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

[garyb]

German

I went back to the meetup last night, after a lot of umming and ahhing since I was tired and had already been out a few nights in a row. Smaller group this time, and no native speakers although the other learners were quite advanced as usual. My speaking wasn't at its best but I got some things out, and I heard some interesting stories from an American veteran who had been stationed in Germany during the Cold War and a keen traveller who had lived in Berlin just before the fall of the wall. That's one thing I had missed about language meetups: you sure do meet some interesting people.

I'm still getting a lot of fairly basic stuff wrong, and I'm not sure if that means I need more speaking practice, or more input to give me a better "Sprachgefühl", or more grammar exercises... My conclusion is I just need more everything. But I am also using more words and getting more things right, so I shouldn't focus too much on the negative. I think the phrase I've heard is "embrace the suck": you just accept the fact that your speaking is going to be bad for a long time before it gets good. I feel that delaying speaking has been a mistake in my German learning, since I just postponed the inevitable pain rather than avoiding it, but then it's maybe more accurate to say that I delayed serious learning in general rather than just speaking!

Japanese

With what I just said about German, I'm also thinking about Japanese output sooner rather than later. I don't think I'll consider tutoring until I finish Genki 1 at least, but I'm taking the Genki writing exercises more seriously now, as I should've done with Spektrum Deutsch. On that, I discovered that Genki has extra reading and writing exercises corresponding to each lesson at the back of the book, which I somehow missed completely until now! Serves me right for not reading the instructions.

And with that, I decided that I wanted learn how to write Japanese on pen and paper! So I spent my Sunday afternoon working on that. There's always debate over whether it's useful at all for most learners to learn to write in the age of computers and phones or it's a big waste of time that would be better spent on other learning activities, and I can see both sides. I know there's research saying you retain things better if you write them down, and as I've said before I'm trying to do more activities away from the computer. So far I had just been answering the textbook and workbook exercises in my head or by speaking aloud, which again I did with Spektrum but on reflection I should've taken the time to write them down. Plus I just felt that I'd rather have a more complete knowledge of the language and writing would be a cool skill to have.

I also hope that learning to write characters will help me to internalise them better and so improve my reading, which is still slow; I've heard other learners say that it helped. It's sure made me realise that I don't actually know the characters very well; I recognise them when written but I couldn't even picture most of them in my head without seeing them, never mind know where to start with writing them.

I'm just focusing on Kana first; I'm not in a rush to write Kanji, although from what I gather there's a sort of 80/20 rule where learning the general principles of stroke order and how to write a few dozen characters gives you enough to get most characters right most of the time.

I tried a couple of smartphone apps (Write Japanese and Ringotan) but I found the old-fashioned method far more quick and effective: just following the drawings in Genki then answering writing exercises and looking up a character when unsure. That's getting me up to speed fairly quickly. I still think the apps could be useful to improve memory and neatness, though.

This is of course delaying my progress through Genki, which has already been slow because I've been busy. But after a few days I should be able to write well enough without checking the charts much and I'll be back up to speed.

I also decided that I should get a suitably nice writing implement for Japanese, which sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole and also made me think about improving my messy Latin-script handwriting! For now I've ordered the famous Kuru Toga self-sharpening mechanical pencil, but maybe in future I'll look at fancy pens...

In media, I watched the tennis episodes of Spy × Family, which I had been looking forward to since seeing them mentioned in golyplot's log. Nice and ridiculous as usual. Fortuitously I had just learnt the word 兄弟 (brothers/siblings) from WaniKani and it came up a bunch of times since a few of the opposing tennis teams were indeed brothers or siblings.

Italian

Had dinner with Italian friends. Good but imperfect speaking as usual.

Spanish

Finished my Murakami book and started the next one. Still haven't got around to booking my trip to Spain, but I've got the first week of April off so I should get around to that soon. I'm leaning towards Northern Spain because it's been on my list for years and it has some good surfing spots so could kill two birds with one stone.

[iguanamon]

I was in Asturias last September. I highly recommend it.

[jeffers]

I'm still getting a lot of fairly basic stuff wrong, and I'm not sure if that means I need more speaking practice, or more input to give me a better "Sprachgefühl", or more grammar exercises... My conclusion is I just need more everything. But I am also using more words and getting more things right, so I shouldn't focus too much on the negative. I think the phrase I've heard is "embrace the suck": you just accept the fact that your speaking is going to be bad for a long time before it gets good. I feel that delaying speaking has been a mistake in my German learning, since I just postponed the inevitable pain rather than avoiding it, but then it's maybe more accurate to say that I delayed serious learning in general rather than just speaking!

