Lisa's Language Log

[Lisa]

You mentioned the workload of catching up with Anki. I can relate. I heard about an addon named loaded balancer or something it that makes that task more approachable and less daunting.

Found it, and it does look good - once I have some time I'll try it out. I'm a little back version on anki right now, so I should deal with that as well, but I'm very distracted right now. I don't think this can actually solve the problem of how many reviews behind you are, since anki is a time-based algorithm and time has passed... but it might make the whole thing less painful (and I can't believe how much time I've spent trying to reduce the pain via moving cards around between decks).

[Lisa]

After I finished Death on the Nile (translated 1959), I've reread 13 bei Tisch (which appears to use a rather antique german, I believe the translation is from 1934) , the man in the brown suit (translated 1963), and am in the middle of rereading Nikotin (1935; per wikipedia translated by the same person, but it doesn't seem as weird as 13 bei Tisch). Given it's been a month I seem to be moving pretty well along, though I'm trying to be focused on vocabulary and grammar. I've been avoiding adding anything new to anki from books.

I've been doing the weekly italki and I'm quite happy. It's challenging, and makes me keenly aware of my weaknesses.... but I can get my point across. My biggest problem is that I attempt sentences that are beyond my abilities, full of dependent clauses and conditionals. I think I do this in english too... but in english they are incomprehensible but at least grammatically correct. In the sessions, we've had a number of topics and a variety of homework assignments which has been interesting.

Periodically I spend some time listening to graded material, or native german talk show/discussion type programs on youtube... on the graded stuff, I get much but not all, and when there are german subtitles I can read them too easily and lose track of what they are saying aloud. I get maybe half of the native materials but it varies a lot, people's speed of talking varies a lot so some people I get most and some hardly anything.

I was on an anki roll for a while, but I think I'm starting to wear. I sorted out words that I knew well enough to ignore - almost 1000 words - and archived them; inspired by LeBaron, I exported them to disk and deleted them from Anki, since they were cluttering my space and I don't need to review der Mann or die Butter on any schedule. I have created bunches of mini-phrases for the more challenging words (I am amazed at how fast the mini-phrases I was learning before, came back in full, since some were a bit hard to hammer in the first time).
There is still a ton of overdue cards, and I add cards from my italki sessions or homework... but the backlog is just going to have to be okay. It is down to about 3400. I have been spotting some of the tricky words in reading or even (wow) in audio and that's encouraging. Some of the tough nuts seem to have cracked a bit.

In the area of grammar... my homework this week was to review separable verbs, which are not difficult (in theory), but one of my grammar books has exercises and doing exercises of any kind will surely help my production. I'm still not altogether clear on my adjective endings - I've got my key phrases setup in anki to study them, but some are giving me trouble (ein words with genitive, which I'm not at all sure I should even be bothering with)... but I've been able to use what I do remember to improve my results for mini-phrases (which often include an adjective). And as a bonus, I'm getting drilled on der/ein declensions along with adjective endings.

[Lisa]

Two more italki sessions... boy, 45 minutes completely drains my brain. I suppose this is a good thing but I think for a living too, so it's hard to get back to work.

Finished Nikotin, and finished a childrens book, Geheimnis der goldenen Vögel. My next patch of german books came in so I'm spoilt for choice. I don't want to just keep reading my agatha christies, but I did get one more... I have been wondering why I prefer these so much, in spite of the more challenging language. I think it's since they are just so comforting to read while wandering around the strange language, confusing words, and frightening grammatical constructions; a familiar story and tone makes the language easier to face. I might even reread LOTR for the same reason.

One of my italki homeworks was the DW Deutsch Learnen, B1 Nicos Weg, and I've been continuing that. I have a little trouble completely understanding the spoken language on video, though the text and even the grammar(!) is mostly easy. I'm not sure it wouldn't be better to listen to native videos on youtube but it's a lot of work to find ones that are interesting and not too long. The slow german ones would work but I think you need a subscription to get rid of the subtitles, and if there are subtitles I will read them...

Still hammering though the anki backlog (it's surprising how easy it is to relearn, but the sheer number of words is overwelming... the backlog being down to 2500 doesn't feel like progress. Though it may have been pretty large before I started my break, since an overwhelming backlog does make giving up appealing.

