Rdearman 2016-24 You Can't Have Your Kate and Edith Too.

[MamaPata]

Good luck with the interview!

[rdearman]

I had 2 French LE's scheduled today, one cancelled and the other was a no-show. But I'm not all that bothered because I'm not really trying to schedule shedloads of LE's any more, these were just people who'd searched me out to speak to. Over the last week I've done one lesson in Mandarin and a couple of other language exchanges. One in Italian was very interesting because my LE partner wanted me to tell her everything I know about General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics in Italian. I should point out that I know next to nothing about these subjects, but what little I do know requires some quite difficult words which I didn't know. She also described what she knew about these topics but in English. Like me she knew little, but it forced her to learn new words also. This topic came up because I quoted something Einstein was supposed to have said about "Never remember anything you can look up."

I like speaking with this lady because we always seem to go off on some strange and interesting topics which really fry my brain. The previous conversation with her was about venom, snakes, spiders and anti-venom. I was trying to explain the difference between poisonous and venomous in Italian. The difference is the method of delivery, venom is always injected.

My local French tutor (aka, neighbour) and classmate (aka, other neighbour) did our first lesson with the new format of asking questions. It didn't go so well since we kept reverting back to the old "What is this word in English" thing and we then had to steer the whole thing back into conversation mode. Still it was better than before.

I have some money still on iTalki which I need to use, and I was looking for someone to speak to in French for an hour, but everyone who was available at a time convenient to me were all determined to teach beginners and they had a lot of PDF's they would teach you from. I know this because all of them except 2-3 I've used before and they were determined to use their lesson plan, even though I had specifically said I was only interested in conversation. There used to be a guy from Belguim I used to talk to, he only did conversation and wasn't interested in "tutoring", so I did a lot of lessons with him before. He seems to have stopped which is disappointing. I might use the money on Mandarin instead.

I'm trying to keep myself more accountable for learning. Basically I'm doing 20 minutes of study per language, and I am using old-school tracking.

mytracking.jpg

Nothing high-tech here, just a line if I have done my 20 minutes. Mostly I've been using apps; Clozemaster, HelloCHinese, anki, memrise, but I'm also working through a couple of textbooks. I'm using "Crescendo!" which is an Italian textbook, "Le Chinois sans peine", "French grammar in context", and finally "THERE IS NO WORD FOR GRAMMAR IN SETSWANA". In this system I'm not counting any LE's, or TV, or films, etc. I did consider counting reading, but decided against it for French & Italian, but I'll count it for Mandarin and for Setswana. This is because any reading I do in those two languages has to be intensive work where I'm more or less looking up every word. I have a lot of course books which I've not used and so I thought I would take a leaf out of PM's book and complete all the books I have for the four languages that I'm working on. I have a load of books for Japanese, Finnish, Dutch and others, but those will have to wait.

I really dislike course books and grammar books, but I can stand them if I'm only doing 20 minutes and then stop. I can put up with just about anything if it is only for 20 minutes.

My goal for reading 100 actual books in Italian is failing. This is because I'm not interested in the books I've started reading. I did switch to a "Jack Reacher" book, but I've read it before and for me these books aren't really worth re-reading. I'm not big on re-reading books anyway, and I can list on one hand the books series I've re-read. What are they you ask?

1. The Hobbit / Lord of the Rings
2. Dune (original authors series)
3. Way-Farer (also called Kensho) Series by Dennis Schmidt (Good luck finding these books now!)
4. All the books by James Clavell, Shogun, Noble House, Tai-Pan, King Rat, etc
5. Robert E. Howard books

After a little thought I figured I would actually need two hands.

1. The Godfather by Mario Puzo
2. The Horseclans
3. The Great Brain (a series of children's books by American author John Dennis Fitzgerald)
4. The Three Investigators.
5. The Foundation Series.

Technically I have re-read Harry Potter in English, French and Italian. But I would rather pluck my eyes out with a fork than read Harry bloody Potter again. BTW I highly recommend the 2 handed list of books above if you're searching for something to read, although some of them like the Way-Farer books are almost impossible to find and I saw them listed on Amazon at £39 per book! I paid a whopping $1.95 for my copy but I bought it new back in 1978 and I've dragged it around the world with me.

[zjones]

Oh gosh, I dislike rereading books too. I thought I would be able to re-read Harry Potter for Greek, but I got nasty waves of nausea when I actually visualized myself reading the story all over again.

There are lots of other YA series out there, some of which seem to be much better than HP anyway.

I just got the Foundation series (by Asimov) in French and I'll be curious to see what it is like. My husband has recommended it to me several times, but he and I have different tastes in books.

[DaveAgain]

My goal for reading 100 actual books in Italian is failing. This is because I'm not interested in the books I've started reading. I did switch to a "Jack Reacher" book, but I've read it before and for me these books aren't really worth re-reading. I'm not big on re-reading books anyway, and I can list on one hand the books series I've re-read. What are they you ask?

1. The Hobbit / Lord of the Rings
2. Dune (original authors series)
3. Way-Farer (also called Kensho) Series by Dennis Schmidt (Good luck finding these books now!)
4. All the books by James Clavell, Shogun, Noble House, Tai-Pan, King Rat, etc
5. Robert E. Howard books

After a little thought I figured I would actually need two hands.

1. The Godfather by Mario Puzo
2. The Horseclans
3. The Great Brain (a series of children's books by American author John Dennis Fitzgerald)
4. The Three Investigators.
5. The Foundation Series.

