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

Continue or start your personal language log here, including logs for challenge participants
User avatar
rdearman
Site Admin
Posts: 7223
Joined: Thu May 14, 2015 4:18 pm
Location: United Kingdom
Languages: English (N)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1836
x 23092
Contact:

Re: Rdearman 2016-23 I’m not superstitious, just a little stitious.

Postby rdearman » Thu Mar 16, 2023 9:16 pm

My wife is just as obstructive with my language learning. When I suggested I get an Italian girlfriend, she was like: No!

She said the same about French and Korean girlfriends. Honestly, she just keeps holding me back.
11 x
: 0 / 150 Read 150 books in 2024

My YouTube Channel
The Autodidactic Podcast
My Author's Newsletter

I post on this forum with mobile devices, so excuse short msgs and typos.

User avatar
PeterMollenburg
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3226
Joined: Wed Jul 22, 2015 11:54 am
Location: Australia
Languages: English (N), French (B2-certified), Dutch (High A2?), Spanish (~A1), German (long-forgotten 99%), Norwegian (false starts in 2020 & 2021)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=18080
x 8006

Re: Rdearman 2016-23 I’m not superstitious, just a little stitious.

Postby PeterMollenburg » Sat Mar 18, 2023 4:19 am

rdearman wrote:My wife is just as obstructive with my language learning. When I suggested I get an Italian girlfriend, she was like: No!

She said the same about French and Korean girlfriends. Honestly, she just keeps holding me back.


Not only that, she's discriminatory. I'd file a lawsuit if I were you, it'd make your wife, sorry life easier. :lol:
1 x

User avatar
rdearman
Site Admin
Posts: 7223
Joined: Thu May 14, 2015 4:18 pm
Location: United Kingdom
Languages: English (N)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1836
x 23092
Contact:

Re: Rdearman 2016-23 I’m not superstitious, just a little stitious.

Postby rdearman » Sat Mar 18, 2023 10:07 am

PeterMollenburg wrote:
rdearman wrote:My wife is just as obstructive with my language learning. When I suggested I get an Italian girlfriend, she was like: No!

She said the same about French and Korean girlfriends. Honestly, she just keeps holding me back.


Not only that, she's discriminatory. I'd file a lawsuit if I were you, it'd make your wife, sorry life easier. :lol:

Err... no, "Happy Wife, Happy Life" is my motto.
4 x
: 0 / 150 Read 150 books in 2024

My YouTube Channel
The Autodidactic Podcast
My Author's Newsletter

I post on this forum with mobile devices, so excuse short msgs and typos.

User avatar
rdearman
Site Admin
Posts: 7223
Joined: Thu May 14, 2015 4:18 pm
Location: United Kingdom
Languages: English (N)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1836
x 23092
Contact:

Re: Rdearman 2016-23 I’m not superstitious, just a little stitious.

Postby rdearman » Tue Mar 21, 2023 11:47 am

Italian
New exchange partner, the others seem to be slowly dropping off the face of the earth. I really need to practice verbs, I have a tendency to say everything in the present tense. A function of forgetting because of non-use.

French
French exchanges seem to be heavily weighted towards the end of the week. I don't know why. So, haven't had any yet, and only one last week.

Korean
Once again, the bulk of any update since this is the thing I'm focusing on. The things I have been doing, are language exchanges (to ask questions) and review of all my lessons. I also do anki reps with words and some new decks which are sentences. I also try to use my LWT to read a tiny bit of an Agatha Christie novel. These activities primarily word the reading and writing aspect of Korean, but I don't practice listening or speaking.

When I was taking Korean lessons on iTalki I was topping up my wallet to pay for my lessons regualrly. I'd applied a top up not long before my tutor quit, and I had some money still in the wallet. I decided last week that I was going to use up the remainder of this money and I would book the cheapest lessons I could find. So I wrote a couple of community tutors asking them if they would be willing to do lessons in 100% Korean for an absolute beginner. Only one man was crazy enough to do this. So in an email I explained where I was and that I could read and sound out hangul and knew some grammar, so not a complete novice. I booked a set of 5 lessons, Mon, Tue, Thu, Fri, Mon and decided to go for it.

