Yet another go at yet another log (Czech, some Hu, Ro, It, Is...)

[Gaggilla]

So I've tried to do this once over at HTLAL a couple of years ago but I didn't really succeed in keeping the log updated. Mostly, this is due to the fact that while I am a language nerd, I do have phases; sometimes I might be more interested in sonata forms in late Schumann, and this will take up all my time, while at other times (such as now) all the time usually dedicated to music will be taken up by languages.
I hope, however, that this time everything will be different, because I have set out to reach a goal for the first time in my language learning history. At the beginning of February, I will travel to Prague to do a Czech intensive course, and before I get there, I want to make sure to have a (low) intermediate level. Otherwise, I will be put in beginners' class, which of course will mean only English with my classmates (or, worse still, German).

I did something similar with Hungarian this summer - although I had been studying Hungarian on and off for a few years beforehand - and I managed to be placed at a level that initially seemed too high, but by only talking in Hungarian to the other participants and by meeting up with as many Budapestians as I could, I ended up speaking almost exclusively my target language for three weeks: The first time I've managed to do this in any intensive course I've taken. Needless to say, my Hungarian profited greatly and is now at about a comfortable B2. I haven't set up a specific goal as to what level I want to achieve in Czech, but because this course will be double the time at six weeks, I hope to get it up to an equally comfortable level which will allow me to read and converse at ease. I know I probably got lucky in Budapest, but here's hoping conditions will turn out to be similarly good. This time 'round, I actually need the language for my PhD, so, who knows, I might get some additional motivation out of this thought.

So, how do I go about this project? I've started working through the FSI Czech FAST course one month ago and I've finished lesson 5 yesterday, which has been the hardest one so far because of all the food-related vocabulary, most of it completely useless for me as a vegetarian. Having a few days off in quiet Bavaria right now, I should to be able to work through the course pretty quickly now. It's very enjoyable so far and a tad more entertaining than the other FSI course I've done (Hungarian), and there's even some joking to be found in the dialogues and the cultural notes. Simultaneously, I've started working through newspaper articles with the aid of a dictionary, writing out idioms and phrases. When I'm done with the FSI course, I plan on getting drilled in the harder parts of the grammar with DLI's "basic" course; it seems fairly thorough with its five volumes of dialogues and grammar explanations only...
Speaking of the DLI course, so far the audio I've found online for the first volume doesn't match the printed version, probably one of the two is a later updated edition. Does anybody know where to find a matching version? The audio for the second volume matches the manual.

When it comes to my other languages, I try to keep them working as best as I can (I do have a mostly language-unrelated PhD to work on, too). I've been lazy with my Icelandic this fall, but at least I managed to meet up with the Zurich Icelanders a couple of times to speak it a bit. My Romanian has been confined to chatting and reading the news (there's been, both unfortunately and fortunately, quite a bit of news from Romania this year). I've practiced some Italian on holiday in Ticino, Verona and Mantova. Also on holiday, I went to Copenhagen with my girlfriend in spring, and for the first time people didn't switch to English immediately, which felt wonderful. I still use French at work. Conversely, my Persian's all but gone; hopefully, I will be able to dig it up a bit next summer. Hungarian is the only language that really got a huge boost this year, and I'm very happy about that.

Czech is the first slavic language I'm studying. I've done some Russian in high school, but that was, of course, classroom teaching at its worst and I only seem to remember a handful of phrases. So far, Czech grammar doesn't seem all that intimidating, but probably I just haven't reached the really scary parts yet. I hope that learning Czech will give me some good groundwork to try and rebuild some of my Russian as well, but I'll see about that when the time is right (i.e., after having been to Prague).

