AroAro's log (languages, books, certificates)

[AroAro]

Progress update for the last 3 weeks:

English/French/Italian - not much to report here except for the fact that I continued to use these languages in my "maintenance mode". I also finally had time to arrange my paper format books in French, English and Polish in the cupboard. We moved to a new flat in August so it took quite a while... Anyway, I sorted the books and grouped them into 3 categories - books I've already read, books I plan to read soon and books that have to wait a bit longer. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that so far I've actually read most of the books in my collection. The problem is that we (me and my wife) move places every 2,5 years on average and moving books is so tiresome that I am a happy Kindle convert and I don't buy paper books any more - except for language books of course!

German - I read yet another collection of texts (called "Deutsch Spezial"), this time the texts were supposed to represent C1 level and they touched on different controversial topics not usually covered by conventional courses (sexuality, in-vitro, mobbing, crime and so on). So yes, I acquired a lot of new vocab but in the end I was tired by it. All the texts seem to have been written in the same way/structure and the variety of topics could not make up for the general boredom. Now, I'm going to flip through a phrasebook in German and stay away from longer texts for a few days.

I also decided to concentrate on developing my listening skills and I listen to German podcasts (mainly from DeutschlandFunkNova) even on days that are allocated to my Romanian studies. The issue is that I can understand Romanian better than German and well, there are not many good podcasts in RO, or at least I still did not find them. I want to elevate my listening skills in German to the point where I'll not have to force myself into understanding what I hear and I'll be able to listen to German without effort. And I have a feeling this moment is right behind the corner, I just have to invest more commitment now.

Oh yes, I almost forgot - I'm reading my first book in German and that is a real milestone for me! I chose to read Paula Hawkins' "The Girl on the Train. Du kennst sie nicht, aber sie kennt dich" and that's because I wanted to read something not overly complicated or sophisticated but at the same time not a real krimi because I'm not really into detective stories. So far I've read two thirds and with each page (or percent? because I'm reading it on Kindle) I see I can read faster. There are words I don't know (fortunately with Kindle I can check them in one click) but I have no problem understanding the plot, so that's good news.

Romanian - I finished the "Grammatica Romena" earlier than expected, probably because there were not many grammatical concepts that were new to me. All in all, it was good to consolidate my knowledge in this field and I did a lot of translations from Italian into Romanian. These languages are similar and yet they differ in some fundamental aspects and I find it cool. Next step - I grabbed a copy of "Curs superior", a textbook published in the late 80' in Urss for the students of Romanian philology, and I will check what use I can make out of it.

Hebrew - I could not resist of course and I started reading Assimil's Cahier d'ecriture, the first 20 pages are about the history of Hebrew script and the origin of each letter - I'm always curious about such things. I knew that Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Hebrew and Arabic scripts are related to each other but for me it was a revelation to hear that the shapes of the letters come from Egyptian hieroglyphs - call me an ignoramus but I just did not know it till now.

[AroAro]

ROMANIAN - Am început să învăț românește la începutul anului 2018. Atunci, prioritatea mea era limba germană dar problema era că am ajuns la un nivel in această limbă și nu mai puteam să fac progrese. Nu faceam aceste progrese și stăteam mereu la același loc, independent de cât timp învățam germana și oricât mă străduiam. Eram dezamăgit și am descoperit că germana era mai grea decât mi-așteptasem.

Într-o dată m-am gândit că aș putea să învăț o altă limbă, mai ușoară, ca să-mi dovedesc mie că de fapt sunt încă capabil să stăpânesc o limbă străină singur. Cunoșteam deja franceza și italiana, deci m-am gândit la spaniola sau portugheza, numai că nu-mi plăcea sunetul acestor limbi și într-adevăr eu aș fi fost cam obligat să le studiez pentru că ele nu mă interesa prea mult. Și m-am dat seama că în Europa Orientală există doar o limbă romană și m-am apucat să citesc despre limba română și istoria României și după câteva zile știam deja că o să invăț această limbă. Poi, am descopit și un canal pe YT pe care îl chema Learn Romanian With Nico și entuziasmul acestei fete era atât de uriaș incât nu mai aveam îndoiali. Unica problemă era că nu există prea multe resurse pentru a învața româna, mai ales în polona, din fericire cunosc italiana și franceza și am putut să găsesc niște cărți interesante și eficiente. Anume, am folosit pentru prima oară metoda Assimil și desigur o voi folosi pentru alte limbi în viitor.

