Mapleleaf's branching log

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MapleLeaf
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Re: Mapleleaf's branching log

Postby MapleLeaf » Mon May 02, 2022 2:19 am

What I did in April:
  • Listened/read-along to 86 Voice of America Special English articles for a total of 454 minutes. I had caught up completely on the RSS feed early in April, so I took a break.
  • Listened/read-along to 4 audiobooks for a total of 42 hours. One was 'Grasp: the science transforming how we learn', but it had very little regarding language learning, or of any specific subject.
  • Gained 83 crowns on Duolingo in the French to English tree, finally completing it to L5.
  • Read '100 days of Cree' by Neal McLeod, a collection of blog postings each with a word list of Cree words, some old, some newly minted, such as 'topwêstikwân-acimosis' (poodle, literally, curly-hair dog).
  • Pondered the April 1 version of xkcd, which has an 8 hour speech generated by text-to-speech, which got retranslated back to text by xkcd fans.
  • Pondered a website (https://loneliness.one/translate) that translates messages through ten random languages and finally back to the original language. Some sentences sometimes survive without change, but more often they transmute.
  • Started on my new goal of reading through the books entered in the 'March Madness' tournament in the teen section of the library, by selecting a graphic novel (bande dessinée): Louca, by Bruno Dequier. It's a series from Belgium. The series consists of very thin, but tall and wide, books; the cover image of the first book is of a teenager holding a soccer ball; each page seems to have up to 60 words. This book promises a lot of informal French, a welcome adjunct to the formal French of my classes, and even better, it has no passé antérieur! The first book consists of three 'acts'. I've gotten through the first act, and already learned much, such as:
    • There are multiple ways to phrase questions in French, and I've been uncertain which is preferred in which situations. This book uses two: 'Mais qu'est-ce que c'est que ce délire' and 'Tu peux rester?', but not inversion.
    • The subjunctive in action: 'il va falloir que tu aies de très bonnes notes aux examens de fin d'année si tu veux passer en classe supérieure'. I'd mistakenly thought 'passer' means to pass, as in to get grades and conclude the course, here it means to be passed on to the next course. A false friend!
    • The passé première forme in action: 'Un enfant aurait eu cette ball' (a child would have gotten that ball), 'J'aurais dû m'en douter'' (I should have known better).
    • Small word in action: What is 'en' in 'Je sais que tu en as les capacités'? DeepL translates this as 'I know you have the ability', but it might translate better as 'I know you have the ability to do it' (with it being 'get better grades, in the previous sentence'.
    • Ne..que in action: 'il n'est doué que faire des bêtises.' (He is only good at making mistakes).
    • The 'l'air' idiom in action: 'Est-ce que ça a l'air d'aller?' Literally, 'Does this have the appearance of going?', but idiomically, 'Does it look like I'm okay?'.
    • New word not in my dictionary: 'Chuis dans la merde'. Wiktionary came to the rescue and defined 'chuis' as a contraction of 'je suis' (I am). DeepL translated this very politely as 'I'm in trouble' although the literal translation is 'I'm in the shit'.
    • Old word with new meaning: 'Mince', which I found in my dictionary as 'thin', but used here as 'drat'.
    • New idiom: 'Tu nous renvoies la balle ?' was rendered by DeepL as 'Are you passing the buck?', but it was used more literally as 'Can you throw the ball back to us?'
    • Informal contractions: 'J'vais me faire tuer'' (I'm going to be killed).', 'J'peux rentrer ?' (Can I come in?), 'M'sieur' (monsieur). I thought these were a Quebecois affection, but this is a Belgium book.
    • Omission of 'ne' in negative statements: 'J'avais pas vu' (I hadn't seen).
    • Informal French expression: 'Qu'est-ce que tu fiches?' (what are you doing?). My French courses would have used the more formal wording of 'Qu'est-ce que tu fais?'
    • The wordiness of French, such as 'tu n'es pas sans savoir que...' which is literally, 'you are not without knowing that...' but translates more colloquially as 'you know that...'.
    • And, of course, sound effects! Aaaah! Vlam! Drriiinnng! Zwip! Aïe! Paf! Blam! Bouing!
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Amandine
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Re: Mapleleaf's branching log

Postby Amandine » Mon May 02, 2022 2:35 am

Very useful list of observations, Mapleleaf. Yes, "passer" is a very confusing false friend for us. "j'ai passé l'examen" just means you took the exam, saying nothing about if you succeeded or not. It also mean to play. I do a volunteer radio show and to say I play a song, it's "Je passe une chanson." Also, I find 'mince' very satisfying to say the way the French do as a polite expletive, "maaaaahhnnssss"
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MapleLeaf
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Re: Mapleleaf's branching log

