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

[garyb]

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?

A group could be a good idea! There have been some great recommendations in here and the linked threads but it would be nice to have them in a place where others might also be able to benefit.


Greek: Language Transfer is just becoming too hard to keep up with. I keep mixing up all the pronouns and articles for all the genders, numbers, and cases, and the vocabulary won't stick easily. I need something supplementary with text and more traditional grammar explanations and charts. Of the recommended resources, I've chosen Greekpod101 by a kind of process of elimination: Colloquial doesn't have great reviews (seems to be considered at best an accessory to other studies), I can't find Spoken World for a sensible price, Assimil would probably be more useful once I'm more familiar with the basics than now, and something online just suits me better than a book at the moment (yes, work's been quiet recently). So far so good, with nice if simplistic explanations of pronunciation and grammar. The first few videos feel long-winded since I'm not an absolute beginner (I chose that level as the next one up still sounded way beyond me), but I imagine it'll get up to speed quickly. I'm not too keen on their advertising, it seems all about trying to sell me "secrets" and "shortcuts", but as I always say even good resources have misleading marketing.

Spanish: I've got enough podcast and video recommendations to keep me going for years - huge thanks to Jaleel 10, NoManches, and Spoonary! Now I just need time for them all. I'm getting back into the habit of regularly reading Asco de vida and other online sources and writing a diary, and I've finally finished Breaking out of beginner's Spanish although I think I'll need to go through it several more times over the course of my learning journey before it all sticks.

I've booked a lesson for tomorrow to get back into speaking, but I'm wondering whether to continue since almost every time I book one the price has increased by one dollar. I get on really well with this tutor, and the conversations and corrections are useful for sure, but I'm asking myself how much it's worth. Probably still better value than trying to find an exchange partner and speaking English half the time, or spending less on a community tutor but having to find a new one every month or two, and one lesson every couple of weeks hardly breaks the bank.

[garyb]

Greek: I tried some Greekpod101 but it just put me off and I ended up going back to LT, which has actually gone back to a gentler pace after some quite intense lessons from around 50-60. It's onto the past and conditional now, which is nice. Pod101 was just feeling like something aimed at a typical beginner who thinks they want to learn a language but isn't really going to put in the effort, rather than a serious learner, between the audio that's mostly the hosts talking shite in English and the spam-like emails about the "fast track to fluency". It's alright as background listening, but when I can pay full attention it feels like wasting time. Picking the "absolute beginner" level was probably a mistake and I should go to the next one up, filling in any gaps with Google searches etc. if needed. I've no doubt that there's good stuff in there once you get past the marketing.

This seems to be a common problem with non-FIGS languages, at least based on Greek and my Russian dabbling a few years ago: beginner material tends to be either too slow or too fast and dense, without much in between.

Spanish: The usual, my speaking still isn't great and I'm not sure whether that means I need more speaking or more input. Probably both: might as well stick with what's worked in my other languages. I might try to add in some self-talk in addition to the lessons.

French and Italian: Just some films, TV, and podcasts: Marseille, Sulla mia pelle, Grand bien vous fasse... Marseille is enjoyable but just a bit too over-the-top. Italiano Automatico has been a long-time favourite but he's losing me now by having his girlfriend, a non-native speaker, accompanying him in recent episodes. Time to go back to some RAI and other radio shows.

[sillygoose1]

I've been really wanting to watch Sulla mia pelle but haven't gotten around to it yet. Alessandro Borghi is just great. Have you seen Suburra or Non essere cattivo? I wasn't too crazy about Marseille season 1 because it was, as you say, a bit much. French drama and crime series don't do much for me anymore in general. Even Engrenages is losing a bit of steam.

[garyb]

I've been really wanting to watch Sulla mia pelle but haven't gotten around to it yet. Alessandro Borghi is just great. Have you seen Suburra or Non essere cattivo? I wasn't too crazy about Marseille season 1 because it was, as you say, a bit much. French drama and crime series don't do much for me anymore in general. Even Engrenages is losing a bit of steam.

Yeah I saw both of these at the cinema when they came out here! Hoping to catch Dogman soon too. All those Italian crime dramas since Gomorrah can feel a bit similar, but not in a bad way: they've found a good formula and they're sticking to it. Nice change from the generic comedies that they've been churning out for a decade or two, even if these are more useful for language learning.

