No Zero Days

Continue or start your personal language log here, including logs for challenge participants
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Axon
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No Zero Days

Postby Axon » Sat May 21, 2022 12:06 am

It's been about 18 months since my last log here. This time the point is to revive a curiosity and passion for language discovery I associate with the first few years after I first started seriously getting into languages (so circa 2013-2015).

Starting around 2018 I realized that I wasn't going to get better at my languages if I kept trying to learn new ones, so I tried to focus on the same core set of 9 listed in my profile. This worked, more or less, and I would say since 2018 I've learned more of and about each of them. But all previous attempts for the last few years to seriously pick up a new language have been more or less failures. I speak no Arabic, Tibetan, or Swedish. I know about a hundred words and a few sentence patterns of Japanese. I did enough audio study with Tamil and Thai that the sound systems are familiar, but the vocabulary and grammar are mere hints and shadows in my head, to say nothing of the scripts.

But nothing is going to change if I just make plans and never actually focus on studying. Consistent and focused practice is the best way to accomplish anything, and I now have more time each day to practice than I've had for a long while.

I've never been great at sticking to language learning goals, so I'll just write down what I'm doing as often as I feel like. Most likely in the future I'll look back and be pleased with how I spent my time. Slow progress is fine as long as I'm having a good time with language study and retaining something from it. Just a little something each day - no zero days.
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Axon
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Re: No Zero Days

Postby Axon » Sun May 22, 2022 6:32 am

Thai
Reviewed Lesson 2 and read Lesson 3 of the Thai Notes reading course. I wish the words had native audio because sometimes I can't hear the difference between certain consonants from the compressed-sounding TTS. Perhaps that's a me problem. Last year I did all of Pimsleur Thai 1, and today/yesterday I also reviewed some Comprehensible Thai and Banana Thai videos on YouTube. I had the Thai consonant chart as the "new tab" default page on my browser at work for about eight months, and even though I can't produce any shapes beyond Lesson 3, that zero-effort task appears to have done some good. I can recognize more letters than I thought in the videos I watched. As for actual language comprehension, each sentence in a Beginner-level Banana Thai video usually has at least one word I know. It's something!

Vietnamese
Anybody who read my last log knows that I've never been great at retaining Vietnamese vocabulary. I'm now trying my hand at it again with some Slow Vietnamese videos, Language Reactor and my trusty notebook. Sino-Vietnamese words are everywhere. This is great.

Mandarin
You can safely assume that any given day includes at least some Mandarin conversation and listening. Since I'm now trying to consistently improve my vocabulary, I'll use this space to list a few of my new words or other things I've learned.
鱼缸 - an aquarium
顾盼自雄 - describes behavior where one erroneously/arrogantly thinks particularly highly of oneself (this gets translated as "to look about complacently" in English, and I don't think that's quite right)

Latin, Ancient Greek, Danish, Polish, Russian
Followed parallel text or dual-subtitled YouTube videos.
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german2k01
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Re: No Zero Days

Postby german2k01 » Sun May 22, 2022 12:01 pm

One thing I have realized is how intensive the language learning process is and how much I need to cover. I would not have known about it had I not lived in Germany and experienced "instant" feedback when trying to listen to the native speakers in day-to-day conversations and going full throttle when putting in hours. If I was learning German in my home country, spending a couple of hours here and there every day knowing that I was learning fast. That is an underestimation. We are literally looking at thousands of hours of listening and reading in reality. Here we are talking about dealing with one language and for people who are learning multiple languages at the same time their progress in each language must be very slow.

I always admire people who can handle multiple languages at the same time for me to make some sort of noticeable progress in German I have to cut down on the usage of English and my native language Urdu. For the last 2 years, both languages have been dormant. Now my subconscious mind is in a position to think in the German language. It is like give and take sort of relationship.

Good luck with your language endeavors, though.
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Axon
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Re: No Zero Days

Postby Axon » Tue May 24, 2022 5:22 am

Thai
Reviewed Lessons 1-3 and read a first pass of Lesson 4 of Thai Notes.

