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 » Thu Aug 20, 2020 9:33 pm

The great thing about the beginner levels in a language is that if you stick at it for long enough, sooner or later you will make noticeable progress. For me, this has come from two things:

- a few weeks ago, while looking for level appropriate listening material, I started following the podcast series Spanish with Vicente. When I tried listening to it then, I got lost very quickly and gave up within the first couple of minutes. Yesterday I listened to an episode about culture shocks he experienced when he moved to Manchester and I got the gist of most of it. The only bit where I really couldn't keep up was when he was talking about differences in dealing with being sick when you are working between the UK and Spain. I still have no idea what the Spaniards do differently there.

- I've had the Anaya Vocabulario A1-A2 book sat on my bookshelf since the last time I really thought about learning Spanish, in 2016 or so, before I planned a trip to Italy and failed to learn Italian instead. The book comes with CD audio and I am saving it up for when I finish Nos vemos to mop up any additional basic vocabulary. Anyway, I distinctly remember when I first tried using this book, I gave up at the first chapter because the very first recording I listened to on the CD sounded like "brrrrrrrrrrrrr". I thought it might be interesting to play it again this evening to see how much I could understand and, yes, it sounded like sentences full of words that I mostly understood.

Another interesting thing happened a couple of days ago. Now that I have covered both reflexive verbs and the pretérito perfecto, I was practicing making up a few short phrases and sentences in my head using both. One of the reflexive verbs I pulled out of the mini dictionary I am slowly installing in my brain was "inscribirse", which means to enroll or to register. It's not a verb that's come up in my textbook in the past tense yet, however I felt certain that the past participle would be irregular, and it would be inscrito. I had to look it up to be sure, but the fact that my intuition was correct felt so bizarre I almost felt a bit queasy - how on earth could I know this?

I was talking it through with my husband this evening and I think what has happened is this. I know enough French to know the verbs écrire and s'inscrire, and to know their past participles which are écrit and inscrit. I've never really though about it before, but these are both irregular and both follow the same pattern of irregularity. I also already knew that the past participle of escribir was the irregular escrito. So somehow I think my brain made the connection between escribir and inscribirse and assumed they'd follow the same pattern, because of French, without me consciously noticing. I guess this is the second-language-in-a-family discount in action.
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dampingwire
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Re: Tatort und Chill (DE|ES|FR)

Postby dampingwire » Fri Aug 21, 2020 10:49 pm

gsbod wrote:I was talking it through with my husband this evening and I think what has happened is this. I know enough French to know the verbs écrire and s'inscrire, and to know their past participles which are écrit and inscrit. I've never really though about it before, but these are both irregular and both follow the same pattern of irregularity. I also already knew that the past participle of escribir was the irregular escrito. So somehow I think my brain made the connection between escribir and inscribirse and assumed they'd follow the same pattern, because of French, without me consciously noticing. I guess this is the second-language-in-a-family discount in action.


If you'd failed to fail to learn Italian, it would have been even clearer :-) scivere is to write and its irregular past participle is scritto. inscrivere and iscrivere follow the same pattern. So the same pattern as French, but somehow more obvious (to me, at least).
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gsbod
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Re: Tatort und Chill (DE|ES|FR)

Postby gsbod » Sat Aug 22, 2020 5:25 pm

I've had a migraine today so my brain feels like mush. The worst bit is not the headache (in my case quite mild), or the general feeling of being tired and hungover, or even the bit when I can't see properly, but rather the fact that my IQ takes a noticeable dip. There's no point in me trying to learn Spanish today - I'd just be going through the motions, but I'd have to do it all again tomorrow for it to actually sink in.

I will need to do my Anki reps at some point today, which is a pain. I wish there was a way of just pressing the pause button on the algorithm for a day or so. I remember once reading the maker of Anki's response to this suggestion, which was along the lines of "you can't stop the algorithm because the brain doesn't stop forgetting!" - except of course the algorithm is only a very imperfect model of how we remember/forget and I know there'll be things I'll struggle to remember today, which won't be a problem tomorrow, because today my brain is mush.

Still, I don't know a better tool than Anki to deal with the drudgery of learning vocab.

Can someone write me an extension with a pause button?
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Re: Tatort und Chill (DE|ES|FR)

Postby Brun Ugle » Sat Aug 22, 2020 7:29 pm

With Anki I have it set up so I do all my reviews before I do any new cards. Then if I miss a day or three, I might spend a couple of days doing only reviews until I catch up. And I only do as many cards as I feel like in a session. So if I have a lot of reviews waiting or my recent new cards were very hard, I might just do 20-30 reviews in the morning and then a few hours later do another 20-30. And if I don’t finish all my reviews, I don’t get to the new cards. I also sometimes don’t do new cards if the last batch was really hard and needs time to soak in. I don’t usually use it for vocabulary though. My cards are mostly sentences illustrating different grammar points.
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gsbod
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Re: Tatort und Chill (DE|ES|FR)

Postby gsbod » Sat Aug 22, 2020 9:27 pm

I got through all of the reviews on the conjugation deck relatively painlessly. But then I moved to my vocab deck which, in addition to single words, includes plenty of phrases and even whole sentences I've designed to test myself on all kinds of tricky things like word order, pronouns, and prepositions. On a normal day, this is all really useful, but today my mind went blank too many times so in the end I just powered through the rest of the deck pretending I'd answered all the cards correctly. The theory being that they'll pop up again at some point in the future, by which time I'll either be able to remember them or not, and then the sodding algorithm can take care of them either way.

