Jeff's language log

[jeff_lindqvist]

2020 - Summary of week 52

I finished one crime novel in Swedish. I spent the beginning of last weekend checking out reviews and videos about Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. I finally placed an order for one of the base sets plus some extra decks. The package arrived on the Wednesday, just one day before Christmas Eve. Festivities and other external factors came in the way - no games so far.

DE: I finished Unheimliche Begegnungen and started another easy reader - Das Feuerschiff (Siegfried Lenz).

FR: I decided to do a quick run through French with Michel Thomas. Almost done!

GA: Only a few podcasts left now.

NL: Woord voor woord has been mentioned a couple of times here. OK, the language in the videos is very basic, but after completing the series in just a few sittings my brain is ready to take the plunge. Strangely enough, I didn't watch De dag this week.

ZH: Reborn / 重生, episode 13-14.

Only a few days left of this year.

[jeff_lindqvist]

Intermission

Just a few hours ago, there was a live streamed concert with the family band Clann Mhic Ruairí. I saw them in Oulu back in 2017. Bhain chuile dhuine an-chuid taitnimh as an gceolchoirm.

[jeff_lindqvist]

Anki summary for 2020

Before I give you the figures I know you have all been waiting for, I want to say that it has been a different Anki year for me. If memory serves, my version of the software stopped synching some time in February. The date was announced and all that, but the operating system on my laptop didn't allow me to update Anki. For the past 10 months I've been using the web interface instead.

Those of you who have been following my log may remember that I faced some computer issues in the beginning of November, and that I have been using a new beast, with Ubuntu. So, today, the first day of the new year, I decided to install the Anki client. To give you the stats, if nothing else.

First of all, these are the numbers before reviewing today's cards:

cs: 28
esperanto: 46
fi: 4
ga: 8
kernewek: 0
mandarin: 49
pt: 512 - 50
ro: 7
tp: 2
yue: 24

This gives us a pretty good idea of my daily dosis. No cards for Cornish today, some days there aren't any for Toki Pona. Czech and Esperanto usually feed me just above or below 50, Finnish a handful, Irish slightly more, Mandarin usually a little more than 50, Portuguese always around 500 (usually more) - and always with 50 unseen cards, Romanian a handful, and Cantonese around 20.

The only interesting deck nowadays would be Portuguese, which long-time readers remember is the one that is based on a large Tatoeba collection.

Portuguese
Mature: 69792 (cf. 51772 in 2019, 31494 in 2018, 15339 in 2017)
Young+Learn: 1065 (cf. 1090 in 2019, 3620 in 2018, 1877 in 2017)
Unseen: 7594 (cf. 25589 in 2019, 43337 in 2018, 61235 in 2017)
Suspended+Buried: 0
Total cards: 78451

I guess you could call this progress. Nothing added, but a lot of reviews. And as you can see, the number of unseen cards will reach zero this year. At last!

There is a chance that I will add decks for new languages, now that I seem to have a more stable version, a better (?) computer/OS, and a stronger internet connection.

Next chapter: Summary of week 53, 2020.

[jeff_lindqvist]

Gaeilge alert

I just want to share a link to a recent documentary (50 minutes) about Moya Brennan / Máire Ní Bhraonáin, vocalist extraordinaire. Most of it in Irish (dar ndóigh!).

https://www.tg4.ie/ga/player/seinn/?pid ... ode=114318

(Available for another 32 days.)

[javier_getafe]

Anki summary for 2020


Portuguese
Mature: 69792 (cf. 51772 in 2019, 31494 in 2018, 15339 in 2017)
Young+Learn: 1065 (cf. 1090 in 2019, 3620 in 2018, 1877 in 2017)
Unseen: 7594 (cf. 25589 in 2019, 43337 in 2018, 61235 in 2017)
Suspended+Buried: 0
Total cards: 78451

I guess you could call this progress. Nothing added, but a lot of reviews. And as you can see, the number of unseen cards will reach zero this year. At last!

There is a chance that I will add decks for new languages, now that I seem to have a more stable version, a better (?) computer/OS, and a stronger internet connection.

Next chapter: Summary of week 53, 2020.

I'm impressed.
This last year I added up 1.015 new words to my anki english deck which makes a total of 7.000 words, and I thought it was a lot of new words.

[jeff_lindqvist]

1015 new cards is still a lot! My 78 451 cards was a one-time investment in the low-growth Portuguese stock in the Anki bank. I still have to work for the cards, instead of them working for me.

