Lisa's Language Log

[Lisa]

I completely ignored languages and anki for several months (fall is always so busy with harvest and vacation). But with the long dark evenings now I did have spare time, and I sure missed anki when it came to exercising inside.

The German audiobook ordered in August arrived during the break, and I started listening to from time to time. I'm happy with comprehension (cheating, since I've read it in english); I do repeat sections, and get more understanding. I have a queue of printed german books to read... but not reading in german (or any foreign language) currently.

When you set down anki for 3-4 months, it's an impossible situation to "catch up". I did start on it, though; going to keep it under sharp control so I don't go crazy. I really don't have goals in german; it's just that anki was such a motivator to exercise and the audiobook, while interesting, doesn't absorb me as much.

I have got it into my head to learn Esperanto; I started in duolingo, and downloaded a deck into anki. It's supposed to be easy to learn, and bound to be easier than german (!). I am not entirely sure I think this is a good plan... we'll see. I didn't (so far!) get any sense of too-much-work-for-any-possible-practical-use, that I got from Chinese and even Malay... esperanto words are very easy to learn. I haven't got a proper printed book on learning esperanto (not so think on the ground as german, never mind spanish...).

Currently I'm studying both german and esperanto words in anki. The languages are sufficiently different and my skill level is sufficiently different that it doesn't seem to conflict. Not going to be quite so easy to find printed books, though I've only done a little online searching (I'm not at any reading level, yet since I started from completely zero). I did find a translation of LOTR to esperanto, in pdf... but that's getting rather ahead of myself.

I was meaning to study french... but my light reading this fall has been late 20thC american, it's the early 20thC english authors that tend to toss out french and trigger me and that's not been happening. French just seems like a slog. I don't have the heart to study Italian since any travel seems very far off (never mind covid, it's a big deal when we're away from the dog for just 8 hours).

[Lisa]

So I got this idea to learn esperanto, and it is indeed easy. Duolingo for Esperanto is much easier than the other languages - don't really have to worry about conjugations or genders, and most of the words have easy hooks to remember the words. I'm learning words faster on duolingo than I can keep up with in anki, and I've surpassed my french level (which might just be duolingo, since I can read french better than I can read esperanto). I'm not working that hard, and still at a pretty low level. Sometimes I think I can see some made-upness of the language, which is a weird feeling.

It does seem like a very different experience than learning spanish or german... never mind the (lack of) resources, I have been trying to imagine using it, since the only people I could speak with would be other people who specifically decided to learn this language; it's not that likely I'd run into shopkeepers or taxi drivers. Whoever I speak with would be unlikely to have that native level fluency that lets people speak very fast with missing or unclear bits, which avoids a lot of pain. Still... I am kind of suspecting esperanto speakers, once you find them, might tend to be a little, well, quirky types. My late esperanto-speaking relatives were Germans learning it in the 1940s/50s with motivations from those rather different times. They were quirky; but I suspect a different kind of quirk from more recent learners.

[Lisa]

Still on Esperanto. Duolingo... which I'm finding is less annoying - possibly since I'm a complete beginner and esperanto grammar is simple so fewer grammar-vortexes that made german such a trial... and I need endless drills. And Anki, which is going quickly since so much of the vocabulary is so much like spanish or english, I'm at about 350 words and started on the affixes. I just got a workbook, but starting in the beginning I'm well past that. Still can't read LOTR although I can now pick through it and identify meanings for unknown words.

My feeble attempts to put together sentences in esperanto, I get a great deal of leak from spanish, especially conjugations of to be. I'm having some difficulties with the plural j and the DO n endings, n just looks like it should be plural (the only leak from german I'm seeing). I've been used to general familiarity with the sounds/pronunciation in language learning... so pronunciation is probably my biggest problem. I worried with french, but I had enough exposure and individual bits, that it flowed.... esperanto was completely unknown, never-heard-a-spoken-word language (which is somewhat baffling in retrospect given that my mother spoke it, clearly she was not an evangelical esperantist). Duolingo's audio helps but obviously I need practice. Especially embedded 'c', -ojn -ajn endings, and some of the diphthongs like 'ie'. My anki deck has some audio but not enough, and the online place I used to generate audio is really terrible for esperanto.