I agree, the last series of Engrenages was a bit weak. All the characters were just going off the rails. Maybe French drama has passed its peak for now, but it seems like there's plenty from the last few years to keep me busy.

[garyb]

I saw my first Greek film yesterday, Kynodontas (Dogtooth). It had been on my list since I saw the director's English-language The killing of a sacred deer last year, and learning Greek gave me the excuse to finally watch it. Needless to say I didn't understand much and subtitles were essential (I used Italian ones to kill two birds with one stone), but I did hear a lot of the words and phrases that I do know from what I've studied so far. It was pretty cool, and no doubt also useful, to hear them actually being used! Proof that native material can be useful even at beginner level; obviously it's not an efficient use of time compared to courses, but it's nice to reinforce even the absolute basics and it just makes the language seem a bit more real. Not to mention showing me that what I'm learning represents how Greeks really speak, since there's always that lingering doubt about courses being too simplistic or formal and academic. The Greek in the film mostly seemed, to my extremely untrained ear at least, quite clear and standard. It'll be interesting to revisit it when/if I reach the B levels.

I finished the absolute beginner series in Pod101, after which it didn't give me any clear direction, which is another point against that site. It's full of content, but it's hard to know where to start; the only structure it provides is "pathways", short series of lessons, but many of these overlap and there's no real order to them. Most seem oriented around phrases rather than grammar points. My opinion is that it's better to tell beginners what to learn rather than let them choose, since what they think they need to learn doesn't necessarily match what they actually need. I chose a "conversational" pathway that looks similar to Assimil, introducing grammar and vocabulary through short dialogues with explanations and cultural info, so will see how I get on with that. I could still do with something more grammar-focused to help me remember everything in Language Transfer, but declension tables etc. should be easy to find online.

Greek is making me rethink my ideas about the beginner level in general and the advice I sometimes give to beginners on here. I've had the luxury of a fairly quick and painless beginner stage in all my serious languages: for French it was just a case of remembering and filling in gaps from my high-school studies and making my pronunciation comprehensible, and I had had so much exposure to Italian and Spanish that they were hardly foreign and the Romance similarity gave me a huge head-start.

I've sometimes said that the beginner stage is "the quick and easy part", "it doesn't get hard until after you learn the basics", and "just work through a course or two, don't over-complicate it"; all well-intentioned to avoid the overthinking trap and based on the truth that, relatively speaking, learning the basics takes far less time and effort than moving from there into more advanced territory, but a little dismissive towards the struggles of a true beginner and the need to find something that works for the particular person and gives enough sense of progress to keep up motivation. Even if it's the shortest stage, it's surely the most intellectually challenging and frustrating one: so much new information to take in, so much repetition needed just to remember the very basics, and "real-life" language feels so out-of-reach. Even in Romance and Germanic languages there's a massive initial hurdle to overcome for an English speaker before being able use them in any meaningful capacity. I have a real respect for those who've learned and can remember the basics in a dozen languages, even if it's not what I'd choose to do. Some find this initial stage exciting, like discovering a new world, but to be honest I dislike it and just want to get it over with.

I'm making a bit more time for Italian too, since my learning in that had become very passive (in the proper sense of the word, not the common misuse here to refer to receptive skills): I was listening and speaking plenty but not doing much to keep advancing. Most L2 English speakers I know here listen and speak far more than I ever will in any language and they make little progress aside from improving spoken fluency (but very much not accuracy), so why should I be any different? I've added in some more intensive listening and reading with online videos and articles like I've been doing for Spanish to help get things moving again. French, on the other hand, I'm quite happy to just keep in maintenance for now. I've got plenty on my plate as it is!

EDIT: forgot to mention (in case I hand't written enough already ), yesterday I discovered that there's a Greek woman working in my office building. We had chatted briefly a few times but I hadn't picked up on where she was from, then I heard her speak on the phone and thought the language sounded familiar! Could come in useful.

[garyb]

More of the same for now! I finally checked out a few of the Spanish podcast and Youtube recommendations. Nadie sabe nada has been a bit surprising after the way people talked about it: it's actually pretty easy to understand what they're saying, and the challenge is more in the cultural references. Lo que tú digas seems great - interviews with people who've led interesting lives - and again not challenging. El Guapodcast is too Mexican for me, but since it's informal yet quite easy to follow it will be a good choice for when I do decide to get more used to that variety.

