Postby rdearman » Thu Dec 19, 2019 9:01 pm
Well I just finished my Skype conversation with my French language partner. I haven't spoken to her in at least two weeks just because one or the other of us has been occupied with something else. It was a good conversation and again it was more than an hour; about an hour and 1/2 so 45 minutes English, 45 minutes French. One of the things that we tried tonight was to use some mork examinations for oral portions of the French and or English exams. We quickly encountered a problem which is that neither of us know how to score someone at the appropriate level. So for example I gave her the question in English, and she gave me a response in English but I had no way to know if her response would be B1, B2, C1 if an examiner were to listen.
I have managed 177 days of Italian clozemaster and 105 of those days I have done at least 500 points. I've been continuing to work with Italian and I've got numerous books that I have loaded onto my Kindle in order to read. Most of these are ancient science fiction books which I have read in the past, but it's fine because I have never read them in Italian.
I'm considering doing the 366-day challenge but I'm not really sure which language to pick. I'm seriously considering doing French for a year, and Italian, and possibly something else yet to be decided. I was looking around today at various conlangs since I thought it might be interesting to learn a constructed language. I really don't have any interest in Esperanto or Klingon, so I was trying to see what else might be available. This could be done for another Free & Legal Challenge since very few of these conlangs have commercial materials.
I still haven't started doing any Polish in any large degree other than the occasional hello, excuse me, good afternoon type thing with my colleague. I was planning to start doing some type of listening and reading program in the New Year. I really don't know what I'll do to do next year I have no concrete plans. Each day I seemed to waver between various options such as stopping all language learning forever, or focusing only on one language, or learning everything at the same time, or a mixture of these.
A long time ago I downloaded a list of 1001 books to read before you die. I recently discovered this spreadsheet on a backup and decided that I would start to look into this. I updated the spreadsheet and worked out that I have read 74 of these 1001 books or 7.39%. Interestingly, or at least interestingly to me, I have read three of these books in French. Of course the other 71 were in English. Given that a significant number of these books are classics and are freely available in the public domain I added them to the collection of books to be on my Kindle. This week I completed Walden Pond by Henry David Thoreau. I think I will try to read any of the classics that I can in either French or Italian.
Outside human languages and constructed languages I've also been looking into programming languages this week. One of the things I've been looking at is natural query languages which allow you to ask questions in a natural human way. One of the things I was looking at using this for was to create a corpus of this website and generate an FAQ based on the actual questions asked. So not the thing I think is the most frequently asked questions but rather the thing that is mathematically the most FAQ. This has led me down a bit of a programming rabbit hole but it is quite interesting.
I don't really have any type of language learning activities planned for the holiday season, so I am unlikely to do an update in the near future. But let me take this opportunity if you are reading my log to wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
12 x
