Kundê qehweyî diçe dibistanê --- Brun Ugle tries a more sensible approach, one language at a time (first up = Kurmanji)

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Brun Ugle
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Kundê qehweyî diçe dibistanê --- Brun Ugle tries a more sensible approach, one language at a time (first up = Kurmanji)

Postby Brun Ugle » Sun Aug 01, 2021 5:19 pm

I’m back! And I’m going to try a sensible approach to language-learning for once. I think I’ve said that before, but this time I mean it.

I was really struggling before when I was trying to learn too many newish languages at once. It had gone all right for a while, but then I added a couple more languages plus my life changed and everything fell apart. I tried starting a log to keep myself organized and motivated, but it didn’t help. And then Corona came and made everything even more impossible.

So, about a year ago, I had already almost stopped learning languages all together and I was really stressed, so, I started doing yoga and meditation and learning to get control of my stress and anxiety. It was a slow process, but it really worked and now I have very little anxiety and when I do, it never reaches the extremes it used to reach and it usually passes pretty quickly. I also don’t find new situations or unexpected changes nearly as stressful as before and can even tolerate noise much better. In general, my comfort zone has expanded greatly. I plan to continue with the yoga and meditation and I hope I will see further improvements. It’s been really helpful for language-learning too since I don’t waste as much time obsessing over things. Before I would have read through this log entry probably 20 times before posting it, rereading it again at least once every time I as much as moved a comma. I even did that for text messages. But now I’m much more relaxed. I’m also more relaxed about mistakes and speaking and writing has become much easier as a result. Before, if I didn’t know the right way to say something, I wouldn’t say anything at all. Now I just mash together some words in a way I think will be understood even if I know it is wrong. I figure I’ll either be corrected and learn the right way, or I’ll be understood well enough that the other person doesn’t feel a need to correct me and I’ll eventually come across the right way in my studies. I also don’t spend as much time trying to construct sentences before saying them. I still make an effort, but if I can’t figure it out pretty quickly, I just jump in and hope to figure it out before I get to that part of the sentence.

When I gave up on trying to juggle multiple languages, I decided to concentrate on Turkish at first. I kind of need Turkish and Kurdish because my boyfriend is a Kurd and comes from Turkey. I decided to concentrate on Turkish because it seemed much easier than Kurdish due to the lack of good materials for learning Kurdish. Even with only one language to learn I still didn’t make great progress due to stress and anxiety and the fact that my boyfriend was home all the time and trying to learn Norwegian. He isn’t a very independent learner so he would ask me about three questions per minute. So, I basically gave up for a longish period of time. But the Corona-situation gradually got a bit better and now that he’s finally got a residence-permit he can attend proper classes and hopefully will be much more well-occupied and out of my hair this fall.

What got me back on learning languages and made me switch over to Kurmanji/Kurdish for now was that I got the opportunity to take online classes starting last December. I’ve made pretty good progress, but it’s still a bit of a struggle. We will be continuing the class starting in a couple of weeks and I’m also taking occasional private lessons with an italki teacher. I’m just starting to get to a point where I can almost understand enough of a TV show to enjoy it, as long as I slow the audio down a bit. There isn’t a lot for learners of Kurmanji and none of the textbooks have much if any audio, so I’ve really struggled with listening and pronunciation. Normally I would use Assimil or something and shadow the audio over and over, but I don’t have that option. My boyfriend and other Kurdish friends haven’t been much help so far because they aren’t great at slowing down and simplifying their speech, and they all speak different dialects, but I’m hoping to soon get my comprehension levels up enough that I can try speaking with them regularly.

I’ve signed up for the 6WC this time. I haven’t done it for a long time because it can be rather stressful, but I thought I’d give it a try again. If it gets to be too much, I can always drop it.

I’m not doing any other languages at the moment, so they are all getting a bit rusty, but I read a good bit in Spanish and German and of course, I use Norwegian all the time. I’m letting all my lower-level languages just rust away completely. I’ll pick them up again one at a time at some unknown point in the future. My plan is to get Kurdish up to a level where it can take care of itself for a while. That means I need to be able to read novels comfortably, watch and understand TV and be able to have reasonably comfortable conversations. Then I will pick up Turkish again. I’ve lost a lot of vocabulary in Turkish by dropping it, but the grammar seems to be sticking and I’m also retaining the more common vocabulary. What I’ve lost is all those lists of words they teach in Babbel that aren’t really used much at a low level. I’m not sure what I retain of the other languages I was studying. But I’m not going to worry about them right now. I’ve found I can make pretty good progress if I just study one language intensely and once I get it to a level where I can maintain it by reading and watching TV, I can move on to another language. And then I can always go back to it later and try to push it to a higher level.

