 minutes French: reading Madame Bovary
- 30 minutes Russian, later Sami
- a daily dose of exercise
- a daily dose of housework
- 30-60 minutes reading Icelandic, then Spanish
- a movie in the evening
- various reading, including a couple of books I want to read before giving them away for Christmas

In my quest to reach 5 books in all of my SC languages, I finished Italian, and got to 6 "books" by the end of the actual book. I then switched to Icelandic, and reached 5, then 6, "books" there too, and hope to finish the actual book this weekend. In Russian, I'm on my fourth round of Шинель, and have 20 pages left to reach the boal and 28 to finish the book.

In between studying for the exam, I did that vocabulary test that several people around the forum have been doing lately. My scores were:
French: 7700 (like a 10yo child)
English: 23022 (like a 30yo successful businessman)
Norwegian: 29864 (like a professor of Norwegian)

I don't know why I'm posting this, because looking at those numbers makes me a little depressed, tbh (I mean the French, obviously, and especially in comparison to the two others)
3 x

User avatar
Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4768
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
Location: Denmark
Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
x 14962

Re: Mista's new perpetual log (currently French, Russian, Italian)

Postby Iversen » Fri Dec 11, 2020 7:58 pm

It is hard to test grammar and idiomatic competence, but at least there is a way to check your vocabulary yourself without using an internetbased test.

You take a mediumsized dictionary from your L2 to L1 or some other language where you feel entirely comfortable, and then you selectt for instance 10 or 20 random pages where you note down all the headwords using three colors: green for definitely known, red for definitely not known and blue for everything in between. Choose beforehand whether to exclude proper names - but with languages where country nationality names etc. regularly are altered it would be OK to include them. Then you count how many words fall in those categories and multiply up to the total number of pages in the dictionary, followed by a calculation of percentages. The more pages you include the more trustworthy the end results become.

If you doubt that you can trust your own objectivity then it can be tested by running through the words a few days later. Do you still remember the meaning of the words you marked as 'known'? If yes, then the results are not totally of the mark.

Another potential reason to doubt the result could be the choice of dictionaries. Well, I have tested my vocabulary using very small and very large dictionary, and my conclusion is that the percentages aren't as dependent on the size as you might expect. Of course you can't prove that you know 30.000 headwords with a dictionary that only lists 10.000 words, but the percentages might still be close to those obtained with a dictionary of 60.000 words - so using a dictionary with for instance 30.000 will still be OK. If you get for instance 50% there then it is unlikely than you would drop til 25% using the larger dictionary - though that might happen with a dictionary of 200.000 words because most words there would be unknown even for an educated native speaker.

Unfortunately there isn't a simple way way to test grammatical or idiomatic knowledge. The best kind of test would let users fill out lacunes in test sentences, but then you have a problem with 'correct' answers that aren't accepted because the the author didn't expect to see them. And I have seen reports from research where both open and multi-choice answers were investigated, and the clear conclusion from that was that multi-choice testing overestimate the skills of the test persons even when you have eliminated the influence from random choices. The reason is that it only tests recognition, whereas free answers demand a minimum of unsollicited knowledge.

But until then: try to make some dictionary based estimates of your vocabulary sizes - this will give you a safer basis for interpreting results from those online tests.
4 x

User avatar
Cèid Donn
Blue Belt
Posts: 513
Joined: Thu Nov 15, 2018 10:48 pm
Languages: en-us (n); français, gàidhlig, gaeilge, cymraeg, brezhoneg, español
x 1877

Re: Mista's new perpetual log (currently French, Russian, Italian)

Postby Cèid Donn » Fri Dec 11, 2020 8:03 pm

What is that site even? (That's colloquial North American English sarcasm, not an actual inquiry.)

