river runs through it (ES, DE, EO)

[river]

Read an interesting article (in English) this week. Sora Kim Russell, LGBT Korea on Film: Anonymity and Representation.

The website I found it on, Words without Borders, is an online magazine for international literature. All of the pieces are translated into English, and sometimes bilingual versions are available. Their search page allows searches by language and country, in addition to keyword and genre searches.

The issues are themed, sometimes by country (Brazil apart from Rio, the diversity of voices in Morocco), sometimes by subject matter (captivity, women on war). And they have a yearly queer issue. Here's the most recent one: June 2016: The Queer Issue VII. It includes bilingual versions of stories in Spanish, German, and Korean.

[river]

Lately I've been studying fairly regularly. In addition to my activities in German and Mandarin, I've been writing out the example sentences from the first Korean From Zero! textbook in my new notebook, and afterwards listening to and repeating after the audio. I started writing out the sentences in the seventh chapter, which was a good place to start; if I'd done so starting from the beginning I would've quit from boredom long ago.

I highly recommend the KFZ! textbook series. All of the content is available for free online, including the audio. The textbooks are comprehensive, the language taught useful, and the lessons natural in progression. Their site: Korean From Zero! (Making hyperlinks is one of my favorite things to do, if you couldn't tell.)

But even though I've been making progress, I'm moving Korean to the back burner. This happens every month or so: I'm plodding along in two languages, get a wild hair to add another, study all of them furiously for a couple weeks, and when the weight of my knowledge becomes too great, I collapse in on myself like a dying star. Then I start all over again a week later.

I exaggerate, but only slightly. One of my biggest challenges in studying languages has been to find the right balance between a healthy amount of study and pressuring myself to do more (the latter is always accompanied by copious self-flagellation).

I fully expect to start messing with Korean again in a week or two, hence its new place as a "cheat" language in my profile. Perhaps if I start thinking of it as my go-to wanderlust language and not as a full-blown addition to my studies, that'll keep me from becoming too obsessive with it.

[river]

Found this while browsing the other day: Babbel's German Animal Names Flowchart. Huge image incoming...

[river]

There's a new kid in town, language-wise. A friend and I were talking about secret languages, namely how poor English is for that purpose and other candidates that could be used. She's also into languages. When I mentioned Esperanto her eyes lit up, and then and there we decided to learn it to be able to speak to each other. (She's also been interested in learning Esperanto for at least half a decade, and I've played with it on and off, all before we met.) Of course there's no guarantee that we'll never be eavesdropped on in Esperanto, but if I get to the level where I'm able to tick someone off by gossiping in a "secret" language they understand, I'll consider it a victory.

So far I've been working with the Duolingo course, some vocab courses on Memrise, and Ana Pana on Lernu. The redesign of the latter site was a lovely surprise, but it seems to lack access to the old courses, at least for the time being. That being the case, it's time to start La teorio Nakamura.

I'm looking forward to adding another language to my "speaks" section. In all the years I've been lurking on language forums, I've never felt comfortable enough in a third language to do that. I can feel a difference with Esperanto after just a few dozen hours of study, and I'm working toward listing it as "speaks" by the end of the year.

Edit: Lernu's old courses, including Ana Pana, can be found in the new site's Media Library under the tag "Esperanto learning materials."

[river]

Most of my time has been spent with German lately. Watching Let's Plays (more on that later) and Türkisch für Anfänger, rereading The Chronicles of Narnia, working through the Duolingo tree, looking up massive amounts of vocabulary...speaking of which, LEO has lacked definitions for more than a few words I've looked up recently. dict.cc has been filling in the gaps.

An interesting Deutsche Welle video I watched: Wenn Anderssein gefährlich ist: Homosexuelle in der Türkei, reported by Gunnar Köhne and Kristina Karasu. The video was released in early July of this year.

