Neoplanta log - German, French, Arabic, Urdu etc.

[Saim]

Lately I've been doing a lot of 1-1 online classes for Portuguese, which I've been enjoying a lot. It helps that my tutor is fun to talk to. I would like to work on my French the same way but I'm not sure when I'll be able to fit it in.

I had a French class today and it was lots of fun. As long as I'm enjoying it it shouldn't be too hard to pencil in occasionally. Once I start building momentum motivation should deal with itself, too.

I just need to avoid torturing myself with languages I neither enjoy speaking nor have any compelling/relatively immediate need to use. So no Urdu for the time being, I suppose.

[Saim]

Portuguese



O Alquimista - Paulo Coelho
232 pages

A fun story and a very easy read. Not sure how I feel about the philosophical point about "following your dreams" and everything but I enjoyed the book regardless. I would say that I preferred Verónika decide morrer, though.

I moved on to Til by José de Alencar, but between the fact that it's a 19th century work and all the descriptions of Brazilian rainforest and fazendas it's quite a slog to get through, even though I'm enjoying the story so far. I think I'll try to find something a bit easier to "devore", and slowly work through Til chapter by chapter (thankfully the chapters are quite short).

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Veronika decide morrer - Paulo Coelho, 210 pages
Um cadáver ouve rádio - Marcos Rey, 126 pages
O Alquimista - Paulo Coelho, 232 pages

Total fiction: 568 pages

I think part of me had this sense that I had read a lot more than that in Portuguese, and for that reason felt a bit frustrated with my level. Seeing that I've only read 3 books makes me feel a bit relieved actually. I'm sure I'll feel much more confident in my language skills once I get to around 2,000 pages, which is a lot but also not that far away.

Yesterday I got to speak a lot of Portuguese; I went to a festival being held for Carnaval with a Brazilian friend. Up until this point I had spoken to him in Spanish; he had had Spanish flatmates and spoke the language quite well and really enjoyed speaking it, so I was more than happy to stick to Spanish for the most part. Nonetheless, yesterday he let me practice Portuguese all night, and I spoke the language to a bunch of strangers and some of his friends we ran into as well. I also ran into a Brazilian I knew from salsa/bachata classes, who responded to me in Portuguese this time -- I tried a bit of tudo bem and other pleasantries on her in class, and she responded in English; perhaps she didn't expect me to actually know how to speak the language (and once I actually insisted on responding in Portuguese a bit more she realised my command of the language isn't terrible)?

I also met a fellow from Cordoba, Argentina, who also happened to be living in the town I grew up in, which was fun because his accent was fairly different from what I'd learned to expect from Argentine accents (which I assume is just a Buenos Aires accent); Wikipedia seems to confirm that Cordoba lies outside of the rioplatense area.

At first I was a bit worried about my level (and feeling frustrated given all the classes I'd taken), because when I started talking to my friend I noticed it took me a lot of mental effort to parse what he was saying and there was words here and there I was missing. But once I got into the groove of it I didn't have any trouble at all, which is great because I expected the opposite (having less energy to parse the language over time and having to default to English or Spanish). I think I may have just needed to get used to his São Paulo accent -- my teacher is from Rio and I'd say there's a bit more of that sort of accent in Brazilian media too.

In any case, I definitely think having taken a bunch of 1-1 classes has made me much more able to take advantage of opportunities to speak the language. Having someone actively correct me definitely helped me expunge myself of a lot of my portuñol, and speaking to someone relatively regularly made it much easier for me to just jump into speaking the language with people.

Another thing I noticed is how valuable it is in language learning to be able to strike up conversations with random strangers. That's something I've been working a lot on over the past couple of months (the Latin dance scene was good practice for that since you're kind of expected to approach people), and so it's nice to see some kind of benefit from that. I kind of regret not having gone to the thing earlier and talked to more people, but then again I never used to talk to strangers at these kinds of events so I've already made a colossal step forward.

[Saim]

Serbian


Knjiga o bambusu - Vladislav Bajac, 228 pages

I think I went into this with the wrong mindset, it touched on a lot of Zen philosophy and I expected a light historical drama.
In any case, it was fun to read about Japan in Serbian, although it did make me feel wanderlust for East Asian languages.

