What next? (learning Spanish, maintaining German, random dabbling...)

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gsbod
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Re: Tatort und Chill (DE|ES|FR)

Postby gsbod » Sat Jul 11, 2020 7:49 pm

I've just finished watching Die verlorene Tochter, a 6 part thriller on the ZDF Mediathek. It started off well - a young woman shows up in her home town 10 years after she disappeared following a high school party, having spent 10 years in France, with no memory of her life prior to that, and almost nobody is pleased to see her. She is trying to piece together what happened in the past, whereas it's clear that a number of people are trying, through whatever means necessary, to ensure that she doesn't unbury their secrets in the process. Great opening and set up, but unfortunately, there was a twist too far in the conclusion which, for me, took the story into really troubling territory. But hey, it counts as 3 films in the Super Challenge.
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gsbod
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Re: Tatort und Chill (DE|ES|FR)

Postby gsbod » Mon Jul 13, 2020 9:05 pm

That's chapter 5 of Nos vemos complete. It's taken me just over a fortnight to complete, which isn't bad. The problem is now that I've generated so many new Anki cards that if I continued at my regular pace of 20 new cards a day, it will take me another 12 days to get through all the remaining new cards from the unit (and I add the new cards as I go along, so it's not as if I've left it all to the end). So since Saturday, I've changed the settings to introduce 40 new cards a day. I'm not sure if this is sustainable in the long run, but I don't really want to take a fortnight's break right now before I move to the next chapter, and it doesn't make sense to move on until I've got my new cards down close to zero.

This still means I get to take a break of 3-4 days before I start chapter 6, so if I still feel like I ought to be studying something, I'll move on to the second chapter in my Lernkrimi.

In other news, I've started watching Vampires on Netflix. It's a drama set in Paris about vampires (I know, I thought it would be werewolves with a title like that). I'm just watching it for fun, which means that without subtitles it's too much effort, however with French subtitles, I can keep up with it comfortably. Like all good vampire dramas, it's stylish, ridiculous, and something of a guilty pleasure. It's also a nice way not to let my French atrophy too much.
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gsbod
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Re: Tatort und Chill (DE|ES|FR)

Postby gsbod » Thu Jul 16, 2020 10:03 pm

gsbod wrote:So since Saturday, I've changed the settings to introduce 40 new cards a day. I'm not sure if this is sustainable in the long run,


6 days in, and it's already stopped feeling sustainable. It's taking much more mental effort to work through the cards each day, and I'm getting all kinds of interference from various languages. It doesn't help that since my default is to show new cards in a random order, some of the cards stuck at the bottom of the pile had been waiting for a good couple of weeks already. And a lot of the new cards involve dealing with numbers - either abstractly, or for quantities, prices, or telling the time. Numbers are just difficult and possibly the hardest aspect (apart from maybe pronunciation) when you want to switch rapidly between languages. To the extent that when I've been reading a German text heavy with numbers, I find it hard to switch back immediately to dealing with numbers in my native English.

So for the last couple of days I've again been questioning what my goals and motivation are for Spanish, and whether or not it's worth the effort. Shouldn't I just put all my language learning eggs back in the German basket, the one language I'm actually good enough at to do something with, maybe even professionally? Get to C2, read all the things, and all that.

The other thing I'm finding a challenge is that at a purely subjective, emotional level, I don't seem to get very excited by romance languages. I don't know why. The stress patterns don't feel right, it's hard to find the right place in my mouth for the sounds, the vocabulary has too much latin and the grammar is too verby. This shouldn't really matter, because objectively, there are so many good reasons to learn them. A1/A2 is good for travel, and with B1/B2 you get access to rich and varied cultural outputs. It's just that while I'm still hoping I can travel again in 2021, I don't quite believe it yet. And I've got a long way to go before native materials will open up to me (and in the mean time, there's enough material in English and German alone to keep me going for decades).

All this gloominess, just because I increased my new cards to 40 :lol: I just need to slow down a bit, I think. Ultimately, I think I'd end up regretting it if I quit altogether at such an early stage. Or worse, if I keep dropping it and restarting it, like with my stuttered start to German all those years ago. I just need to find the right pace, and maybe think a bit more about what could be an appropriate point to aim for. A2 might actually be the right goal, on the basis that it means I do a thorough job on the grammar and vocab appropriate to that level.
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gsbod
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Re: Tatort und Chill (DE|ES|FR)

Postby gsbod » Fri Jul 17, 2020 6:01 pm

Still feeling pretty gloomy today. Too much uncertainty. Although maybe life was always uncertain, it's just the usual method of fooling ourselves otherwise (like making plans for the future) has been exposed for the ruse it always was. It could be that life stays mostly local for quite some time - maybe even years. We just don't know.

