Brun Ugle goes to the Gathering (ES, EO, DE)

[Anya]

Good luck with our studies! I did't see yet "La Fea Más Bella", I will try this telenovela this evening.

[Brun Ugle]

The great thing about Spanish is that a lot of television stations have YouTube channels where they put massive amounts of stuff -- entire series! So you can watch a lot of Spanish language television legally and for free. All you have to do is learn a bit of Spanish first.

La fea más bella is the Mexican version of the Colombian show Yo soy Betty la fea, which is the original Ugly Betty. It's apparently been remade many times in many different countries and in several languages.

[Brun Ugle]

Update for week 47
I’ve now passed 40 hours of German and 100 hours of total study in the 6WC and seem to have settled into a comfortable 4th place in both. The 6WC is making me do a lot more German than I’d anticipated. It’s great, but it means my Spanish is not getting as much time as I’d like to give it. I think it’s going to be Esperanto that will have to give way a little. I was trying to do about an hour a day of Esperanto, but I think I’ll reduce it a little for the remainder of the 6WC.

Spanish
FSI Basic: 13-14
Gramática de uso del Español (A1-A2): 74-77
La Fea Más Bella: 20-24

I also had an Italki session which went very well. I’d tried to take a lesson with this teacher earlier, but he had various problems and then I had some problems, but now I decided to try again. I really liked him, so I’m going to try another lesson with him. This time we started with me telling him my background. I told him about not learning much in high school and then studying on my own now and about the various courses and books I’m using or have used and described them a little to him. And apparently in all that blather, I only made two small mistakes and had great pronunciation. I knew my pronunciation was pretty passable, but I really was shocked to find that I’d hardly made any mistakes. I’m also starting to be able to speak much more fluently at least some of the time. I’m a little surprised to admit it, because I didn’t think much of Memrise when I started using it the first time, but I think Memrise has helped me a lot in that area. I’ve drilled a lot of vocabulary and it mostly sticks pretty easily, so it means I don’t have to think so hard when I’m talking. I still need a lot of work though.

We also went through all the different verb tenses and moods to see what I knew. I sort of know all of them, but some don’t come so automatically yet. He confused me a bit with his names though. Apparently there are loads of different names for each tense and no one in the Spanish speaking world quite agrees on what to call all these different tenses. He managed to find a few names I’d never heard before, but I recognized what they were when I heard examples. Phew! I almost thought for a minute there were going to be even more tenses to learn. Who am I kidding? That would be fun. I love all the conjugations in Spanish. I should probably write down the names for next time though so I can remember what he’s talking about with his antecopretérito and such.

Televisa has suddenly made a bunch of their videos private on Youtube, including La Fea Más Bella. I found them another place, but those were restricted and couldn’t be seen in my region. Then I found them another place and those I can still watch. I hope they don’t disappear altogether. Televisa had taken them down earlier this autumn, but then they put them back again, so maybe this is temporary. Televisa, you can’t get me hooked and then take it away!!!

I’m way behind on where I wanted to be on FSI Programmatic and on my grammar book. That’s partly because I underestimated how hard the second half of Programmatic would be and how many exercises are in the workbook, and partly because I’ve been using so much of my time on German lately. So, I need to get a move on.

I actually enjoy FSI. It’s just so sexist and un-politically-correct that it makes me laugh sometimes. Of course, a lot of the courses were made in the 60’s, so I guess it’s to be expected, but I remember having a few laughs even at the Finnish one which is from the 80’s if I remember correctly. I wonder what their modern stuff is like. I assume they still continue to update and make new courses. Surely they don’t teach this stuff to the diplomats, they’d get laughed at.

German
Assimil passive wave: 32-38
FSI Programmed Introduction: 11-16

Still chugging along. German conjugation seems a little lacking after Spanish, I must admit. And the cases don’t seem like much either. Finnish cases were fun, but German doesn’t seem to be sure if it really wants to have a case system or not. And then there’s the pronouns. Couldn’t they think of any more? They’re all the same. Have some imagination, guys. I still feel like I’m not really getting anywhere, but that’s the Assimil way, I think. It will all come out in the end.

FSI Programmed Introduction to German is pretty easy. And it’s useful, but nowhere near as good as FSI Programmatic Spanish. For example, in the Spanish course, they carefully illustrated the kinds of mistakes Americans make in pronunciation and how to avoid them. There were all kinds of drills where the speaker would say a Spanish word correctly and also with some mistake and you had to learn to hear the difference. Like mañana, muhñana, mañanuh. And you have to pick the right one. They do this a little bit on the German one too, but there it’s a German woman giving the correct version and an American man giving the incorrect version. Their voices are so different it’s hard to catch what his error is, at least for a beginner. It’s very easy to pick out which one is wrong though; you just have to listen for the male voice. I’m not sure how useful that is. I’m sure it would be clear to a German what the guy is doing wrong, but to me, the biggest difference is that he’s obviously a man and she isn’t.

