Tuckamore: slow growing and gnarly (Japanese, French & Thai)

[dampingwire]

In サザエさん, they spoke slow enough, with text-book pronunciation, about daily life in Japan. I learned so much from this one show — linguistically and culturally. If it’s possible to get a hold of サザエさん outside of Japan, I highly recommend it for beginners.

Amazon Prime in the UK refused to acknowledge its existence and the Japanese site refused to acknowledge mine There's a reasonable number of episodes available on youtube.

[tuckamore]

In サザエさん, they spoke slow enough, with text-book pronunciation, about daily life in Japan. I learned so much from this one show — linguistically and culturally. If it’s possible to get a hold of サザエさん outside of Japan, I highly recommend it for beginners.

Amazon Prime in the UK refused to acknowledge its existence and the Japanese site refused to acknowledge mine There's a reasonable number of episodes available on youtube.

Good to hear that at least there are some episodes on Youtube. Years and year ago, I remember searching online and coming up fairly empty handed.

[tuckamore]

Thai

I have 3 more lessons of Linguaphone that I am determined to finish by the end of the month. That means, by the end of this week. No more procrastinating. I am definitely not overlearning this material. I’m spending the bulk of my time on the dialogues. A reason I’m getting bored with this course is that a handful of vocabulary words, those which I don’t care to spend too much effort to learn right now and which were only used 1x in one exercise, are coming back to haunt me in these later lessons. It’s a killjoy.

One of the reasons why I get frustrated with a lot of textbooks: each new chapter expects complete mastery of the previous chapters with little review in subsequent lessons. I need review — beyond just going back and reviewing the same boing chapter ad nauseum. It tries my patience. Which results in me dropping the course or flitting among resources, neither of which is good for progress.

I would do well if intro textbooks had corresponding readers that repeated the words and structures that they specifically selected to include in their lessons and where the introduction of these words and structures mirrored that of their textbook. Corresponding audio would be a bonus.

The Maanii Readers, on the other hand, are a joy! I know, I said this last week and the week before. I’m so lucky to have this resource at my disposal. The repetition of words is outstanding. I’m being exposed to and internalizing so much. And, everything is within the context of a story, which seems to make it easier for me to latch onto new words. It’s almost like what I mention above, except in reverse — SEAsite took an established reader and made a web textbook from it. Are most books designed to teach kids how to read this repetitive? If so, it got me thinking that using readers made for native speakers may the way to go for learning opaque languages, except, unfortunately, that they wouldn’t come with audio or translations.

ก็ and ให้: two little buggers that I knew from the beginning would take significant exposure to understand. Thanks to Maanii, I think I’ve got a good feel for ก็. I wouldn’t be able to use it like I should, but I’m understanding its intended meaning and use. However, I’m still grasping at ให้. Some moments, I think, “I’ve got this nailed,” but then I see another sentence and I’m at a loss again for which of its multiple meanings applies.

Japanese

Last week, I mentioned that the book I was reading was easier to get a start on than the other ones I read in this series. But, surprisingly, the text is more dense than in the later publications. More description, less dialogue and even the dialogues are often longer narratives. I’m glad I wasn’t introduced to this series with this particular book, otherwise I may have given up. It was a bit of a slog at times. The last third of the book, however, became more conversational and I breezed through it. Wanting to know ‘who done it’ adds a nice boost at the end, too.

I’m continuing along quite nicely with my vocabulary studies using Kanji in Context. I’m not learning any new kanji with this activity, just vocabulary. I’m seeing great synergy between learning new words/being reminded of certain words, and then seeing them in my reading.

French

With just a wee bit of effort, I feel like my listening skills are back to where they used to be. Hold the applause. It wasn’t a high level to begin with and still pales in comparison with reading. But, at least I’m getting the global message, even if all the words aren’t clear.

I’m also getting the itch to do some proper studying again with French. Mostly because, compared to Japanese and Thai, the return on time invested is tremendously high. And, that in and of itself is a great motivator. But, I will refrain until a listening habit is fully realized.

