Systematiker's attempt at a log

[sfuqua]

A friend of mine who was a professional writer (scripts in Hollywood) said that he wrote better after one shot of whisky. Two shots and he might as well give up and get drunk.
Perhaps he had noticed a related phenomenon.

[Systematiker]

Things progress. Weekends are, as usual, busy, and today is a rather important day in my faith tradition, so there's just bits and pieces of time to squeeze stuff in.

I actually got back to Hebrew (in part thanks to Team Middle East), and I've gone through the first four chapters of Jenni. Now to start re-learning vocabulary...

I also tried out a Dutch film on Saturday, Publieke werken. I had wanted to watch Oorlogswinter, but the "Dutch subtitles" there only subtitled the German spoken, and I need subtitles. I had a bit of trouble with understanding a couple of times, but aside from those few scenes, I don't think I missed much. I'll try to get a bit in here and there.

In Spanish and French, I continue watching, reading, and listening to my podcasts. Podcasts remain unreported in my SC stats. Reading French is getting a bit faster, I've noticed a difference. Watching French still needs subtitles, but I'm hoping that I can make a transition there soon like I did with Spanish (which, I note, I can only get away with no subtitles in for certain things). Well, it's all progress.

Swedish is still watching and podcasts, though I did do one of the Pimsleur units. It at least gets me speaking. I should go back to Rivstart, maybe when I've got a bit more time. I'm not a huge fan of police procedurals, but I'm watching Wallander, and there's a bunch available, so I won't run out anytime soon.

Danish has been podcasts only lately. I listened to a recording of a church service Sunday (the time change means I can get these things in the wee hours of the morning), and learned a bunch of new things - the nice thing about the traditional Christian liturgy is that it's the same everywhere, so I know what to expect, and can go "cool, that's how it goes in ...." for whatever langauge it is (also, it means I can basically go anywhere and participate).

Little bits of Greek and Latin here and there, better than nothing. I still want to re-do the exercises in LLPSI, I think I can get producing if I do them all through.

I've got to travel the coming weekend, and this week is pretty full, so I may do even less in the coming time. On the other hand, reading on the plane is time I wouldn't normally have, right?

[LadyGrey1986]

Systematiker I am a native Dutch speaker and I am happy to help. Don't hestitate to send me a pm if you have questions ☺

That would require my getting over my embarassment about spelling like a deranged walrus in Dutch (see above). Seriously, the best conversation I've ever had in Dutch was while drunk at a theology conference, and everything else has been worse than that...haha!

But I'll totally take you up on it (hey, look, more motivation to actually work on Dutch, having someone who would help me...I'll take whatever motivation I can get!).

You made me laugh! Don't worry about sounding or spelling like a deranged walrus. I am very flattered that someone who speaks English and German has an interest in Dutch. You could speak with 99% of the Dutch in English or German. Don't worry about mixing German and Dutch. Heck..some members of our royal family made a career out of it.

[Systematiker]

Systematiker I am a native Dutch speaker and I am happy to help. Don't hestitate to send me a pm if you have questions ☺

That would require my getting over my embarassment about spelling like a deranged walrus in Dutch (see above). Seriously, the best conversation I've ever had in Dutch was while drunk at a theology conference, and everything else has been worse than that...haha!

But I'll totally take you up on it (hey, look, more motivation to actually work on Dutch, having someone who would help me...I'll take whatever motivation I can get!).

You made me laugh! Don't worry about sounding or spelling like a deranged walrus. I am very flattered that someone who speaks English and German has an interest in Dutch. You could speak with 99% of the Dutch in English or German. Don't worry about mixing German and Dutch. Heck..some members of our royal family made a career out of it.

Well, you can see I got some motivation. Now to pick your brain: maybe you could recommend some media (podcasts, books) that are worth checking out? I'll spend a bit on books, films though I never buy. Also, if I were going to pick a newspaper to get the blog feeds from, what do I need to know about the ones that are out there (audience, bias, etc)?

