Languages and Life: Gary's log (Italian, Spanish, German, Japanese, bits of French)

[garyb]

Hi Gary, have you considered Colloquial Greek? If you are mainly after a text-based course then I think it can be a good alternative to Colloquial. Less expensive, and the audio files are all available free for download on Routledge's website.

I've not but I'll look into it, thanks! I've heard the name Colloquial but never looked into their offerings.

I see that Greek is a heritage language for you and that you might have a trip coming up. Both excellent motivations! I'm in a similar situation with German, and not coincidentally, I'm finding myself very motivated and moving right along. Whereas I'm interested in Greek but don't have a strong personal connection to it, and that's probably why I'm just dabbling for the moment.

Indeed, I respect those who can find the motivation to learn a language they have no use for or connection with, but I can't do it!

I wonder how many lessons Mihalis records in a single sit-down with a student. It could be that in some cases they're remembering something from five or ten minutes earlier rather than the previous day.

Quite possibly! Although if I try to do more than three or four lessons in one sitting, my brain reaches capacity and I still keep forgetting everything... it might be different they're in a room being recorded with their full attention on the lesson though.

Out of curiosity, which "vintage" of Assimil Italian did you do?

"Le nouvel italien sans peine", published 1983. I thought it was great: not too easy or too hard (given that I knew French and had already done MT Italian), good balance between touristy dialogues and other subjects, and recent enough that the language felt modern and everyday.

Your location says Scotland - so you're Scottish? That's cool! Scottish accents are bomb! I find them very interesting. I understand your point, though. Not many English learners study the accent from your country. They pick English or American. (And there seems to be a divide on what's right to choose, just like there is with what we consider foreign.) Are you proud of your accent? I can't tell. If you're not, you should be

I'd say I'm proud of it and I wouldn't want to lose it completely, but in practical terms it can be a hindrance. I said in a recent thread that I'd love to have an accent that's clearer and easier to understand but still obviously Scottish, like the people you hear on the radio and TV here, but I grew up in a working-class area in the centre of the country where the accent is a strange mix between those of different areas - a bit of Glasgow, a bit of East Coast, a bit of North. I can't lose it even if I try, even if I did manage to tone it down a little when I went to university and most of my fellow students were from England or abroad, and then made a lot of international friends in more recent years.

It's not a bad accent for learning foreign languages though! As long as I pay a little attention to rhythm and intonation, I don't usually sound like an obvious English-speaker and people are more likely to think I'm German or something. We often use pure vowels where standard English uses diphthongs, so we avoid butchering Romance language vowels in the typical way.

Is the e-method version you are referring to the app version? If so, I own the Spanish course and would be happy to give you more information over it.

I think so! It's called e-méthode on Assimil's site but it just looks like an app version of their courses. Sure, let me know!

[aravinda]

Hi, Gary, the first 7 lessons of Assimil e-méthode (or rather the app for iOS and Android) are available for free. I think all the features of the full version are not available in the free lessons but you can still see if the app suits you or not. As far as I know, you can’t download the audio tracks from the app.

[jonm]

"Le nouvel italien sans peine", published 1983. I thought it was great: not too easy or too hard (given that I knew French and had already done MT Italian), good balance between touristy dialogues and other subjects, and recent enough that the language felt modern and everyday.

Ah, good, I'm just starting that same one, so I'm happy to hear you liked it.

[Expugnator]

Yes, I'm an avid reader of your log and I've always hoped you'd enjoy Modern Greek beyond dabbling.

First, a link to an old post.

Second, if you want a standard textbook style, I'd definitely go for Living Language/Spoken World Greek. I find their dialogues authentic and long, plus they have pronunciation and translation almost the Assimil way.

I've done the Assimil editions from pre-reform and from 1996. Not sure there is a third one. I like the newer one much better and they actually coincide for over 50%. The newer edition is definitely not an entirely new work.

I've also enjoyed the Kypros course but I'm not sure it would fit your style . It has longer lessons, too much English and vocabulary cramming. On the other hand, it teaches more from the actual language usage and vocabulary than just syntax like LT does.