Postby MapleLeaf » Fri Jun 10, 2022 1:30 am

What I did in May:
* Watched the Great Courses' video series Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths of Language Usage by Professor John McWhorter. I found it very interesting as a lingophile. I didn't know sit/set were related, as were drink/drench.
* Watched the Great Courses' video series The Secret Life of Words: English Words and Their Origin by Professor Anne Curzan. It had many interesting stories and observations, such as: if adding 'un' to a verb reverses its meaning, then consider 'unravel'.
* Puzzled over the grammar of pronouns in the negative imperative. Duolingo says: "when giving commands, le/la/les always come before te/nous/lui/etc, but with negative commands, like 'don't give it to me', le/la/les come after me/te/se/nous/vous but before lui/leur". Perfect makes Perfect's Advanced French Grammar discusses pronouns in the imperative but not in the negative imperative. I checked a Bescherelle grammar book but it did not cover this point.
* Completed all stories in Duolingo English for French speakers.
* Duolingo added stories to 'French for Spanish speakers', so I'm going through these as well.
* Gained 36 crowns in Duolingo French. I'm roughly nearly half way down the tree.
* Completed Mango Latin: 73 lessons in 7h45 minutes.
* Completed some lessons in Mango French and Spanish;
* Read the rest of the graphic novel Louca, without looking up anything and moving past anything I didn't understand which was too much of the book; I have to go over the book again.
* Scored over 20 language-related books from a used book sale such as l'espagnol en 90 leçons et en 90 jours. 90 days...doubtful, but it's nice reading.
* Started reading a dual language book that translates The Old Man and the Sea into French.
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MapleLeaf
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Re: Mapleleaf's branching log

Postby MapleLeaf » Mon Jul 18, 2022 2:23 am

What I did in June: very little. I kept up my streak in Duolingo in French only, and finished reading Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea in a bilingual format (French/English). I learned many terms for sailing and fishing, and I was puzzled over the title character catching a dolphin, a 'burnished gold fish with its purple spots' and 'shining golden head', since dolphins are grey. The French translation called it a 'dorade', and my first googled images of 'dorade fish' did not appear particularly golden to me. I found commentary on the book that explains the term 'dolphin' refers to a dolphinfish, or mahi-mahi, which is called 'dorado' in Spanish because of its color, and in French it's a 'dorade coryphène'. The book has several Spanish words in it, including 'dorado' itself ('Il l'appelait dorado'), which makes me wonder how that would be handled in translation to Spanish.

I found more examples of my faux ami 'passer' and added them to my list of interesting sentences:
    La pièce de théâtre va passer en direct à la télé.
    It faut passer par un tunnel de sept kilomètres pour aller là-bas.
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MapleLeaf
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Re: Mapleleaf's branching log

Postby MapleLeaf » Sat Sep 17, 2022 12:15 am

What I did in July and August:

  • Duolingo: I heard that Duolingo was updating their trees yet again, and Duolingo has reset their tree before when I had nearly gotten to the end, so I focused on completing the French tree and gave all other languages and websites a break for this period. I've gotten my Golden Owl just 5 minutes ago, so I can consider that a mission accomplished. It was a very full tree: I wrote down 3673 French sentences or words in my notes for this course and each of the lessons in the final stretch introduced several idioms new to me. I will spend the rest of tonight polishing my golden owl.
  • Read Kazuo Ishiguro's Crooner Nocturne in a bilingual format (French/English).
  • Read several French graphic novels: Louca 1 and 2 (a story about a soccer high schooler); Seuls 1, 2, 3, and 4 (a horror story about children mysteriously alone in an empty city); Au-delà des étoiles (a friendship story about high schoolers who form a breakdancing group). The language is very casual, with 'ne' almost never appearing; and this gives me some trouble with the 'ne..plus' construction: 'Bouge plus' is literally 'move more' but it means 'Don't move'.
  • Read Highly Irregular: oddities of the English language by Akira Okrent. It has a lot of interesting information about English spelling and pronunciation that I hadn't seen elsewhere.
  • Read Neural Machine Translation which is about computer translation of printed words. It was a very dense book with a lot of math and I didn't understand most of it.
  • Read Le latin pour les nulls, a French tutorial on Latin. It seemed very informative, and was definitely fuller than the Latin course on Duolingo. I liked it, but I didn't have much time to study.
  • Read Korean Grammar by Soohee Kim. A very thick book, but I found it fun to read. So much info! So much I'd like to study, so little time!
  • Read the lonely planet's Japanese Phrasebook. It had an informative summary of Japanese grammar at the front; I skipped the phrases themselves.
  • Watched Great Courses's Writing and Civilization; I was particularly intrigued by the description of how cuneform writing was decrypted by modern day linguists.
  • Met my faux ami 'passer' a few more times: Je ne peux pas m'en passer (I can't go without it); Je lui passerai le bonjour (I will give him my regards).
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MapleLeaf
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Re: Mapleleaf's branching log