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Fiction

Ana Marija me nije volela - Ljiljana Habjanović Đurović, 184 pages
Javna ptica - Ljiljana Habjanović Đurović, 303 pages
Uho, nož, grlo - Vedrana Rudan, 172 pages
Mundo libre - Marko Krstić, 232 pages
Ostrvo - Meša Selimović, 198 pages
Sjećanja - Meša Selimović, 256 pages
Američki derviš - Ayad Akhtar, 354 pages (translated from English)
Glad - Mirjana Bobić Mojsilović, 224 pages
Derviš i smrt - Meša Selimović, 369 pages
Ono sve što znaš o meni - Mirjana Bobić Mojsilović, 235 pages
Tvrđava - Meša Selimović, 373 pages
Niko i ništa u Parizu i Londonu - George Orwell, 180 pages (translated from English)
Neoplanta ili Obećena zemlja - Végel László, 257 pages (translated from Hungarian)
Dvojnici iz tame - Morea Banićević, 282 pages
Elitna prostitutka - Jasmina Ana, 192 pages
Lutkar - Jostein Gaarder, 235 pages (translated from Norwegian)
Bljuzga u podne - Predrag Ličina, 243 pages
Roman o Londonu (Prva Knjiga) - Miloš Crnjanski, 388 pages
Paunovo pero - Ljiljana Habjanović Đurović, 49
Igra anđela - Ljiljana Habjanović-Đurović, 462 pages
Knjiga o bambusu - Vladislav Bajac, 228 pages

Non-fiction

Nova lica jezika, Ranko Bugarski, 250 pages
Mađarska revolucija 1956 - Ivan Ivanji, 325 pages
O psovanju - Predrag Krstić, 125 pages
Imaginarni Albanac - Aleksandar Pavlović, 128 pages

Total fiction: 5864
Total books: 6692


German

I'm getting into a decent reading flow and now that I'm happy about my progress in Portuguese it could be good to try and do some more writing and speaking. Maybe I can start with writing a bit more; today I wrote some messages to a friend who's also been learning the language for a bit and it was quite fun and relatively intuitive to piece the sentences together using Glosbe as a guide. I wouldn't have been able to produce them off the cuff so perhaps writing will be a better introduction to output for now, then I can try doing some classes after a couple of weeks.

Reading

Lately I've been reading a lot on Readlang. I was trying pdfs before but I found them a bit unwieldy. Let's see how long this lasts.
I find it a bit easier to switch between books when they're in digital format, and also read for 5 or so minutes when I get the chance (mini-breaks at work, waiting at the hairdresser, etc.). Ideally there at any given time there should be a "main" book that I'm dedicating at least 30 minutes a day to (and this will essentially be made up of German books now) and then other stuff that I do a couple of pages every once and a while for fun.

The only sad thing about Readlang is that it doesn't support Punjabi.

I've been trying to set aside blocks of 25-30 minutes of reading, when I tell myself I'm going to read for hours I end up procrastinating and just don't do it.

Currently reading:
der ehrliche lügner
246/496 pages: 246 / 496

Teed up: Glennkill: Ein Schafskrimi and Wie die Deutschen weiß wurden.

[Saim]

Ukrainian



Незамінна річ - Роберт Шеклі, 11 pages

Cool story. This is a translation of "The Necessary Thing" by American author Robert Schekley. There is an accompanying audiobook (30 minutes) which I might listen to as well.

Next up:

Карбід - Андрій Любка, 286 pages

[Saim]

German



Der ehrliche Lügner - Rafik Schami, 496 pages

Finally!

I quite liked this book, although it was a bit of a slog for my fist/second read in German. There isn't so much of an overarching plot as a bunch of short stories that are tied together by a fairly loose thread, so it's hard to get "addicted" to reading it, although I did enjoy lots of the stories.

It was quite good in terms of the vocabulary, it didn't seem like it had that many obscure words except for a handful of circus-related terms (I'm thinking of words like Manege, Loge, and especially Sattelgang).

I'm looking forward to going through something that's a bit easier to "devour". Hopefully Glennkill: Ein Schafskrimi will do the trick.

Glennkill: Ein Schafskrimi
11/100 percent: 11 / 100
(352 pages)
[15/04/2022]

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Der ehrliche Lügner - Rafik Schami, 496 pages
Blutwette - Andreas Franz & Daniel Holbe, 221/394 pages

Total: 717


I've been trying to set aside blocks of 25-30 minutes of reading, when I tell myself I'm going to read for hours I end up procrastinating and just don't do it.

Oops, I was going to write basically the same thing in this entry as well. Maybe I need to put a post-it somewhere to remind me not to plan to read too much.

[Saim]

The "compelling reason" to learn German that I was alluding to in an earlier post is the fact that I live in Germany now.

Use in daily life: I haven't made much of a push to socialise in German because honestly my language skills aren't really there yet and it's not really a priority. I have no issues using "communicative" German and did my Anmeldung and requested my Aufenthaltserlaubnis in German, but proper conversations are a different beast.