I’ve also discovered some things about my own language learning style this past half year. One is that classes can be more useful to me than I previously thought. Of course, it depends on the class, but if you are in a class of motivated students and you have a good teacher, it can really push you, as can private lessons with a good teacher. The other is that while I can learn multiple languages at once, it is easier to learn one at a time. I like the feeling of studying one language intensely and letting it take over my brain and start to push itself out in the form of thoughts and then eventually in actual speech. That doesn’t happen as easily if I am constantly switching between languages. I’ve also found that I can get something out of speaking at a lower level. And that I actually sort of like speaking with people even though it can be exhausting and sometimes it’s so stimulating that I can’t sleep that night.

So, I’m going to try this for a while. I’m going to study one new language at a time, intensely, while continuing to enjoy media in my more advanced languages, and occasionally taking breaks between new languages to polish my old languages.
Last edited by Brun Ugle on Tue Nov 23, 2021 1:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Brun Ugle tries a more sensible approach, one language at a time (first up = Kurmanji)

Postby DaveAgain » Sun Aug 01, 2021 5:30 pm

Welcome back Brun Ugle, glad to hear all is well. :-)
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Re: Brun Ugle tries a more sensible approach, one language at a time (first up = Kurmanji)

Postby rdearman » Sun Aug 01, 2021 8:55 pm

So you're saying that box full of French stuff I sent you is wasted? :lol:
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Re: Brun Ugle tries a more sensible approach, one language at a time (first up = Kurmanji)

Postby Xenops » Mon Aug 02, 2021 2:12 am

Velkommen hjem. :D Vi savnet deg!
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Re: Brun Ugle tries a more sensible approach, one language at a time (first up = Kurmanji)

Postby Saim » Mon Aug 02, 2021 2:32 am

Kurmanji is a cool choice! Good luck. :)
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Re: Brun Ugle tries a more sensible approach, one language at a time (first up = Kurmanji)

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Mon Aug 02, 2021 5:24 pm

So good to hear your voice again. Welcome back!
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Re: Brun Ugle tries a more sensible approach, one language at a time (first up = Kurmanji)

Postby Brun Ugle » Wed Aug 04, 2021 8:10 am

rdearman wrote:So you're saying that box full of French stuff I sent you is wasted? :lol:

No, I’m definitely going to do French, just not quite yet. After Kurmanji, French is going to be so easy by comparison that I should be able to do it in a matter of months. ;)

Actually, learning Kurmanji with its lack of good resources is making me try a lot of new things. I’m pushing myself to do things I wouldn’t normally do, like taking classes and talking at an early stage. And all that is teaching me how to learn languages more efficiently. So, I think it will make future languages much easier when I get around to them. I’m really looking forward to French with all its great resources for learners.
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Re: Brun Ugle tries a more sensible approach, one language at a time (first up = Kurmanji)

Postby Cavesa » Thu Aug 05, 2021 9:20 am

It's so awesome to see you back here among us! I've missed you! But I am really glad your break has helped and that you've found a new and better learning path for you and for this phase of your life. (Plus time spent caring for one's mental health is never wasted!)

Don't worry about forgetting your other languages, stuff gets relearned faster, it's ok, and you have a clear priority right now.

I'm looking forward to hear about your new learning adventures, you're diving into something I have never dared as a learner, and I wish you all the best and cheer for you!
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Re: Brun Ugle tries a more sensible approach, one language at a time (first up = Kurmanji)

Postby Brun Ugle » Sun Aug 08, 2021 5:55 pm

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Re: Brun Ugle tries a more sensible approach, one language at a time (first up = Kurmanji)

Postby Brun Ugle » Sun Aug 08, 2021 5:56 pm

As usual, the week didn’t go as planned, but keeping track of time for the 6WC is helping me to notice where my time actually goes, so maybe I’ll be able to do something about it. Keeping track makes it easy to see how I could once study 5-6 languages per day and now can barely manage one. Of course, I probably wasn’t making good progress in those 5-6 languages and would have been better off limiting myself even then, but I was able at one point to find 5-6 hours or even more per day. I can do that now too sometimes, but only rarely and only by squeezing in a lot of listening while walking and doing other things. I’ve been doing a lot of that during the 6WC to get some time in, but I think it has somewhat limited usefulness. I think my brain gets some benefit from just walking in silence that is lost when I try to squeeze in as much time as possible.