Postby MapleLeaf » Sun Dec 04, 2022 3:39 am

What I did in September, October, and November:

  • Procrastinated updating my language log.
  • Took a break from the computer to reduce panic attacks at not keeping up with streaks. Breaking up with wordle was painful but necessary.
  • Glanced at the title of an Economist article, 'Phrasebooks are dying out' while I was reading phrasebooks.
  • Read Le Québécois pour mieux voyager, by Ulysse, which is a Quebecois phrasebook for Francophones. I am not sure how seriously to take this phrasebook. It has such phrases as 'Bonjour / Bonjour' 'Bye / Au revoir', and I notice that 'appareil photo' (camera) appears in different lists, one as 'camera' and another as 'Kodak'.
  • Read Words of the Inuit by Louis-Jacques Dorais: an etymological exploration of the Inuit language.
  • Read The Man Who Tasted Words: a neurologist explores the strange and startling world of our senses by Guy Leschziner. It had a chapter on Synesthesia, where senses (often color) are experienced with words; I wonder how that interacts with multiple languages.
  • Read Contemporary Linguistic Analysis: an introduction by William O'Grady and John Archibald: a big textbook that covered many topics including secondary language learners.
  • Watched the Great Courses' Language and Society by Professor Valorie Fridland. A discussion of sociolinguistics. (that word took me several tries to spell correctly).
  • Went on a few day trips to Quebec and had to make sense of road signs such as 'à chantier', which turned out not to be 'to the singer', but 'to the construction area'. I volunteered to be a safety road crossing guard for an event and found wearing a bright reflective vest was a magnet for a few drivers to pull over to talk to me. I did not understand a single word, and eventually found that chanting 'du parking' (parking) and pointing to the parking lot just out of sight would get them to move on. At least I got in much practice with 'bonjour'.
  • Adjusted to Duolingo's change to 'path'. The biggest issue for me is that stories is no longer a separate tab; a course that I had completed before stories had been added to it updated to a completed 'path' with no obvious way to access the stories I hadn't yet read. At least I didn't have that issue for the French tree--even though I had completed it, it updated to a 'path' half-way completed, with stories available along the path.
  • Took back up an old, forgotten hobby (a board game) and found a very multilingual online forum where I played 'identify the script/language', spotting Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Cyrillic, and one new to me--Georgian.
  • Took a month off Spanish, and came back to find Spanish words looking completely alien, so I spent November refreshing my Spanish.
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MapleLeaf
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Re: Mapleleaf's branching log

Postby MapleLeaf » Mon Jan 02, 2023 10:47 pm

What I did in December:
  • On Duolingo, I started the English for Spanish speakers course and refreshed the basics of Spanish, getting as far as section 25 (out of 200). It had many drills on the correct usage of 'do' in English.
  • On Mango, went through the very short Cherokee course and learned it uses tones and an alphabet that looks related to the latin alphabet in the form of letters if not sounds. It covered how people greet each other and give their names.
  • Read the third graphic novel in the Louca series. I was able to follow along, learning new impolite terms to call others such as paumé (misfit) and empoté (clumsy oaf), but one word didn't show up in my directory and DeepL translate couldn't handle it, either: 'steuplé', which turns out to be a form of 's'il te plaît'.
  • Read Barron's AP French Language and Culture. This is a bit beyond my level, and it made me so very grateful I don't have to take or pass any tests. I might re-read this book after I get stronger in French.
  • Read Spanish for the Rest of Us by William C. Harvey. It's a beginner level book, with no practice material (particularly for reading), but with a lot of lists of words. Maybe useful for Anki-style studying, but not so interesting to read.

