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

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garyb
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby garyb » Sun Nov 06, 2022 7:05 pm

I would like to spend a bit more time in Milan. I've been there, but for not even 24 hours! I have always found most of the north of Italy to be more learner-friendly than the centre or south.

Many people will switch to English upon hearing any foreign accent, since it's the "international language" and all. So as much as I'd always encourage native English speakers to make an effort to have a more neutral accent and at least attempt to not completely butcher the vowels and the rhythm, it's never going to be a cure-all for switching. I certainly don't sound Italian but from recording my voice recently I seem to have a relatively neutral foreign accent, not obviously Anglophone, and I was still replied to in English about 50% of the time in Campania last month. Of course accent isn't the only factor and there are others like confidence (although you do seem far less reserved when talking to strangers than I am!), body language, appearance, and location.

I also had a similar experience of not actually being able to speak that much beyond basic interactions, whereas on previous trips I interacted much more with the locals. It can just be a matter of chance.

Understanding someone speaking to you without any context is always going to be one of the biggest challenges of listening comprehension, and like you say, more often than not I don't even understand the first time when a stranger speaks to me out of the blue in English! Eavesdropping is easy in comparison and I found myself able to understand most conversations in Italy even very early on in my learning journey (although already knowing French was a huge boost there). It does help that the vocabularly is limited since about 90% of Italians' conversations tend to be about food or coffee! Which sounds like an unfair stereotype, but I feel I've spent enough time in Italy and around Italians to say it's accurate.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby rdearman » Sun Nov 06, 2022 8:11 pm

MorkTheFiddle wrote:I wonder how thick? Maurice Chevalier spoke English with an obvious French accent, but I wouldn't have called it thick. Maybe you don't know who Chevalier was, but my point is that an accent does not have to be Pepe-Lepew thick to be obvious

See, I wonder this too. I did a straw poll of my language exchange partners a year or so ago, and I got some odd results. Most of the French people said something along the lines of "Oh, you have a definite American accent." but the Italians would say, "You have a British accent". So.... who knows. The problem of course is that I can't actually tell myself. Your post did get me thinking perhaps I should try another straw poll with native speakers and give them a scale of 1-10 how bad is my accent. Let's call this farmer a 10 in English, and say the Queen as a 1.



garyb wrote:Of course accent isn't the only factor and there are others like confidence (although you do seem far less reserved when talking to strangers than I am!), body language, appearance, and location.

Yes, I'm fairly certain my mode of dress would have helped to peg me as an English speaker.

garyb wrote: It does help that the vocabularly is limited since about 90% of Italians' conversations tend to be about food or coffee! Which sounds like an unfair stereotype, but I feel I've spent enough time in Italy and around Italians to say it's accurate.

To be fair, it is 90% of what I talk about, too. :)
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Carmody
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby Carmody » Sun Nov 06, 2022 10:34 pm

rdearman »

Thanks so much for sharing your diary of your Italian trip; it was greatly appreciated. Those of use who don't travel especially appreciated it.

If you have time could you share with us in more detail what it was like with your 10 mins. chats. What did you find that you had not expected? Was grammar an issue or not at all? What about vocabulary? Did anything surprise you from the chats as far as you language skills?

Thanks again for sharing the journey!
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby rdearman » Mon Nov 07, 2022 3:14 pm

Carmody wrote:Thanks so much for sharing your diary of your Italian trip; it was greatly appreciated. Those of use who don't travel especially appreciated it.

No problem. I thought it might bore people. :)

Carmody wrote:If you have time could you share with us in more detail what it was like with your 10 mins. chats. What did you find that you had not expected? Was grammar an issue or not at all? What about vocabulary? Did anything surprise you from the chats as far as you language skills?

Well, had to have a little think about this one. Generally, most of the chats which were 10 minutes or more were typically around me speaking to someone in a sales position. So these were, hotel receptionist, computer tech shop assistants, restaurant assistants, or the charity people. All my conversations were with 3 types of people. People who never spoke anything but Italian, people who asked if I preferred English or Italian, and people who spoke to me in English but switched back because I continued in Italian. The charity lady would fall into the last category, but then she asked if she could continue in English, so she could practice. This non-switching behaviour was really very good. When I was in France, everyone would switch to English, regardless of how bad their English was. Even in Rome, I had a lot of people switching to English. I think the northern Italians seem to be better for language learners because they didn't automatically switch.