[Lisa]

The problem with learning a language for which I don't have any actual goal is how free I feel to just ignore it for a few days. I can set myself goals, but I can't make myself believe in those goals. So I do some duolingo if I have a moment, and do the anki words, they are easy enough that I don't get far behind (luckily the words are so easy that it's not really burdensome). I still am not quite sure why I'm doing this.

I'm at about 650 words, and have have started the second section of duolingo. I've got a paper book with grammar, vocab, examples and practice that's useful. Being a non-false beginner is frustrating... When I come to a sentence, I feel like I'm having to look at each word, separate off any endings, translate, and apply endings... rather than just "reading". I suppose that's practice. I don't have enough vocabulary to read yet. And there's not all that much great material compared to spanish <sigh - those were the days> or german.

I occasionally listen to some of my german audiobook, or pick up a book at read a sentence... german would be more useful to know...

[Lisa]

I might possibly be moving back to German; I read/listened to some news in German, and did a few words in anki. While I don't mind fiddling around with Esperanto, I don't know if I'm willing to really put in serious effort, and I've let the anki lapse. When I tried producing German it was a little hard as esperanto was coming out, but it didn't take much to get back to it. Spanish is also still an option but I think I'm closer to my goal in German than in Spanish.

This forum, however, is becoming unusable - it's almost always giving me 503s and 502s, and it can take me any number of attempts to even get logged in. I've archived my log posts to disk for reference. Alas. I've enjoyed this forum but perhaps the universe is telling me to look elsewhere...

[Lisa]

Catching up in German. I'm not sure what the recommended action is when you take a 5 month break from Anki. I was about 9000 reviews behind, which is to say, impossible to just catch up. I've been sorting out the easier known words, just the TL->NL cards, and I can get through up to 600 reviews in a day just to sort them into known/forgotten. And the forgotten ones I seem to be able to pick right back up (for the easy cards). It's not drudgery yet, but it is painful to have all this undone work hanging over me.

While much of that is useful, I do need to come up with a new strategy to make vocabulary progress. As effective as anki has been with the first 3k or so words, it really seems to be breaking down with the kinds of things I need to learn, like those separable prefix verbs that all look the same. -gehen/-geben, vor-/ver-, -haben/-handen. <deep sigh>. Spending some time on memorization tricks... or something like written drills.

I think my history of (1) extensive grammar study resulting in no ability to communicate, followed by (2) extensive focus on what was needed for immediate basic communication with someone that didn't speak english, has left me with the sense that vocabulary is key, and once you have some basic grammar the rest can be ignored. And I think this means that, whatever my current stated goals are, the underlying destination seems to be a functional but broken language level - I have friends who speak english that way so it doesn't seem like a bad thing. However. You can't meet a goal unless you can identify what it actually is, and then, are what you are doing going to get you to that particular goal.

Finished Sommer am Meer - mostly as intensive reading (not looking up every word, but paying attention to every word to see if I could detect a base form, recall it or infer it, and unwinding any grammatical constructions). I started reading it a second time to get every word I wasn't sure about and making sure it's in anki... but that ends up being quite a job (since I've got kind of a lot of anki catch up going on too). Got to about p13 or so. I have the preview of the english original to check against, and it's so much fun to see how they translate things. E.g. the term brass pixies is translated as messingfische... and while I've been reading the german wikipedia article, I have no way to figure out if steinbrecher/escalonia is a reasonable translation.

I've started my last unread german Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile. I'm trying to take it slow and read carefully and unwind each sentence, but there are some sentences that I just can't make work, even if the general sense comes through. This one I haven't read in English (at least, not for many decades), but it's still fairly predicable so easier to read.

Besides still having issues with 503s and 502s, my keep-logged-in status goes away (perhaps they restart the server), and it takes me about 5 tries to login as I have always exceeded my login attempts and it doesn't like the first captcha.

[Lisa]

I don't know if it's my break, but I feel like my reading and audio comprehension is noticeably better. I have even booked a german italki to see how bad (or good) my conversational abilities are. There's a german meetup tomorrow evening if I wanted a test even sooner.