    From fear of missing out, I tried several sites new to me. I had to make several tries to turn off email notifications from these sites.
  • Signed up for Kwiziq. Got confronted with a 53 question French quiz, to which I gave 23 incorrect answers ang got listed as A2 - Lower Intemediate. I switched to Spanish and it asked if I'm studying Spanish from Spain or Latin American, then gave me a 53 question quiz, to which I gave 30 wrong answers and got listed as A1. The quizzes focused on the usage of qui/que (french), que/cual. (spanish), and verb tenses. I'm not sure how to use Kwiziq.
  • Signed up for Clozemaster. Limit of 30 sentences per day. By language, so I can do both French and Spanish. I didn't continue using it.
  • Signed up for wanikani. I spent the first 3 days on radicals, with English names, and then learned 5 kanjis, and learned what a 'reading' was. Wanikani quizzed me on both the reading (typed in hiragana) and in the meaning. The website does a nice job of translating my typing in roman to hiragana, although I had to figure out what to type for some of these characters. The website https://j-talk.com/convert was useful in figuring out that step. I've now learned 11 kanji out of 17 of 'level 1'.
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MapleLeaf
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Re: Mapleleaf's branching log

Postby MapleLeaf » Mon Jan 02, 2023 11:30 pm

2022 Year Review:

  • English:
    • 8172 minutes (136 hours, or nearly 6 days) on the Voice of America Special English website. I've managed to get to the point where I can understand half of the audio without having to read along.
    • 40 audiobooks read along with the written material, in 471 hours (nearly 20 days). I'm happy with how much my English comprehension has increased; there was only one book I had trouble understanding, which was a lecture series that had been recorded from a live session, so there was quite a bit of audience noise, and also a lot of diverging from the written notes.
  • French:
    • Practiced sentences on Duolingo. ~370 crowns.
    • Listened to Mango: 10 hours total. 29 lessons.
  • Spanish:
    • Practiced sentences on Duolingo. ~140 crowns.
    • Listened to Mango: 7 hours total. 28 lessons.
  • Other languages:
    • Browsed through books and websites for Latin, Cree, Inuktitut, Korean, Japanese.

I wanted to read more in French, but did not get that done. I'm also considering just how to quantify how much I read or watch, since I know I watched the Extra series, several movies, and French by the Nature Method videos, but I don't have that logged in a way that's easy to summarize. This is the first year I've tried tracking my activities, and I'm still figuring out the best metrics.

For 2023, I want to:
  • read a French book each month.
  • improve my verb tenses in French and Spanish. I will likely use a verb conjugation practice website, although I am not sure how I will track this.
  • get audio input in French and Spanish. I'm looking over the Dreaming Spanish website, which suggests 15 minutes a day for a goal of 1,500 hours. I expect I'll need more, as I did with English, but like the tortoise--every bit helps.
  • continue enjoying learning languages.
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grayson
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Re: Mapleleaf's branching log

Postby grayson » Thu Jan 05, 2023 8:49 am

MapleLeaf wrote:Synesthesia, where senses (often color) are experienced with words; I wonder how that interacts with multiple languages


I have the most common kind of synesthesia, where color is associated with letters and numbers. Over Christmas I was grilled pretty heavily on how-does-that-work-for-foreign-languages-then by someone who just learned I have synesthesia, so I can provide one data point! :D

Romanized scripts, with or without additional ornamentation, carry the same color associations as English does for me. For example, the letter C is light blue, and so is Ç. The letter L is very dark blue, and so is the letter Ł. (The "ornamentation" itself is dark gray, but it's so small it doesn't affect my sense of the letter's color.)

Pinyin letters have color, too, but Mandarin hanzi do not — nor do Hebrew, Arabic, etc. The Cyrillic alphabet has color for letters that map onto English letter shapes, but no color for those that don't. So Р is pink, like English P, А is red, like English A; but also, Я is yellow, like English R and Ю is ink-colored like English I for the left half and white like English O for the right half! In contrast, Д and П have no special color. From this I conclude that my associations are based on shape, not sound.

There's one exception: Many Greek letters without clear English-like shapes *do* have colors for me. I think that's because I spent so much time with them as a math and physics student. The associations are less strong than for English letters, but they're there, and largely related to the English letter that corresponds to the Greek one. For example, Γ is green for me, like English G, and Δ is orange, like English D. From this I conclude that if I were to become very familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet, I would develop colors for the remaining letters there, too. And perhaps with greater familiarity I'll develop colors for common Mandarin hanzi, related to their pinyin romanization colors? Time will tell. If so, I'm betting that hanzi will end up as multicolored palettes rather than single colors.
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golyplot
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Re: Mapleleaf's branching log

Postby golyplot » Thu Jan 05, 2023 4:28 pm

If you don't mind me asking, why are you studying English? You have "Languages: English(N)" on your sidebar, which I assumed meant you are a native speaker.

Also, congrats on starting Japanese! I'm curious to see how things go for you, as I've been studying Japanese for the last three years myself.
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