Grammar wasn't an issue for me, although I suspect my grammar was bad for them! :roll: I have just returned from my Italian neighbour's house, because I took over some magazines I bought for her as a gift. We were discussing this sort of thing, and she said I have no problem with anything in the present tense, rarely any problems with past tense, but I do have a tendency to mix up future tense and cause some confusion. I think generally I did OK, not a lot of "caveman" talk, it was grammatically correct sentences most of the time. Definitely better after day 2 or 3 because at that point my thinking was beginning to shift into Italian.

As for vocabulary, I didn't have any issues except for some technical words. For example, having never had to talk about computer memory sticks or USB ports, I was stuck using the English words. But after one or two shops, I knew the Italian words. Because I could point at a memory stick they did have, ask what it was called, then ask for a smaller USB-C size. They didn't understand USB-C, but I could point at the opening on my phone, and we all knew what we were talking about them. So I don't think vocabulary for anything you can point at is ever going to be a problem. I can say that other than those words, I had more than sufficient vocabulary to express my needs. However, vocabulary from the comprehension point of view was a different kettle of fish.

When we were speaking, they might say something or use a word I didn't know. This became a problem, because it became a log-jam in the stream of my understanding. I would spend a few moments trying to drag up the meaning of the word or phrase from the catalogue of words in my brain and try to match it to known words. The problem of course is that they have moved on, and now I was losing the thread of the conversation. So a couple of times I had to mentally force myself to let that part of the conversation go. But the 3rd day these types of things were less common because my Italian word knowledge was now closer to the front of my brain than the back (if that makes any sense) and I just let things go if they didn't seem important. I did stop one person and ask them to repeat what they had said, but it was because I was ordering food and I didn't get part of the ingredients he was reeling off, and it was important to me.

I have some fossilised pronunciation errors. I couldn't seem to pronounce poetry correctly no matter how often I practised it correctly. But that was just one little annoyance that I noticed, and It was going away after the fourth or fifth bookshop I went into.

The thing that supposed me the most about my language skills is how quickly they switched over to Italian mode. It did take a day or two to get my mind right, but by day three it was all flowing well. I think if I was there for a month, then I would absolutely be thinking 100% of the time in Italian. Also, nobody will correct you, so it is worth trying to get your pronunciation better or at least neutral. The only time I was corrected was when asking for the poetry section, and they would be like... you mean poetry? Then I would correct my pronunciation, and we'd be OK.

I had some comprehension problems when speaking with the author, who was giving me his sales pitch for his book. Mainly because I couldn't figure out what his book was about. Because he was talking to me, I couldn't read the book jacket to get an idea of the storyline, and because he log-jammed up my brain within a sentence or two it was really difficult. Also, I was worried I was going to miss my train and was concentrating more of when I could politely say goodbye and leave than what he was saying.

So all in all, I'm pleased with how I did. I'm not a perfectionist, so if I flub up some grammar or have an accent, I'm not all that worried. As long as I get my meaning across, and I understand what is being said to me, then I'm generally happy. Could I do better? Oh yes, without a doubt. I should practice writing in Italian more, and getting better at listening, but I've no need to study more, I'm not planning on moving to Italy, or applying for any job that requires some kind of certification.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Mon Nov 07, 2022 6:40 pm

rdearman wrote:
MorkTheFiddle wrote:I wonder how thick? Maurice Chevalier spoke English with an obvious French accent, but I wouldn't have called it thick. Maybe you don't know who Chevalier was, but my point is that an accent does not have to be Pepe-Lepew thick to be obvious

See, I wonder this too. I did a straw poll of my language exchange partners a year or so ago, and I got some odd results. Most of the French people said something along the lines of "Oh, you have a definite American accent." but the Italians would say, "You have a British accent". So.... who knows. The problem of course is that I can't actually tell myself. Your post did get me thinking perhaps I should try another straw poll with native speakers and give them a scale of 1-10 how bad is my accent. Let's call this farmer a 10 in English, and say the Queen as a 1.

After I posted, I tried to think of living people with accents. Two were Henry Kissinger and Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose accents I would call unmistakable and thick. Also unmistakable but not thick the accent of Diane Kruger from Inglourious Basterds . I have heard Juliette Binoche speak English, unmistakable but slight, and also Marion Cottillard, thicker than Binoche but not so bad. In Spanish there are Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayek and Pedro Almodovar, all unmistakable, thicker than Binoche but nothing like Schwarzenegger or Kissinger. All very subjective judgments, of course. and I would not argue about any of them. I leave out languages I know nothing about, like Gaelic or Russian. An Irish accent can be lovely, but that Irish shepherd is incomprehensible.
I encourage you to redo the poll, which would be useful for all of us, I think.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby rdearman » Mon Nov 07, 2022 6:44 pm