And battering myself against the wall of adjective endings. There are 48 endings to learn. Those non-preceded genitive singulars feel like a waste of time... but that's what I said about second-place familiar plural at one point. And noun genders, for that matter. Anyway online exercises show me at about 80%. Next up grammarwise: prepositions. I think it will be easier than adjective endings, since they are less arbitrary.... but we will see. And I have noticed a problem with als vs. wenn that I need to work on.

[Lisa]

I overdid things a bit for awhile; didn't really get burned out, but it was just taking too much time, so took a week off from the tutor and youtube. I might not start that up again for another couple of week until the various tomato plants delivery trips are done and the garden is settled.

Adjective endings are in fairly good shape. Just started the non-proceeded but it's looking like they will be easy. I found a number of errors in my anki phrases - I only use examples from the online dictionaries, but I'd apparently taken an example with a non-proceeded adjective, and stuck on a leading article, without changing the ending. Tut tut.

To get Anki to where I didn't hate it, I stashed about 2/3 of the words (this doesn't include the 10% of well-known words I'd earlier stashed), so it's down to about 1500 words, which seems easier to focus on. It still feels like I'm playing catch-up, especially since I had to start including conjugations and plurals again (my tutor's homework exposed some weaknesses); but it does feel like I am catching up, not just getting farther behind.

Finished the audio book for der Mord an Roger Ackroyd. Need to find another audiobook for the car, now that I'm driving to Portland again.

I'm about halfway through Der Ball Spielende Hund. One of the books I got, and attempted to start, was an Eckhart Tolle, which I got since the spanish-self help books were useful practice, and I have this particular book in english; but that was a bad choice. The book uses common words but in weird contexts to make rather esoteric points or concepts; okay in english, but it's very hard to get a handle on the meaning of the sentences/paragraphs in german.

[Lisa]

Finished Balle Spielend Hund and started a cozy: Manchmal muss es eben Mord sein; native german written in 2013, never read before; so rather different from my usual fair.

Many words and expressions I don't know, since e.g. hole punches don't actually appear in Agatha Christie. That sense of missing vocab happens pretty much every new book I start, though. Online dictionaries have been much less helpful, partly since words like Ablage can have several meanings and none entirely make sense in context.

It was quite challenging to get my bearings, though, during the first chapters. The construction of many books (including Agatha Christies), starts off by introducing various unrelated characters (who will meet sometime) in life scenes, from which you have to figure out their age, gender, profession, etc. Agatha Christie has pretty standard "types" so even if you don't know the particular book it's not hard to figure out. For other authors it can be more tricky. I was guessing this one character was a male actor but after several re-reads, determined instead a female policeman. And I'm suspecting there's a fair bit of deadpan/ridiculous humor; some small mildy entertaining stuff, but other bits give me some confusion, and it can be hard to know what is part of the plot or if it's just decoration; some things that seem overdone and are just not funny; and I am fairly sure there is some of this that is going right over my head.

Other than reading and anki, most everything is on hold until the garden season is under control...

[Lisa]

Finished Manchmal, and also Lady Hardcastle und der Tote im Wald.

My next book I found on amazon US - Das Geheimnis der Chimneys. What I got was not the normal book I expected. It turned out (I believe) that someone scanned a book (possibly the same 2005 paperback I have, if the hyphenation over line breaks leading to typos in the German is a clue), ran it through DeepL, then had it printed up at something like LuLu. Clever! The not-human-like typos eventually gave it away. A review on amazon DE pointed out that use of du and Sie was all over the place, and I went back and... wow.

DeepL is very sensitive to small details and adding double quotes to part of a paragraph, somehow makes it decide to use different prepositions or verbs. Once I got every punctuation right in the english (from my paperback), the translation was word-for-word identical. I'm very impressed with DeepL in general, it can figure out words that are not in any of the online dictionaries... but yes, what it produces can be very rough.