Once I tried to do that French test on Dialang, and on the first part, that tests your familiarity with vocabulary, I got a perfect score and the results for that section said I had a native speaker's vocabulary, which is absolutely absurd. :roll: I was so annoyed by that that I didn't even bother with the rest of the test. :lol:

Frankly, with measuring language skills, be careful about how you interpret test results of any kind, but especially from any online test. I've worked in education all my adult life, I've been everything from a GRE/MCAT tutor for rich college kids to a classroom teacher administrating standardized tests to less privileged grade school kids, and I could go into a long rant about how the majority of tests test how well you can take a test as much as, if not more, than your actual abilities. But I'll just say, that unless it's a very knowledgeable and fair teacher who is gauging your abilities in real time over an adequate period of observation, do not take any test scores as some kind of gospel truth--especially with languages, because so much of our skill with language is not quantifiable in ways that can be measured by standardized testing (which all online tests are), and this includes the normal fluctuations of fluency and confidence that any speaker, both L1 and L2, experiences because that's just how our brains work.

I know people like clear-cut answers and "hard" data to "prove" they or someone else are good (or not) at a thing, but that's not reality. Reality is messy, fuzzy and harder to measure, and that's OK. What's more important for self-learners is developing the ability to self-assess their own weak and strong points, because you will always have the most data about your own abilities compared to what a test can assess, and if you learn to understand that data, you can make very good assessments on your own.
2 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.

Mista
Blue Belt
Posts: 608
Joined: Wed May 11, 2016 11:03 pm
Location: Norway
Languages: Norwegian (N), English (QN). Studied Ancient Greek (MA), Linguistics (MA), Latin (BA), German (BA). Italian at A2/B1 level. Learning: French, Japanese, Russian (focus) and various others, like Polish, Spanish, Vietnamese, and anything that comes my way. Also know some Sanskrit (but not the script) and Coptic. Really want to learn Arabic and Amharic.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=7497
x 1459

Re: Mista's new perpetual log (classical intermezzo: Greek, Latin, Norse)

Postby Mista » Fri Jan 01, 2021 8:58 am

December Super Challenge update (total numbers)

French
Books: 3112 pages = 62 books
Films: 4478 minutes = 49 films

Finished Notre-Dame de Paris, almost done with Madame Bovary

Ancient Greek
Books: 8 pages

Spanish
Books: 116 pages = 2 books
Films: none

Portuguese
Books: 262 pages = 5 books
Films: none

Read O alquimista on kindle over Christmas

Swedish
Books: 611 pages = 12 books
Films: 1723 minutes = 19 films

Arabic
Books: none
Films: 564 minutes = 6 films

More films from the Film festival: Adam (from Morocco), A son (from Tunisia), and Tiny Souls, a documewntary from a refugee camp in Lebanon

English
Books: 3854 pages = 77 books
Films: 2377 minutes = 26 films

Read A Town like Alice, The Plot against America, and The Three-body Problem

Icelandic
Books: 380 pages = 7 books
Films: 521 minutes = 5 films

Sami
Books: 53 pages = 1 book
Films: 45 minutes

Russian
Books: 257 pages = 5 books
Films: 469 minutes = 5 films

Danish
Books: 1303 pages = 24 books
Films: 1320 minutes = 14 books

Read the first two volumes of the graphic novel Aya, which my mother has in Danish (I'm guessing they have been on sale on Norway because there is no Norwegian translation)

Latin
Books: 23 pages

German
Books: 283 pages = 5 books
Films: 470 minutes = 5 films

Italian
Books: 324 pages = 6 books
Films: 580 minutes = 6 films

Turkish
Films: 196 minutes = 2 films

Hive (from the film festival)
Sommerfugler (butterflies) (DVD from the library)

Japanese
Films: 113 minutes = 1 film

Under kirsebærtrærne (under the cherry trees) (from the film festival)

Average per day
Books: 35 pages (of 41)
Films: 42 minutes (of 75)

I've also unofficially started to track my Nynorsk reading, where I'm currently at 341 pages = 7 books
8 x

Mista
Blue Belt
Posts: 608
Joined: Wed May 11, 2016 11:03 pm
Location: Norway
Languages: Norwegian (N), English (QN). Studied Ancient Greek (MA), Linguistics (MA), Latin (BA), German (BA). Italian at A2/B1 level. Learning: French, Japanese, Russian (focus) and various others, like Polish, Spanish, Vietnamese, and anything that comes my way. Also know some Sanskrit (but not the script) and Coptic. Really want to learn Arabic and Amharic.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=7497
x 1459

Re: Mista's new perpetual log (classical intermezzo: Greek, Latin, Norse)

Postby Mista » Sat Jan 02, 2021 4:09 pm

So, as already announced in my new log title, I'm planning to spend a few weeks studying classical languages (although I'm not sure Old Norse can be called a "classical language", strictly speaking, but at least it's old).

