Mapleleaf's branching log

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MapleLeaf
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Mapleleaf's branching log

Postby MapleLeaf » Tue Jan 04, 2022 2:26 am

I've never kept a language log so this will be a first for me. Likely I'll do it all wrong but I'll learn from the attempt.

I'm studying English, French and Spanish. I want to be able to read the level of a children's or mass-market novel in French by year end; and to be more comfortable in Spanish so that I can look at a sentence containing 'yo's and 'lo's and make sense of it.

My daily schedule is 3 to 6 articles on VoA Special English; French and Spanish on Duolingo and on Mango. I want to start reading something longer than a couple of sentences in French, preferably narrated so I can learn how it sounds. I'm looking into a few sites that might provide that, including my library's subscription to Tumblebooks which has narrated children's books. My stretch goal: the series of mass-market Quebec French novels I picked up from my library's used book shop. Multiple-generation family saga set where my grandparents grew up? Sounds great!
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MapleLeaf
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Re: Mapleleaf's branching log

Postby MapleLeaf » Sun Jan 09, 2022 3:41 pm

The first full week of 2022 is over: time for the first review of my language log. I'm going to have to set up a standard format for reviews but I'll do that later. Procrastination is important.

I started a spreadsheet to track my activity and I can verify I've kept up daily activity on my target languages even though Latin distracted me; I'm nearly finished Latin on both Duolingo and Mango. The Latin material is basic on both, but Mango includes interesting, actual quotes from Latin sources in their lessons and more verb tenses. The Frogs is a quite funny play, and and it was very interesting seeing how much French and Spanish inherit from Latin. I also enjoyed watching the movies Bon Cop, Bad Cop and Bon Cop, Bad Cop2 which feature two bilingual cops; the subtitles were not bilingual, so I watched each movie twice, first with English then French subtitles.

I'm considering if it's useful to set SMART goals. If I do, the daily goals to track in my spreadsheet will be:
- 15 minutes listening in English. I'm having to limit myself to at most 15 minutes from Voice of America Special English since they have such a deep repository and I'd never stop; I also do read-alongs (audiobook + regular book).
- 15 minutes practicing French (any method) which includes 5 minutes listening.
- 15 minutes practicing Spanish (any method)

I hope to be able to move up to use RFI's Journal en Francais facile by the end of this year. Duolingo stories are good for practice as I can easily replay any particular sentence; I'm doing one per day and while they're gradually getting more complex, they're not yet complex enough to be challenging, and I am hoping they will become so as I haven't gotten very far yet. However, I am uncertain if the voices are computer generated. I've tested playing computer-generated 'text to speech' to my relatives, who recoiled with horror, so I looked for human-read stories, and I'm adding the african storybook, 1jour1actu, and tumblebooks. I'm tracking the stories in my spreadsheet and am sorting out how best to set up a queue.

It's easy to find classic children's books in English, less so in other languages. The lists of the most-read ones from libraries and media sites are heavy with books translated from English. I have not yet found the equivalent of Charlotte's Web or Anne in Green Gables in French or Spanish. I'm quite happy to have obtained untranslated modern French novels; and I've already learned they use quite different punctuation than I'm used to, in particular guillemots and tirets.

I've learned how to type all the accents in French and Spanish. Yesterday I learned about the ordinal indicators in Spanish, and how to type them. I just realized I don't know how to type them in any other language. Let's give it a try: 1st, 2nd, 3rd; 1er, 2e, 3e -- no, I don't know how to do superscripts on this forum.

My computer died last month and I'm on a new computer, with files restored from backup, and Anki is not working. I'm going to have to reinstall, and I hope it will keep the old files. Whenever I encounter a sentence with a difficult grammar point (in particular, usage of 'y' and 'en') or new vocabulary, I like to enter it into Anki.
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Re: Mapleleaf's branching log

Postby Xenops » Sun Jan 09, 2022 4:15 pm

MapleLeaf wrote:I've never kept a language log so this will be a first for me. Likely I'll do it all wrong but I'll learn from the attempt.


Welcome to the forum! As another member commented on a different log: it's your log, your space. :D Do what you want.

My stretch goal: the series of mass-market Quebec French novels I picked up from my library's used book shop. Multiple-generation family saga set where my grandparents grew up? Sounds great!