But, although I felt I should return it in indignation, and that I shouldn't read crappy German lest it mess me up... but, I kept it and read it. It was in fact rather easier to read than real German, but mostly since I really like the book and it was in my hands and I'd have a long wait to get an actual translation or a book that was remotely as appealing. It was fun noticing problems in the text, and I avoiding paying any attention to grammatical details. Not quite sure what to do with the book now, though. Perhaps I can mark it with highlighter up for new words or errors or something.

As for Anki - I've accepted I'll never catch up or keep up... also realizing I spend too much time on it. The part of my whole deck that I was working on got a little boring so I rotated in a different chunk. Added some new words for trees and vegetables and other interesting things, rather than <shudder> trying to learn these terrible verbs that all look the same and each has about 20 different meanings that completely overlap with other verbs. I've also been adding more grammar drills; besides adjective endings (solid on der, marginally okay on ein, non-proceeded still rough; the problem is I keep getting them mixed up), some prepositions and some relative pronouns, set up so the interval is never over a month since I seem to forget these details faster than regular words.

[Lisa]

Haven't done much besides reading and anki; the garden is not quite in (3 weeks late with all the rain and cold). Also I think that since it doesn't look like I'll get to Germany anytime soon, it's giving me motivation problems.

Read Death on the Nile again, then started Ein Schritt ins Leer, which is not that enjoyable; disappointing since I quite like this book in english. It's interesting how the same book gives quite a different experience if it's quickly read in english or slowly read in different language. More books arrived; the second lady hardcastle, the second frida mey, and yet another agatha christie (the chimneys, I think). And I've been surfing the internet a bit in german rather than english. I went back to some of the books I opened early on and just couldn't make any sense of, and now they are quite understandable, if still somewhat slow going.

A couple of weeks ago I spent some time listening to the new audiobook (not agatha christie... vorhang auf ein mord, IIRC)... and it was tricky, spoken faster and slightly higher pitch than I'm used to; but I haven't had occasion to listen further since nor spent any time listening to anything else.

The problem with anki is that while I like it, and it's effective, I think (for me) it requires way too much time tuning the experience so I'm balanced between overwhelmed, frustrated, and bored. I enjoy the tuning, frankly, but I just think, where I am now, it's just alphabetizing the CDs, so to speak, and not really an effective use of time. I think I might need to take a break from it again, but I wasn't even caught up from the previous break... There's kind of an addictive quality to it, at first it promises learning, then the fear of getting behind keeps you showing up...

[Lisa]

testing - been seeing blacklist errors

[Le Baron]

testing - been seeing blacklist errors

Ah, so you too. I notified the admin of this when I couldn't post. It was quickly sourced to a problem in the DB.

[Lisa]

(glad they fixed the blacklist issues. I hadn't been around here much over the summer/fall, and then that happened, and I disappeared again)

Germans's been on hiatus this summer; although I've kept reading the german agatha christies (I have developed a kind of a obsession and have collected over 20 of them now, I have a couple of other books but the ACs are just the right mix of challenging and comfortable). And it's not been a waste, sometime over the summer/fall, my reading ability took an uptick and I felt more able to read some harder material, like the example sentences that the Collins online dictionary presents (although of course the first thing that happens after you think that, that is you find something that gives you trouble). I also think understanding spoken german has gotten easier but I might be overestimating myself.

I'd quit doing anki, then restarted, but I have enough words that it's just unmanageable. While I would like to have 20-30 minutes worth of cards to study every day, to get the right set of words out of all those cards just takes too much time. I keep trying new systems and they never just work, since passing a review just does not correlate well with really knowing a word. Sometimes when I see the english word prompt I throw something random in german and it's correct, although I don't have any idea where it came from, and there are plenty of words I am understanding in context but get wrong in anki.

Currently ignoring grammar except for adjective endings. I am still determined to master adjective endings but drilling on der and ein before I start again on not-proceeded. I would probably get at least a B on a test but I want this to be automatic and obvious.

This all said, I feel like it's stagnating a bit, and I've been considering something new, perhaps trying Assimil French (actually buying a program). My last start in French never went anywhere. As a false beginner with random abilities, programs were absolutely maddening but here I would be an actual beginner. I was also wondering if I should spend some time on Spanish as that has been idle for almost three years. I feel like I can still read fairly well, but I was so terrible at conversation... well maybe I didn't have a lot to lose there anyway .