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

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

Postby DaveAgain » Mon Jun 08, 2020 8:20 pm

garyb wrote:I was just reading Deinonysus's log which mentioned Destinos, and that reminded me that a similar series for German exists: Fokus Deutsch. I might try that instead of or in addition to Dark for now.
One of the DW.com courses has a series vision too. 'Jojo'

https://www.dw.com/de/deutsch-lernen/telenovela/s-13121

and Nicos Weg (another DW course) can be watched as a continuous film.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... Z-Alh1WHyM
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Re: Languages and Life: Gary's log (Italian, Spanish, bits of French)

Postby garyb » Tue Jun 09, 2020 11:54 am

DaveAgain wrote:
garyb wrote:I was just reading Deinonysus's log which mentioned Destinos, and that reminded me that a similar series for German exists: Fokus Deutsch. I might try that instead of or in addition to Dark for now.
One of the DW.com courses has a series vision too. 'Jojo'

https://www.dw.com/de/deutsch-lernen/telenovela/s-13121

and Nicos Weg (another DW course) can be watched as a continuous film.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... Z-Alh1WHyM


Thanks, I'll check them out sometime for sure! I've not looked into the DW courses yet but I've always heard good things. German learners are spoilt for choice.

I watched a few episodes of Fokus Deutch yesterday and so far I have to say that despite being for learners it's actually more difficult than Dark! Less slang of course, but more dialogue on a much wider variety of subjects. It's probably a good thing that it doesn't make too many concessions for beginners, but it's maybe better left for once I know more basics. The A1 part of Nicos Weg might be more appropriate at my level...
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Re: Languages and Life: Gary's log (Italian, Spanish, bits of French)

Postby garyb » Mon Jun 15, 2020 9:22 am

Still keeping up the German streak and onto Assimil lesson 28 now.

Back to my point about being a proper beginner again, I had another similar thought: despite being quite an experienced language learner by now, I've never truly taught myself a language from scratch before so I do feel a bit like I'm in uncharted territory and figuring out what works for me. I did years of French at high school, where I learnt the basics the old-fashioned way: lots of written exercises. I didn't get far beyond that, but when I picked it up again as an adult and worked through some courses I was really just revising and filling in gaps. Then with Italian and Spanish I breezed through the beginner stage because of all the similarities. And then there was Greek, but that didn't last long.

At this stage there are many ways to skin the cat and consistency is more important than exactly which resources you use in which order. You'll cover the same ground eventually in any case. With some languages you have to just make do with whatever you can find and slog through it (Greek was like that to an extent, and I think of Iguanamon with his minority languages), while German seems to be the opposite: so far it appears to have the best quality and variety of resources of any language I've studied, for beginners and beyond. That's obviously great, but could also lead to traps like analysis paralysis or spreading oneself too thin so again one just has to choose a few things and stick to them.

There's a bit of a battle between two parts of me: my laid-back side says to just keep doing what I'm doing and things will naturally fall into place, while my perfectionist side wants to cover everything in a bit more detail and understand the logic sooner rather than later. It seems like there are a million prepositions and the logic of when to use which is mostly unclear, and some things like numbers and case endings are going to benefit from more specific practice than "high-level" resources like Assimil and Coffee Break provide. Overall I'm leaning towards the laid-back side for now; I definitely think I'll add in some lower-level study sooner or later, but it'll make more sense once I've had more exposure and I don't want to bite off more than I can chew. I'm keeping up with everything now but there needs to be a bit of margin for when life gets busy or priorities change.

I've watched the first film of Nicos Weg. I could just about follow it with dual subtitles and a bit of strategic pausing and rewinding. I took a look at the exercises based on sections of the video on the DW site and they seem pretty good - could be ideal for some more focused practice of specific themes and points - although they might be overkill with the other work I'm doing. For now I'll just keep doing what I'm doing and see if I feel the need to go over certain points later. I've also been following some of the logs of other German learners on here, particularly Lingua who seems to be a bit ahead of me on the same path, to see what resources they're using and their thoughts on them.

I actually think DuoLingo could be a useful addition at this point, for a bit more specific practice of the things I'm hearing and learning, but I stopped using it as a matter of principle and want to stick to that!

It's early days but I'm loving German so far. It's got the right balance of being an enjoyable challenge where progress is noticeable enough to give me satisfaction and keep up the motivation, and I've got enough interest in German-speaking culture and countries to enjoy discovering that aspect.
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Re: Languages and Life: Gary's log (Italian, Spanish, bits of French, and now German!)