I've still got a few others to check out. I've still not found the "holy grail" of a podcast that reflects real-life conversations, but I believe I was barking up the wrong tree in the first place by looking for it: radio, as a rule, is clear and easy to understand, even if not scripted, so its role in language learning is extensive listening to comprehensible language on diverse subjects and in diverse registers. These recommendations are especially great for that last point as they're more informal than the usual news/debate stuff. Video (TV, films, Youtube, etc.), on the other hand, is the place to go for more conversational speech. Different tools for different jobs.

Watched a couple of films on Netflix: Los heroes del mal (high-school story with a dark twist) and El club de los buenos infieles, a silly but fun mockumentary-style comedy. The Spanish film festival here is starting soon, so I'll make some time for that. As I've said before, for me the full immersion of cinema compensates for any disadvantage of forced English subtitles.

The Assimil-like "conversational" pathway on GreekPod101 suits my style so it's a keeper. I've started working through it using Luca's double-translation method, since that worked great for the Italian and Spanish Assimils. The translation-to-English step definitely forces me to pay far more attention to the language than just reading and listening do, and the translation back to Greek should do even more and also help with the writing system. I'll just need to figure out how to type in Greek, which will be a challenge in itself. If all goes well I might finish it in time for Greece, which is in exactly a month now. I'll also confess that, while I'm usually against SRS use at beginner level, I'm rather tempted to put some of the dialogue phrases into Anki to help make the words stick. Different rules for more difficult languages, or do I think I'm experienced enough to be able to use it sensibly now, or just typical beginner impatience?

I've made good progress with Language Transfer too in the last week: I'm on lesson 95 or so. I know for sure that even once I've finished the course I won't know half of the material in it well enough to use, but it's a foundation and will all become more familiar over time. My experience was similar with MT in my other languages.

[DaveAgain]

The Assimil-like "conversational" pathway on GreekPod101 suits my style so it's a keeper. I've started working through it using Luca's double-translation method, since that worked great for the Italian and Spanish Assimils. The translation-to-English step definitely forces me to pay far more attention to the language than just reading and listening do, and the translation back to Greek should do even more and also help with the writing system.

I'm going through Duolingo's german course at the moment. It occurs to me that their course includes double-translation, although of phrases rather than complete dialogues.

They also use transcription, and some multiple choice exercises.

[garyb]

I'm going through Duolingo's german course at the moment. It occurs to me that their course includes double-translation, although of phrases rather than complete dialogues.

They also use transcription, and some multiple choice exercises.

Interesting - I never even considered using Duo for Greek as I've never really seen it as a "serious" resource, but it could be useful for a bit of extra practice and every little helps! Anything with questions or exercises is useful at this stage. The main thing that's put me off Duo in the past is the way it penalised the user if they didn't use it every day, but I believe they changed that part a while ago.

[garyb]

Greek: I'm nearing the end of Language Transfer! But I'll admit that some of the recent lessons were too hard to follow: I didn't really take them in and listened to them a bit passively rather than pausing to think about each answer as one should. It feels like they've tried to cram in every verb form and grammar point in order to justify the "Complete" label. It's good just to know that these things exist though, and as I said it's a base to expand on as my studies continue so I'm not too worried about remembering it all.

The Pod101 work is continuing too, but again it's getting quite difficult quite quickly (which Expugnator did warn us about!). There's some idiomatic stuff that's not really explained and the grammar only makes sense thanks to LT; I imagine an "absolute beginner" (quoted from the title of the series) would be pretty confused about why noun endings and articles keep changing. I'm still considering just getting Assimil to have the real deal, although I suppose that's always going to be an issue with thit type of course: you can have realistic dialogues or you can introduce and explain grammar gradually, choose one.

Spanish: I was up for doing lessons the last two weeks but my tutor's just not been available at times that suit me. Hopefully that's been an exception rather than a real change, but it just shows that even if you're willing to pay for conversation practice, even including the premium for a professional rather than community tutor, you can't rely on it. I'm off work next week so can surely fit in a lesson, but for the longer term I might have to rearrange my schedule a bit or find another way to practice.