I've done two lessons now, and while they are not a complete disaster, they are painful for both the student and the teacher. He does force me to speak and asks me questions, feeding me vocabulary and correcting pronunciation. I record every session and I strip the words and phrases out and into anki and study them like mad between each lesson. I've only done two lessons, but I think they are helpful. Certainly it forces me to use what I know and to recall what I can. I can only imagine how painful it is for him to listen to my caveman Korean.

I've also stripped out all the sentences in my Korean anki decks which I downloaded and I've used a script to create glossika type files. Obviously old ones, and I didn't bother to do English translations, so it is just all Korean, all the time. So I plan to listen to those a lot and practice speaking.

General Stuff
I'm falling behind on just about everything at the moment.
10 x
: 0 / 150 Read 150 books in 2024

My YouTube Channel
The Autodidactic Podcast
My Author's Newsletter

I post on this forum with mobile devices, so excuse short msgs and typos.

User avatar
rdearman
Site Admin
Posts: 7223
Joined: Thu May 14, 2015 4:18 pm
Location: United Kingdom
Languages: English (N)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1836
x 23092
Contact:

Re: Rdearman 2016-23 I’m not superstitious, just a little stitious.

Postby rdearman » Mon Mar 27, 2023 12:52 pm

Tomorrow is my last Korean lesson that I booked, doing 100% Korean. I think it has been helpful, and it certainly has generated a lot of new vocabulary for me to learn. I'm writing down all the vocabulary and also putting them into anki. I've recorded all the lessons, so I'm re-watching my terrible self-humiliation. But I think it has forced me to get better. Today I had to explain why I know how to cook (used to be a short-order cook) and then had to explain the difference between a Chef and a short-order cook. Which is basically they both do the same thing, but a Chef has an army of people to help them, and they can faff around with a ruler making sure the asparagus is perpendicular to the carrots. Whereas a short order cook normally works alone (possibly with a prep-cook) and has to deliver food fast. Also, if you start screaming at people like Gordon Ramsay, you're more likely to get a punch in the mouth than an "Oui Chef!"

So this involved a LOT of 한국어로 어떻게 말해요? (How do you say in Korean?) and a long time for the poor teacher sitting and staring at me while I tried to construct sentences, which he didn't understand because my pronunciation is so poor.

However, I've now agreed with 2 of my LE partners to do a similar thing for at least 15-20 minutes of our language exchanges. After all, if you want to learn to talk, you have to talk.
12 x
: 0 / 150 Read 150 books in 2024

My YouTube Channel
The Autodidactic Podcast
My Author's Newsletter

I post on this forum with mobile devices, so excuse short msgs and typos.

User avatar
rdearman
Site Admin
Posts: 7223
Joined: Thu May 14, 2015 4:18 pm
Location: United Kingdom
Languages: English (N)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1836
x 23092
Contact:

Re: Rdearman 2016-23 I’m not superstitious, just a little stitious.

Postby rdearman » Thu Mar 30, 2023 2:06 pm

Italian
Didn't have any LE this week, I read a little poetry in Italian but that was all, and I watched some YT cooking videos in Italian.

French
Watched another French show about a region of France, they aren't really documentaries, and they aren't travel vlogs, more like an in-depth, 1-hour government tourism infomercial. Anyway they are interesting and this time they did a region I thought I was familiar with, Grenoble, but there was a lot more than I thought, including the Roman building which the Lincoln Memorial is based on.



Korean
I'm annoyed that I spend significant time and effort making glossika type files. I have discovered that I can just take any MP3 into WorkAudioBook and in the setting just tell it to repeat each phrase X number of times as it plays the mp3. So no need to faff around with python for ages. Just load up any old mp3 and let it create glossika sentences for you. So if you remember, I had a whole load of audio I dumped from an anki deck, and this took me days to get chopped up into glossika A, B, C type files. But now I have a better method with WorkAudioBook, so I just listed them all into a text file:

Code: Select all

ls -1v ./source-* > file.list.txt

Then merged them into one big mp3.