Ooh, I wonder if I can still watch TV, I used some site that was called something like uitzendung gemischt...I wonder if that works here in the States....

Ok, I'm sold. If I can ensure I'll have enough material by the end of the year, I'll do a half Super Challenge in Dutch as well. Because, why not.

[Elenia]

A tip: På Spåret will be starting up soon. It's might be difficult, but it's incredibly fun. I'm really looking forward to it!

[Systematiker]

A tip: På Spåret will be starting up soon. It's might be difficult, but it's incredibly fun. I'm really looking forward to it!

That looks neat! Thanks for letting me know!

[LadyGrey1986]

Systematiker I am a native Dutch speaker and I am happy to help. Don't hestitate to send me a pm if you have questions ☺

That would require my getting over my embarassment about spelling like a deranged walrus in Dutch (see above). Seriously, the best conversation I've ever had in Dutch was while drunk at a theology conference, and everything else has been worse than that...haha!

But I'll totally take you up on it (hey, look, more motivation to actually work on Dutch, having someone who would help me...I'll take whatever motivation I can get!).

You made me laugh! Don't worry about sounding or spelling like a deranged walrus. I am very flattered that someone who speaks English and German has an interest in Dutch. You could speak with 99% of the Dutch in English or German. Don't worry about mixing German and Dutch. Heck..some members of our royal family made a career out of it.

Well, you can see I got some motivation. Now to pick your brain: maybe you could recommend some media (podcasts, books) that are worth checking out? I'll spend a bit on books, films though I never buy. Also, if I were going to pick a newspaper to get the blog feeds from, what do I need to know about the ones that are out there (audience, bias, etc)?

Ooh, I wonder if I can still watch TV, I used some site that was called something like uitzendung gemischt...I wonder if that works here in the States....

Ok, I'm sold. If I can ensure I'll have enough material by the end of the year, I'll do a half Super Challenge in Dutch as well. Because, why not.

Unfortunately, Uitzending gemist is not available outside the Netherlands. I discovered this when I lived in Belgium for six months. You could also try the Net in Nederland Channel. It is aimed at refugees who have been granted asylum and are in the process of learning the language. They have a daily podcast of the news. It is just the regular evening news, except there are closed captions available in Dutch. If you want to watch comedy or satire, I recommend Koefnoen and De Kwiz. If you are interested in protestant (if you forgive me the term, I use it in the sense of Christian, but not Catholic) religious life in the Netherlands, I recommend the daily Trouw. It is associated with the PKN (Protestantse Kerk in Nederland). As far as reading is concerned, many learners of Dutch recommend the young adult thrillers by Mel Wallis de Vries. I haven't read them myself, so..Hope this helps.

Since you kindly offered to be a godparent in the Team Scones and Tea, please feel free to point out any mistakes I made in this message.

[Systematiker]

I didn't do a great deal today, both because I was pretty busy and because my pod-catching device bit the dust. I used some of my spare time setting everything up again on my phone. I listened to a few podcasts, and that's been it today as far as actual language work. Well, that and reading a bit of Swedish, both in the Bible and the news (cause, you know, Lutherans and the pope in Lund).

In meta-news, though, my Danish grammar showed up, and I'm even more excited because it's got a smaller format than I had thought, so it's not a desk-only work. It's totally coming on the plane with me. I think the last of my orders has now slowly arrived, so I'll write about that tomorrow or so. I've also fiddled around with where my electronic resources are, so I may be able to squeeze in a bit more. Sadly, the loss of the other device means that I'll have to dig my old iPod out for some of the audio stuff.

I've also been doing a lot of thinking about method and approach, so when I have the Muße for it, I want to do a write up of that. But for now, I'm going to play with my new book.