So, what did I do this week? Well, I had two Italki lessons, and while I like the teacher and the lessons, he has been away from his usual location, visiting friends or something, and we have had problems with the sound. When I first took lessons with him, he used earphones and the sound was good. But about three lessons ago, he didn’t have his earphones, so I asked him to try to use them the next time. Then, on Tuesday, he used earphones, but they were different earphones, without a microphone, so it didn’t help me at all. My problem isn’t how well HE can hear, but that the computer microphone picks up the sound of the fan and my brain can’t filter it out easily and I get exhausted trying to filter out the fan noise and just hear his voice. And of course, my brain has enough work to do just trying to understand Kurmanji. I had another lesson on Friday, but he still didn’t have earphones with a microphone because they were broken. So again, I struggled through the whole lesson and was completely exhausted by the end. So, I think I need to send him a message and ask him to message me when he gets a microphone and then I will schedule more lessons. I just don’t get enough out of them when the sound is so bad.

I’ve also been slowly working my way through the Hînker level 3 textbook. I really need to speed it up a bit though or I’ll never be finished. I’ve been using scriptorium on the written passages, but maybe I’ll just skip that now. It takes a long time. This is the textbook series we used in the group classes I took online, but we never really went through everything in class. Level 5 of the group class starts now on Monday. I’d kind of like to copy some of the passages over to LWT and use that to decipher them, but last time I used it, it broke and I can’t figure out how to fix it. :cry:

I’ve also watched some videos and even transcribed a bit of one of them. I’m watching a comedy series called Sebra Malan and I’m starting to get to the point where I can understand chunks of dialogue and sometimes even whole scenes, but I’m still relying a lot on the video portion and guesswork. I’ll have to watch it again sometime when I actually know Kurmanji to really understand what’s going on. I watch it using the video speed controller add on in Firefox and slow it down to 80-90 percent.

I’ve also watched some nice documentaries and the transcription I’ve been working on is of one of these. They are nice because the presenters speak really clearly and fairly slowly. One of the reasons I’m transcribing them is because there is almost no material in Kurmanji with both audio and transcription. The textbooks generally don’t have audio. And this makes it very hard to learn proper intonation and pronunciation. Normally when I start a new language, I use a lot of time on shadowing dialogues from the textbooks. Assimil is really good for this because of their crystal-clear audio. But I couldn’t do that with Kurmanji because there isn’t any audio for the textbooks. So, I thought maybe I could shadow some documentaries with nice, clear audio. But first I need transcriptions. It’s also this audio that I listen to most of the time when I’m out walking. I downloaded a bunch of them from YouTube.

I’ve also been trying to get a bit of writing in. I’m using a list of questions for language exchanges. The list is divided into levels and I’m doing the A1-A2 questions. That’s also taking me a long time. My production is still very low. That’s why I’m doing this. If I have to talk about something that I’ve previously talked about or written about, I can usually manage OK or even pretty well, depending on the topic and how used to it I am. But I struggle with other things, so I need to work on writing to expand my vocabulary a little and get me used to expressing myself on a variety of topics. I should probably try doing most of them several times, both written and spoken.

Speaking of speaking, on Thursday when I went for my usual walk, my boyfriend decided to come too. So, I didn’t get to do much listening during that walk, but we ended up going to visit some Kurdish friends. On the way there, he and I started talking a little in Kurdish. That went really well because he managed to remember to slow down and speak a little more clearly than he usually does. I was able to speak pretty well too. So, then we got to our friends’ house. At first, only the wife was there and I managed to speak a little to her too. Then her husband came in and the lady next-door came with one of her kids. Then it got harder and I mostly just listened. After a while the two women left and we just sat with the man and talked a bit while finishing our tea. I managed to speak a bit then too. The man was telling my boyfriend about how he’d seen me on the street the other day and asked where my boyfriend was and I’d told him he was visiting his brother in another town. Every time I speak Kurmanji to any of them, they tell the story to everyone, repeatedly, like it’s something really amazing. It makes me feel a bit like circus freak or something sometimes, but I’m starting to get used to it. And once I’m able to speak well, they will probably get used to the idea of a foreigner speaking Kurdish and stop being so amazed.