Mandarin
Reviewed flashcards and participated in conversations. Casual reading and video watching about China and things Chinese.
烤面筋 - one of the best street food snacks and one with a special place in my heart. One of those food words that I didn't learn for years after experiencing the food itself.
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Axon
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Re: No Zero Days

Postby Axon » Sat May 28, 2022 4:24 am

German
A funny thing happened the other day while I was watching Chef's Table on Netflix with my wife (formerly known in my previous log as my girlfriend). We had the English audio on with Chinese subtitles. She got up after an episode ended and started doing other stuff. Without my input, the next episode started with a German dub and English subtitles. I went with it.

Indonesian
Watched some Let's Play videos from a streamer and a LondoKampung video. Tried to watch an Indonesian movie on Netflix but the captions (marked CC) were sanitized and formalized, and the mismatch was distracting. I would have powered through if either the captions or the movie were good, but alas.

Vietnamese
The Slow Vietnamese channel on YouTube with Language Reactor has been really nice so far. I'm learning a lot and easily able to decipher most simple sentences. I'm just not fast at it, certainly not fast enough to do it without pausing and without captions.

Thai
More review with Thai Notes. This script is just not sticking for me. I need way more review.

Danish
Review with Ayan Academy and Easy Danish. I learned a lot of core vocabulary five or six years ago, and I'm reasonably acquainted with the phonology, so I have high hopes for the reading-with-audio method. I'm hoping to visit Denmark again sometime later this year or early next. Last time I went there were one or two times I needed Danish and didn't have it, so on the outside chance that happens again I want to have a little more comprehension at the very least.
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Re: No Zero Days

Postby rdearman » Sat May 28, 2022 8:45 am

Congratulations on your marriage. :D
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Axon
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Re: No Zero Days

Postby Axon » Tue May 31, 2022 6:49 am

Thai
More review with Thai Notes and various videos. I can match up slow audio to text reasonably well, but that's not the goal here - I want to be able to look at the text and know how it sounds, otherwise known as reading. I'm starting to think that what I thought was the best possible method, where you build up from basic letters and decode real words, might not be that great. Perhaps I need to take words and phrases I already know and look up each letter as if I was a computer program: this letter is this consonant with this sound value, it's a high class consonant so it's a rising tone in a live syllable... Painful but perhaps more effective than what I'm currently doing.

Vietnamese
Review of the videos I pulled vocabulary from, review of that vocabulary. Some transcription practice.

Danish
Reading and listening of Easy Danish videos and other text with audio. I estimate I'm about halfway to where I'd like to be in terms of knowing how a word should be pronounced in natural speech. Once I get to the point where I can intelligibly read off a simple sentence in Danish, I will try some guided online output like Duolingo or Clozemaster. This is a language where in theory I don't really care about my accent, but in practice I know if I ever want to use Danish in Denmark I had better be good or else I'll get Englished.

Mandarin
In the last few years there have been lots of channels all over various sites in various languages doing summaries of movie plots. I watched 10 minutes of one of them, for a movie I knew well, and got an enormous number of new words from the subtitles, mostly synonyms in a more elevated register for concepts I can already express in a basic way. Hit 500 Pleco cards (in this iteration of the deck, starting December 31 2021).
蒲公英 - dandelion
顿时 - suddenly, all of a sudden, all at once
饲料 - feed (for animals such as birds)
伸(一个)懒腰 - to stretch (as when waking up)
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Axon
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Re: No Zero Days

Postby Axon » Fri Jun 10, 2022 6:01 am

I had a long and complicated move to a new place, so there were some days that were close to zero. Even then:

German
Listened again to the very enjoyable German radio drama for Star Wars Episode IV. Even without doing much German recently, it's easy to understand.

Thai
Alphabet review.

Vietnamese
Slow Vietnamese videos intensively with Language Reactor. Reading of signs and advertisements in a Vietnamese restaurant.

Danish
Review of Easy Danish videos.