Does the fact I can't make travel plans really matter in terms of how much time I spend on languages, or which language I prioritise? It's interesting that when I first started to become an independent adult language learner, with Japanese, I was at a stage in life where I didn't have the opportunity to travel anyway, primarily due to economic reasons, so this question wasn't even relevant. And back then I was younger, I'd had very little experience of foreign travel beyond a few family holidays to France in my childhood, I didn't really know what I was missing. Amazing how much things can change in 12 years, and then change again.

Anyway, I managed to temporarily cut through the gloom by forcing myself to study a bit more Spanish. I was like "just do one exercise, just the one" and I did it! It was all about some facts about Bogotá and Sevilla (somewhere I've been wanting to visit for a number of years :roll:). Moving on I think I need to be a bit more choosy about how much material I transfer into Anki. I'm going to focus mainly on words that I need to look up in a dictionary, words that I can't recall when I need them, and trickier grammar bits like nouns and their genders where it's not obvious from the word ending, and use of prepositions. This means that I should hopefully be able to develop a better balance between reasonably regular, bitesize chunks of textbook study and shorter flashcard review sessions.

And I just need to stop taking it all so seriously. Dabbling is just fine. If I keep dabbling long enough, I might just get somewhere. If I don't, it doesn't matter.
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gsbod
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Re: Tatort und Chill (DE|ES|FR)

Postby gsbod » Tue Jul 21, 2020 8:00 pm

The world hasn't really changed, but at least I don't feel quite so bad about it. I'm trying my best to avoid news websites, news on TV and radio, and government announcements about either COVID or Brexit on the TV and radio.

I'm trying to spend more time reading books, both in English and German, which was tough to start with when the gloom initially settled in, but my ability to concentrate is improving again and with it, the gloom is lifting.

So whenever the gloom and despair starts to settle in, my mantra should be: read books, not news.

A couple of days ago I was leafing through Nos vemos and realised that written Spanish has suddenly become a lot more transparent. The reading comprehension exercises were super comprehensible, at least until chapter 22 where the conditional is introduced (I figure this is just, at this stage, one unfamiliar verb form too far, which is not bad given that I've so far only properly studied the present tense).

This makes sense, given my experience of learning other languages, but it still came as something of a surprise. It felt like something had very suddenly come into focus. It was like putting on a pair of glasses for the very first time. I'm now thinking that if I want to make good progress, I need to not spend too much time on reading comprehension, as it will probably take care of itself. Instead I need to prioritise active recall and correct use of vocabulary and grammar (as a precursor to subjecting a real live person to my spoken Spanish) and, of course, listening comprehension. (Or I could have opted to celebrate my success by sticking to reading only, it's just that I don't actually need another reading language at the moment, given the piles of unread German, French and Japanese books in my possession).

I've now started to work the Gramática de uso del español A into my study sessions. I'm also using the Lernkrimi primarily as listening comprehension, but I think I need to find some additional sources of easy listening, particularly for when I'm waiting for the number of new cards in Anki to settle down.

Oh, and its not language related, but over the last couple of days we've finally had some clear skies at night so I managed to finally see the comet. It's not as impressive as the last comet I saw (Hale Bopp, 1997) but what with the floods and the plague it seems somewhat fitting.
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Brun Ugle
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Re: Tatort und Chill (DE|ES|FR)

Postby Brun Ugle » Wed Jul 22, 2020 7:37 am

I second the “read books and not news” idea. When the plague first hit here and Norway shut down, I had a terrible time concentrating and couldn’t do anything. After two or three weeks of scrolling through Twitter and Facebook, I decided to turn all that off and just read things that looked really light and fun, or that I’d read before and enjoyed. Of course, I was limited to books in my house since the library was closed, but I have plenty of books at home. I ended up reading a bunch of books, mostly in English, and got rid of most of my anxiety and by the end of April, I was eager to study again and finally able to concentrate on it enough to make some progress.
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gsbod
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Re: Tatort und Chill (DE|ES|FR)

Postby gsbod » Wed Jul 22, 2020 9:28 pm

This week I ordered myself the Teach Yourself Welsh Grammar book by Christine Jones. I'm not sure if I'm really ready to attempt to learn Welsh, but I am getting a bit curious.

The biggest difficulty is finding decent learning materials for self study. My impression from courses that I've looked at before is that a lot of Welsh education is still stuck in the 90s, i.e. don't worry your little head with difficult things like grammar, just fill in the blank in this sentence pattern using the box of options above. That approach didn't teach me German in 1993/4, and I'm pretty sure it's not going to teach me Welsh today.

