dEhiN's Language Log

[dEhiN]

Hi, just stopping by to say that I have skimmed through some of your posts, and was fascinated by one with a sentence in Tamil.
I had never (consciously) seen any Tamil before, and the script looks so beautiful!
I wonder if this is a language like Georgian, that language learners end up dabbling with just because they adore the writing system.

Bienvenue y bienvenida to my language log Sonja! I'm glad you liked my posts.

Tamil is actually my heritage language but from growing up here, in Canada, I never learned it as a kid. My parents speak it fluently but for reasons I don't feel the need to elaborate, we spoke English at home. I have to say, I'm jealous of the amount of languages you know at a high or intermediate level! Aside from English, I don't think I can claim in good conscious to know any language at an advanced level. Even at an intermediate level, I only feel comfortable with French.

As for Tamil, I know someone in India who runs an online, private Tamil school essentially. They have many non-Indian students, including many of Western background. I am also part of several Tamil Facebook groups, and the same there - there are several non-South Asians learning Tamil. So, I'm not sure what the various motivations are.

I see you're learning Turkish. Tamil is agglutinative like Turkish and has many suffixes. The writing system is an abugida. The language is also SOV and uses dative-construction for stative verbs, which I found a little challenging to get used to, but now I think is really cool. It's a diglossic language, although not to the same degree as Arabic.

If you're interested, I can start posting small Tamil lessons on here.

[dEhiN]

I'm considering using księżycowy's approach and creating weekly goals, even if it's mostly just with Anki. To start, I currently have 111 Spanish cards in new status that are all the numbers from 0 to 100 plus 200/300/400/500/600/700/800/900, 1K and 1M. While I'm still concerned with overloading myself, I do feel that it shouldn't be too hard for me to learn the numbers. I also edited each card to have the Explanation-Definition be in French, instead of English. So, my goal for this week (and I count my weeks from Sunday to Saturday):

Week of: 01/01 to 07/01

• Go through the 111 Spanish number cards I have in new status

[dEhiN]

Update time:

I thought I had written an update post yesterday, but I must have forgotten to post it. At any rate, I started working on my weekly goal today. I calculated that I would need to do 19 of the Spanish number cards per day if I wanted to do all 111 by the end of Saturday. I don't remember if I've shared this before, but as part of the planning every part of my database, I created several deck study options, including ones going from 1 new card/day up to 19. After going through the 19 and seeing that it wasn't taking me that long, even when I would sometimes spend time editing a card, I decided to try learning more new cards. I kept the "Ready-on-Deck" (now just called "Ready-Deck") cards alone, as I will need to focus on them after I work through the Spanish numbers. I then created a 3 deck under "Current-Learn", so now I have "Cram-Deck", "Now-Deck", and "Ready-Deck". The idea being that as I plan what cards to learn next, they go from the "Future-Learn" deck to the Ready one, then from there to the Now one. I will use the Cram one for special pushes like this one with the Spanish numbers.

I decided to start with 10 cards in the Now deck, and to avoid having to choose which cards, I took all those in the Future-Learn deck and randomized them. I took the first 10, but then realized that about 2 or 3 of the French cards in the 10 were too easy. I put them for archive status. All this resulted in me studying 48 unique cards including 29 new ones. I'm going to keep this up and see how it goes. My reasoning is that even though I don't want to overload myself, I found Sunday and Monday that I go through my due cards pretty quickly, even factoring the time for those I need to redo. And, adding 5 or less new cards doesn't add much time either. This leaves me with having to make up the rest of the 30 minute study block with other stuff. However, since I want to go through my new cards anyway, I might as well try to use up the 30 minutes each day working through new and review Anki cards.

Here are my deck stats with just the changes since Sunday:

Updated: 00:00 2023-01-03

español (Spanish)
Restructured Active: 185 (was: 184)
Restructured New: 469 (was: 470)

français (French)
Restructured Active: 649 (was: 644)
Restructured New: 284 (was: 290)
Restructured Subtotal: 933 (was: 934)
Total: 1448 (was: 1449)

português (Portuguese)
Restructured Active: 225 (was: 224)

Shqip (Albanian)
Restructured Active: 11 (was: 9)
Restructured New: 47 (was: 49)

தமிழ் (Tamil)
Restructured Active: 135 (was: 134)
Restructured New: 60 (was: 61)

[księżycowy]

Your decks are multiplying like bunnies.

[dEhiN]

Update time:

Over the past two days, I've stuck to learning 19 new Spanish number cards a day along with 10 new cards on top of that. This meant that I studied 90 unique cards yesterday (i.e., January 4), 115 unique cards on January 3, and 135 unique cards on January 2. I say unique because the way my Cram and Now deck study options are set, I'm repeating the 19 Spanish cards 3 times before they graduate and I'm repeating the other 10 cards 2 times before they graduate. I try to do all the learning steps on the same day, but since the steps are 1.5h 2h 1.5h for the 19 and 2h 4h for the 10, it can get tricky. Particularly since work has been quite busy.

Overall though, I have found with the Spanish number cards, that I'm getting to practice both my Spanish and French numbers. Most of the numbers are pronounced similarly enough that it's easy to make the connection. But some are a little harder. For example, the number 3 (tres in Spanish, trois in French) aren't as close as say 5 (cinco in Spanish, cinq in French).