[Systematiker]

Unfortunately, Uitzending gemist is not available outside the Netherlands. I discovered this when I lived in Belgium for six months. You could also try the Net in Nederland Channel. It is aimed at refugees who have been granted asylum and are in the process of learning the language. They have a daily podcast of the news. It is just the regular evening news, except there are closed captions available in Dutch. If you want to watch comedy or satire, I recommend Koefnoen and De Kwiz. If you are interested in protestant (if you forgive me the term, I use it in the sense of Christian, but not Catholic) religious life in the Netherlands, I recommend the daily Trouw. It is associated with the PKN (Protestantse Kerk in Nederland). As far as reading is concerned, many learners of Dutch recommend the young adult thrillers by Mel Wallis de Vries. I haven't read them myself, so..Hope this helps.

Since you kindly offered to be a godparent in the Team Scones and Tea, please feel free to point out any mistakes I made in this message.

Response first: that's a shame, but there's certainly something that works, because I used it in Germany. Now that I've got the right spelling, I can google around, haha (you'll note the German "Sendung" creeping in there, and my memory making me think it was about variety, German "gemischt", rather than having missed something). As for reading, aim a bit higher for me, please - the last thing I read before the MSB moved their Dutch section was "Sigfried" by Harry Mulish (Mulisch? Muelisch? I don't remember) and I had pretty decent comprehension (probably 3-4 unknown words per page that I couldn't get as cognates or context).

Regarding your post: I'll point out all that I see, if anything is too harsh, let me know. Your English is very good, better than many university graduates I know, so I'm going to offer suggestions like you're aiming higher than that.

a couple small errors:
1. "Protestant" gets capitalized.
2. "If you'll forgive me" is kind of a set piece, it needs the future.
3. The team doesn't need a definite article, since it's a proper noun.

Stylistically, one can tell that it is non-native, because your register changes back and forth, and you tend to use separated simple sentences where a compound sentence would be more natural (e.g., I'd have said "they have a news podcast, which is just the regular evening news but [or except] there are closed captions...). The phrase "learners of Dutch" strikes me as awkward, but you did well not using "Dutch learners", which would have been ambiguous here; possibly a relative clause would be best (you did the same of-clause with news in my example above, it's a hard thing to get a feel for). Lastly, I know (well, I assume) that you actually want me to correct things, but contextually saying "feel free" here doesn't quite match, because it's more if I want to do so. It made your sentence carry the connotation of "well, since you're wanting to do this, I guess you can do it to this post, too". You'd have been better off just with a direct request, and (if this is the aim of your "feel free") an additional statement about not holding back or something.

Now, you get to tell me if that's the level of correction you want, or if I'm being a pedant (I am a pedant, I just try to keep it in check ).

[Systematiker]

I've got a bit more time today, so I can write some this morning as well.

Read through some of the Danish grammar last night - it's got exercises for each grammar point, which I like about it. I also watched a bit in Danish - I've had to change shows. I was watching Dicte, but I can't do it any more. I was already mildly irritated with how religious believers were presented (it seems that this is low-hanging fruit there, feels like American TV 1995-2005 or so); the content got to me though, too. I watched the first four episodes, so two storylines, and I had to stop the fifth episode. I'm not a huge fan of police procedurals or courtroom dramas, and while I appreciated the character depth and develoment in Dicte, it's a little too realistic. If you've seen it and wonder why I pick on this as realistic but have less problems with things more bloody, I mean it is handled in the show realistically, and I saw too much real as a trauma chaplain to want to re-live it when the characters on the screen have got real-looking emotions about it. So I switched to Rita, which also has the advantage of having Danish subtitles (at the cost of not being able to check my understanding, but the benefit of getting things I don't hear in fast spoken Danish). It looks more promising.

I've got everything over to the iPod, the lack of external speakers is a pain. We'll see how it works the next few days.

Thinking about learning languages, part 1: I've come to the conclusion that I don't really know how to learn a language. I've learned some, to a greater or lesser degree, but even though I know a lot about my learning style and preferences, I don't have a methodology for how I learn language.

German in high school and Spanish in middle school don't really count, I think. Or French in like 2nd grade, where I think I learned to count to five. Spanish was pretty ineffective, to be honest, I'm pretty sure all I learned was "mierda".