This s 100% me, although I'm still not speaking much. I've always rationalized it by saying that my language learning interest was more about things like reading and watching films, but I sill wish I could speak better. I agree that, "I just need more everything", and I also wish I had done more output sooner. I have to say that one thing that helped me speak better in French was doing some writing every day for a period of time. I think I got to a streak of something around 80 days before I missed a day and stopped. I should get back to writing again, and in all 3 of my current target languages. Soon(tm).

[Chmury]

Spanish

I switched from a Spanish-English dictionary to a monolingual one for my reading. I actually think that the benefits of doing so are hugely overrated, but it's still worth it just because the Kindle translation dictionaries are so damn bad that I might as well use something better if I can!

Which Spanish-English dictionary were you using Garyb? I've used New Dictionary HISPANO Spanish-English v.4.0 for quite a few years now (it's just recently been updated) and I've found it to be pretty decent.

I was in Asturias last September. I highly recommend it.

Reckon I'll be there in October! Stoked! Anything in particular you'd recommend?

I'm still getting a lot of fairly basic stuff wrong, and I'm not sure if that means I need more speaking practice, or more input to give me a better "Sprachgefühl", or more grammar exercises... My conclusion is I just need more everything. But I am also using more words and getting more things right, so I shouldn't focus too much on the negative. I think the phrase I've heard is "embrace the suck": you just accept the fact that your speaking is going to be bad for a long time before it gets good. I feel that delaying speaking has been a mistake in my German learning, since I just postponed the inevitable pain rather than avoiding it, but then it's maybe more accurate to say that I delayed serious learning in general rather than just speaking!

This s 100% me, although I'm still not speaking much. I've always rationalized it by saying that my language learning interest was more about things like reading and watching films, but I sill wish I could speak better. I agree that, "I just need more everything", and I also wish I had done more output sooner. I have to say that one thing that helped me speak better in French was doing some writing every day for a period of time. I think I got to a streak of something around 80 days before I missed a day and stopped. I should get back to writing again, and in all 3 of my current target languages. Soon(tm).

Definitely agree about the power of writing Jeffers. I find it to be an excellent and highly under-emphasised tool to help consolidate knowledge. It helps us to identify weak points in our understanding of grammar as well as to pinpoint holes in our vocabulary, and it's also just a really great way to produce language, to think in the language. I'd say it without question has direct effects on our ability to speak.

So don't know if you've got the time in what must be an already busy language learning schedule Garyb, but I'd highly recommend giving journalling in German a go if you're not already doing so. Viel Erfolg!

[garyb]

Thanks all! I'm struggling to decide where to spend my time in Spain, since I'll only have one week. My flight is to Santander so I'll spend at least a few days around there, but several people are recommending Asturias so I might just have to make my way there too! Oviedo seems to be the main town worth visiting, and the Picos de Europa for hiking. I hear mixed things about Gijón. I'm more interested in surfing for this trip so I'll mostly stick to the coasts, although if I do go to coastal Asturias I'll likely have to pass through Oviedo anyway, and hiking could be a backup plan if the waves aren't great.

My languages have come in useful: for surf camps and schools in the area, it just seems normal for their websites to be half in Spanish even if you're supposedly on the English version, and dashes of French aren't uncommon either. Some only have a Spanish site, which I consider a good sign. And I'm told that there are some places where most of the guests are German speakers.

In fact, travel research and planning has somewhat taken over my life for the last few days, so I've not done lots of language work. I need to make a decision soon so I can move on and get back to the study and ramp up the Spanish practice. But I caught up with some Genki workbook and reading/writing exercises this afternoon. I "finished" lesson 7 earlier this week, but I want to get caught up with the reading/writing parts that I had missed before going onto 8.

I did have a bit of a Yakuza game binge this weekend, since I was feeling drained from work and planning. I'm still picking up bits and pieces of dialogue, but not enough to consider it a productive activity; I think it did however give me a motivation boost that helped me get back on the wagon and do that Genki work today! A lot of what's motivating me to improve my Japanese in the shorter term is being able to enjoy media like this, since it could be a while before I return to Japan and I don't exactly have many opportunities to use it here. Although cherry blosson season isn't far away and I live next to a big park, which is always a good bet for hearing some Japanese...