What series is this? I hope to restart my French studies in the future (probably 2023 at the soonest).
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Re: Mapleleaf's branching log

Postby DaveAgain » Sun Jan 09, 2022 4:42 pm

MapleLeaf wrote:
It's easy to find classic children's books in English, less so in other languages. The lists of the most-read ones from libraries and media sites are heavy with books translated from English. I have not yet found the equivalent of Charlotte's Web or Anne in Green Gables in French or Spanish. I'm quite happy to have obtained untranslated modern French novels; and I've already learned they use quite different punctuation than I'm used to, in particular guillemots and tirets.
There is a classic French children's books thread that might interest you.
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MapleLeaf
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Re: Mapleleaf's branching log

Postby MapleLeaf » Sun Jan 09, 2022 4:58 pm


My stretch goal: the series of mass-market Quebec French novels I picked up from my library's used book shop. Multiple-generation family saga set where my grandparents grew up? Sounds great!


What series is this? I hope to restart my French studies in the future (probably 2023 at the soonest).


I picked up two series of 4 books each: Une simple histoire d'amour by Louise Tremblay D'essiambre, and Chroniques d'une p'tite ville by Mario Hade. The series are remarkably visually alike, with a similar cover design showing a small Quebec town and the same book size, 400 pages per book, although different publishers. Trembley is, incidentally, the most common last name in Quebec. Regarding the p'tite spelling, Quebec uses a lot more contractions than France.
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MapleLeaf
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Re: Mapleleaf's branching log

Postby MapleLeaf » Sun Jan 16, 2022 11:19 pm

Second week of 2022:

I tracked activities with a spreadsheet. I was able to keep up with some activities each day, but not all of my planned activities. It's hard finding time for them all.

  • English: 30 minutes daily with Voice of America Special English; 30 minutes daily with an English audiobook, Wandering in Strange Lands, the tale of the author discovering her Creole heritage. Lots of new words.
  • French: 15 minutes daily on Duolingo; 10 minutes on Mango in their 'French Canadian' course, which I completed. Mango listed having reading and listening activities but I found only a few courses have these; out of 74 courses, I found reading and listening activities in 9. I'll continue in their regular French course, which has reading and listening activities. I watched board games online, and was able to follow along in the chat, which was in French. I didn't keep up reading or listening to a story regularly, and only got in two 4-minute stories (the African storybook and 1jour).
  • Spanish: 15 minutes daily on Duolingo. I was delighted to catch Spanish references in an old western, for example: 'It doesn't look so lindo out here'. Being the last in my family to learn Spanish, I received a number of handed down course books and children's books, including The Cat in the Hat / El Gato Ensombrerado.
  • Latin: 10 minutes daily on Mango in their Latin course. I'm now in the last few units, which is using sentences from Cicero's Pro Archia, a legal defense of a case which outcome is long lost to history.
  • Any other language that's tempting: I've always wanted to know how to read a variety of scripts. Duolingo added a 'learn the characters' section to their Japanese course, so I spent 5 minutes a day learning the hiragana.
  • BBcode: 5 minutes today learning how to make a list.
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MapleLeaf
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Re: Mapleleaf's branching log

Postby MapleLeaf » Mon Jan 31, 2022 2:49 am

January 2022 nearly over, and I've procrastinated updating my log, but not on keeping up daily practice, as my spreadsheet proves.

  • English: Completed two readalongs with audiobooks: 10 hours with _The Fated Sky_ and 11 hours with _Exhalation_. I was briefly baffled by a claim that dawn rhymes with horn until I learned about non-rhotic accents. Apparently, people with rhotic accents say 'um' and people with non-rhotic accents say 'er', so I'll have to keep an ear out for this.
  • Latin: Completed the tree on Duolingo. Wrote 965 Latin sentences in my notes.
  • French, Spanish: Working through the Spanish to French tree on Duolingo, thus practicing both languages at the same time. I've already completed the French to Spanish tree. This does occasionally result in the situation where I'll learn a term or phrase in both French and Spanish but not know what it is due to the lack of context. Tried out apprendre.tv5monde exercises, Snappy Spanish, and a website for drilling numbers in both languages.
  • Linguistics: I discovered the International Linguistics Olympiad and went through some of their past problems. It seems to depend quite heavily on regularity in obscure languages and scripts; also it helps to know the spelling of Brazil in different languages. This threatens to be quite the timesink.
  • Children's books: I looked for assigned and summer reading lists in francophone middle and high schools, and found the lists heavily populated with graphic novels / bandes dessinés, such as _Paul dans le mêtro_. Lucky Luke and Asterix thus might be on my future reading lists.
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Sonjaconjota
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Re: Mapleleaf's branching log

Postby Sonjaconjota » Mon Jan 31, 2022 8:36 pm

MapleLeaf wrote:It's easy to find classic children's books in English, less so in other languages.

For French there's Le petit Nicolas (a bit more classic), for Spanish Manolito Gafotas (a bit more modern).
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MapleLeaf
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Re: Mapleleaf's branching log

Postby MapleLeaf » Tue Mar 01, 2022 7:58 pm

Thank you Sonjaconjota, Daveagain for the recommendations.

