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

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rdearman
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Re: Rdearman 2016/17/18/19 [Remember if we get caught, I'm deaf and you don't speak English]

Postby rdearman » Sat Jan 26, 2019 3:34 pm

Every time I think I've hit rock bottom, someone throws me a shovel.

Thinking about changing my log title to this!

Again a poor week for language learning. I probably should have stuck with that 365 day challenge because things really tailed off after I gave that up. Still doing the same old stuff. LE's on occasion but down to 2-4 a week now. People seemed to be impressed with doing 2+ exchanges per week, but for me this is a drop from 2-4 exchanges per day it seems like nothing really. I had a nice long conversation with Zenmonkey (mostly in French) about app programming on Android and IOS. Don't think my French was particularly impressive. Today I've done 40 minutes of scriptorium in Mandarin and I still like writing the characters. I'm only on page 3 of this reader, but I can already remember a lot of the characters (and stroke order) without having to look them up. I've been very lax in keeping to my schedule with Chinese and should get back to it. I have another easy reader in Chinese with a audio CD, so in hindsight it would have been better to start with that one, but... I've started with this one so I'll continue.

My neighbour visited Shenzhen and brought me back a book. Which was very kind, but it is a book for Chinese people to learn English. By the time I learned enough Chinese to read this book, I wouldn't need the book. :) She's going to ask her daughter to bring me back some novels in February.

I've done some exercises in Italian, and most of the LE's I've done this last week have been in Italian. One very useful is a lady who teaches English! So her English is near perfect and doesn't need a lot of help from me, but she is lumbered with a thick below average learner with poor grammar in 5 languages. :lol:

I've been reading in various logs about this 24 hours of reading in 48 hours, and I think I might take that challenge. If I did it for Italian I would defo knockout a lot of my super challenge requirements.
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Re: Rdearman 2016/17/18/19 [Remember if we get caught, I'm deaf and you don't speak English]

Postby zenmonkey » Sat Jan 26, 2019 5:30 pm

rdearman wrote:I had a nice long conversation with Zenmonkey (mostly in French) about app programming on Android and IOS. Don't think my French was particularly impressive.


Like I said, it was fun and we should do this every once in a while. And don't sell yourself short, sure, you got stuck on a few words (that you did know) but you're much more comfortable and fluid now...
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Re: Rdearman 2016/17/18/19 [Remember if we get caught, I'm deaf and you don't speak English]

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sat Jan 26, 2019 10:34 pm

Even Tarzan-speech is output. And compared to me, you talk A LOT in your target languages.
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Re: Rdearman 2016/17/18/19 [Remember if we get caught, I'm deaf and you don't speak English]

Postby Expugnator » Sat Jan 26, 2019 11:07 pm

I second Jeff's words. You speak more in your TLs in a week than I do in a year!
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Re: Rdearman 2016/17/18/19 [Remember if we get caught, I'm deaf and you don't speak English]

Postby rdearman » Mon Jan 28, 2019 10:10 pm

Expugnator wrote:I second Jeff's words. You speak more in your TLs in a week than I do in a year!

Humm. You might be right. Some how since I wrote my last post, I've had 2 language exchanges in French and 1 in Italian with 7 more scheduled before Friday. I've also got two other people hounding me to find a slot to fit them in. (Oh and I have a Mandarin lesson scheduled)

So I'm kinda confused why people find it hard to find language exchange partners. As an English speaker learning FIGS I could have more partners than a dog has fleas. One problem I have with this over abundance of people is I sometimes forget which language they speak, and start speaking French to an Italian or Italian to a French person.