Postby garyb » Mon Jun 22, 2020 9:35 am

I've had a slight dip in motivation since the excitement last week. I suppose the initial honeymoon period is over and it's just back to the reality of beginner level: yes, the zero-to-basics stage is much shorter than the basics-to-good stage, but it's also less fun and more arduous since you can't understand or produce very much and even if the basic language comes up everywhere it still feels like it takes an age to stick. I'll still maintain (and remind myself) that the answer to basically every beginner question is just "keep studying", but it's another reminder to empathise more with people in that position. At some point I'd like to hit up the German person from that party for a little practice but it still feels like it'll be several months before I feel anywhere near ready to attempt a conversation.

I'm using the 1987 edition of Assimil, which covers a lot of good language and has a certain dated charm with currencies in DM, references to the Bundesrepublik, questionable uses of "fräulein", and the odd suggestive lesson title about little sausages, but the pace is extremely quick and it throws a lot of new vocabulary and grammar at the learner in each increasingly-long lesson. Some more hardcore language learners prefer the Assimils from that period and call the more recent editions "dumbed down", and as a not-real-beginner I loved the Italian course from back then, but for a genuinely new language it is a bit much. I'm still keeping up with it (only missed one day last week!) but am not worrying too much about fully understanding and learning every point and am seeing it more as a quick introduction to things that I'll then pick up and study properly over time.

I'm working through it using the same interpretation of Luca's method that I used for Spanish and Italian (translate L2 to L1 after a week, L1 to L2 after two weeks, and make Anki cards for anything that I struggled with in the L1 to L2 part and seems worth learning) but I can see that becoming unsustainable and it might make more sense to just do the traditional passive wave now and active wave later, using another resource like the Nicos Weg lessons for more active study in the meantime.

I've watched six episodes of Dark and I'm getting into it. Despite it being a little hard to take seriously with the cheesy presentation using every "supernatural" cliché in the book (and this is coming from someone who's not even particularly into the genre or TV in general), it does have quite a complicated and clever plot. I might come back for a second watch at a later point when my comprehension is better to get more benefit and understand the story better. It does put me off Germany a little since apparently it rains constantly there!

In Italian I've finished Il processo (another quite clever plot) and started Luna nera, and just finished a re-read of Ammaniti's Il momento è delicato of which I had barely remembered a lot of the stories. I should be meeting up with an Italian friend and conversing sometime this week. In Spanish I'm managing about ten minutes of Elite per week but my work is now giving out free Headspace subscriptions and I've been using that in Spanish.
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Re: Languages and Life: Gary's log (Italian, Spanish, bits of French, and now German!)

Postby PeterMollenburg » Mon Jun 22, 2020 10:05 am

garyb wrote:I've had a slight dip in motivation since the excitement last week. I suppose the initial honeymoon period is over and it's just back to the reality of beginner level: yes, the zero-to-basics stage is much shorter than the basics-to-good stage, but it's also less fun and more arduous since you can't understand or produce very much and even if the basic language comes up everywhere it still feels like it takes an age to stick. I'll still maintain (and remind myself) that the answer to basically every beginner question is just "keep studying", but it's another reminder to empathise more with people in that position. At some point I'd like to hit up the German person from that party for a little practice but it still feels like it'll be several months before I feel anywhere near ready to attempt a conversation.

I'm using the 1987 edition of Assimil, which covers a lot of good language and has a certain dated charm with currencies in DM, references to the Bundesrepublik, questionable uses of "fräulein", and the odd suggestive lesson title about little sausages, but the pace is extremely quick and it throws a lot of new vocabulary and grammar at the learner in each increasingly-long lesson. Some more hardcore language learners prefer the Assimils from that period and call the more recent editions "dumbed down", and as a not-real-beginner I loved the Italian course from back then, but for a genuinely new language it is a bit much. I'm still keeping up with it (only missed one day last week!) but am not worrying too much about fully understanding and learning every point and am seeing it more as a quick introduction to things that I'll then pick up and study properly over time.

I'm working through it using the same interpretation of Luca's method that I used for Spanish and Italian (translate L2 to L1 after a week, L1 to L2 after two weeks, and make Anki cards for anything that I struggled with in the L1 to L2 part and seems worth learning) but I can see that becoming unsustainable and it might make more sense to just do the traditional passive wave now and active wave later, using another resource like the Nicos Weg lessons for more active study in the meantime.

I've watched six episodes of Dark and I'm getting into it. Despite it being a little hard to take seriously with the cheesy presentation using every "supernatural" cliché in the book (and this is coming from someone who's not even particularly into the genre or TV in general), it does have quite a complicated and clever plot. I might come back for a second watch at a later point when my comprehension is better to get more benefit and understand the story better. It does put me off Germany a little since apparently it rains constantly there!