I understand I could have just waited and deal with a whole load of backlog tomorrow, or over the next few days, however my current pace to get through Spanish A1 by the end of the 6WC requires me to be consistent with my Anki reviews and new cards, otherwise I'll end up having to pause my textbook study again just to get caught back up in Anki.
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gsbod
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Re: Tatort und Chill (DE|ES|FR)

Postby gsbod » Sun Aug 23, 2020 8:55 pm

I did double study today as I finished off unit 9 in Nos vemos and made a good start on unit 10 as well. Units 6-9 have basically read like a travel brochure for the Spanish speaking world, so I'm glad that unit 10 is going back to basics with hobbies and free time activities that I'm still allowed to do without having to quarantine myself afterwards.

A few months back when I was googling recommendations for French textbooks, I came across someone's paper who had done an analysis of a French textbook (I think it was Édito) to demonstate their theory that language textbooks are written with an idealised view of what the language learner should be. I'm not going to try and dig the paper out again now, since it probably crosses the no politics line and I didn't agree with the actual analysis, although I think the basic theory is an interesting one. I'm sure everyone at one time or another has felt frustrated that a textbook isn't really covering circumstances, experiences or viewpoints that really coincide with their own, even if the overall structure and delivery of important grammar and expressions is done well.

Why is it that nearly every textbook at some point, in the chapter on health, includes a dialogue about going to the doctor, where the patient has nothing more than a mild flu and the doctor gives them a prescription (I hope not for antibiotics) and tells them to rest. I'd never waste my doctor's time with a mild flu. Where are the realistic dialogues?

Maybe they can at least update the mild flu example in the next generation of textbooks so that it's COVID relevant, although this still probably doesn't fit with the idealised language learner, who can of course travel the world freely without having to worry about such things.
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jeff_lindqvist
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Re: Tatort und Chill (DE|ES|FR)

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sun Aug 23, 2020 10:48 pm

gsbod wrote:Why is it that nearly every textbook at some point, in the chapter on health, includes a dialogue about going to the doctor, where the patient has nothing more than a mild flu and the doctor gives them a prescription (I hope not for antibiotics) and tells them to rest. I'd never waste my doctor's time with a mild flu. Where are the realistic dialogues?

Maybe they can at least update the mild flu example in the next generation of textbooks so that it's COVID relevant, although this still probably doesn't fit with the idealised language learner, who can of course travel the world freely without having to worry about such things.


I see your point. Textbooks are... interesting.

Beyond the "My name is..." chapter, a lot only seems to be useful on an "increase your vocabulary" level and not directly applicable. If I ever travel, I never go to the doctor abroad, I don't have a family photograph with three four generations of relatives, I don't live in a semi-detached house (nor have I any plans moving to one), I don't book my accommodation/plane or train tickets on the phone - and not in the country either, I don't eat or drink a large part of what's offered at textbook restaurants, I never have anything to declare at customs, and the list goes on...
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gsbod
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Re: Tatort und Español (DE|ES|FR)

Postby gsbod » Sun Aug 23, 2020 11:11 pm

And why is it that textbooks (and phrasebooks for that matter) always seem to cover checking in to a hotel (including lots of unnecessary questions about the room facilities), but never cover checking out?
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Re: Tatort und Chill (DE|ES|FR)

Postby gsbod » Mon Aug 24, 2020 12:56 pm

jeff_lindqvist wrote:I see your point. Textbooks are... interesting.

Beyond the "My name is..." chapter, a lot only seems to be useful on an "increase your vocabulary" level and not directly applicable. If I ever travel, I never go to the doctor abroad, I don't have a family photograph with three four generations of relatives, I don't live in a semi-detached house (nor have I any plans moving to one), I don't book my accommodation/plane or train tickets on the phone - and not in the country either, I don't eat or drink a large part of what's offered at textbook restaurants, I never have anything to declare at customs, and the list goes on...


And even the "My name is..." chapter falls short for me, since it then goes on to teach you "I am a..." but I am neither a doctor, nurse, engineer, teacher nor a student.

Thinking about this some more this morning - after last night I started wondering whether I'd actually make quicker and more satisfactory progress ditching the textbook altogether - and I have to say that there hasn't yet been a single word or collocation that's come up which isn't useful to know, and it's mostly obviously high frequency vocabulary. I am now able to throw together odd random sentences in relation to things happening in my life right now, and do some rudimentary self talk using things I've learned directly from the textbook, just in different combinations to the original presentation.

I think this is maybe the one benefit of the Assimil courses - the dialogues are much more random, quirky, and less aspirational, but by the end they cover a lot of the same ground. But I just can't handle the way the grammar is presented and I need more exercises to practice what I've learned, so I know what I'm doing is more effective for me, even if I do gripe about it!
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Re: Tatort und Español (DE|ES|FR)

Postby gsbod » Thu Aug 27, 2020 6:59 pm

I definitely feel like I am reaching my limit with studying Spanish at this intensity now. The constant onslaught of new cards in Anki required to keep up with the pace of presentation of material in the textbook is getting a bit much (even though I'm on the most boring holiday I've taken in the best part of a decade). But if I didn't use Anki, there's simply not enough repetition in the textbook alone for me to remember anything more than the bare minimum. I think the assumption may be that the typical A1 student only needs to remember the bare minimum, but I am hardly typical...

I'm going to try to maintain the pace until I get to the end of the A1 section of my textbook, which would see me essentially "finishing" A1 by the end of the 6WC and therefore presents a nice milestone. But after that I think I will need to slow things down again for a few weeks and just allow a bit of space for things to soak in naturally.
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