I think the jury is still out in my mind if all these LE's are really helpful, but certainly for some topics I can navigate pretty well. For example today I had to describe a "dehydrator" in Italian and what I do with it. Which was not too bad, but I started to struggle when I was talked about using the dehydrator to make dog treats from meat discounted at the supermarket. So basically in the UK when the meat gets to within a day of the sell by date some supermarkets makes deep discounts on it, so you can pay as little as £0.09 ($0.12) for a kilo of meat (especially organ meat which most people don't buy). But these types LE conversations always have a ton of vocabulary that you aren't getting in Assimil. (At least I don't remember a dialogue about fegato di manzo scontato in them) So, it certainly forces me to be creative about descriptions.

Another recent example was a French exchange this weekend where I was talking about my decision to complete all the maths books on the top shelf of my bookcase and I was starting at elementary mathematics and working my way up to differential calculus. This would seem to be an easy topic until you actually fall into the rabbit hole and discover you don't know the French words for "bookcase", "shelf", and a number of other words you have to use to describe the idea. So using the vocabulary I have, I had to describe a bookcase in sufficient detail for her to work out what I meant and give me the word. Then carry on describing the shelf for my newfound word until she supplied that one too me as well.

It also happens the other way too. So the person I was speaking to in French (we were using a phone and couldn't easily use a dictionary for lookups) told me about her application for a different job using words like: "candidature", "panneaux publicitaires", "communes", "départements". So while familiar with the English use of commune and department, it means something different in the French political system. It seems there are not 36,000 communes with vegan hippies wearing flower-power t-shirts, but rather this is a term for the local municipal government.

The problem is that I'm not revisiting these words and so they tend to slip out of my mind. Vocabulary words are slippery little suckers! So I really need to buckle down and so some serious reading to get a large hit of vocabulary.

On a personal note, Dave posted episode 8 of our Lollygagging podcast, and I really need to take more editorial control of this! If you listen to it to the end you'll see what I mean. Talk about out of context!
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Re: Rdearman 2016/17/18/19 [Remember if we get caught, I'm deaf and you don't speak English]

Postby daveprine » Wed Jan 30, 2019 4:02 pm

rdearman wrote:
On a personal note, Dave posted episode 8 of our Lollygagging podcast, and I really need to take more editorial control of this! If you listen to it to the end you'll see what I mean. Talk about out of context!


But is it really out of context, Rick? Is it? Hmmm.....

Although even before reading this, I was tempted to use a line for the next one where you refer to something that rhymes with "hex toys," but decided not to use it in order to keep things borderline PG. But now, I'm wondering if I was being hasty in decision.

Besides, this is what keeps them listening til the end. (Or at least fast-forwarding to the end.)
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Re: Rdearman 2016/17/18/19 [Remember if we get caught, I'm deaf and you don't speak English]

Postby rdearman » Thu Jan 31, 2019 7:52 pm

OK. I had a go at this read for 24 hours out of 48 and I managed.... wait for it... wait for it.... 5 hours and 15 minutes. So, not so good. Still I did manage almost 6 hours so almost 25% of the target. Somehow I managed to rack up 7 language exchanges and one Chinese lesson this week. Also 4 LE's were during my 48 hours, so that ate of 4 hours of my time. I should be happy I managed 5 hours, but I did a couple of those in French so didn't get any nearer to completing my Italian book doing that. Still French is much easier for me to read than Italian.

I have also seemed to have tailed off on the 20 minutes of working on various languages, so I need to kick that back into gear. I've got 4 more LE scheduled already and a couple of people who want some of my time. Hopefully, I'll manage to fit some people in. But I do have a 4-5 hour round trip up north in the UK next week, so I'm planning to spend some time listening to a couple of audio books in either French or Italian. It really suck treading water in intermediate lake. :(
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Re: Rdearman 2016/17/18/19 [Remember if we get caught, I'm deaf and you don't speak English]