Which Spanish-English dictionary were you using Garyb? I've used New Dictionary HISPANO Spanish-English v.4.0 for quite a few years now (it's just recently been updated) and I've found it to be pretty decent.

I was just using the built-in one, "Oxford Spanish-English dictionary". Maybe I'll try that instead, thanks!

I agree on writing. I got into a nice routine with German journalling (dictation and writing) for a couple of weeks earlier this year, but then things got busier and I didn't keep it up, and it did feel a bit painful because I had to pause and look up words so much. But it might be the no-pain no-gain type. I've done plenty of Italian and Spanish journalling and I think it's helped, even if it's no substitute for speaking, but with my higher level it's far easier to get into the flow.

My frustration with German production is probably just me yet again being impatient because it's taking much longer to develop than my other languages with the high-school-French foundation and related-language discount, and I have to do some real work! And if it's this bad for German I dread to think how it'll be for Japanese, but at least with Japanese I knew what I was getting into so I've been taking it seriously from the start.

For obvious reasons I plan to focus on Spanish for my input and writing for the next few weeks, and after the trip I'll try to get back into German writing.

[garyb]

One benefit on my job is that I sometimes get a bit of free language practice. Every so often I have to investigate problems with customers' websites, and these customers are all over the world with quite a few in Spain and Japan. Last week I got a little reading practice by trying to find my way around a Japanese site (and spotted a few combinations of familiar Kanji: a form field labelled 会社名 was easy to figure out when I know that 会社 means "company" and 名 means "name"!), and today I watched a video where a customer described their problem in Spanish rather than having to rely on the support employee's translation of it.

And yes, the company does have an office in Japan, which would be a very tempting alternative to my idea to move to Berlin! But I don't think they have any engineering teams there, just sales and support, and the time difference would be unworkable in the long term with my UK/EU team.

[garyb]

Long one (and I somehow managed to double it up; should be fixed now through edits!)

After commenting on a topic about motivation I realised that I've had a bit of a dip in the last couple of weeks. The gaming binge didn't really finish, even if I managed to keep it under control for a couple of days, and I've been staying up too late and not sleeping enough. I am keeping up the language study, but it's been slow.

I need to get back into the healthy lifestyle that I was managing quite well in the last few months. Gaming is a healthy enough pastime in moderation - nothing wrong with having fun - but the designers are also clever about making games hard to put down. Yakuza has a very compelling combination of story, entertainment, challenges, the feeling of walking around a realistic Japanese city, and the idea that there's always just one more thing to do with all the side quests and extras.

I need to get better at knowing when to stop, but also, I might as well exploit the compelling nature of gaming for my own gain by turning it into a useful language-learning activity in the same way that other people who already enjoy TV have made huge language gains from binge-watching target-language series. I understand why TV series are considered such a great language resource, but they're one that I've always under-exploited since sitting watching TV isn't really my thing.

Of course it's only an effective use of time if done with the right material and at the right level. Perhaps I need to remind myself that if I get better at Japanese then the Yakuza games will become both more productive and more satisfying. Final Fantasy in German was also not the best use of time since my level was too low to follow it without pausing to look up lots of words that I then just forgot again. For now, Spanish is the obvious candidate, given my upcoming trip and my more advanced level. I've found some suggestions for dialogue-heavy games with full Spanish audio, which include classics that I've been wanting to play sooner or later anyway like Skyrim and the Fallout series. I'm lucky that my language choices match up perfectly with the most common languages that games are available in: FIGS plus Japanese.

SRS Special

I noticed I was repeatedly failing many of my German cards in Anki, which I partly put down to the crazy-big FSRS intervals (a few days very quickly become a few months or years!) but also because of my cards being too hard. My standard approach in other languages has been to make a "production" card (sentence with partial-word cloze deletion) for words that I'd like to be able to use in speaking, and a "recognition" card for words that I'd like to be able to understand but don't see myself using much. But yet again, what worked for my Romance languages doesn't necessarily work for an unrelated language! (And it's debatable whether it even worked well for my Romance languages, given my recent comments about resetting my decks...) I realise that I was trying to run before I could walk, and I can't exactly produce a word if I don't know it well enough to even recognise it! So I'll stick to recognition cards for most vocabulary, even stuff I feel like I "should" know, and production cards only for stuff like verb forms, prepositions, and usage.