What I did in February:

  • completed 51 crowns in Duolingo, in French to English, Spanish to French, and English to French.
  • learned the Japanese writing system via Duolingo: it's not quite as simple as each character mapping to a consonant plus vowel or 'n'. There are diacritics (dakuten and handakuten), small characters, doubled characters, and sometimes a weak vowel at the end of a word disappears in the pronunciation. I'm currently in the katakana section and learning how Japanese pronounces and spells many country names.
  • updated my bookmarks after Duolingo announced dropping their forums.
  • listened/read-along to 100 articles on Voice of America Special English for a total of 595 minutes which is nearly 10 hours.
  • listened/read-along to 5 audiobooks which ranged from 10 1/4 hours to 14 1/2 hours for a total of 58 hours. One book's protagonist prepared for a mission in Israel by reading a Hebrew language reference book on the plane trip; when he landed he was able to speak in the language with native speakers, who recognized him as a second language learner but were able to communicate with him. The book, _Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds_ by Brandon Sanderson, is science fiction, and his ability to pick up a language that quickly was highlighted as a very unusual ability.
  • found a 'folio bilingue' collection at the library, bilingual books with translations of classic English stories in French, English printed on the left hand pages and French translations on the right hand pages, published by Gallimard in 2012-2013. I selected the book that was in the best physical shape, and found it a little hard going (Fitzgerald stories, ISBN 978-2-07-045018-3). The books in the worst shapes are the easiest to read, thus the most read.
  • didn't use Mango at all. Didn't have time.
  • searched for French children's books and found a scanned 1795 bilingual book of fables in both English and French. It's the 7th edition, dedicated to Lady Mary Montagu, daughter to John Montagu, 2nd Duke of Montagu. It is archaic: it uses the 'long s' , 'whither', and for French, 'étoit', 'avoit', and 'beure'. It has an unfamiliar form of pagesetting where the last word on each page is on a line of its own at the right side and is the same as the first word on the next page. This is called a 'catchword'. I find it very challenging not to read the long s as an f.

URLs that I consulted:
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MapleLeaf
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Re: Mapleleaf's branching log

Postby MapleLeaf » Fri Apr 01, 2022 10:12 pm

What I did in March:

  • Listened/read-along to 6 Voice of America Special English articles each day, for a total of 186 articles, or 18 hours. VoA even had an article on ancient languages: https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/a ... 88034.html
  • Listened/read-along to 4 audiobooks for a total of 30 hours. One was 'Four Lost Cities', which had a few mentions of the ancient languages in these cities (Çatalhöyük, Pompeii, Angkor).
  • Gained 113 crowns on Duolingo in the Spanish to French tree and French to English tree. I nearly finished these trees but didn't manage to by this writing. That'll have to be a goal for April.
  • Practiced the Japanese writing system for 1 minute every day on Duolingo. Duolingo added a listing of the writing strokes for each character. I find it annoying to have to trace the strokes with a mouse, but it does help visualize the character.
  • Toured my local library and picked up several children's and young adult's books in French from the used shop. One book had 'Premier Roman' on the back cover, so I thought it'd be a good 'first novel', but the first page contained seven sentences, each of which contained words unfamiliar to me. The next book I tried was listed 'Pour enfants 5 ans et plus' and I'm enjoying it so far; only one new word per page to learn, which I'm keeping in a list in a bookmark in the book. It helps that this book's pages are double-spaced and so has less words per page than the first book.
  • At the same library, I noticed the teen section has a 'March Book Madness' where 16 books are in a tournament with the winner determined by votes. I obtained the list of the entries in the French tournament, and this is my next goal in French: to read all these books. At least 4 are graphic novels and appear to be original French, at least 5 are translations from English, and I haven't yet checked out the rest.
  • Learned one reason I find reading French works so hard is : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elegant_v ... ge_example
  • Struggled with the imperfect and conditional verb tenses in French (pouvais vs pourrais) and I keep using the wrong one. In Spanish that'd be podía and podría, and I can mindlessly translate back and forth in the Spansh to French tree, but I don't recall what these mean in English. The DeepL translator tells me 'il pouvait; il pourrait' translates to 'he could; he could', which hasn't cleared up my confusion.
  • Enjoyed reading about the difficulty of translating jokes and the complexity of Sumerian verbs in this twitter thread about an ancient Sumerian bar joke, which goes: "A dog walked into a tavern. His eyes do not see anything. He should open them". https://twitter.com/LinManuelRwanda/sta ... 8627088389
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