I kind of regret not getting to ~B2+ before moving here, because then I would have been able to jump straight into using the language in varied contexts, but then again in Australia I was focusing on Latin dance and socialising so it wasn't really a priority, and also now I have more access to books.

Classes: My work provides free German classes, but they're only on once a week and sometimes I have to work during that time so I'll keep going on with the occasional iTalki lessons.

There was a point where I was doing 3-5 iTalki lessons a week but I wasn't doing enough input alongside it to really justify it, I constantly felt rusty. Once I feel like I have a good input routine going I might up the lessons again.

Input: Now that I feel fairly settled in, this week I've stepped up reading substantially and am aiming to get to 300 pages per week, at a rate of 20-80 pages per day depending on what else I have going on. I can generally bang out a bunch of pages of a pdf or Readlang during downtime at work, so I'm pretty lucky in that respect.

I find that focusing on Readlang percentage points or setting timers doesn't work too well for me, I work best making pages my goal. I tend to do a kind of "reverse procrastination", where I set an easy goal like 5 pages and then keep extending it once I'm already reading. I also make sure to read a variety of books at once so I don't get bored: some of them are print and some e-books or on Readlang.

To reach my goal this week, I need to get in another 33 pages by the end of the day, which'll be pretty hard to fail at. I also only started this goal on Wednesday, so it seems fairly manageable, although we'll see if I manage to keep it going week by week. I do feel it's a necessary minimum though if I want to learn the language at anything resembling a reasonable pace given I have such an obvious use for it.

SRS: I'll do some Anki here and there but I'm prioritising quantity of input at the moment.



Other languages

I told myself that I'd not add any languages this year, then immediately started dabbling in Latvian. Oh well. It's a fun language anyway, the overall feel of it reminds me of the Slavic languages. I find it hits the sweetspot of easy enough to not be frustrating but alien enough to be very intellectually stimulating (Albanian for example just slightly misses the mark and tilts over into frustration).

Still, I'd like to focus on getting incrementally better at some of the languages I'm already somewhat good at, like Serbian or Polish, or even French or Hungarian.

I hear Russian and Turkish on almost any day I spend much time outside, so those two are quite tempting. Russian could also be somewhat useful at work for reading purposes, but then again the fact that I probably won't visit in the near future kind of takes away my motivation. And also I don't really struggle reading non-fiction Russian anyway; I guess it can wait for now.

[Saim]

I've started reconsidering my flashcard use, moving towards throwing out SRS. I'm also reconsidering my use of extensive reading.

I've started using a lot of Quizlet for German, completely avoiding SRS. I find that testing myself once or twice on a word is enough for me to understand it the next time I see it, and sometimes even for me to incorporate it into my active vocabulary, at least for a while. I feel like it may be better for my overall level to do a "quick and dirty" run of lots of words than to the more slow-and-steady SRS approach, especially since I'm also doing lots of extensive listening and taking 1-1 classes where I get corrections. In Anki, you can at most do 10 cards a day without going crazy, and that's probably only if you're just studying a single language. I can do far more than that in Quizlet without breaking a sweat.

I also find that in Quizlet it's much easier to start with recognition cards and then move onto recall, as you just have to flip on the "writing" switch in the settings. I tend to do "flashcard" recognition (German > English) until the cards are in the "still learning" pile, then once they're there I do "writing". And then I just forget about them for the most part. I remember experimenting with doing both recognition and recall in Anki back in the day, but I find it too confusing and unwieldy to have multiple cards associated with the same "note".

In September and a lot of October I managed to read an average of 300-400 pages a week, but I found that at this pace I didn't have time for many other activities and so even though I got some limited benefit out of this I'm not convinced it's the best method. I think adding in more vocabulary study and reading a more modest amount should work better, alongside a bit of listening and classes. I've been enjoying my reading a lot more and have been paying more attention since I've added in a healthy heaping of vocabulary study. I can also more easily fit in other languages this way.

Overall my study plan is looking something like this:

[*] 30-90 minutes of reading per day
[*] 100-200 Quizlet cards per week
[*] at least 30 minutes of listening per day
[*] between 30 and 90 minutes of classes per week (alternating weeks)

Hopefully some days I'll be able to push reading or listening up to 3 hours or so.

I've also deleted my YouTube app on my phone and switched over to Apple Podcasts. The app is kind of annoying in terms of its design, I don't like how it doesn't let me run a finite playlist and always adds new tracks as if I'm supposed to listen forever, but it more or less suits my purposes. I find that YouTube advertises too much content in English, including short form content that I find hard not to click on, which gets to be quite distracting. I'll keep using it to watch the Urdu dub of Yasak Elma (شجرِ ممنوع), though.