In Italian I've finished Il processo (another quite clever plot) and started Luna nera, and just finished a re-read of Ammaniti's Il momento è delicato of which I had barely remembered a lot of the stories. I should be meeting up with an Italian friend and conversing sometime this week. In Spanish I'm managing about ten minutes of Elite per week but my work is now giving out free Headspace subscriptions and I've been using that in Spanish.


Interesting takes on Assimil, and great progress with German. Your sentiments of beginning a language (the hard slog, keep pushing, can't say much) all remind me of my recent experience with Norwegian. It's somewhat relieving to read another experienced language learner having the same sentiments.

Dark - I loved it, as did my wife. I'd rate it as the most riveting series I have watched on Netflix (I couldn't wait for the next episode!). Obviously I contain a lot of cheese myself as I really didn't notice the clichés... Here's hoping you bring some credibility back to me after you get through it and hold the series in as high regard as myself.


garyb wrote:I watched a few episodes of Fokus Deutch yesterday and so far I have to say that despite being for learners it's actually more difficult than Dark! Less slang of course, but more dialogue on a much wider variety of subjects. It's probably a good thing that it doesn't make too many concessions for beginners, but it's maybe better left for once I know more basics. The A1 part of Nicos Weg might be more appropriate at my level...


I own the Fokus Deutsch course and I am a huge fan of both French in Action and in particular, Destinos, which I feel is the best course ever made. I once had high aspirations of using perhaps another super cool well rounded full-bodied complete course for German, that would be the FD course... However, esteemed and respected serial reviewer and collector of all things courses (especially German courses) from many an era, and fellow LLorg member, speakeasy, felt that Fokus Deutsch was so poorly constructed that he concluded that the best place for it was actually in the rubbish bin!

I'd be really interested to see what your take on this course is, as well as Dark, when you get back to it! Keep up the progress!
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Re: Languages and Life: Gary's log (Italian, Spanish, bits of French, and now German!)

Postby garyb » Mon Jun 22, 2020 11:32 am

PeterMollenburg wrote:Interesting takes on Assimil, and great progress with German. Your sentiments of beginning a language (the hard slog, keep pushing, can't say much) all remind me of my recent experience with Norwegian. It's somewhat relieving to read another experienced language learner having the same sentiments.

I think it must be the same for everyone although some learners get a lot of pleasure out of discovering the "new world": picking up the basics and seeing how it all fits together, and enjoying the relatively fast progress where it truly feels like you know more each day, so it doesn't feel like such a slog. For me there's some element of that but it's mostly just a stage that has to be endured before I can get onto the real fun :lol:

PeterMollenburg wrote:Dark - I loved it, as did my wife. I'd rate it as the most riveting series I have watched on Netflix (I couldn't wait for the next episode!). Obviously I contain a lot of cheese myself as I really didn't notice the clichés... Here's hoping you bring some credibility back to me after you get through it and hold the series in as high regard as myself.

I was probably guilty of judging a book by its cover with Dark and basing my first impressions on the presentation rather than the content. As I say I'm starting to really get into the story now that I've got through a few episodes. I'll report back!

PeterMollenburg wrote:I own the Fokus Deutsch course and I am a huge fan of both French in Action and in particular, Destinos, which I feel is the best course ever made. I once had high aspirations of using perhaps another super cool well rounded full-bodied complete course for German, that would be the FD course... However, esteemed and respected serial reviewer and collector of all things courses (especially German courses) from many an era, and fellow LLorg member, speakeasy, felt that Fokus Deutsch was so poorly constructed that he concluded that the best place for it was actually in the rubbish bin!

Interesting to hear these thoughts, and I think I did actually read speakeasy's opinion but that was years ago and I had forgotten about it since. Just as I did with FIA and Destinos, I was just planning to watch it as a series and not bother with the supplementary material. But it seems like Nicos Weg is a similar thing but better and more modern, and between that and Assimil (and perhaps a revisit of MT) I think I'm very well covered for beginner courses as it is.
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Re: Languages and Life: Gary's log (Italian, Spanish, bits of French)

Postby lingua » Thu Jun 25, 2020 12:51 am

garyb wrote: I recently finished In other words by Jhumpa Lahiri, the accounts and short stories of an Indian-American woman who decides to learn Italian just for passion and move to Rome with her family. At first I expected the typical romanticised ideas about learning a language and living abroad, and the heavy use of metaphors seemed to confirm that, but as I got further I realised that she tells things as they are and isn't afraid to describe the bad as well as the good. Her story about shopkeepers refusing to take her seriously as an Italian-speaker felt very close to home! A lot of interesting thoughts about cultural identity and belonging too. As a learner of the language I'm surprised I hadn't heard about that book until an Italian recommended it to me a few weeks ago. I'll write a proper longer review sometime soon.