Another weakness with the German course is that a lot of the drills just give the prompt, but not the answer. The answer is in the book, but not on the tape. I really like being able to hear the correct answer and repeat it after the native. I find it helps me learn the grammar and the pronunciation better.

Anyway, at this rate, I think I’ll get through the Programmed Intro by the end of the 6WC. I don’t know if I’ll start the Basic course then or not. Maybe I will, but I won’t try to go too fast. I want to concentrate more on Spanish now that I’m making such good progress.

Esperanto
Teach Yourself: 6
Gerda Malaperis – The Movie

Esperanto has mostly been about Duolingo and Memrise this week. I did read a few things and do one chapter in TY. And then I found that they’d made a movie of Gerda Malaperis! It was so bad it was great! Of course the book itself is pretty ridiculous, but it’s pretty good when you consider it starts easy with a very limited vocabulary and gradually gets hard teaching grammar and vocabulary all the way and following a mystery story at the same time. Anyway, if you have an hour and a half or so to kill, why not give it a try? It doesn’t require a very high level of Esperanto, but if you aren’t used to hearing the language, you might want to read the book first, in which case I recommend LRing it on Lernu.

[Brun Ugle]

Apparently last Tuesday was a fluke. I just had a conversation in Spanish with a friend and I felt like a complete blathering idiot. I was just throwing words together at random with whatever verb form came to mind first without regard to person, number, tense or mood. It probably wasn't really quite as bad as that since he understood me without much trouble, but I sure felt like everything was coming out wrong.

[Brun Ugle]

Update for week 48-49

Not a great deal got done these past two weeks. First, I got some sort of stomach virus that lasted for days. Then my boyfriend said to me that we need to think about our relationship and whether or not we are right for each other. I don’t think anyone ever followed that by saying, “because I’m 100% sure we are,” so I was a little upset for a while. And he’s away now, so we haven’t talked about it yet.

However, the main problem is that I’ve been fighting off depression since early spring, and I seem to be losing. I can tell because at this point I’m exhausted and hearing the sounds the insects and frogs made on summer nights in the woods where I grow up. That’s always the first hallucination to appear and the last to go. I did one evening hear a sort of monster voice say one indistinguishable word and then disappear, but other than that, it’s just been crickets and frogs. So, I’m taking it as a sign that I need to find a better way to take care of myself.

Mania is easy for me to recognize and treat. Usually I realize after a couple days of hardly sleeping and still feeling great and full of energy that something is wrong. So I just try to withdraw and do something quite and take sleeping pills for a few nights. Usually, I’m cured within a week. But depression is sneaky. I usually don’t feel sad or down at all for a long time. I just get exhausted and maybe have occasional brief waves of despair. And I can’t seem to fight it like mania. Mania, I can fight by acting depressed, but I can’t get rid of depression by acting like I’m manic, because being social is actually not so good for me since I’m autistic. It’s all so complicated.

Anyway, enough about that. Back to languages.

German
Assimil passive wave: 39-49
FSI Programmed Introduction: 17-20

I skipped a few days of Assimil while I was sick, but I’m now ready to start the active wave. Hopefully, this will make German grammar seem more sensible and less like a game of Fizzbin. It might be the Assimil method, but it does seem sometimes like they’re just making up the grammar as they go along. I think the problem is that the cases don’t really seem so logical as in Finnish, for example. In German, sometimes the articles change for case and sometimes they don’t, depending on the case, which to me seems to halfway defeat the point of having cases. And the other problem is gender. Gender in Spanish is easy; a majority of the words you can tell by their ending what gender they have. Norwegian is more like German; some words you can tell by the ending and some because they fit in some narrow category, like names of trees or something which mostly all belong to one gender, but you still just have to remember most of them. However, Norwegian genders are much easier because of the lack of cases. I think the fact that in German the masculine and neuter have the same article in some cases and the feminine dative and genitive have the same article as the masculine nominative makes it a little harder. Oh well, I’m sure I’ll figure it out eventually. Knowing Norwegian at least helps a lot with vocabulary. I can often recognize words in German because they are similar to Norwegian words. I’ve found I can also to some extent go the other way and guess what a word might be in German based on the Norwegian word.