Greekpod101 was my source for authentic and up-to-date language. I have to get back to it; I paused when I dropped Greek textbooks for listening-reading only and when the learning curve got too steep.

I've used other resources more to complement the ones mentioned above.

[jonm]

I've done the Assimil editions from pre-reform and from 1996. Not sure there is a third one. I like the newer one much better and they actually coincide for over 50%. The newer edition is definitely not an entirely new work.

Hi Expugnator, that's very good to know. I saw on your log that you had done two Assimil Greek courses, but I didn't know which two. So it would seem that there are three editions in all, with the first two sharing some content. In addition to those two, there's this edition, so far only available in French, by Jean-Pierre Guglielmi and copyright 2017. That's the one I've got. I can't give a review, as I haven't done it yet, but I can say that like some other recent Assimil courses, it starts out with very short, simple dialogues rather than diving right in as the older courses did. There's some sample audio on the page I linked to.

[garyb]

Thanks so much for all the Greek recommendations! Seems like I'm spoilt for choice even for a non-FIGS language. Some interesting ideas in the "path" thread. I can understand your preference for materials with text as well as audio as I feel that would help me retain better too. LT does have transcripts available; following the course with a transcript would probably defeat its purpose, but it could be worth reading after finishing each lesson for reinforcement.

I did go through a couple of Kypros lessons last week and found them useful for revising some basic vocab and picking up a few more everyday nouns, so I reckon I'll continue with it for now. I don't mind lessons with English in this case. If I were learning another Romance language I'd avoid a course of this style and opt for something more immersive, but Greek is distant and complicated enough to merit English explanations.

These two should be enough to keep me going for the time being, and I'll look more into Colloquial and Assimil for the next step. Where do you think GreekPod101 would fit into this plan? Leave it until after the courses, or would the basic podcasts complement them? For now I prefer to focus on one or two resources at a time; I'm not the "5 courses in parallel" type.


Spanish thoughts

The weekend away was the same disappointing story as the other "possible opportunity to speak Spanish" stories I've posted here: a few Spanish speakers but plenty non-speakers, English level too high for there to be any point in using my weaker Spanish. There was one South American guy with flawless English, and two Spaniards who spoke like most who've spent a few years in the UK: very incorrectly but very fluently and with enough vocab to handle most situations. I still feel that, while my Spanish is slowly improving, it's just not up to the standard to use in the situations where I encounter speakers. I do appreciate however that trying to use a language other than English in an English-speaking country is always going to be swimming against the current, regardless of the levels involved; just because I know some Spanish doesn't mean I'm entitled to having people speak it with me, rather if they do it's a big favour and kindness on their part.

I'm feeling motivated to work on this. As always, time is at a premium, but I'm thinking about prioritising my efforts in the time I do have towards conversational ability rather than the more general and nebulous "working on my Spanish".

First up is listening comprehension, because if I can't understand then there's no point in even bothering with speaking. I still struggle with some accents: one speaker was Catalan and very comprehensible but the other was Galician and spoke at a million miles per hour with various dropped and mashed-together sounds. I'd like to have a decent understanding of most accents from Spain. Latin America isn't a worry for now: let's stay realistic about how much I can focus on! I encounter far fewer Latin Americans and those I do speak English so well that using Spanish would seem an insult.

Next obstacle is vocabulary. If I don't understand or don't know how I say something, it's usually because I don't know the word I need. I've always seen vocab as something that mostly takes care of itself and looked upon discussions about word numbers and study methods with bemusement, but maybe there's something to them and I'd do well to at least put some more of the unknown words I come across into Anki. I'm quite good at it when reading, but I don't usually bother for films and TV even though that's where the juiciest stuff comes up.

I believe the best strategy for both of these is better choice of input. Stop wasting time with crime, fantasy, historic fiction, etc. and focus on stuff with lots of everyday language. Even if it means crappy Netflix comedies I just watched one, Ahora o nunca, which was completely silly but the dialogue was very like how Spanish people really speak. Comedy/drama films really helped my Italian at the intermediate level, especially once I found titles that were "everyday" enough to be useful but enjoyable enough to watch several times (Gabriele Muccino's films, etc.). Hopefully I'll find stuff like that in Spanish even if it means digging through some rubbish. And of course I can look for the real thing too in non-scripted material.