I started reading this a couple of days ago and had a vague recollection of you mentioning it. It was recommended by one of my Italian teachers as something that would be an easy read for me and that it was not a translation even though Italian isn't her native language. I'm about 20% through it and while I agree it's easy enough I am not a fan of her writing style. It feels like she's just substituting Italian for English and a lot of the phrases feel like Italian 101 to me. It feels like one of those literal translations I dislike.

Did you get this sense as well?
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Re: Languages and Life: Gary's log (Italian, Spanish, bits of French)

Postby garyb » Fri Jun 26, 2020 12:51 pm

lingua wrote:I started reading this a couple of days ago and had a vague recollection of you mentioning it. It was recommended by one of my Italian teachers as something that would be an easy read for me and that it was not a translation even though Italian isn't her native language. I'm about 20% through it and while I agree it's easy enough I am not a fan of her writing style. It feels like she's just substituting Italian for English and a lot of the phrases feel like Italian 101 to me. It feels like one of those literal translations I dislike.

Did you get this sense as well?

I got it a little in the earlier chapters but not too much. If anything I had a kind of opposite feeling, that the Italian was "too good" to be written by a learner in that it was not only very correct but also used a very wide range of vocabulary and expressions, which contrasts with her own assessment of her learning journey, difficulty expressing herself in the language, and her confusion with fairly basic concepts like imperfect versus perfect tense (although of course it's important to keep in mind that these texts were written and revised over a few years while she was living in Italy and learning the language, so it's unfair to judge her ability based on the earlier ones). She mentions sending the texts to a native speaker for correction, and I imagine that they went back and forth a few times and were changed to the point that it's hard to claim that they're entirely her own writing. Maybe for the earlier texts there was less effort to make them like natural Italian as she wanted to put across the idea of her writing becoming more complex and natural over time, so the "Italian 101" feeling is maybe deliberate.

None of that is a criticism of her and her Italian level; I surely couldn't do any better and if I wrote a book in Italian I'm sure it would also need so much correction and editing that I'd find it hard to claim it was all my own work. But especially for such an introspective book it was strange to have that feeling that the words weren't directly hers, neither in the original Italian nor the English which is a translation from the Italian by another person.

Anyway I enjoyed it enough and could relate a lot to some of the parts, and there are some interesting reflections in it, so it wasn't a bad book.
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Re: Languages and Life: Gary's log (Italian, Spanish, bits of French, and now German!)

Postby lingua » Fri Jun 26, 2020 6:35 pm

Thanks for the feedback. I finished the book last night and as it turns out once I started reading it again after I posted I somehow no longer felt that way. Probably because I got into the rhythm of her writing. In the end I mostly liked the book. I bought the English version too ... something I sometimes do with short books. I've only read about half of it and it's truly awful.
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Re: Languages and Life: Gary's log (Italian, Spanish, bits of French, and now German!)

Postby garyb » Tue Jul 07, 2020 11:37 am

There was the initial high, then there was the dip, and now my German motivation seems to have stabilised. Studying it doesn't quite excite me but I don't dread it either; it's enjoyable enough once I get into it and things are gradually starting to fit together more. Listening to Schubert and watching Dark are helping to keep it up too.

Dark is feeling a tiny bit easier too, in that as long as I pay enough attention I just about manage to listen to the dialogue while following the German subtitles and referring to the English ones as needed without much pausing. Doing all that plus keeping up with the plot is quite a big ask though! I do feel like I'm getting a lot out of it, not just reinforcing things I've already learnt but also picking up new words, and an episode feels just as productive and much more fun than an Assimil lesson. Of course they're complementary activities, with TV being further along the intensive-to-extensive spectrum while Assimil is around the middle, but I'm certainly seeing the benefits of semi-extensive input even from quite early on in the learning process and I think my studies from now on will lean towards more of it, with courses playing a supporting role rather than a main one.

The vague plan for now is to continue with Assimil, keep listening to Coffee Break, and maybe add in the Nicos Weg exercises at some point to fill in the intensive side and firm up the basics and the structure, and maybe something else focused on grammar after that if I feel the need, but apart from those I really don't see myself using any other beginner courses.

I checked out "Easy German" on Youtube for a bit more assisted input. The A1 videos were very slow and painful while the A2 ones were stretching my ability, but it seems like a good source of everyday language and there are hundreds of episodes.

In Italian I'm watching Luna Nera, which is not bad. It feels a bit young-adult-fantasyish and at times comes close to a silly "battle of the sexes" plot line of the good women versus the evil men, but for a bit of escapism and language input it's just fine and it's a pleasant change from the usual modern crime stories.
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