[Gaggilla]

Czech: Finished lesson 6 of the FSI FAST course today. Vocabulary hell continued as I learnt how to negotiate the prices of chinaware and jewellery, while there have been a few exciting new things in terms of grammar and idioms. Nominative and accusative plural were introduced, as well as some (unexplained) constructions in the dialogues, such as něco + adjective neuter (?) genitive (?) singular (e.g. něco jiného: something different) and z + noun genitive plural which appears to mean something like "when it comes to", in shopping situations at least (e.g. ze šperků máme..., "when it comes to jewellery, we have...").
The individual lessons usually contain two dialogues that the students are supposed to study closely, grammar explanations, "useful phrases", the usual drills, and finally two additional dialogues "for comprehension only" that come without translation and that treat similar situations as the other two dialogues with different vocabulary. Interestingly, these comprehension dialogues appear to be full of idiosyncratic idioms that you're not supposed to spend too much time on; or maybe it only appears to me this way because of the lacking translations. Anyway, thanks to this lesson's additional dialogues I got to learn such beauties as "Ani bych Vám to neměl(a) říkat, ale..." (I'm not even supposed to tell you, but...) and, one my new favourites, "podpultové zboží", goods from under the counter.
Also, I've worked through this review of the new Coldplay album, a band that neither I nor, much to my delight, the critic likes. Again, loads of great new things to add to my Anki, such as "Doby, kdy... , se staly minulostí" (Gone are the times, when...) or even "přetékat až pubertální naivitou" (to overflow with teenage naiveté).
Finally, I may have found somebody for a language exchange nearby, we're going to meet up for the first time next week!

Hungarian: Watched this report on elderly Hungarians trying to guess the meaning of various slang terms. I didn't know all the expressions either, and unfortunately, they're never explained; I will try to find out about them the next time I speak to somebody younger. It was still a lot of fun to watch, and I even got some of the cultural references, such as "Hé, mizu, mizu, tudod, ez a hülye gyerek" at 3:17. In her very charming way, she's referring to this incredibly popular song. I also watched half of "Vacak, a hetedik testvér" before I fell asleep, an animated movie about an abandoned dog appropriately enough called "trash" (vacak).

Romanian: Not much, but I've listened to Creangă's Povestea poveștilor for pure enjoyment. Warning, NSFW, although chances are dim that somebody speaks Romanian at wherever you work, and if they do, they will probably enjoy it, too.

[Gaggilla]

Czech: Done with lesson 7, which has been much more enjoyable than the previous one: Lively dialogues, quite useful vocabulary (booking rooms and subsequently complaining about them), and also the amount of new words has been slightly reduced. I have been officially introduced to the genitive plural, which I was glad to meet; I'm a sucker for genitives in general (probably because it's become an endangered species in German), and I'm happy to be studying a language that seems to use them all the time (hey, there's a recipe for you, German) after the deplorable lack of genitives in both Hungarian and Persian.
Anyway, I didn't progress through the course this week quite as quickly as I had hoped; however, I haven't been sitting on my (meagre) laurels. The reason for my slow pace is that I have been digressing from good old FSI. I had originally planned to only use this course until I'd be through with it, also because I was interested in just how far it would get me. But the need to write my first emails in Czech – in order to set up a date for my first language exchange – meant that I have had to look up a lot of words in the dictionary, all of which seemed so useful that I just had to learn them. But learning them turned out to be much harder if I didn't know the root words for the complex ones, so I looked them up, too, and added them to my Anki deck, which by now is pushing 2500 entries (including set phrases and idioms); therefore, a good amount of my time has been consumed by reviewing, which in turn, happily, meant that my understanding of native texts has, on a very low level to be sure, skyrocketed over the course of the last week.
I've also started a small diary on lang-8 today; as almost always, the corrections proved to be of enormous value, and I am happy to report that the amount of both grammatical and syntactical errors I made turned out to be lower than expected.

Romanian: Chatted a lot and watched the first half of Casa dintre câmpuri on Youtube, a feature film by the very underrated Alexandru Tatos, who in my opinion ranks among the greats of Romanian cinema, which isn't short of them. Much to my chagrin, I experienced a lot of trouble understanding the dialogues, which bewildered me at first, as I know no such problems when dealing with live native speakers anymore. Obviously, this has to do with the differences between actual language in the wild and what is used in a scripted movie, and some of my problems may stem from the abysmal audio quality of what seems to be the only version available, likely an old VHS copy. Still, I will try to make sure to spare some time during the next months to watch a couple of movies without subtitles to get used to the speed of Romanian actors. (Most of the Romanian movies I know I watched when I was still learning the langue, always with subtitles.)