Aquí no hay quien viva will be my main series from now on, rather than an occasional change when I want something lighter. I'll finally check out the YouTube comedy stuff that Jaleel recommended to me a while ago and I still haven't got around to. The aforementioned Netflix comedies are suited to more intensive work as they almost always have Spanish subs. I'll find some more conversational and challenging podcasts (another thing I keep meaning to do and I'm sure I've mentioned here before), although the current easy ones (Futuro Abierto etc.) are probably worth keeping for the more intellectual side of everyday conversations (everyday doesn't just mean small-talk!). On the reading side: more online articles, less fiction, and I might reconsider my current books.

The other obstacles are simply confidence and practice, so I plan to keep up the "lessons", which these days are just an hour of conversation plus corrections.

[Expugnator]

Greekpod101 is more up-to-date and the dialogues are shorter, so the vocabulary you get introduced to at each lesson is of the prioritary type. You don't get vocablists with all household items as in some Kypros' lessons but you do get important vocabulary, while with LT it's mainly work on syntax and morphology.

I didn't use LT and Kypros simultaneously, because I find them rather similar, being audio courses. I would alternate one of them and a more visual course. Greekpod101 has sample sentences and explicit grammar explanations. It's also shorter when you just listen to the dialogue and read the pdf instead, and that's what I do now for other languages. If you want to stick to both LT and Kypros at the moment you don't need Greekpod101 right now, then; you can use it as a warm-up for native materials, going hastily through the earlier levels and focusing on the intermediate ones (it gets hard quickly at the intermediate level and the dialogues are rather long, longer than Assimil). For the moment, though, I'd still recommend some visual, grammar-oriented resource so you can get used to morphology. It's all well-explained on LT but it takes rather long; having an overview on your own would help at this stage. That's where Spoken World Greek would help (or Colloquial and TY, for that matter, though I haven't used them).

Throughout the Greek learning path, I've felt that it's all a matter of finding the good proportion of explicit grammar. Romance languages help way more than I could have thought in the first place; verbal morphology is a bit less intuitive, and cases have the issue of being similar with some coincidental forms, but at least there's not much to learn. I don't think you need to focus so hard on explicit grammar as long as you learn to identify and keep an eye for the changes, and this LT teaches pretty well, but you do need exposure and maybe even guided practice for it to stick. You shouldn't allow yourself to feel overwhelmed with grammar but you should also be sure that it's sticking proportionally to the other skills.

[Jaleel10]

I believe the best strategy for both of these is better choice of input. Stop wasting time with crime, fantasy, historic fiction, etc. and focus on stuff with lots of everyday language. Even if it means crappy Netflix comedies I just watched one, Ahora o nunca, which was completely silly but the dialogue was very like how Spanish people really speak. Comedy/drama films really helped my Italian at the intermediate level, especially once I found titles that were "everyday" enough to be useful but enjoyable enough to watch several times (Gabriele Muccino's films, etc.). Hopefully I'll find stuff like that in Spanish even if it means digging through some rubbish. And of course I can look for the real thing too in non-scripted material.

I am thinking of doing the same so if you find any movies you find helpful, shoot some recommendations my way as well. I know that Ahora o nunca has the actor Dani Rovira in it. You should check out some of his standup and interviews on Youtube. He has your peak Málaga accent. You might enjoy this video I literally had to watch it 4 times, had my friends explain certain parts and watch it 4 times again for it to be comprehensible This should help with your Galician accent issue because the Andalusian accents are probably the toughest Spanish accents from Spain.

If you are looking for unscripted stuff the video podcast Nadie sabe nada might be right up your ally. It's a weebit outside of my level of comprehensible input but it's ultimately my goal for listening comprehension - some nice Catalan accents too

I'll finally check out the YouTube comedy stuff that Jaleel recommended to me a while ago and I still haven't got around to.

Espero que las disfrutes

Always a pleasure reading your log. Good luck with your studies!