Mandarin
Listened to some local radio stations as I drove through the San Francisco Bay Area. Upon tuning in (in the middle of a broadcast) I found it really hard to understand, but after about 30 seconds it became much clearer as I got more of the context. With a language that has demonstrably more homophones than English, I wonder if native speakers tuning in to a radio conversation have it any harder in Chinese to pick up the flow of what's going on. It's probably wishful thinking and I just need more vocabulary. Speaking of, some interesting new words:
箅 - a grate, grid, or lattice structure, as in 竹箅子, a bamboo grid placed in a pot and used for steaming things. 箅子 on Google Images appears to be the kitchen implements as well as stone or iron grates for drains etc.
计步器 - record-step-machine, a pedometer. This is a word I looked up and don't think I'll really need to review because it's so transparent in meaning.
寒风刺骨 - an idiom I heard and slowly parsed in my head, then looked it up to confirm: bitter piercingly cold wind.
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Axon
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Re: No Zero Days

Postby Axon » Wed Jun 15, 2022 6:57 am

Thai
Alphabet review, not every day though. I don't think I'll get to go to Thailand in the near future and that saps some motivation. At the same time, though, I'm noticing a bit more progress where I can, in many cases, match up a Thai letter mentally to its transliteration when viewing both at the same time. My natural instinct is to just listen to comprehensible input videos from various channels and ignore the script, but I remember the feeling in Laos when I looked around me and yes, everything was in fact written in Lao. The Russian and Greek alphabets have never become completely automatic for me even after many years of "knowing" them, and Arabic and Tamil slipped away as soon as they arrived. Since I like Southeast Asia and plan on becoming a competent tourist in Thailand at some hazy point in the future, I'm getting an enormous head start by trying to learn the script well from the beginning rather than thinking of it as an afterthought.

French
I watched Les Quatre Cents Coups, a famous classic film I'd always been meaning to watch. It had burned-in English subtitles and there were no French captions available, which is probably just as well as I was understanding only parts of every sentence. By the end my brain was thinking much more in French and the next day I watched some videos from Easy French and French Mornings with Elisa. I watched Easy French first and then the French Mornings videos, and my brain said "Wow, you really picked up a lot from Easy French! She's really easy to understand!" Yes, because she's a French teacher who is speaking as clearly as possible. I have already been an adequate tourist in France, and there is much more French in my head than the last time I was there, so I just want to keep it fresh and learn some new things from time to time.

Mandarin
Videos, speaking practice, vocabulary study. Six months of regularly doing Pleco flashcards in spare moments, at roughly 70 new cards per month (the algorithm biases heavily toward review rather than new cards), has really had an effect. These particular cards are a mix of literary language from some favorite poems, higher-register language from vloggers speaking to an audience and people sounding fancy in dramas, and words that fill in vocabulary gaps for everyday things such as tools, hobbies, and so on. I'm also trying to learn the Mandarin names for countries and well-known cities around the world instead of just guessing at them if they come up. If I watch a vlog and carefully look up everything I don't know as well as I'd like to, it's virtually guaranteed that I'll come across a phrase not in any of my (numerous) Pleco dictionaries. I can tell that the speaker conceives of them as set phrases by their intonation, and I often find the exact phrase used with a Google or Baidu search. Some examples of this:
顺带一问: by the way, just asking (used tongue-in-cheek)
富有意义: be significant, have significance
记忆优新: remain fresh in memory, be still vivid in the mind upon recall

Indonesian, Spanish, Danish
Occasional videos and light Internet reading.
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Axon
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Re: No Zero Days

Postby Axon » Sat Jun 25, 2022 12:00 am

French, Russian, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian
Some interview and vlog-style videos. Some not for very long, but hey, it all counts.

Latin
LLPSI from ScorpioMartianus. I had cause a year or two ago to read some untranslated documents in Latin for a personal project. Latin is now manageable for me to get through in that field specifically (historical accounts of China from missionaries), but I really have to concentrate on LLPSI since it's so far from academic language. It's fun to hear the voices though.

Mandarin
More vlogs, some book reading, some speaking practice. I know the vocabulary study is doing something because books are easier. Some good words:
栽 - to plant (plants, crops). When I wrote that down just now I realized I wasn't clear on the difference between it and 种. I guessed at random that 栽 was used for seedlings or sprouted plants rather than seeds, and it was very gratifying to see that people online had their own question answered with that same answer.
不合时宜 - to do something at an inopportune time. In the context I heard it, it was describing bringing up an uncomfortable topic at the wrong time. My dictionary translates it as "incompatible with present needs."
劈 - to strike (of lightning)
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