I had a similar experience with Renshuu for Japanese too. I had turned on the option to type answers instead of multiple choice because it felt like the "better" way, but I just kept failing the same words and it was becoming a time sink. So I've gone back to multiple choice (with choices initially hidden) and it's not only much easier-going but also still effective, in that I do seem to remember most of the words better each time. Which is reassuring for German too. I like the idea that SRS should be a helping hand rather than a main method, and so cards should be quite easy and you shouldn't expect all of them to stick all of the time.

But I have been following some of the recent discussions on here about Subs2Srs, Migaku, etc. where SRS does take centre stage. I wasn't very interested when all that first came up a few years ago because again for my Romance languages my methods were working just fine and it didn't seem worth the effort to set these tools up and find appropriate media with accurate subtitles. But now that I'm learning more difficult languages where breaking out of the beginner stage requires more exposure and repetition to language, I can see the appeal of using flashcards with TV audio to "burn it onto your brain" (if there's anything that's been burned onto my brain in the last couple of weeks, it's that phrase!). Plus both the ease of use and of finding media have improved since then.

I gave Migaku a try. As a new user, the onboarding wasn't promising: a "Starter Guide" with a "Get Started" link that... sent me back to the starter guide; a half-hour wait to download a dictionary (while other tools like Language Reactor work just fine with an online dictionary); and then a prompt to enter my known words into a text field! Questions about what it means to "know" a word aside, a list of words I know isn't exactly something I just have lying around, and it could be in the hundreds if not thousands even for German! That's made me reluctant to pay the subscription, although the price is very reasonable.

But after all that, it does seem to do what it says on the tin: it lets you create sentence cards with audio from subtitles, at least once you figure out how. And it uses its own SRS app rather than Anki, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. That plus a Netflix subscription could turn out to be a good investment for a few months once I'm back from Spain and go back to focusing on German.

It could also be useful for Japanese, but even easy native material is far too hard at the moment. I realise that part of the appeal of these tools is to "engage more with native material from early on", but that's not something I really feel a need or desire to do. Learner materials plus a little bit of input from anime/films/games is plenty already and I'm quite happy with the progress I'm making.

Non-SRS stuff

Finished a few things in the last week or two:

Hiragana: Forbidden Speech: completed the game, although didn't get through all of the words that it teaches. They encourage playing through it again, but I'm not sure if I'll bother: the lack of Kanji makes it less appealing as I've said. I'll put it in the same box as a lot of the methods I've used other than Genki, like DuoLingo and Michel Thomas: I don't think it's been essential to my learning, but it has given me some satisfaction by front-loading some useful stuff that I wouldn't have picked up as quickly just from the textbook. For example words like "ganbaru"/"ganbatte" (a saying of encouragement like "go for it" or "do your best" which I'm now hearing all the time in Yakuza and anime/films) and informal form.

Spy × Family: It's been fun. I'm sure I'll come back to it once my level is higher.

WaniKani level 5. I'm around halfway through 6, which is actually feeling a little easier even though the number of reviews is growing, since there's more language that I've encountered in other places and more combinations of previously-learned material. But I still get a lot of things mixed up: similar-looking Kanji, similar words (previous vs. past, etc.), different readings for characters.

I'm really enjoying the reading and writing exercises at the back of Genki. The reading ones are getting me more used to longer texts rather than just single sentences and dialogue lines; seeing a big chunk of written Japanese is always intimidating at first but it's satisfying to get through it and understand it. The writing ones remind me of my favourite part of high-school French, where I got to be a bit creative and humorous, and I'm happy to be producing language from early on since I do want to speak sooner rather than later.

I see way too many Japanese learners who reach a high receptive level and pass N2 or N1 but can barely converse, while I know others who are far from N3 but speak confidently even if not perfectly. This isn't a criticism at all, since I know that plenty people's main interest is reading rather than speaking and being able to read well in Japanese is a very impressive achievement, but I think it is good evidence that you only get good at what you practice and against the whole idea that production comes automatically with input.

I just signed up for a membership at a nearby cinema where you can watch unlimited films for a fairly low monthly fee: two films per month and it pays for itself. It's a mainstream cinema so I'll still have to go elsewhere for some of the more art-house stuff and I feel a little guilty for not supporting the indie places after one of them closed down a couple of years ago, but it's big enough to have some more niche and international material as well as the blockbusters. They do quite a lot of Asian stuff (it's the main spot in town for Indian films, and I also see C/J/K stuff come up) and also some European. There's a Japanese one called Monster (Kaibutsu) on that I'll try to catch soon.