After we finished our tea, we left and hurried to catch up to the two women who were walking into town. They were walking slowly because they had two small children with them, so even though we left ten or fifteen minutes after them, we caught up to them fairly easily. From there, we walked together into town, chatting along the way. In town, they all had a few things to do and so we split up and met again fifteen minutes later to visit the daughter of the first woman. She’d just had a baby a few weeks ago, so my boyfriend and I went to the bookstore for a card while the others were finishing their errands. We spent quite a bit of time there too, but most of the conversation was too fast for me to get more than the gist of what they were talking about. To add to that, the TV was on and the two kids that came with us were each given a phone to play with and were watching cartoons and things on them. So, it was very noisy. The last hour we were there, my brain just gave up. I couldn’t process the sound anymore and it felt like listening to a radio tuned between stations with the volume turned way up. By the time we left, I was so exhausted, I could barely walk home.

We were on the way to visit them again yesterday, but I got a flat tire on my bike, so we just turned around and came home again. But I should probably try to spend more time with them. Most of them don’t speak any Norwegian, so I’m forced to speak Kurdish with them.
As for where all my time goes, I’ve found I use a lot more time on taking care of my foster cats than I had realized. I knew that I used a lot of time on them, but I think it is probably more than I thought. And it’s certainly more than I had thought it would be when I originally signed up. But this week it has been even more than usual. One evening we had a meeting at the Center. The meeting itself was about two hours and I road my bike there and back, about half an hour each way. Another day, they asked for a picture of one of the kittens I am currently taking care of. That’s normal. They post pictures on their website every few days to find homes for the various cats. Well, I sent one of the pictures I had, but they asked if I could wipe his eye and take a new picture. There was a miniscule amount of sleep in his eye that you couldn’t even see if you didn’t enlarge the picture tremendously, but I took another picture. This time the background wasn’t nice enough. I sent picture after picture, but there was always something wrong – background, lighting, angle. It turned out that they’d had a professional take some pictures of a couple of the other kittens and they expected me to come up with something similar. I’m not a photographer. I don’t have a studio and professional equipment. And the kitten had never seen humans until a few weeks ago and is still rather shy and was getting very nervous about all the picture taking. Eventually, I thought of my big, blue duvet cover with a very high thread count that almost looks a little silky and decided that would make a good background. Only it was jammed in the closet and needed to be ironed. So, I ironed and ironed and finally decided was good enough. I draped it over a chair, sat the kitten on it and snapped a whole bunch of photos with my phone. I sent the best of the bunch and it was finally accepted. Then I had to take pictures of the other two kittens. All that took something like an hour and a half. I had been planning to study then, but I ended up not doing any of what I’d planned to do.

There was also one day when we went to the beach. I took a book with me (in Spanish) and I did read a bit, but mostly I was too distracted to read much. It would have been easier if I’d taken a more interesting book perhaps, but I didn’t have one. I don’t regret it. This is Norway and if the weather is nice, you have to enjoy it. In the old days though, I probably would have stayed home and studied.
And then there are just the daily things that come up and the fact that it can be distracting when you share a space with another person. Your routine has to be more flexible and you don’t have as much control over it. There is also more housework to do with two people and a bunch of cats. And then there is stuff like yoga that can’t be combined with language-learning. I didn’t take care of myself well enough before and I’m not going back to that. And then there are the things I could probably do more about, like social media. One of the problems with the 6WC is that it uses Twitter and I tend to easily get sucked in. So, I think I’m going to set a timer when I post things and not let myself spend extra time there. Facebook is also a problem since there are various groups on there that I really do need to check regularly for classes and volunteer work, but I also end up getting sucked in. And it’s much worse if I haven’t gotten enough sleep or if my quality of sleep wasn’t good enough.

School officially starts in a week and my boyfriend will be taking Norwegian classes and probably some English and math. That might help to give us more of a routine, or it might mean I have to use a lot of time helping him. I’m not sure which way it will go. Also, my volunteer work teaching Norwegian will start up again and that will take up some time. My Kurmanji class starts up again on Monday, so I’ll at least have two hours a week accounted for with that. Beyond that, I really want to work on my textbook, watching videos and output.
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