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

[zenmonkey]

Don't get me started on keyboards.

Every few months I blow up and spend an hour search Amazon for a keyboard.

I know I would note want to even consider learning German without owning one of these:
https://www.daskeyboard.com/
Inscriptionless is the way to go and they are tough as steel. I have broken almost every peripheral I own (I even broke my beloved ducky shine), but not these. I know exactly when that key is going to register (very important when the one your hit is F5).

For as many languages as described, I think I might almost bail and go speech to text. Failing that, I want Visual Studio-style autocomplete for languages. It is a strange world how we have Resharper for Visual Studio but are left almost hung out to dry with foreign languages?! Didn't they foresee us typing in five languages at once? I can also imagine a google translate option with N boxes, where a type in any one language will faithfully replicate and translate it into all language that you wish to write in. I learn slow enough where that may be a reality before I am actually ready to use it.

Apologies to rdearman - feel free to move this to it's own thread on keyboards ....

I don't know - I clicked on German for that site and it stayed in English - I can find a reasonably good German keyboard and already have the integrated one on my Mac - finding a keyboard in the basic 5 languages isn't usually a problem it's the frustration of needing overlays or stickers for the rarer ones. It pisses me off, I go on Amazon and ... buy nothing (other than MOAR stickers!). I'm not buying another one it's just that I get frustrated in the hunt and peck of new scripts. As to speech to text - ya, nope. It's useless - there is no good speech to text for Tibetan (or a few others rare languages).

Heck there isn't even a Google translate.

[rdearman]

Apologies to rdearman - feel free to move this to it's own thread on keyboards ....

Don't worry, I feel the keyboard pain. Although it might be a good idea to raise a thread in the resources area RE: Keyboards and get Reineke to add it to the master list of resources. Everyone (near enough) will hit this problem sooner or later.

[zenmonkey]

Apologies to rdearman - feel free to move this to it's own thread on keyboards ....

Don't worry, I feel the keyboard pain. Although it might be a good idea to raise a thread in the resources area RE: Keyboards and get Reineke to add it to the master list of resources. Everyone (near enough) will hit this problem sooner or later.

Thread raised - I'll add some content later.

[rdearman]

OK, an update on my little experiment in transcription. I've done as badly today as I did on Friday. This time I've kept the stats and written them down in a spreadsheet I've started. Today I did 91 words in total, of with 62% were errors, either in spelling or omission. I was thinking I could keep this in some kind of progress bar, but other than total words transcribed I don't see any other way to record. My goal is actually to have a reduction in errors with a target of less than 5% errors in transcription.

The effect on comprehension is yet to be determined, but I can already say more than half my errors are spelling mistakes and problems with accent marks. Very few of the errors in the bit I've done so far has been a failure of comprehension. Still the audio piece I'm doing now is fairly easy with no slang or other noise, so comprehension errors are less than I'd expect with something more complex. I don't want to jump straight into some really difficult thing to start with, so I'll progress with this.

Although I can type faster than write in English, this isn't the case in French and so using a pen and paper is the best option at the moment. The review and checking for errors will help me the next time I sit down to transcribe. Because I can see where I've misspelt, and the words are going to keep repeating themselves for most of the words in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will become transparent for me soon.

Just to give a flavour of some of the errors I marked myself with:

"droit" instead of "droits"
"le" instead of "les"
"Declaration" instead of "Déclaration"
"du le humanity" instead of "du l'humanité"

So lots of errors, but nothing which was actually causing me to misunderstand. Some portions where I did misunderstand the words completely were:

méconnaissance et le mépris
l'avènement
inaliénables (after I saw it in written form, it of course made sense)

These types of things weren't as frequent, in fact all three of them are above. It took me about 30 minutes to do 90 words, including the error checking. So spending a 1/2 hour or hour per day doing this wouldn't be too difficult.

[Brun Ugle]

If you want a progress bar, how about one that shows the percentage of words you transcribed correctly. To keep it from going wildly up and down, you could take an average of the last ten transcriptions. That way if you did unusually well or unusually poorly on one transcription, it wouldn’t make a huge difference. And hopefully over time you will approach the 100 % mark.

[Arnaud]

"du le humanity" instead of "du l'humanité"

Check again

[rdearman]

"du le humanity" instead of "du l'humanité"

Check again

Dooh!

[Brun Ugle]

"du le humanity" instead of "du l'humanité"

Check again

Dooh!

I laughed when I saw this because I knew when I saw Arnaud’s comment that that would be your answer. Also, I believe it’s spelled “D’oh!” (Sorry, I had to.)

[rdearman]

"du le humanity" instead of "du l'humanité"

Check again

Dooh!

I laughed when I saw this because I knew when I saw Arnaud’s comment that that would be your answer. Also, I believe it’s spelled “D’oh!” (Sorry, I had to.)

Dooh!

[smallwhite]

I think broad rules about grammar need to be known in order to get sentence structure correct, but I'm perfectly happy to brutalise someone else's language.

I think you said you want to be C1 in French. One can't reach C1 with poor carefree grammar. How do you handle this gap?