Mi-a fost mai ușor să învăț româna decât germana pentru că sunt multe lucruri care seamană între aceste două limbi, dar sunt și niște aspecte gramaticale care sunt destul de diferite (de pildă articolul genitival). Am avut și nevoie de ceva timp ca să mă obișnuiesc la folosirea conjunctivului în loc de infinitiv și la faptul că articolul este pus la sfârșitul unei cuvânte. Cu toate că învăt româna de mai scurt timp decât germana, mi se pare că cunosc cele două limbi la același nivel.

Învățarea limbii române mi-a dat multă îmcredere în mine deoarece mi-am dovedit că sunt capabil să studiez o limbă străină singur cu succes. Și in mod paradoxal am început sa fac progrese mai rapide tot în germana, deci asta a fost o hotărâre excelentă.

[AroAro]

Progress update for the last two weeks

English/French/Italian - these were my English and French weeks (16-22.11 and 23-29.11 respectively) and I read 5 articles (Le Point and Time) and had some some 50 minutes of listening in French and 2 hours in English (mainly YT videos - Poisson Fecond, Lindie Botes, Langfocus but also a BBC radio documentary "Blood lands" about racial tensions in South Africa)

German - I finished reading "The Girl on the Train" in German translation, I'm not very impressed with the book because the plot was engaging only to some point and in the end I was slightly tired and the whole story was just not really plausible to me. Now I'm reading something else in Polish so that does not count. I flipped though a German phrasebook just for fun and I skipped the sections of no use to me (like buying a ticket for a ferry because I'm not going to do that in German any time soon).
Now, I'm reading yet another collection of texts on economics. I remember when I bought it a few years ago - my German was still at beginner level - and I did not understand anything from it, but now I'm able to read it without much problem. This book ("Blickpunt Wirtschaft") claims to contain texts ranging from B2 to C2 levels, and I think that indeed my reading skills are quite high.
As for the listening, I committed to listen to more podcasts on FunkNova and I tried hard to do it but my brain said no and sometimes I fell asleep 5 minutes into a podcast. I have free time for this activity in the evenings, at 22-23 pm, so maybe I should try to allocate another time slot for it but I don't know when. I'll have to figure out what to do to stay focused when listening.
Reading - 6 articles from Der Spiegel
Listening - 5 YT videos by MrWissen2Go, 4 by Die Frage channel, 6 podcasts from FunkNova (some in sleep mode)

Romanian - so I'm reading "Curs superior" but overall if looks like a waste of time. The texts are mainly excerpts from literature, some date back to 19th century, and that's not really something I'm interested in. I am definitely going to read some books in Romanian in the future but only those published after 2000. I think I'm reaching the moment where I'm done studying Romanian because of the lack of resources for advanced learners and I will move it to "maintenance mode".
I also looked for some podcasts in RO and found some interesting ones, for example "The Real You" - the guy is some kind of coach and I'm usually not into such things but his podcasts are quite good, he talks more about psychology than the real coaching. I also discovered "Podcastul Pe Bune" - these are interviews with Romanian artists about their jobs, life and so on. There are some interviews with Romanian film directors/producers and as someone who used to go often to cinema, I find them especially interesting.
Reading - 5 articles from the Deutsche Welle service in Romanian
Listening - 3 YT videos by Zaiafet, 1 by Top Opt, 3 podcasts Pe Bune, 1 podcast from The Real You, 2 podcasts from "Istoria Romaniei by Catalina" and quite a lot of tv/radio news because of the presidential elections in Moldova won by Maia Sandu