Like with the gaming, it's about finding input that I enjoy and that absorbs me. Again, people always argue for TV over film and I understand why, but I'm more of a film fan and I get a lot more out of being at a cinema where I'm fully focused. But I'm still thinking about Netflix+Migaku for the intensive side of things.

(edit: fixing spelling of Migaku, not Mikagu; you'd really think that the many WaniKani items in the last two weeks with 学 ("gaku": study) in them would've had some effect!)

[emk]

But now that I'm learning more difficult languages where breaking out of the beginner stage requires more exposure and repetition to language, I can see the appeal of using flashcards with TV audio to "burn it onto your brain" (if there's anything that's been burned onto my brain in the last couple of weeks, it's that phrase!).

Sorry, my fault!

I gave Mikagu a try. As a new user, the onboarding wasn't promising: a "Starter Guide" with a "Get Started" link that... sent me back to the starter guide; a half-hour wait to download a dictionary (while other tools like Language Reactor work just fine with an online dictionary); and then a prompt to enter my known words into a text field! Questions about what it means to "know" a word aside, a list of words I know isn't exactly something I just have lying around, and it could be in the hundreds if not thousands even for German! That's made me reluctant to pay the subscription, although the price is very reasonable.

But after all that, it does seem to do what it says on the tin: it lets you create sentence cards with audio from subtitles, at least once you figure out how. And it uses its own SRS app rather than Anki, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. That plus a Netflix subscription could turn out to be a good investment for a few months once I'm back from Spain and go back to focusing on German.

Yeah, I wasn't kidding when I said Migaku was "clunky." There are so many minor obnoxious things about it. If you want to just watch videos and look stuff up, Language Reactor is much smoother in dozens of little ways.

Where Migaku shines is that it actually makes decent flash cards. It captures the original audio and an image. It allows you to add more information with a few clicks. Lot of little details suggest that whoever designed this part of the app actually uses audio cards.

Personally, I'm just going to feed my DVD collection into substudy, and export to Anki as needed. But that's because I want to push myself to build a video watching tool for substudy. So I can't give you any long-term experiences using Migaku, just what I saw when I played around with it.

[Tumlare]

I'm lucky that my language choices match up perfectly with the most common languages that games are available in: FIGS plus Japanese.

I'm also someone who prefers gaming to TV watching for relaxation. Unfortunately I am learning a language (Swedish) that games aren't generally translated into. I really want to pick up a FIGS language just so I can feel productive with my gaming time.

I see way too many Japanese learners who reach a high receptive level and pass N2 or N1 but can barely converse, while I know others who are far from N3 but speak confidently even if not perfectly. This isn't a criticism at all, since I know that plenty people's main interest is reading rather than speaking and being able to read well in Japanese is a very impressive achievement, but I think it is good evidence that you only get good at what you practice and against the whole idea that production comes automatically with input.

Idrives me a little crazy when people claim that production skills will just appear like magic if only you get enough input. Obviously input helps with output to some degree but you do have to actually practice speaking in order to get good at speaking!

[garyb]

Yeah, I wasn't kidding when I said Migaku was "clunky." There are so many minor obnoxious things about it. If you want to just watch videos and look stuff up, Language Reactor is much smoother in dozens of little ways.

Where Migaku shines is that it actually makes decent flash cards. It captures the original audio and an image. It allows you to add more information with a few clicks. Lot of little details suggest that whoever designed this part of the app actually uses audio cards.

Personally, I'm just going to feed my DVD collection into substudy, and export to Anki as needed. But that's because I want to push myself to build a video watching tool for substudy. So I can't give you any long-term experiences using Migaku, just what I saw when I played around with it.

Yeah I'm starting to realise that if you want to make the most of technology for language learning, you need to have some tolerance for clunky user interfaces. Especially in the Japanese-learning world, which seems to be the furthest ahead in terms of enthusiastic learners trying to create software that is actually useful for other learners so has a lot of stuff that's genuinely good but not always nice to use. I already wrote about Renshuu; I've heard of all sorts of programs for extracting text and flashcards from manga and games and visual novels that I've saved to my list for later, and I don't expect them to be particularly user-friendly; and based on the name and the site design I'd guess that Migaku was also originally intended for Japanese.

I can't be too critical since many of these are one-person projects, and UX is a different skill from software dev and there's a reason that it's a job speciality in itself. And it's very cool that people (including you!) are making these efforts and that we might finally be starting to reach the stage where software resources are as useful or more so than traditional books and audio courses, or at least complement them better.