[jeff_lindqvist]

2020 - Summary of week 53 A

The TV series The Name of the Rose started. I haven't seen the movie from 1986, nor read the book (but I have it in Dutch, of all languages). I've watched four episodes so far. One character speaks Occitan which I'm able to understand through the filter of French, Spanish and Catalan.

DE: I finished Das Feuerschiff.

FR: The whole Foundation series is now finished, which means +8 hours of necessary practice in a rusty language.

GA: At last! There was no new content after the 23rd December, so I listened to the last podcast of Barrscéalta a couple of times during the last days of the year.

Next chapter: Summary of week 53, 2021. Yes, it was still the 53rd week although the new year has started.

[jeff_lindqvist]

2021 - Summary of week 53 B

I finished one book in English and started reading the rulebooks for the Rogue Mage system. One more episode of The Name of the Rose. I prepared mentally to get back to work after some four-five weeks' vacation.

DE: I started and finished another easy reader. My inner voice reads German with Dutch pronunciation. Easy readers are at the right level, but boring. "Real" literature is more difficult, but more interesting. Oh, the dilemma!

NL: Listening to short stories from Radioboeken. This probably counts as free and legal content, but I'm not taking part in any challenges. I might throw children's books from the library into the mix.

ZH: Reborn / 重生, episode 15-16. I also watched the movie The Promised One. For a second, I thought of doing some proper studying again so I went to the Yojik site. Some treasure trove! Hmm... maybe next year.

[Caromarlyse]

DE: I started and finished another easy reader. My inner voice reads German with Dutch pronunciation. Easy readers are at the right level, but boring. "Real" literature is more difficult, but more interesting. Oh, the dilemma!

This is my issue with easy readers too - I have absolutely no patience and get bored very quickly. I've had better luck with trashy adult novels. Sadly my current German novel, which is not trashy (as far as I can tell!), is going nowhere near as fast as my page turners did, and is bringing me back down to earth and making me question my abilities. I've got to plough through though, rather than buy something else instead, as I have too many books as it is!

[Montmorency]

DE: I started and finished another easy reader. My inner voice reads German with Dutch pronunciation.

Interesting. I used to have that problem, because I tried to learn Dutch (not terribly successfully, but over at least a couple of years) long long before I seriously tried to learn German, and in that time, I'd listened to a fair amount of Dutch / Flemish. It took me a while to "unlearn" it for German-learning purposes. Now my inner voice would probably pronounce Dutch as German...

But anyway, at the risk of trying to "teach Grannie to suck eggs", may I suggest audiobooks to you? Yes, hardly an original idea for an HTLAL/LLORG veteran, but anyway, it seems slightly relevant here...especially as...

Easy readers are at the right level, but boring. "Real" literature is more difficult, but more interesting. Oh, the dilemma!

I have a "real book" that might possibly be at the right level, and for which I know a German unabridged audiobook is available. It also has the advantage that it has been widely translated, so if you chose, you could almost certainly find a Swedish or an English translation of it, if that helped. The book is:

"Emil und die Detektive" by Erich Kästner. Kästner was usually known as a children's author, although he also wrote some books for adults, and was also a journalist/essayist. "Emil" is, I would say, aimed at 11,12,13-year olds, as that's the approximate age of Emil Tischbein, the eponymous hero. (If you do buy the book, you might as well buy the edition that has the sequel, "Emil und die Drei Zwillinge" as well).

Audiobook: theoretically, you can buy this online from a German online retailer and download it, but I found that for licensing reasons, I couldn't! And I don't think this was because of Brexit, because I had exactly the same problem some years ago, before Brexit was on the horizon, and the UK was still very much in the EU.

So, I don't know what the situation is regarding buying it from Sweden. If you are able to buy a downloadable version, please be very careful to make sure that it is unabridged, because there are abridged versions out there, and also "Hörspiel" versions, which are all very well, but not really what you need.

So what I did was find a CD version which I was able to get, 2nd hand, from Momox/Medimops. This was an ordinary audio CD version, actually on 3 CDs. It took about a week to arrive, and was quite cheap. I ripped it to MP3 files for convenience, but it's nice to have the audio CDs as a backup. (That only has the first book, not the sequel). The reading is fairly fast, but once it's on MP3, you can slow it down in your media player (well, you can in some media players; I don't know about all).

Well, that's just one suggestion. If that particular one does not appeal, the suggestion may in any case trigger off other ideas along similar lines, but with authors / types of book more to your taste.

And of course these days, there are quite a few audiobooks on youtube; I don't know if that particular one is; I can't remember now if I looked for it.