For Anki, I'm still trying some strategies.
(1) set aside the english->german cards. They do help me learn in the beginning, by making me pay close attention to the details of the german word, but after I know it, about 3/4 of them are a waste of effort. Non-trivial words that need to be active vocab (and probably nouns that I'm weak on gender) being the exception.
(2) set aside plurals, verb forms, and any grammar-assist cards, and some of the prepositions. I ought to get back to them but not til things have settled down.
(3) German->english cards that are several months overdue and weren't learned that well, I'm just rescheduling them so they get treated like new cards. It feels like I'm going to reduce my final grade but I don't really have anything to lose, it doesn't change my level of actual knowledge... and it's easier to start fresh than to try to catch up.
(4) one-to-many verbs, and many-to-many adjectives, are just not well suited to anki. Instead, I'm putting in mini-phrases (in both directions) and setting aside the direct learning cards. I was using mini-phrases before for the hard-to-learn words but for most of the words I'm working on, makes more sense than trying to memorize list of meanings.

I still don't know how I mean to handle the nevertheless-moveover-although-likewise type words. Possibly they should just all be set aside and learned via input. They aren't usually critical to understanding and learning is not going to really allow me to use it.

I've got about 12k cards with about 5k words, and it has been quite a lot of work to try to get things back where I can handle it. I'm now only about 700 reviews behind, but not done with the fiddling: there's an additional 800 cards that I need to decide if they need to be active, and of the ~350 unstudied words, many of these will need to be converted to phrases. And ongoing, as I work though the backlog and end up with leeches, I do the conversion to phrases for that word.

[Lisa]

I had my first german italki session! Very happy... after my experience with spanish italki, where I was stuck and tongue-tied, I was worried I had false confidence, but yes, I can blather on in german as expected. There were a few times the tutor got an expression on his face as he tried to understand me... and a few places I had to wave my hands as I described my current job and some past work experiences and didn't know the vocabulary... but otherwise 100% german, and while it was draining it wasn't difficult. (of course zoom meetings in english are draining too)

In the 3 days between booking and the actual lesson, I was working a bit harder on listening (and now that have a switch so I don't have to disconnect the speakers to plug in headphones, I can listen late at night). I also pulled up the udemy class that I bought last year, the beginner was soooooo boring that although I need grammar basics, I just started the intermediate/B1. I'm on the first lesson (famous german people); not having trouble following the spoken german (no subtitles). I will say that since the last time I was on udemy, my spoken comprehension has gotten noticeable better. Any listening effort in the interval (which I don't know how exactly long... you logs when you start, but not so much when you trail off and just somehow never get around to doing something), anyway my effort has been quite sporadic; I was making some effort last summer (per my log entries), and then an audiobook while driving (that is, quite rarely) is all since September... besides the few days this week. It's surprising to see visible improvement, although quite welcome.

Grammar is still the elephant in the room. I keep hoping I'll magically absorb it from reading and just... sense... the right adjective endings.

[Lisa]

My italki tutor assigned me a 4-minute talk about any topic, and I picked gardening since that's on my mind this time of year. Well. This was either a terrible idea or absolutely brilliant.

I've been intensely gardening for almost 20 years and have figured out what works for me and and I don't open garden books any more (except as a reference if I'm giving a talk or something), so it never occurred to me to look for, and I haven't run across, a german gardening book, magazine, seed catalog, etc, and I've never googled gardening instructions. I have been adding some garden vocabulary, but only the most basic... and have no idea what words are used in which contexts or how to create a natural sentence such as "I start seeds in pots under grow lights". To try to catch up, I've been attempting to read garden sites and seed catalogs in german. The online dictionaries are somewhat useless with this specialized vocabulary... e.g., they don't provide anything for Anzuchterde, which I think means seed starting mix (rather than potting soil), and I am thinking platzfest means crack-resistant. Samenaufbewahrung and Keimdauer are easy though not in any of the four online dictionaries I use. What is the difference between Saatgut and samen? altbewährte might be the same as heirloom... Wachstumslicht, Tonböden. Tomatenstab, Tomatenkäfig, staunässe...

I can feel my brain going into change-and-grow mode, that unpleasant baffled and frustrated feeling. I've read so many (english) seed catalog descriptions and seed-starting instructions over the years that what I'm reading in German should be easy! But I don't know any of these words! It's perhaps quite odd that I never considered reading on a topic that I know extremely well.

The topic I should have suggested for my little speech was something about mysteries! After all my Agatha Christies I'm well prepared to talk about blackmail, kidnapping, poison, corpses, etc...

[Ccaesar]

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.