[german2k01]

We both live in North Rhine Westphalia. I live in Soest. I agree with you working up to the B2 level before landing in Germany would have improved our day-to-day interaction experience. I guess it is never too late to start learning German; it will simply improve our day-to-day interaction with natives.

You managed to achieve intermediate ability in listening in Urdu. May I know how much can you understand this TV show aimed at children? I received most of my input in Urdu as a native kid from watching this TV show. It was a very popular show in the 1990s. I picked up most of the common words used in native conversations by watching this TV show regularly. It is a show about a particular guest house where guests stay and the funny thing is it is run by silly employees. They are not good at their jobs. They make mistakes while managing the guesthouse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4f9-JJSYLU

[Saim]

Interesting video, thanks! I'm understanding almost all of it (I've listened up to 10:00). I had to relisten twice to catch what the older fellow having breakfast was saying around 8:30, but I'm pretty sure it's دودھ کی نہریں ہوں گی شائد اور میٹھے پھل ہوں گے. And I wasn't 100% on one word of what his grandson is saying at 8:18 or so: آگے جا کر سارے (عمر؟) یہی پینا پڑے گا, but I think it is indeed 'umr.

I do find this more enjoyable than the modern Pakistani dramas I've seen so far (just bits and bobs of Jackson Heights and دیارِ دل, and I think one other one that had a lot of Enlgish dialogue in it, to be fair), so maybe I'll watch more of it if I ever get sick of dubbed material.

I picked up most of the common words used in native conversations by watching this TV show regularly.

Is Urdu not your native language?

Anki

I've been thinking about what kind of use, if any, of Anki I should have going forward. My Anki decks were bloated, I had too many decks, and my cards were too complicated (sentences, definitions, etc.), but that doesn't mean it's not a good tool for certain purposes.

I've already decided I won't use it for any Germanic, Romance, Slavic or Indo-Aryan languages, or Hungarian, or even Turkish if I decide to get back into that at some point. There I will use Quizlet if I feel the need to study vocabulary.

Out of the "harder" languages I've studied, which ones do I want to prioritise and get to a more comfortable reading level, which is what I find Anki is best for? Here are my criteria:

• took classes at university (leaves: Arabic, Hebrew, Basque, Finnish, Greek)
• can already read news with a popup dictionary without it frying my brain after five sentences (this disqualifies Finnish and Greek)

So I've deleted all my decks in Anki, removed all the add-ons and presets and so on. And I'm left with this.



My goals are as follows:

Arabic: 6 new/day, +15 minute semiextensive reading sessions interspersed throughout the week where I don't add cards
Hebrew: 3 new/day
Basque: 2 new/day

All my cards are English > target* (recall) with single words or short collocations (ما يشبه, تمثل المصالح, على خلفية, قانون مكافحة التضخم, احتواء الموقف) and have audio on the back.

I am prioritising Arabic over the other two because 1) hopefully it'll bleed over into reinforcing my Urdu to a certain extent, 2) it's probably the most challenging in terms of the amount of vocabulary I need to learn, 3) it's the "one that got away" that I've been interested in for ages but haven't made that much measurable progress in, 4) could potentially be useful in my line of work at some point, 5) has native speakers where I live (the diglossia makes this less relevant, but it's still a minor factor).

I am tentatively committing to this regimen for 12 months (12/2023); I say tentatively because I am allowed to reconsider after 6 months (5/2023), but no earlier.

I am allowed to dabble in other languages, like say Albanian or Persian, but there I have to use print pedagogical materials (i.e. bilingual textbooks, grammars) where I don't have to make flashcards or look at a screen.

*Spanish > target in the case of Basque. I used to have both English/Basque and Spanish/Basque cards, or even have both translations, but that's too confusing.

EDIT: Also, I'm going to drop Chinese for the next several years at least. It was fun dabbling while it lasted but I have more than enough on my plate with European, Indian and Middle Eastern languages, and I'd prefer to more deeply explore those language families and civilisational groups than add anything new. Realistically if I wanted to make a real push to get my Mandarin into the B band, I'd have to drop all three of my "Anki languages" and cut back on languages like French and Hungarian. I also reckon I'd more enjoy having Arabic in the B band than Mandarin, as it'd be easier to maintain and use given my knowledge of Urdu.

[german2k01]

Is Urdu not your native language?

It is my native language. Such TV shows are a great source when it comes to developing informal spoken language because that's how they speak in day-to-day interactions even in real life. Very good for developing your active vocabulary. Your understanding is very good. You guessed it correctly. Keep up the good work!