[garyb]

Greekpod101 is more up-to-date and the dialogues are shorter, so the vocabulary you get introduced to at each lesson is of the prioritary type. You don't get vocablists with all household items as in some Kypros' lessons but you do get important vocabulary, while with LT it's mainly work on syntax and morphology.

I didn't use LT and Kypros simultaneously, because I find them rather similar, being audio courses. I would alternate one of them and a more visual course. Greekpod101 has sample sentences and explicit grammar explanations. It's also shorter when you just listen to the dialogue and read the pdf instead, and that's what I do now for other languages. If you want to stick to both LT and Kypros at the moment you don't need Greekpod101 right now, then; you can use it as a warm-up for native materials, going hastily through the earlier levels and focusing on the intermediate ones (it gets hard quickly at the intermediate level and the dialogues are rather long, longer than Assimil). For the moment, though, I'd still recommend some visual, grammar-oriented resource so you can get used to morphology. It's all well-explained on LT but it takes rather long; having an overview on your own would help at this stage. That's where Spoken World Greek would help (or Colloquial and TY, for that matter, though I haven't used them).

Throughout the Greek learning path, I've felt that it's all a matter of finding the good proportion of explicit grammar. Romance languages help way more than I could have thought in the first place; verbal morphology is a bit less intuitive, and cases have the issue of being similar with some coincidental forms, but at least there's not much to learn. I don't think you need to focus so hard on explicit grammar as long as you learn to identify and keep an eye for the changes, and this LT teaches pretty well, but you do need exposure and maybe even guided practice for it to stick. You shouldn't allow yourself to feel overwhelmed with grammar but you should also be sure that it's sticking proportionally to the other skills.

Thanks again, great to hear the thoughts of somebody who's done what I'm trying to do! It sounds like GreekPod101 and the more visual courses would suit me better right now than Kypros. I was mainly using Kypros because it included written notes (and for convenience, since it's free and online), but I appreciate that it's primarily an audio course so not the best tool for the job.

Greek sure does have more grammatical complexities compared to other languages I've learnt (note that in my assessment of my Spanish weaknesses I didn't even mention grammar; I'm sure mine's far from perfect, but it's the least of my obstacles right now!) and I know I'll have to find that balance. I don't want to fall into the typical beginner trap of feeling overwhelmed by it all and letting that discourage me from the language in general (or marvelling over how wonderful and exotic all these features are - another side of the same coin), but too much of an attitude of "grammar will take care of itself over time, no need to worry" isn't productive either.

I am thinking of doing the same so if you find any movies you find helpful, shoot some recommendations my way as well. I know that Ahora o nunca has the actor Dani Rovira in it. You should check out some of his standup and interviews on Youtube. He has your peak Málaga accent. You might enjoy this video I literally had to watch it 4 times, had my friends explain certain parts and watch it 4 times again for it to be comprehensible This should help with your Galician accent issue because the Andalusian accents are probably the toughest Spanish accents from Spain.

If you are looking for unscripted stuff the video podcast Nadie sabe nada might be right up your ally. It's a weebit outside of my level of comprehensible input but it's ultimately my goal for listening comprehension - some nice Catalan accents too

Great stuff as always, your Spanish recommendations are always exactly what I'm after! I already knew Rovira from Ocho apellidos vascos (definitely a candidate for a re-watch sometime!) but haven't looked up his other stuff. Working on the toughest accent in order to understand them all seems to be a popular method, at least amongst people who've chosen me as a language exchange partner I actually didn't find the accents too bad when I was in Andalusia, although they got tough around Seville. To be honest I dislike the Galician accent and maybe that's partly why I struggle but the people I've met from there are great and I'd love to visit. They say the food there the best in the country, at least if you like fish and meat.

EDIT: I've started a Google Doc to list all these native material recommendations, because I kept losing track of them and having to dig them out again in threads on here, which isn't ideal when I just want something to fill a spare ten minutes. Should be another efficiency improvement to my learning.

[Spoonary]

I'm happy to see that you're learning Greek Gary! You're learning it, Clare is learning it, I'm supposed to be learning it and am now very motivated to get back to learning it. Maybe we need a Greek study group where we can put all of our resources in one place?

Also, you definitely need to go to Galicia!