Edited the file to add "file " and quotation marks around the file names. (Regular expressions in a text editor, took literally a minute) then ran the command.

Code: Select all

ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i file.list.txt -c copy zmerged.mp3

So in total took all of about 3 minutes, rather than the hours (actually days) I spend arse-aching around with python.

Loaded it up into WorkAudioBook and Volia! instant glossika.
===

I have now spread my message to all my Korean partners that I want to spend at least 15 minutes in 100% Korean, but now I preplan a topic so that I can cram vocabulary before we start rather than just winging it like I did with the teacher. I've also been doing a lot of study and writing using textbooks that I have.

General Stuff
I'm trying to get back into spending a couple of hours per day reading. Need to keep on top of the reading list. I flipped over to doing so much Korean study that reading has sunk down again, so need to float it back up the priority list some more.
11 x
: 0 / 150 Read 150 books in 2024

My YouTube Channel
The Autodidactic Podcast
My Author's Newsletter

I post on this forum with mobile devices, so excuse short msgs and typos.

User avatar
rdearman
Site Admin
Posts: 7223
Joined: Thu May 14, 2015 4:18 pm
Location: United Kingdom
Languages: English (N)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1836
x 23092
Contact:

Re: Rdearman 2016-23 I’m not superstitious, just a little stitious.

Postby rdearman » Thu Apr 06, 2023 6:50 pm

Italian
Couple of cooking videos and a language exchange where we talked in English. I got called away before it was my turn to switch to Italian. Oh well, it happens.

French
Couple of language exchanges. One with a lady with a level of English slightly below my French, so I spend some time stopping our conversation in English and repeating back to her what I said in French, so she understands. In both my language exchanges, I spend a lot of time talking about the political situation in France and the use of 49.3 of the French constitution. Interestingly for me this clause has been used 81 times between the establishment of the 5th republic in 1958 (11 governments) until the election of Emmanuel Macron, who has used it 11 times in 18 months. No politics here, I know, but it was some good language exchange material because I learned a lot of words (including new curse words) revolving around this clause 49.3. It appears the problem most people have with it, is that it allows the government to push through a law without the debate or approval of the parliament. I was interested in why anyone would even put something which basically bypasses democracy into their constitution. The explanation was complex, and I mostly didn't understand it, since it was all explained to me in French, but this was injected to overcome some problems they'd encountered in the Fourth Republic.

Anyway, while I don't discuss politics here, I do talk about it with my LE partners, and I always get some interesting perspectives from natives which I don't get on the news.

Korean
So, I did one last 100% Korean class since my last update, and I was actually trying to talk about the political situation in France. I absolutely do not have the vocabulary to do this. But, I tried! I did learn all sorts of new words in Korean also. (like 폭동) I was asking about if Koreans were political as a people, or generally just not bothered, etc. So this sort of interaction was mainly me spending a lot of time asking "[[Insert English word here]]" 를 한국어로 어떻게 말합니까? (How do you say "???" in Korean?")

A lot of stuff going into the old anki deck that day I can tell you. So continuing with this theme, I've asked all my Korean language exchange partners to do at least 15 minutes of 100% Korean with me. While they all do this, two of them are way better at helping me than the rest.

But one of these two stands hands and shoulders above the rest. She is an Astrophysicist student in Germany, and she is super patient with me. She also understands that she has to "dumb down" things in order to help me progress, so she decided she would just focus on numbers, times, and dates with me. So she asks what time it is, or what day it is, etc. She tells me the time, and I have to type the numbers into the chat window, so she can make sure I understood what she said. But even just simple date and time questions can be expansive. For example, some of her questions which I was supposed to answer in Korean:
  • What time is it?
  • How many years have you lived in your house?
  • How old is your dog/daughter/wife/etc?
  • How much is €10 in Korean Won?
  • What time do you wake up?