"Italian": We binge-watched six episodes of the TV series Gomorra to fight New Year's hangover. I had naively purchased the box set in Milan in autumn, believing I could use it to broaden my passive understanding while enjoying a critically acclaimed show – little did I think of the fact that both fictional and real Camorra operate in Naples! So it's been subtitles all along, but on the flip side, a small Neapolitan phrasebook is on its way to me. What an intriguing little language!

[Gaggilla]

Czech: Only finished one lesson of the FSI course this week, because most of my time has been eaten up by PhD-related stuff, applying for a new passport, organising my trip to Prague, and to no small extent by other means of studying Czech:
- I've been putting one little story each day on lang-8, which take some time to write because I still have to rely heavily on dictionaries. After having received several corrections (Czech appears to be wonderful language to study on lang-8, lots of People giving excellent advise), I study the new, corrected vocabulary and phrases and add a combination of the best corrections to a document which will become a personal textbook, with the German version on one page and the translation on the next. I am aware of the fact that, whatever I write and however well it is corrected, these translations still bear the mark of a native speaker of German living outside the Czech Republic. Then again, this is just who I am, and with sufficient exposure to real Czech in the next two months, I hope that I'll be able to phrase things in a more native-like fashion at least partially automatically.
- I've joined a facebook group for Czechs ans Slovaks in Zurich and posted a little message there in order to find language exchange partners. Apparently, whoever runs this Group liked my idea, so they shared my post. As a consequence, my inbox is boiling over with messages from Czechs living in Zurich willing to help me with my Czech if I help them with their German. Curiously, some Slovaks wrote to me as well, even though I had used the word "čeština" several times in my text; I'll save project "understanding Slovak" until after project "understanding Czech" is completed.
- Had my first real-life conversation in Czech last week with a girl who has been living in Switzerland for a few years already and wanted to improve her Swiss German. It was a bit like running a marathon, the first one you've ever done, during which you realise that it's actually a triathlon, and that you can't swim. (Not that I'd know what it's like to run a marathon; I don't even run for the bus.) Anyway, I've figured out that I actually love the feeling you only get during the first few conversations in your TL: Being completely horrified and stressed out, full of adrenaline, struggling to find a word, to add the proper ending, to get the syntax right, basically amount to feeling your brain at work; it's like watching yourself trying as hard as you can to get a bit smarter.

Romanian and Hungarian: I watched a few videos on dialects/variants of these two languages. Particularly interesting was a Hungarian report on the Csángós and their dialect from the Romanian province of Moldova. All but forgotten by Hungarian nationalists until this day, finally there's a Hungarian dialect with loads of Romanian loanwords (like "trín" for "train" instead of "vonat", but I think I picked out "scrisoare" (letter, instead of "levél") and "sigur" (sure, instead of "biztos"), too, but I have to admit that I was far from understanding everything in the report.

Icelandic: Ran into a friend when getting off the tram and talked for five minutes. We'll be meeting up for lunch this week.

[Gaggilla]

Wow. I really do suck big time at keeping logs. Luckily, I don't suck even half as much when it comes to studying languages: I've just arrived back in Switzerland after 6 weeks in beautiful Prague, which I had been preparing for two months in advance with the FSI FAST course, (coincidentally) designed for the same amount of time before the US send their brave diplomats into the city of, apparently, taxi sharks (true) and personal servants (haven't come across any of these).