For many years, when anyone would ask why Walter Kissinger, who arrived as a German Jewish refugee in America in 1938 with the rest of his family, had lost his foreign accent, while his older brother, born a year earlier, had not, the younger brother would repeatedly claim, “Because Henry doesn't listen.”
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby Carmody » Mon Nov 07, 2022 7:16 pm

rdearman
So all in all, I'm pleased with how I did. I'm not a perfectionist, so if I flub up some grammar or have an accent, I'm not all that worried. As long as I get my meaning across, and I understand what is being said to me, then I'm generally happy. Could I do better? Oh yes, without a doubt. I should practice writing in Italian more, and getting better at listening, but I've no need to study more, I'm not planning on moving to Italy, or applying for any job that requires some kind of certification.
What a beautiful summary and excellent achievement.

My guess is that many of us beginners thrown into that situation would experience far more "logjams" than you did when it came to comprehension.

If anyone is serious about language acquisition and traveling they might wish to start a thread on the topic of where to go in a country to have extended conversations. My wife and I during our visit to Kyoto many years ago were plagued by young school groups of girls descending on us to practice their English. In fact they were a bit locust like, in human form.

Thanks again for sharing the journey.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby rdearman » Sat Nov 12, 2022 12:40 am

Mandarin
I've parked Mandarin again.

Italian
I'm just sporadically reading. My reading challenge in Italian isn't going well, mostly because I don't like this Stephen King book either. I've read it before, and I don't like to reread books. I can count on my hand the number of books that I have read more than once. Although the ones I have read again, I've read a LOT of times! I think I'm just going to throw away the books I don't want to read. It reduces the amount of space taken up on my bookshelves and reduces the amount of time I spend reading stuff I don't like, or want to read. Life is to short.

French
I've not done anything with French and probably won't until next week at least.

Korean
I'm doing anki, some LE's and trying to read. But honestly, I'm not getting very far. Without a tutor I'm struggling. I am seriously considering packing this in also. Although... I did get a new book:

So I am going to just stick it out until I complete this book. Hopefully, my motivation will increase a little.

General Stuff
I've been very anti-language learning since I got back from Italy. I've not had a great deal of time, and the anki decks alone suck up way too much time. I did find a tip about changing the lapse time to 50% so that when you fail a card, it doesn't just show up again the next day, but rather half the time it would have. e.g. if it had shown again in 10 days, it will now show up again in 5 days. Makes me a little more willing to fail cards I had temporarily forgotten.

I have found it difficult to keep organised all the stuff I have/want/need to do, so I have once again started using org-mode. Which unless you are an emacs fan is probably fairly useless to you. But if you know how to use emacs this is kickass. In fact I know people who learned to use emacs, just so they could use org-mode. Anyway, I'm organising my life using it. I have a ton of stuff I need to learn, because I'm studying for 3 certifications (computing, not languages) and all the other tasks I need to do on a daily basis. I'm hoping that clearing out a load of stuff which has been on the back-burner for far too long will help me to carve out time for other things.

One thing I have wanted to automate, and I'm 80% of the way there, is to organise my screenshots of my Korean lessons. When I was being tutored, my teacher used an electronic Samsung whiteboard. He would write stuff on it, then swipe over to another screen and write on that one, etc, etc. Then at the end of the class I would take some screenshots using skype. This is great stuff, but... the screenshots would always have a two panel view, so I'm in the top part of every shot. So I have gone into gimp selected the whiteboard, then exported to png. But I needed to convert it into greyscale to remove the colour and then to black and white image. So having now done all that, I'm working on a script to generate a simple LaTex file which will allow me to generate a PDF with all the stuff in it.

I also have a tonne of handwritten notes, which I want to convert into the same PDF document. Then I will have managed to organise everything into one place and I can print it all off, as well as keeping an electronic copy.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby rdearman » Tue Nov 22, 2022 5:53 pm

I know I haven't posted in a while when my log is buried in the back pages. :)

Italian
Not even reading at the moment, but I did do a couple of language exchanges. The books I have, I don't really like, and I can't seem to whip up the enthusiasm to just read them just so I can throw them away like the French books.

French
No LE, no reading, no nothing. I might pull French off the updates like Mandarin, since I'm not really doing anything with French.

Korean
I have installed the KakaoTalk app in order to talk with my Korean LE partner. KakaoTalk, commonly referred to as KaTalk in South Korea, is a mobile messaging app for smartphones operated by Kakao Corporation. I have been sending her 2-3 sentences per day and she corrects them or gives me a thumbs up. The sentences are very basic, but every little helps I suppose.

I have ordered a second-hand copy of Teach Yourself Korean. I'm hoping a physical book will help me a little.