But I don't just give the time as a response. If she asks; What time do you go to sleep? I can't just say "10:00". I have to use a decent, grammatically correct sentence. 밤 10시에 자러 간다. etc.

Next week she is planning to help me with conjunctions: as, if, or, so, and, but, for, why, yet, when, after, since, until, where, while, before, though, because,
although, whenever, wherever, always, etc.

So, I've loaded them up in a special deck, and I've been trying to get them into my head.

General Stuff
Once again I'm really getting behind on my reading, and I've really failed at writing for the last few years, since Covid. I used to write every day but slacked off. So now I'm trying to do at least 1500 words a day and not let languages suck up all my time. I'm also trying to commit to doing more YT videos and also resurrect my podcast.
9 x
: 0 / 150 Read 150 books in 2024

My YouTube Channel
The Autodidactic Podcast
My Author's Newsletter

I post on this forum with mobile devices, so excuse short msgs and typos.

DaveAgain
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1961
Joined: Mon Aug 27, 2018 11:26 am
Languages: English (native), French & German (learning).
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... &start=200
x 4030

Re: Rdearman 2016-23 I’m not superstitious, just a little stitious.

Postby DaveAgain » Thu Apr 06, 2023 8:58 pm

rdearman wrote:I used to write every day but slacked off. So now I'm trying to do at least 1500 words a day
How long does that take you?
0 x

User avatar
rdearman
Site Admin
Posts: 7223
Joined: Thu May 14, 2015 4:18 pm
Location: United Kingdom
Languages: English (N)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1836
x 23092
Contact:

Re: Rdearman 2016-23 I’m not superstitious, just a little stitious.

Postby rdearman » Thu Apr 06, 2023 9:08 pm

DaveAgain wrote:
rdearman wrote:I used to write every day but slacked off. So now I'm trying to do at least 1500 words a day
How long does that take you?

It depends, I can type about 50 words per minute, but the problem is thinking up the words. :) So my actual average is about 30wpm, so normally just under an hour, although if I'm on a roll it can be 30 minutes. I used to use a program called "Write or Die" which started to delete the words you just wrote if you stopped writing, so you couldn't stop for corrections or anything really. That used to really drive up my word count when I did Nanowrimo's. :)

EDIT: I thought I should add that now I use a program called "wordgrinder" which has a GUI, but I use the terminal based program. That is because I could SSH into my home machine and write during my lunch hours. It is just a black screen you type into, it doesn't have any bells or whistles, so no distractions. I really like it because there isn't a lot of stuff you can do with it. No tables, or anything fancy. You can change the text to bold, or italic, and that is about it. I do my 15k words in that, and then import it into Scrivener, which I run in a Virtual Machine (no Linux version)
6 x
: 0 / 150 Read 150 books in 2024

My YouTube Channel
The Autodidactic Podcast
My Author's Newsletter

I post on this forum with mobile devices, so excuse short msgs and typos.

User avatar
rdearman
Site Admin
Posts: 7223
Joined: Thu May 14, 2015 4:18 pm
Location: United Kingdom
Languages: English (N)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1836
x 23092
Contact:

Re: Rdearman 2016-23 I’m not superstitious, just a little stitious.

Postby rdearman » Mon Apr 17, 2023 9:30 am

Italian
Everything cancelled, and nothing done. (Covid)

French
Everything cancelled, and nothing done. (Covid)

Korean
I have continued to try and do all the transcription stuff, where I'm rewriting all the lessons I had last year. I have been doing a lot of anki, but honestly I'm not sure it is helping much, since I'm just sort of passively using it. So I built some cloze cards (see below).