I've been to a couple of screenings for the film festival but they were disappointing: a series of short films that were mostly contrived feel-good cheese with a large dash of political propaganda, then Verónica, a horror movie that was mostly too silly and clichéd to be scary. It did have some good comedy moments, so I was thinking that they should've just gone all the way and made a parody rather than attempting a serious horror. After those I'm not too motivated to see others.

Spoke some Italian and French at the weekend. They're still alive and... well would be an exaggeration, but I'm conversing fine. I've been wanting to catch up on Italian cinema from the last few years so I've looked up a few titles. One of them was Ammore e malavita, a musical comedy mafia story with songs in Neapolitan... Now I really have seen everything!

[garyb]

I was off work last week and it was the usual story: more free time but less routine so it's questionable whether I got any more done than usual.

Greek: Finished Language Transfer just over a week ago, and as expected I've already forgotten half of it, even some of the stuff that was covered quite extensively like the past tense . I'll maybe take Mihalis's advice and go over it again at a later point, or maybe other materials will cover the same things sufficiently. My feeling about LT is that it's perhaps just too ambitious, trying to cover a lot of grammar like I said in my last post; for a beginner it's all just too much to remember and perhaps more balance (less grammar, more useful phrases and vocab) would be better at this stage. It might have been better split into "basic" and "advanced" courses, like Michel Thomas, rather than as one big "complete" one.

My Greekpod101 30-day trial expired a couple of days ago, and I was debating whether to pay for a few months' subscription or spend the cash on Assimil instead. Pod won in the end: despite its faults, the web-based format is just far more convenient for me than either a paper book or an app, and I'd like to finish what I've already started rather than jumping onto something else. Assimil might be better-designed overall (or might it not be - I still can't find much feedback on the latest edition) but at the end of the day there are many ways to skin the cat so the important thing is to choose one that fits well into my routine. Any half-decent method just needs to teach enough basics to move onto the next step, and the gaps that will be filled in later anyway.

Greek is still an interesting opportunity to either practise what I preach or to entirely reconsider what I preach. I've started using Anki in conjunction with the "Luca method" with the dialogues: any words I don't recognise in the L2-to-L1 phase go into recognition cards, and any I don't remember (and actually seem useful) in the L1-to-L2 phase go into cloze cards. Yes, it's basic vocab that I usually think is common enough not to need SRS, but in a more opaque language it just seems like there's no such thing as enough repetition and it's definitely helping my retention. It's also extra practice with the script, since a big complication is all the same sounds that can be written in different ways (ο/ω, ι/υ/η/οι/ει, etc.), although for the upcoming trip writing is far less of a priority than reading, listening, or speaking.

I also took DaveAgain's advice and started using DuoLingo, again for a bit more practice/repetition and exposure to more varied vocabulary. It's been a few years since I last used Duo; back then it was far more pleasant to use on a computer than a phone, but these days it's the opposite so it's a handy way to practise anywhere. They've also got rid of the behaviour where skills declined if you didn't practise them, which was the main deal-breaker in the past. It's still far from a perfect resource and could do without all the gamification clutter and intrusive adverts, but decent for what it is, an accessory to other study.

Watched another Greek film, Suntan. Again useful to hear some of what I'm learning in different and more natural contexts, but overall my level's still way too low to get much bang-for-buck from native material. The language was decidedly less clear and more colloquial than in Dogtooth. I might look for learner-oriented videos or podcasts once my level's a bit higher, but it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff in these.

Everything else

Spoke some more French. I'm realising that my French is still far from where it was at its peak a few years ago: I'm making some mistakes and forgetting some words that I'd have felt rather ashamed about back then. As I say I'm still conversing well enough and understanding near-perfectly, but I'm beginning to doubt whether I can still reasonably call it "advanced". The result of lack of practice and being pushed aside by other Romance languages. Every new language you add is always going to compromise your existing ones, not just in terms of time but also in mental capacity, at least in my experience.

I'm finally starting to seriously consider going back to the Monday evening language meetups, despite my mixed experiences in the past. It would solve my Spanish problem as finding native speakers there is practically guaranteed, and any opportunities to speak the others would be a bonus. I also have a little more free time in evenings thanks to having to give up basically all forms of exercise due to worsening injury and a long NHS waiting list, and getting out the house is always good. It's five minutes away, and I like to think that socially I have a thicker skin than I did a few years ago so I can deal with the less pleasant people better. Maybe not today as I'm tired after the return to work and am losing my voice, but sometime soon.