Technically I have re-read Harry Potter in English, French and Italian. But I would rather pluck my eyes out with a fork than read Harry bloody Potter again. BTW I highly recommend the 2 handed list of books above if you're searching for something to read, although some of them like the Way-Farer books are almost impossible to find and I saw them listed on Amazon at £39 per book! I paid a whopping $1.95 for my copy but I bought it new back in 1978 and I've dragged it around the world with me.

I liked Conn Iggulden's Julius Caesar, and Gengis Khan series.

I think that Benetton, Fiat and Vespa (Piaggio) would have some interesting non-fiction around them. The norman-french wars in Italy too.

I read Henri Troyat's biog of Alexandre Dumas last year, Mr Dumas involved himself with Garibaldi's revolution. I think there was a failed attempt to supply arms, and an administrative appointment in Naples (?)

[rdearman]

I liked Conn Iggulden's Julius Caesar, and Gengis Khan series.

I think that Benetton, Fiat and Vespa (Piaggio) would have some interesting non-fiction around them. The norman-french wars in Italy too.

I read Henri Troyat's biog of Alexandre Dumas last year, Mr Dumas involved himself with Garibaldi's revolution. I think there was a failed attempt to supply arms, and an administrative appointment in Naples (?)

Thanks for the recommendations. I looked on Amazon for the Khan series, and eventually after going to Amazon.it and finding the book, it transferred me back to the UK to buy it. Although it wasn't listed on the UK site initially. Anyway, I have the first book of the Khan series, so I start that one.

[rdearman]

Because people kept asking me how to create Subs2SRS cards, I decided to do a video series about how to do it. I don't know how many videos it will take, but the first one was just posted to Youtube here:

https://youtu.be/-lMKtsQ3vnY

COMMENTS AND SUGGESTIONS ARE WELCOME AND ENCOURAGED!

[rdearman]

This week I've continued with my old-school tracking system on paper and I'm doing 20 minutes sessions for each language (plus a TY Mathematics book) and it is working well for me. I haven't managed to complete all the 5, 20 minute sessions every day, but I'm managed enough of them that I'm continuing to see progress. What I'm doing is using some different resources (mostly) for each 20 minutes in order to keep them fresh. The resources look like this (mostly):

• French
  - "French Grammar in Context" <- I really don't like this book, but I'm working my way through it.
  - French anki deck with Audio only, then show sentence & translation
  - Clozemaster (input, not multiple guess)
• Italian
  - Cresendo (Textbook)
  - Clozemaster (input, not multiple guess)
  - Exercises which my tutor (Italian Neighbour) has given me. I have about 100 pages of exercises to get through.
• Mandarin
  - Spreadsheet copy books (AKA Smallwhites method of having characters in printable spreadsheet with greyed out characters to trace over. Photo below)
  - Clozemaster
  - Assimil "Le Chinois sans peine" (The explanations help my French too!)
• Setswana
  - Memrise
  - Bible
  - Setswana Grammar book <- I only do about 10 minutes of this and switch, it is mind numbing!)

So I'm rotating my way through these resources. I do other things, like for example I'm reading a book in Italian. Thanks to DaveAgain I've switched to Conn Iggulden's Gengis Khan series. I'm watching some TV in French, and the occasional YouTube video. I also watch some YouTube cooking shows in French or Mandarin, and I watch the odd show on Singapore TV catchup. I don't however, count any of this stuff in my 20 minute rotations since they are normally longer than 20 minutes, and I'm not doing it for study purposes.

In this photo you can see one of my Mandarin exercise sheets. From the left, the first column is the Pinyin, 2nd is the meaning, 3rd is the bolded character. Then there are a series of 3 block columns. First cell has the 50% greyscale character for me to trace over, then two blank ones to try freehand, then this is repeated for 5 more 3-block sections. I normally use the yellowbridge.com dictionary to see an animation of the stroke order so that I can do it properly. Where there are two characters, I skip the freehand, or do it on another page if I really want to freehand it.

character_ex.jpg

I have a huge number of resources to use for all my 20 minute sessions in the future. Some resources I plan to move on to are:

• Italian
  - Collins Italian Grammar
  - Italian verb drills
  - La linqua Italiani per stranieri (Volumes 1 & 2)
  - Italian for commerce
• French
  - Further French
  - French made simple
  - Business French
• Mandarin
  - Chinese for Today
  - About 30 online textbooks for schools (http://www.hwjyw.com/textbooks/downloads/zhongwen/)
  - 4 Chinese easy readers (actual paperbacks)
  - 2 Chinese novels (paperbacks)
  - 10 ebooks

I am resource poor for Setswana, but the bible should keep me going for awhile anyway. I'm determined to get through all the maths books I've had on my shelf for years. There are 38 books going from basic mathematics to calculus and beyond. I've done a "back of the fag packet" calculation based on my rate of progress and doing it for 20 minute chunks, then I'll complete all 38 of them in about 570 days as long as I do it every day.

I've done a few language exchanges this week with my regulars and a new lady (French) who's husband is English, but doesn't like to speak to her in English. I don't remember how many I've done, probably only 2-3 this week. One hour long session in French while walking my dog and sending photos of the park from my phone and trying to describe the scene in French, and answer questions about politics. So that was difficult.

Next week I plan to do at least one more instalment of "How to do Subs2SRS".

[rdearman]

I have posted Part 2 of the "How to create Subs2SRS cards"

https://youtu.be/es1kGaSanqA

[SGP]

I have been pondering on the log's title for a while, but I still don't really seem to understand it.
Could you tell me what it is about?

[rdearman]

I have been pondering on the log's title for a while, but I still don't really seem to understand it.
Could you tell me what it is about?

It is basically a joke. Something someone might say to someone who is conspiring with them. The problem with jokes is that if you have to explain them, they aren't funny.