I did a couple of LE in Korean last week, even though I felt like death warmed over. Both my LE partners for the week insisted I do my 15 minutes minimum of 100% Korean, and of course I added a lot more cards into my anki deck. I have 7 decks of Korean anki cards, so I'm getting between 400-700 cards per day to do. Three of them are premade decks which I downloaded by "Evita" and they are very good if you're looking for some premade decks. But these I just look at the card and call it good, I never mark them bad, so really it is just me flipping through cards in hopes that something might stick.

The others are more personal. One deck is a list of most of the vocabulary words my teacher gave me last year, they are all mature. I might export it and do some pruning or fixing of this deck later. But right now it pops up 5–10 words each day only. I have a deck for conjunction words: but, and... etc. Very few words in the deck, and it gives me about 20 per day. Then I have my "100% Study" deck. These are all the words and phrases that I've been given or needed to know during my conversations. This has some really common stuff, and so really strange words. Things like immigrate, riot, as well as names of places like Prague, and small towns in Korea.

Added the seventh deck yesterday, which is my new cloze sentences deck, with audio sentences and cloze on 80+ verbs. I'm trying to do "free recall" on these verbs as well as writing them down in an Iversen type of way. It will help me a lot in my conversations if I know the most common verbs. walk, run, talk, think, do, make, read, learn, sleep, try, etc, etc.

I have been trying to watch all Prof. Yoon's Korean Language Class on YouTube. I'm about 1/2 through the first beginners playlist, and working through the textbook at the same time. It is nice since there is a textbook free to download from University of Iowa, where the professor works.

General Stuff
I got another case of Covid starting last week, so I've been under the weather, as they say. Also the reason I didn't post anything last week, just didn't feel up to it. I didn't manage to do any writing for a couple of days either, so I need to get back to that. I'm not beating myself up about it, just thinking I broke my streak.

I was reading EMK's thread about learning from the machines and decided that I really did need more cloze deletion cards. So I wrote this little script to go through a list of Korean sentences looking for words I want to close delete, and output a CSV which I could import into anki. Feel free to use it if you want. This got me about 3000 cloze sentences from about 8000 sentences. I was only looking for 83 verbs, but they are the most common. The longest part was downloading all the anki decks I could find with audio, then putting them into anki, then exporting the notes to csv and putting all the sentences into the same columns, TL, NL, Audio. Then I just used the filters in the spreadsheet to remove blank lines, entries without audio, etc.

I've only done two days worth of cloze cards, but because they are active rather than passive learning, it has made me slow down and pay attention. I think these will definately help.

Code: Select all

#!/usr/bin/python                                                                                                                                                                                                                             
#!/usr/bin/env python       

# Assumes the target for cloze deletion is in row zero.                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
import csv
import getpass
import sys
import re
import traceback
import subprocess
import logging

wordlist = []

def generate_cloze(cloze,tl,nl,snd):
    tab = "\t"
    newline = "\n"
    clz_prepend = "{{c1::"
    clz_postpend = "}}"
    replacement = clz_prepend + cloze + clz_postpend
    new_row_0 = tl.replace(cloze,replacement)
    cloze_line = new_row_0 + tab + nl + tab + snd
    return cloze_line

# main function                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
def main():

    with open("wordlist.csv") as f:
        reader = csv.reader(f, dialect='excel', delimiter='\t')
        for row in reader:
            wordlist.append(row[0])

    with open("consolidated.csv") as f:
        reader = csv.reader(f, dialect='excel', delimiter='\t')
        for row in reader:
            for element in wordlist:
                if element in row[0]:
                    print ( generate_cloze(element, row[0], row[1], row[2]) )

if __name__ == '__main__':
    try:
        exit_code = main()
    except Exception:
        traceback.print_exc()
        logging.error("Exception occurred", exc_info=True)
        exit_code = 1
    sys.exit(exit_code)
13 x
: 0 / 150 Read 150 books in 2024

My YouTube Channel
The Autodidactic Podcast
My Author's Newsletter

I post on this forum with mobile devices, so excuse short msgs and typos.


Return to “Language logs”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Google [Bot] and 2 guests