Hebrew - I finished Assimil's "Cahier d'ecriture" and to my surprise I even remembered some Hebrew letters from 7 years ago when I tried to learn the alphabet for the first time. I also spent some time looking for Hebrew resources on Amazon and of course I ended up buying something - I bought "Hacking Hebrew Script" and the main reason was that it was co-written by Judith Meyer. She was one of the polyglots I discovered a few years ago when I got interested in language learning. And although her blog is no longer active and almost all the posts were deleted for whatever technical reason, I was happy to see that she's still active in this "polyglotism" thing and having a series of books published with "Teach Yourself" is quite an achievement. In fact, she published also the books to learn other scripts, like Korean or Arabic. I wonder if they will ever publish the books for Armenian, Georgian or Amharic scripts, though sadly I know the market for such publications is simply non-existent.
Anyway, I'm happy to have both Assimil and Teach Yourself books for Hebrew script. The Assimil is more about the actual writing the Hebrew letters whereas the TY is more about reading in Hebrew, so they nicely complement each other. There are plenty of words in both printed and cursive forms that the user must decipher. And although 95% of them are international words (countries, cities, famous people's names) it's still a rewarding feeling to be able to actually read something in Hebrew script.
I will now probably start working with "Otiot, otiot", the first book in the series of books published by Shorr's Foundation for Polish learners of Hebrew.

[cjareck]

And how do you rate your ability to read Hebrew cursive? I had to learn it from scratch with my language partner. I asked him to rewrite the first page for me, and then I made an Anki deck with the words and tried to read the second page. He corrected it for me, and I put it into Anki. We worked through the whole document that way - about 19 pages. It was not that easy since the letters - despite being written by the same hand - changed their shape quite often. I also didn't know the bigger part of the words what made it impossible to guess them after recognizing part of the letters.

[AroAro]

And how do you rate your ability to read Hebrew cursive? I had to learn it from scratch with my language partner. I asked him to rewrite the first page for me, and then I made an Anki deck with the words and tried to read the second page. He corrected it for me, and I put it into Anki. We worked through the whole document that way - about 19 pages. It was not that easy since the letters - despite being written by the same hand - changed their shape quite often. I also didn't know the bigger part of the words what made it impossible to guess them after recognizing part of the letters.

Despite being a total beginner, I was able to read the cursive in those two books but you know, it was not a real hand-writing like in the pages you copied here! I can recognize some 50-60% of the letters on these pages but some of the letters seem totally blurred to me and I just cannot decipher them. And yes, even if I recognized them, I would still not be able to read the text aloud because I don't know what vowels I should use.

[AroAro]

And how do you rate your ability to read Hebrew cursive? I had to learn it from scratch with my language partner. I asked him to rewrite the first page for me, and then I made an Anki deck with the words and tried to read the second page. He corrected it for me, and I put it into Anki. We worked through the whole document that way - about 19 pages. It was not that easy since the letters - despite being written by the same hand - changed their shape quite often. I also didn't know the bigger part of the words what made it impossible to guess them after recognizing part of the letters.

Despite being a total beginner, I was able to read the cursive in those two books but you know, it was not a real hand-writing like in the pages you copied here! I can recognize some 50-60% of the letters on these pages but some of the letters seem totally blurred to me and I just cannot decipher them. And yes, even if I recognized them, I would still not be able to read the text aloud because I don't know what vowels I should use.

And here's an example of cursive writing from "Hebrew script hacking" - it is very easy to read:

[cjareck]

It is rather an example of "sandbox mode" in Hebrew script hacking But perhaps it is easier to learn such easy letters at the beginning and than learn their form in natural Hebrew handwritten texts.