Even the Teach Yourself book could do with a little bit of formatting to, you know, turn the lists of verb forms into tables. That would help tremendously. But it cost less than £10 and having spent the last hour or so flicking through it I've already learned a few interesting things about the way the language works. Like how the gender of nouns doesn't seem to change the form of the article or word endings, but rather it is expressed at the beginning of nouns (after the definite article) or adjectives in the form of mutations. And the plural forms of nouns make German plural forms look like a walk in the park. Good fun.
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Re: Tatort und Chill (DE|ES|FR)

Postby gsbod » Thu Jul 30, 2020 8:51 pm

When I started my Spanish project, I used a partially used notebook from the last time I dabbled in Spanish (2016) and hit a milestone of sorts this week by completely using up the space in the notebook. So now I'm trying to find another partially used (or maybe even empty) notebook to continue my project in. In doing so, I found a notebook that was last used in 2017 when I was studying German - first some B1 stuff with Aspekte Neu and then the B2 Erkundungen book. It seems I was basically using similar methods to what I am doing now with Spanish - that is, following the exercises in the textbook, creating lists of vocabulary and useful expressions as I went along, and putting those lists in Anki to review. I guess I have a way of working after all. The only thing I'm doing differently with Spanish is trying to stick (mostly) to one resource and seeing it through to the end without getting distracted.

Anyway, what is interesting is that as I added stuff from the old vocabulary lists into Anki, I ticked them off in the notebook. And there was a list at the end, where I'd obviously run out of steam for that period of study, which had never made it into an Anki deck for review. What is interesting, is that looking through the various vocabulary lists I'd made, generally my retention rate some 3 years later is really very good. The one single exception is that list at the end, which I'd never gotten round to drilling/reviewing, where my retention rate is much lower than I would have liked.

I think the lesson to take here is that although reviewing in Anki is a pain, it seems that just a few months (or maybe even a few weeks) of Anki reviews then translates to much better retention than not using Anki, even several years after dropping those Anki decks.

Genuinely unexpected, but on the whole I think this is good news for what I'm now doing with Spanish! Shame I wasn't using Anki for it back in 2016...
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gsbod
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Re: Tatort und Chill (DE|ES|FR)

Postby gsbod » Sat Aug 01, 2020 6:09 pm

I've signed up for the 6WC for the first time in years - since it's taken me several years to get vaguely serious about a new beginner language rather than having one or more languages stuck in the intermediate zone for which the challenge is not appropriate. I'm quite excited to see that right now I am in second place on the leader board. I'd better make the most of it, since I'm unlikely to be able to keep up that kind of pace for the whole 6 weeks.

It is quite a nice time to do a 6WC since I've had something of another A1-level breakthrough where I now know just enough Spanish to start introducing additional resources and extend the amount of practice I do. I think that for the first few weeks of a language, I just need to stick to around 30 minutes a day of study (plus maybe a few minutes Anki reviews on top) otherwise I either get overloaded with too much new information or I'm just wasting time overlearning stuff and I'd be better off heading to the beach. Now I've got a very basic vocabulary of a couple of hundred words, I know a few common connectors and sentence patterns, and I've got the basic idea of how the present tense works, which gives me enough to start playing around in addition to adding a bit of new material to the knowledge bank every day, so I can fill up more time with genuinely meaningful and useful activities.

That being said, yesterday I finished unit 2 in Gramática de uso del español which covers the basic principles of noun gender in Spanish and turned into quite a vocabulary dump since it covered things that haven't yet been covered by Nos Vemos (but probably will be in later chapters) such as classroom nouns and names of animals. Looking ahead over the next few units it seems that these get repeated quite a lot in the examples and exercises so I might as well memorise them now. It means I'm back up to 40 new cards a day in Anki, let's hope it doesn't lead to another bout of Anki-related despair!
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gsbod
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Re: Tatort und Chill (DE|ES|FR)

Postby gsbod » Sun Aug 02, 2020 9:55 pm

Today I finished my A1 Lernkrimi Hörbuch, El sacrificio. So many twists and turns for such a short story in such simple language! The fact that I had the audiobook version, rather than the original Lernkrimis which are just text based, has been really useful. Although overall it means less material (so one short story rather than 3 or 4), it's much more important for me to work on my listening comprehension than my reading comprehension, since A1 reading is already too easy for me but I can't say the same for listening. I've been looking for other A1 audio materials, ideally along the lines of the Deutsche Welle stuff for German, but no luck so far. So I've ordered the other A1 Lernkrimi Hörbuch for Spanish.

Also on the way is the A2 Fonética book from Anaya, since I'm hoping this will give me something worthwhile to work on during the 6WC when I want to avoid another vocabulary dump while working through my textbooks. Out of all the elements of learning a language, pronunciation is the area I find the most difficult. I deal with this by making as much effort as I can, but also accepting that my pronunciation is never going to be perfect. The main things are to make sure that I have a good mental model of how the language is supposed to sound (also essential for listening comprehension) and to make sure that my pronunciation doesn't get in the way of other people understanding me.

I'm starting to really like Gramática de uso el español. The exercises are pretty well thought out, do a good job of referencing vocabulary and key grammar points from the previous chapters, and there are some nice synergies with things being introduced in Nos Vemos. It's getting quite addictive. Or maybe it's just that I'm over the second beginner hump and am starting to enjoy Spanish a lot more in general.
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