[river]

I've been studying, but I had to retool my approach. In September I got tired of always feeling pulled between three or four languages at a time, and I decided to drop Mandarin for the rest of the year to be able to focus on German and Esperanto (not to mention work and school...y'know, the other parts of my life). Time that I spent studying Mandarin was not automatically filled with German and Esperanto instead, but it has been a relaxing couple of months and it's actually gotten me excited about going back to Mandarin in January.

I've also been looking at refreshing my Spanish, which I'll need next year (I'll save the whys and wherefores for another post). I have my first official italki lesson tomorrow morning, so I'll be preparing for that later tonight.

This is also the first day of the trial month of my friend and I only speaking Esperanto to each other. Our goal is to do so in January, but we'll get our feet wet this month.

I found this site earlier today: Grimm Grammar. It's a beginner/lower intermediate site for learning or reviewing German grammar. The examples are short paragraphs about Grimm Brothers' characters living in a castle in the 21st century. The website reminded me of Tex's French Grammar. Turns out they're both offerings of the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL) at the University of Texas at Austin. Lots of resources on their page: Featured Materials.

[river]

First lesson on italki went quite well. My Spanish is worse than I thought (probably around B1, which is both an extremely useful and very limited level) but this was the first time in a long while that I've gotten extensive corrections on my speech. My friends or the conversation partners I've had for Spanish always tell me that my Spanish is perfect, which it definitely isn't, but I was willing to rest on my laurels.

During the lesson my teacher wrote a lot of notes in the comment field and also kept asking me questions, which, in my experience, does not happen in conversation exchanges. I can be shy or sometimes lazy and often let my interlocutor do most of the talking, which is great for their English and not so much for whatever language I happen to be practicing. My teacher was pretty relentless today and we talked briefly about all sorts of topics (languages, work, family, the election). As well, after today's lesson, I took the time to write out the corrected sentences in my language notebook, which I rarely did after my free conversation exchanges.

You could say that "you get what you pay for" applies to me here. Not necessarily in terms of the actual price (my teacher's lessons are dirt cheap), but in terms of the motivation that shelling out money for a lesson gives me. I read in someone else's log (possibly qeadz's? I've been enjoying his Korean log) about their reluctance to spend ten bucks or less on a language lesson despite being willing to blow almost as much on pricey coffee drinks on a regular basis. I'm the same way: I put off adding credits to my italki account for a long time but spend all sorts of money on takeout and tchotchkes. I didn't want to spend money on something I could get for free, either via conversation exchanges or by earning credits giving my own lessons and thereby not having to pay for my own, but I've reached the point where my time is more valuable than paying for an hour or two once a week. Now the trouble will be avoiding booking a dozen lessons, because I got a lot out of this one and have bookmarked a bunch of other teachers I'd like to try.

[river]

Well, it's been a long time. I became ill shortly after I wrote my last post and had to put language learning on the backseat. I'm better now, and these past months I've been exploring how to incorporate language learning in my life in a way that balances progress with variety and doesn't get me bogged down by perfectionism. That meant dropping Mandarin (again); I found it too hard to make decent progress in a Category V language when I studied it alongside a handful of others. Variety is covered by studying German, Spanish, and Esperanto at once. German is officially my favorite language, a high level of Spanish would be wildly useful in my career, and I have a couple of friends with whom I only speak (well, text) in Esperanto. So the motivation is all there, and even three languages seems manageable since they're "easy" ones.

Lately I've been focusing on listening in Spanish and German, which has been a boon to all my skills. While my perfectionist tendencies still arise in my need to write down every single new vocab word I hear, I don't feel compelled to look up and study every word before seeking out new listening material, which is a big change for me. And I've found podcasts and YouTube content that have gotten me genuinely hooked.

In Esperanto I've made a lot of super flashcards. I'm using the technique in Esperanto for two reasons. One, the language has a small vocabulary, so I won't be making flashcards for eternity. And two, I'm learning the language alongside a friend, so we can play the game the maker of the video below describes, in which two people swap decks and try to earn back their flashcards by correctly translating five to six terms on each card.