[Cavesa]

Hi, I just wanted to say I love your log! We have a few languages in common already and I am planning to start Hebrew soon too

[AroAro]

Hi, I just wanted to say I love your log! We have a few languages in common already and I am planning to start Hebrew soon too

Thank you, that's very nice! I'm going to start learning Hebrew (and Russian) "full-time" before Christmas and I'm really looking forward to it (both Hebrew and Christmas)

[AroAro]

Weekly update

Italian - it was my Italian week (well, technically it still is because it will end on 06.12 but it's easier for me to write an update on Fridays), so I read 2 articles from L'Espresso and watched two YT videos by Nova Lectio. I plan to read another article from L'Espresso and watch one more YT video by the end of the week

German - I finished "Blickpunkt Wirtschaft" and now I'm going through "Practice Makes Perfect. German Pronouns and Prepositions" but I'm doing only the prepositions part. I finally grasped the difference between "ich freue mich auf" and "ich freue mich über", I did not really pay attention to it before. Once I'm done with the prepositions, I'll start listening to "Assimil Perfectionnement Allemand" - I will not do the lessons in detail with translations and so on, just listen to the dialogues to check how much I can understand.
Reading - only two articles from Der Spiegel, but the interview with FDP politicians was quite long.
Listening - 1 video by MrWissen2Go, 2 videos by Die Frage, 2 podcasts from FunkNova - in "Eine Stunde History" they talked about Bertha von Suttner, the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and I read more about her in Wikipedia in German. The interesting fact is that she lived for several years in Georgia where she made her living by teaching German but she also started translating books from Georgian into German and that's quite impressive that she managed to learn Georgian to such a high fluency. I believe it's one of the harder languages for Indo-European speakers because it mixes agglutinative features with ergativity and tops it with super-complicated verbal system (that's at least what I believe to have read here and there, so please take it with a grain of salt). But probably the immersion helped her a lot. Time to read more about Caucasian languages.

Romanian - I put aside "Curs superior" - it's one of the rare instances where I did not go till the end but I could not care less and I think I'll spend my time better doing something else. As I mentioned in my previous post, the resources are pretty scarce for advanced learners, and for the time being I decided to listen to the recordings for the Romanian courses I gathered, without necessarily doing the exercises. I'm listening now to "Româna cu sau fără profesor", a course published at the end of 80', and in this book the first person singular of the verb "a fi/to be" is spelled "sînt" and they clearly pronounce it as "sɨnt". In the Assimil new version from 2014, it is spelled "sunt" and interestingly they pronounced it as "sunt" - the pronunciation follows here the new spelling rules introduced by Academia Română in 1993 (from what I read, it was and still is very controversial, the new spelling was supposed to make Romanian look more "latin" but it was not embraced by all and there are quite a lot of newspapers/writers that continue to follow the old rules). I may be wrong, but usually the spelling reflects the pronunciation but in the case of Romanian, people started pronouncing "sunt" instead of "sɨnt" to accommodate to the new spelling. It's as if the spelling impacted the pronunciation and not the other way round. And we are talking about one of the most basic words - "I am". I will check next week what pronunciation was used in the old Assimil from 1991.
Reading - 3 articles from DeutscheWelle in Romanian.
Listening - 4 episodes from the podcast "Istoria Romaniei by Calina", a very interesting and comprehensive series and 1 YT video by Zaiafet - this one was about the Black Death in Europe. It seems like every youtuber felt compelled to bring up the Black Death because of the Covid, but this video was really good, the guy talked about that pandemic from the point of view of regular people and what they had to face and how it impacted the life of those who survived.

Hebrew - not much done, I read the first 20 pages from "Otiot, otiot" and memorized some vocabulary from "Assimil Cahier d'Ecriture" and "Hebrew Script Hacking". Youtube suggested I should watch a video by a young American who learns Hebrew because her husband is from Israel and I was able to understand some words and expressions she said in the video (like boker tov or bevakasha and so on) but her level at that moment was probably no better than mine now