Postby rdearman » Tue Feb 05, 2019 10:02 pm

I'm not happy with my new "spreadsheet tracking" system for hours on languages. Back when I was simply marking off a line line on a piece of paper was 20 minutes, I was doing more, this month I have only done 1 hour! I believe this was because the piece of paper was sitting on my desk and a constant reminder that I should be studying not doing other stuff. Now that it is on a spreadsheet, this unconscious reminder isn't there. So while the spreadsheet is quicker than counting all the marks and multiplying by 20 it doesn't have the same psychological drive that the paper had. I have not done very well with the 6WC and to be honest I've not got the motivation to do it. I was doing much better with the simple paper and pencil for motivation. gggrrrr. :evil:

LE's are ramping up again, even though I haven't gone out of my way to find them. However, the people that were doing them with me want regular weekly sessions. So I have 6 scheduled this week and it is people asking me, not me searching for them. I probably could have had about 8-9 LE's but I had to turn down a couple people this week because I will be out of two for two days. Had another session today with the French lady who doesn't like to speak English. Basically an hour of French practice for me. I keep trying to encourage her to speak in English but other than a few sentences she doesn't and continues in French. I'm wondering what she is actually getting out of these meetings. :?

One LE partner, an Italian fellow, said my vocabulary needed work and he was going to help me expand it. He feels this way because I was finding it difficult to explain in Italian how web-server load balancing and least cost telephone routing worked. Most people I know couldn't explain this in their own language let alone having a couple vocabulary gaps in a second language! :lol: Still it is great that he is determined to "get my vocabulary to a high level". One thing about doing LE's is once you find people who're determined to study, they also push you. I would like to say I feel that Italian fellows ideal of minimal vocabulary is a bit like the drunk test Steve Martin took. (See below)

I've been really disappointed in my progress reading my most recent book in Italian, I've only just managed to get to 20% of the book on my Kindle. However, after looking up the page count of the paperback I don't feel to bad, since 20% of a 462 page book is still 92 pages. I did a little experiment recently. I have a couple of books by the same author one in French and one in Italian. Different books but same author so the writing style/level should be about the same. I discovered after spot checking a couple of pages that I knew 96% of the words on the 5 pages of French I read. But I only knew 56% of the Italian words from 5 pages. I believe there are two reasons for this. The first is more cognates in French <-> English than with Italian <-> English, and I did 2 super challenges in French. So I have read a lot more French than Italian. Another thing I noticed was for a couple of words I didn't know in Italian, if I "sounded them out" I knew them. I just didn't recognise the written word immediately but if someone had said it I would have know straight-away. I think I might need to cram some vocabulary, or just read more.

Tomorrow is one of the days I am away, and I'm driving alone for 4-5 hours, so I'm planning to listen to an audiobook, but I don't know if I should do Italian or French. I might flip a coin. Although I did consider doing 5 hours of Pimsleur Mandarin, which would give me a better score on the 6WC.

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Re: Rdearman 2016/17/18/19 [Remember if we get caught, I'm deaf and you don't speak English]

Postby IronMike » Tue Feb 05, 2019 10:41 pm

Oh mein Gott, that movie...memories....
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Re: Rdearman 2016/17/18/19 [Remember if we get caught, I'm deaf and you don't speak English]

Postby rdearman » Sun Feb 10, 2019 8:51 am

Well the plan to listen to 5 hours of French or Italian in the car was a bust. I listened to 30 minutes then switched on Spotify and listened to music the rest of the trip. It was too difficult to drive to a strange place and actually undertand a second language the whole time. However, I took a trip to Brighton on Thursday night and because the wife drove I managed to listen to an hour of an Italian audiobook.

I've done 8 language exchanges this week even though I was travelling for 2 of the 5 days. I don't know how I seem to have gotten so many LE's but they'll have to get scaled back soon since I should be starting a new job shortly. I haven't had much opprotunity to study my textbooks so need to start again blocking out time each day for the apps, textbooks and other things. But if I'm commuting this becomes easier since that time is forced on to me. No need to schedule it.

My reading also dropped off after that stint of trying to read 24 out of 48 hours. If consistancy is the key to learning languages then I am well and truly screwed.
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