First of all, I have to say that this FSI manual worked wonders. Having arrived in Prague, I surely made tons of mistakes and very often didn't manage to understand a thing the other person was saying. Usually however, almost instantly I had the right phrase at hand for the right situation, which in turn meant that even in the first week the conversation hardly ever switched to English. If you follow through with all the drills, this thing really enables you to start speaking.
Also, the level you can reach with it isn't too bad at all: Combined with some additional reading and some first steps into talking to people, I was placed in the B1 group of a traditional classroom-style language course at the language centre of the Charles University. Most people on here don't seem to think too kindly of these traditional settings, and neither do I; in fact, I am convinced that you can achieve much more on your own, out in the wild, than you will learn sitting in class. In spite of this, I for one like the playful atmosphere of a good language class where both students and teachers are motivated; also, our teacher spend quite some effort working on our accents, which was great. However, my main reason for going to class each day was a more pragmatic one: I felt that I needed some structure, that walking around the city each day on my own would only get me depressed in the end.
I made sure to make my Prague environment as Czech as possible. For the first two weeks, I had the wonderful oppurtunity of living with an older lady and her big family; she only knew some basic German, which she spoke better than she understood it, which meant that I really had to speak in Czech to her most of the time. The other four weeks, I lived with flatmates my age which I had found on Airbnb, specifically looking for people who spoke Czech. I had also planned to meet up with a lot of people from Couchsurfing, as I had done in Budapest. Strangely, this didn't work at all; the few people that bothered to reply said they didn't have time. I wonder why that is; it might have something to do with the incredible amount of tourists flooding Prague each day. Or maybe it is a question of novelty; most foreigners I met who lived in Prague spoke at least some Czech, while the same isn't true for Hungarian in Budapest. Luckily, there's some great activities for language learners in Prague. Each Sunday, I went to the big Speak Easy language exchange at Globe Café, each Monday to the Czech-German "Štamtiš"; on both I got to know some people that I'd meet up with during the rest of the week.

I could say much more (or less; whom am I saying this to, anyway?). It had an amazing time in Prague and I am incredibly glad I got to do this. All in all, I've been learning Czech only for three and a half months, but I think I already speak it quite well , in any case way better than any of my former languages at that point of study. So, what's changed? I think it boils down to a few key differences in my approach this time:
1. A clear goal when studying on my own: I knew I only had two months before I'd be in Prague, and that I essentially had one book to work through in that time. So there was no postponing or procrastinating, I just tried to get through it as best I could.
2. Early immersion: Six weeks is my longest "language holiday" so far apart from my five months as an Erasmus student in Bucharest. It's also been the first time that I had actively tried hard to make my stay immersion-friendly; back in Budapest, the thought of looking for Hungarians on Airbnb didn't even occur to me. Because my stay was over a more extended period this time, I got to advance a lot even though my speaking and understanding of speech were essentially at a beginner's stage when I arrived.
3. Connected with point 2, psychological advantage of not having studied that long: This may be the most complicated point. But I think the fact that just over three months isn't that long to study a language, the first Slavic one at that (I don't really buy into the notion that they are as insanely difficult as they're made out to be, by the way) completely changed my attitude towards speaking the language. Because, come on, Czech in a few months? That's ridiculous. So, no more "Gee, I should know that", no more "How on earth can I still not understand this?", no being ashamed for sounding a bit off - because I always knew that this was the best Czech I could speak after such a short amount of time. It was a liberating experience and it made my brain suck up the new structures that much faster, because I didn't have much time to think about whether or not I was using them correctly.

So, in the end I passed the final exam of the course with a 1 (which is the best mark in the Czech scholary system); I only didn't receive the price for the best students, an honorary t-shirt of the university, because I had skipped class a few times. The true reward however was the entire last week of my stay: Meeting up with my new friends for the last time, enjoying the beginning of spring, speaking, joking and discussing in Czech with groups of Czechs and having a great time at that. This was all I'd dreamt of achieving, and to know that I did is a wonderfully rewarding feeling.

I hope that I will find a way to keep up with studying Czech now that I'm back; I still can't read all that quickly, so my goal until summer ist to build up my vocabulary to a good passive B2. I've started watching some old episodes of "Chcete být milionářem", most of which (!) appear to be on youtube, and also I've brought with me about two suitcases worth of books and vocal scores of Czech opera. So I've got my work cut out for me, and I'm looking forward to it.