Oh, I’ve also started Duolingo for German, which so far, is a lot of fun. It’s a nice gamey break from real studying.

Spanish
FSI Programmatic: 33-34
FSI Basic: 15-16
Gramática de uso del Español (A1-A2): 78-82
La Fea Más Bella: 25

For some reason, I haven’t been watching much TV lately, probably because my internet connection is such that I often have to sit in the hallway to watch and that isn’t so much fun, especially if it’s cold and you’re a little sick.

I sometimes feel like I’ll never finish with FSI or my grammar book. I had all these plans for how many lessons I would do per week and so on, but I underestimated how hard they would get. I also perhaps overestimated my time and energy. So now I’ve decided to not try to make any schedules and just keep going at whatever pace suits me in the moment.

I wanted to join the book club this time, but I’m having a little trouble finding the book. I wanted to just get it as an e-book, but that doesn’t seem possible and I don’t feel like ordering the paper version when I don’t have anything else I want to get. For a moment, I thought I’d found it on iBooks and for only NOK 25. I was wondering why there was an accent over the a in agua though. That didn’t seem right according to the accent rules of Spanish. It turned out it was Portuguese. So, maybe I’ll just read my own books for now. I have some stuff to read and plenty to study.

Esperanto

All I’ve been doing lately for Esperanto is Duolingo. My tree is finally gold again for the first time since I completed the course around the end of September. I was beginning to think there was something wrong with Duolingo as I kept reviewing and reviewing and it just refused to become gold, but I beat it in the end. They keep adding new sentences too, so even though I’m just reviewing, I still find sentences that aren’t familiar to me. Also, I asked Judith, and she said the version 2.0 should come out in a few months. It will include more stuff and also have some of the old stuff moved around a little. I’m not entirely sure how that will work. I guess the old tree will disappear and the new tree will appear with the lessons that were gold on the old tree still gold on the new one. But if the lessons are in a different order, maybe there will be a mixture of locked and unlocked lessons. Usually they unlock in order as you complete the tree, so I’m not sure how it will work in the transition. I’m looking forward to it though.


When I was sick, I stopped doing Memrise for all my languages and I just haven’t gotten back to it yet. Maybe I’ll just take a break for a while. I like Memrise, but it’s a bit slow. I’m also looking forward to the end of the 6WC. I enjoy it, but I get bored with the tracking sometimes and it also makes me maybe not do things that I might otherwise do. So I might study a bit more in the traditional sit-down-with-a-book type of studying, but I tend to do less of random “studying”. And those random things that I do do, I tend not to record. For example, I often find myself reading posts in Esperanto on Facebook, but I don’t usually think about it until I’ve been reading for a while and I don’t know how long, so I don’t record it.

[Elenia]

Sorry to hear about all your troubles. Sometimes plans and detailed goals are great, other times you just need to take a step back and just do what you can without pushing yourself. I think you're still doing great. Just keeping on means you're already winning over me, and the huge chunks of nothing I've been doing over the past few months.

[Anya]

Hi Brun Ugle,
Sorry to hear about your problems. Take care of yourself! I found you very courageous to keep going in spite of all!

[Brun Ugle]

Ugh! I just had a nightmare about magic doily monks. I woke up screaming. Don't laugh. It was scarier than it sounds.

Thanks guys, but I don't think I'm particularly courageous to keep going. Actually, studying languages is probably a refuge for me. But I have also given up many times. Those that know me from the old forum are used to my years-long disappearing acts. I actually joined in 2006, but I've probably been away more than there in that time. If you only knew how many years I've spent studying and not learning Japanese.

What I probably need to do is prioritize physical and mental health. I love languages so much, that I easily let them take over. So gym first. Except, the gym is so noisy and the noise wears me out too much to exercise properly. But it's no longer the only gym in town. Maybe one of the others (hopefully the nearby one) is music-free. I found it much easier when I didn't have a job or boyfriend, because then I didn't have much human contact, so then I could tolerate a bit of noise when it was limited to an hour or so at the gym.

[Iversen]

"A doily (also doiley, doilie, doyly, doyley) is an ornamental mat, typically made of
paper or fabric, and variously used for protecting surfaces or binding flowers, ..."


What do doili monks do in your dreams, and what do doili monks actually look like?

[Elenia]

Still, it is very easy to not do the things that you know will help you feel better. You are taking a very proactive approach, and sorting out what you can, so I still think you're doing well. About the noisy gyms - would doing solitary outdoors exercise help at all? I can only think of running/jogging right now, but things along that line. That way you can pick quieter places - hopefully prettier places, too.