Anyway, here are the changes to my deck stats.

Updated: 02:30 2023-01-05

español (Spanish)
Restructured Active: 251 (was: 185)
Restructured New: 402 (was: 469)
Restructured Subtotal: 653 (was: 654)
Total: 793 (was: 794)

français (French)
Restructured Active: 654 (was: 649)
Restructured New: 276 (was: 284)
Restructured Subtotal: 930 (was: 933)
Total: 1445 (was: 1448)

português (Portuguese)
Restructured New: 83 (was: 84)
Restructured Subtotal: 308 (was: 309)
Total: 560 (was: 561)

Shqip (Albanian)
Restructured Active: 12 (was: 11)
Restructured New: 46 (was: 47)

தமிழ் (Tamil)
Restructured Active: 136 (was: 135)
Restructured New: 59 (was: 60)

As you can see, I haven't touched any of the cards that still need to be refactored. Also, if it isn't clear, the times when a subtotal or total goes down means that I archived more cards than I studied or added.

[dEhiN]

Update time:

My 365 Day Challenge impetus seems to have slowed down. It started on Thursday, the same day as my last post. Even after doing more new Anki cards that day, I still had about 12 minutes left for the 30 minute mark. I ended up doing some Duolingo for Spanish from French. However, on Friday, I temporarily paused new cards as it was getting a little stressful doing that around work. Unfortunately, though, that meant I had almost 15-20 minutes left on the 30 minutes after doing Anki. I ended up not doing it and skipping that day, planning to do pick back up on Saturday. Yesterday came and went and I also didn't do 30 minutes.

Currently, it's Sunday at about 4:30 pm for me, and I'm considering skipping today as well. Don't get me wrong: I'm still doing my Anki, and I even re-added some new cards to my study for today. But, because I don't have a resource I'm specifically going through for each language, or any of them, it's hard to fill out the 30 minutes.

As a result, I'm wondering whether I should bow out, even though it's only the first week! I think if I do continue, I need to have at least 1 or 2 more resources I can turn to beyond Anki. One possibility is to add some stuff to practice my French listening skills. I don't know if I shared already, though it doesn't look like, but I had a recruiter reach out to me on LinkedIn because I have French listed on my profile. It was for a bilingual job in my field. Even though I'm not bilingual, we did a French assessment with a bilingual person from the agency. I needed a 7/10 for the agency to recommend me for the job. Unfortunately, I got a 5/10.

I was proud of myself though as the person called me first thing in the morning (I think this was on Thursday) and I was able to carry on the conversation plus understand some of what she said. I can noticed myself picking out more words when I hear French in, for example, an ad on YouTube.

Anyway, here are the changes since Thursday for my decks. Since I didn't do any new cards, there's not much change:

Updated: 16:45 2023-01-08

español (Spanish)
Restructured Active: 276 (was: 251)
Restructured New: 377 (was: 402)
Restructured Subtotal: 653 (was: 654)

français (French)
Restructured Active: 657 (was: 654)
Restructured New: 273 (was: 276)

português (Portuguese)
Restructured Active: 226 (was: 225)
Restructured New: 82 (was: 83)

[Le Baron]

but I had a recruiter reach out to me on LinkedIn because I have French listed on my profile. It was for a bilingual job in my field. Even though I'm not bilingual, we did a French assessment with a bilingual person from the agency. I needed a 7/10 for the agency to recommend me for the job. Unfortunately, I got a 5/10.

I was proud of myself though as the person called me first thing in the morning (I think this was on Thursday) and I was able to carry on the conversation plus understand some of what she said.

At least you didn't chicken out, that's the main thing. Such an interview in an L2 is never easy, even at a point of 'fluency', so it's a great real-world test. And you were only 2 points off. It's a glass half-empty/half-full sort of thing in that it didn't come off, but it's an indication that you're not really that far away.

[dEhiN]

Time to update my weekly goal:

Week of: 01/01 to 07/01

• Go through the 111 Spanish number cards I have in new status

I didn't go through all 111 cards since I stopped doing new cards from Thursday. There are 35 left, so my goal for this week is:

Week of: 08/01 to 14/01

• Go through the remaining 35 Spanish number cards I have in new status

[dEhiN]

At least you didn't chicken out, that's the main thing. Such an interview in an L2 is never easy, even at a point of 'fluency', so it's a great real-world test. And you were only 2 points off. It's a glass half-empty/half-full sort of thing in that it didn't come off, but it's an indication that you're not really that far away.

Thanks, and you're right - I did my best. I also think the way to get those 2 points is really more exposure to the spoken language, particularly at native speed.

[dEhiN]

For French, I always figured that de with a proper noun (i.e., name) that starts with a vowel became d' unless the definite article is also added. For example:

Je viens d'Abbottsville

But, as I was reinstalling Adobe Acrobat with my computer set to French, I saw this:

Screenshot 2023-01-12 172831.png

Perhaps there's some rule I haven't learned yet, but to my (intermediate-level) French brain, de Acrobat both looks and sounds wrong. Is this a case of Adobe having an incorrect translation or have I been wrong and de followed by a name starting with a vowel doesn't change to d'?