Looking at just self-study, or langauges after I knew a bit about self-study:

Korean was the first language I tried to learn on my own. I got the level one of Pimsleur, having read that it would teach me to speak it, and pretty quickly figured out that what I was learning wasn't very applicable or flexible. I had a bunch of native speakers around me who were super supportive, and wanted to help me learn. They even bought me books. I did have some limited success, but I think that was probably in spite of what I did rather than because of it - most of what I learned was through asking "how do you say..." and then trying out variations, building up through trial and error. It was pretty inefficient. I took a trip to Korea to visit a friend, and while we were traveling around, his brother-in-law died, and he had to leave me somewhere - so I did pretty well, I managed to play tourist and get back to his apartment in Seoul, mostly without people who spoke English.

This same sort of "how do you say..." trial and error was what I used to dabble in Japanese, Mandarin, and some other Chinese dialect (I don't even remember what it was, just that a friend spoke it). I was good at it, but as before, it's inefficient, and stuff didn't stick, because it probably would have taken years and years to build up to a maintainence level.

I dabbled a bit with some of the other Pimsleur courses, I actually felt pretty good about Russian when I was in Russia, but it was never more than tourist stuff, and it didn't stick. We all know (now) that Pimsleur alone, like any program, doesn't quite live up to the advertising claims.

So then I moved to Germany. At this point, I'd had German in high school, and positive experiences learning several languages - at least, in my mind. I hadn't really put any of them to the test. However, this did lead me to assume that I could just pick up German, I didn't need courses. I got a coursebook, and started off. I probably tried everything at least once in German - grammar drills, vocab, flashcards, etc. Probably what did the most, though, was intentional exposure. I made a real effort to not speak English, and to do stuff in German even when I didn't understand much.

Another major factor in German was laddering. I knew I would have to take examinations in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and I had a fair amount of time on my hands (I couldn't work, wrong visa), so I started using German for Hebrew and Latin, as well as building in 15-30 minute slots for other languages. I think I tried Korean vocab here, too. Latin quickly shifted to LLPSI, which was a mistake for that situation, but ok in the long run. I tried to brush up on Greek using my old text in English - also a mistake, for that situation. I started Spanish with my wife's (att, girlfriend's) Spanish textbook from college (German base), and Italian along with her using a German book.

This has been a fundamental principle of my langauge learning: I'm cheap. Whatever I can get used, free, from the library, etc. is preferable to spending money, even if it makes the process harder. I didn't, and don't, have to be, but I really wanted to prove that I could do it in Europe without help, even though I was in grad school, and the attitude has stuck with me.

So now I've got parallel streams: I was bettering my German, while doing Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, and a few fitful attempts at Korean vocabulary.

Hebrew happened after that in class. I probably did less than many of my classmates - flashcards everywhere, one girl made a board game for vocabulary for us. I squeaked by in the exam; the class probably helped my German more than my Hebrew. Of course it was only one semester (8 hrs/week), for something "remedial" (not really, but officially); those who "came with it" took three or four years to take the test.

Latin was decent, from LLPSI; I got to go into the translation course and skip the first two semesters. I struggled a bit with translation conventions in German, but did OK; same story with the timing in Latin though. My wife did this exam in Gymnasium, after like 3 or 4 years of study; we were expected to take it after 3 semesters (of 90 minutes/week!).

Greek was hell. I failed the Graecum twice, both times due to interference from having learned Greek through English first. The second time I failed, I was one error away from passing, and I even argued it - I wrote "Nach dem, ..." meaning "After that, ...", which was, of course, wrong, I should have written "Danach" for the preposition in question. But the grader was all "no, you wrote nachdem, that's a different preposition, and you screwed up the relative clause." No I didn't, you idiot. I'm still irritated about that. Oh well. I got better at Greek through it.

None of this taught me how to successfully approach learning a language, other than brute force - aside from the improvement in German.

This is getting long, so I'll do another post at another time talking through the shift in other languages, thinking I had a method, a Korean 6WC, and casting about for an approach in the last six or seven months (plus the newcomers).