Latin
This is my 365-challenge language for the next couple of weeks. I'm reading Ab urbe condita, and in the process making a parallell text in word. I'm thinking that I can later make it a pdf and read it in kindle, and also import it into anki to get sentence-by-sentence cards. But for now, I'm just going to continue what I'm doing until I reach the end of the first book.

Greek
My plan is to read Herodotus, I'll probably start tomorrow.

Old Norse
This semester, a new course appeared at the university, teaching the basics of Icelandic to students of Old Norse. I've registered for it, but I don't have the recommended background, which is the introductory course to Old Norse. Therefore, I'm planning to read through the grammar book they used at that course last semester. If I get the time, I'll also have a look at the text they read (10 pages from an Old Norse text).

Greek and Latin are now the only languages where I haven't made it to one book yet in the SC. I'm also still below 5 in Spanish and Sami, and I haven't met my 5 films goal in Spanish, Portuguese, Sami, Turkish and Japanese. I'm planning to do what I can to get there by the end of January, though I can say straight away that I won't get there with Sami reading.

Apart from that, I've picked up again Crime and Punishment in Swedish, and I'm also planning to start reading some other books for my literature courses soon.
8 x

User avatar
tungemål
Blue Belt
Posts: 947
Joined: Sat Apr 06, 2019 3:56 pm
Location: Norway
Languages: Norwegian (N)
English, German, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Polish
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=17672
x 2181

Re: Mista's new perpetual log (classical intermezzo: Greek, Latin, Norse)

Postby tungemål » Sun Jan 03, 2021 12:03 pm

What is the book they use at the Old Norse introductory course? I've got a book by Terje Spurkland, but haven't read it.
0 x

Mista
Blue Belt
Posts: 608
Joined: Wed May 11, 2016 11:03 pm
Location: Norway
Languages: Norwegian (N), English (QN). Studied Ancient Greek (MA), Linguistics (MA), Latin (BA), German (BA). Italian at A2/B1 level. Learning: French, Japanese, Russian (focus) and various others, like Polish, Spanish, Vietnamese, and anything that comes my way. Also know some Sanskrit (but not the script) and Coptic. Really want to learn Arabic and Amharic.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=7497
x 1459

Re: Mista's new perpetual log (classical intermezzo: Greek, Latin, Norse)

Postby Mista » Sun Jan 03, 2021 12:51 pm

tungemål wrote:What is the book they use at the Old Norse introductory course? I've got a book by Terje Spurkland, but haven't read it.

You can actually choose between three different books. Spurkland's book is one of them, but the one I have is by Odd Einar Haugen, Grunnbok i norrønt språk. It's the newest of the three, and comes with a CD-ROM with exercises.

Here's the link to the full curriculum, if you're interested: https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iln ... index.html. All the grammar books are available online from Nasjonalbiblioteket (though not necessarily the latest edition).
3 x

User avatar
tungemål
Blue Belt
Posts: 947
Joined: Sat Apr 06, 2019 3:56 pm
Location: Norway
Languages: Norwegian (N)
English, German, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Polish
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=17672
x 2181

Re: Mista's new perpetual log (classical intermezzo: Greek, Latin, Norse)

Postby tungemål » Tue Jan 05, 2021 10:00 am

I started a resource list here: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 19&t=16442 since I'm interested in studying some Old Norse.
If you've got more to contribute please do. Is there a good online dictionary somewhere?
3 x


Return to “Language logs”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: emk, Google [Bot] and 3 guests