The images from my Skype sessions with the blackboard have all been grey scaled, converted to B&W and standardised by size. I generated a LaTex file and from that an HTML document. This means I can edit the HTML document to put in translations and notes next to the stuff my tutor had written on the board. I also want to photograph my handwritten notes and get them included. Then I will generate a PDF for review. I don't know how much use this will be for me, but given that I'm forgetting things quicker than I'm learning them, it should be useful.

General Stuff
I'm reading a lot of books, although most are in English. I'm trying to get through the backlog of maths books on my shelf and read 100 books before the end of the year. This isn't going to happen since I've only read 21 books, and so not likely to get through two and half books per day in December. But I'll try to end the year with as many read as possible, then redo the list. 100 books in 52 weeks isn't that bad, only 2 books per week.

I got sidetracked for a little while with recovering lithium batteries from disposable vapes and reusing them for some Xmas decorations. It wasn't just the wiring however, I 3D printed new battery cases, and went a little stupid. But they all work now on rechargeable batteries and I don't have to keep replacing the batteries every year.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby rdearman » Wed Nov 30, 2022 5:18 pm

Well, doesn't seem to be any point breaking this log up into languages, since I am not really doing anything other than Korean (if you ignore English).

I used to think that my mind was like a sieve. I would pour stuff into it, and some of it would stick to the sieve, but the rest would leak out. I now realise that my mind is simply a pipe. I pour stuff in and it all just goes WHOOSH, straight out the hole in the bottom.

What have I been doing? Well reading mostly. I have my spreadsheet of 100 books to read this year, which I didn't start until like October. But I've managed to read 26 books. I've got a lot of them on the go.
  • 조지,마법의 약일 만들다
  • Terre desolate (Ebook & Physical)
  • Martin Chuzzlewit (Audiobook)
  • Massacre 007 (Book)
  • Discrete Mathematics for New Technology (Book)
  • Teach Yourself Korean (Book)
  • Basic Korean Grammar (Ebook & Physical)
  • A History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell

Let me break down what is happening with these.

조지,마법의 약일 만들다 is Roald Dahl's 'George's Marvellous Medicine' in Korean. I have not even managed to complete the first page. This is because I have been doing what everyone in a recent thread said not to do, which was jump into native material. However, I plan to change the way I'm using this book. I am going to translate each page in one go from Korean to English, then set aside the translation for a day, and come back and try to translate the English back to Korean. It will be difficult and tedious, but worth doing, I think.

Terre desolate (Ebook & Physical) is the "Dark Tower, book 3" and honestly I don't like it, I'm bored with it, and I'm probably just going to throw it away.

Martin Chuzzlewit (Audiobook) I listen too when I am doing something that allows me to listen to a book. I have to say that I'm not all that impressed with Dickens. Perhaps it is just me, but all this great literature leaves me cold. I know Dickens is trying to be funny in this book, but it isn't funny to me. Still I've managed to get through 6 chapters, so hopefully I'll get this one done by the end of the year. I don't hold out any hope it will get better.

Massacre 007 (Book) is a book about the shooting down of KAL flight 007 by the Soviet Union in 1983. I'm quite interested in this book, because at the time I was working 16-hour shifts, 7 days a week while stationed in Okinawa because of this incident. A tragic tale for which no good explanation or justification has ever been had.

Discrete Mathematics for New Technology (Book) a fecking enormous maths text book, and one of the many on my bookshelves I'm trying to power through.

Teach Yourself Korean (Book) is a book I bought recently. I wanted a simple beginners book on Korean, and so I ordered this one off Abebooks used. It is in good condition, but no audio with it. Still, it is useful to me, and I'm just working my way through the book slowly but surely. I'm sure I'll need to return to it repeatedly for reference.

Basic Korean Grammar (Ebook & Physical) the second Korean book I'm working through. This one has lots of examples, but is 100% grammar focused. It helps to reinforce all the other stuff I do, and the TY book.

A History of Western Philosophy is another one of those listed as "books you have to read before you die". It is meh.

I'm having 2-3 LE's in Korean each week and what I have been doing is finding a Korean website (newspaper) and then I try to read an article from the news while my LE partner corrects my pronunciation. I don't know most of the words, but I'm looking to help with my reading in hangul and pronunciation. There are some pronunciation rule changes for some letters when they are at the end of a syllable or at the start or whatever, and I am trying to get my head around that. I only started that last week, so this week I plan to be a little better prepared and to find the article first, then translate it, then read it out to my LE partner.

Not much else of note has happened, other than I melted two breadboards trying to program PIC microcontrollers, and I feel a bit crap because of a flu injection and a covid jab at the same time.
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