[tuckamore]

After two weeks of logging the pages I read in Japanese, shoutout to Nandemonai and his tadoku app, the itch to tally how much I’ve read the first half of 2019 has gotten to me.
The grand total: 3791 pages!! I’m stoked If I include what I’ve read over the last couple years, I estimate that I’ve read ~5000 pages. These page counts don’t include readers or websites or intensive reading or other misc reading. Just books for pleasure.

I still have a loooong way to go until I’m at a level where I would like to be. Even so, if I compare my reading skill at the beginning of the year with where I am now, I have made unbelievable gains in just 6 months: speed, comfort, anticipating words and phrases (correctly), not getting lost (as much) in multi-clause sentences, etc. Granted, the books I’ve read are light reads, the type of books I’d probably knock off in afternoon or two if they were written in English. And, over half these pages are from the same series, same author. I don’t see this as a drawback per se, I just wanted to qualify my achievement.

There was a recent conversation on Lawyer&Mom’s log about getting to a point where you are as comfortable reading in a foreign language as in your native language. I’ve never thought about reading in a second language this way and can fathom a time when I can read in French as comfortably as I read in English. I’m not there yet, but it seems attainable. It’s on the horizon.

In contrast, I cannot imagine this feat even being possible in Japanese. Seems like it would require magic. But, I’m ready to prove myself wrong. Cavesa suggests roughly 10,000 pages for this transition. Let’s use this 10,000 pages as a benchmark. I suspect, that if this outcome is even plausible for me, Japanese would require a difficulty factor of at least 2-3x for 20,000 - 30,000 pages. So, I’ll start the first phase of my challenge with a 10,000 page goal and we’ll see where I stand.

First things first. If I want to improve, I need to eventually switch authors, which will likely introduce plenty of speed bumps. But, I’m a chicken and will continue with Akagawa Jirou until I’ve read the few remaining books I have easy access to. This cowardliness right here is why my personal difficulty factor may be >3x.

Books read in 2019:
（１３）三毛猫のホームズの冬（赤川次郎）
（１２）三毛猫のホームズの推理 （赤川次郎）
（１１）三毛猫のホームズの卒業論文（赤川次郎）
（１０）三毛猫のホームズの家出（赤川次郎）
（９）三毛猫のホームズのフーガ（赤川次郎）
（８）三毛猫のホームズの黄昏ホテル（赤川次郎）
（７）三毛猫のホームズの騎士道（赤川次郎）
（６）三毛猫のホームズの駈落ち（赤川次郎）
（５）闇にひそむ影　（ジョン ベレアーズ）
（４）ルイスと不思議の時計　（ジョン ベレアーズ）
（３）時をかける少女　（筒井 康隆）
（２）ピーターと影泥棒（上）（デイヴ・バリー/リドリー・ピアスン）
（１）ピーターと星の守護団 （下）（デイヴ・バリー/リドリー・ピアスン）

In other news…

I might be imaging it, but I think my French listening skills are better than before I took a long hiatus from listening. If it is not my imagination, it’s either because all the reading I’ve done in the meantime has boosted my listening or taking breaks really can lead to some unexpected advances. I wager that any noticeable progress is not from my activities these past few week. Instead, I think these past weeks were just getting that itsy-bitsy part of my brain that knows a little French back into listening mode. The transition over a matter of weeks went something like this: “yikes, I know this is French, but @*$!?” to “OK, this is familiar territory. I haven’t regressed much during my break” to “Wow! I cannot believe my ears.”

I’ve wrapped up Linguaphone Thai. I half-assed the last 3 chapters, but I just needed to get it off my plate. Someday, I may revisit them to do them properly...or not.

[tuckamore]

I have a dilemma.

Recently, I confronted myself with the question, why am I not studying my most favourite language? This language is Swahili.

The answer is involved, but has a lot to do with timing. I happened to be in Japan, studying Japanese on my own when I began to understand how to learn a language. This is key, as for me the learning curve for learning how to learn a language was steeper than actually learning the language. So, I purposely put Swahili off until after I made solid gains in Japanese. In hindsight, this was a wise decision (regardless of how long I’ve been at Japanese and have put off Swahili — there’s a reason ‘slow growing’ is in the title of my log). The more relevant question being, how, then, did French and Thai sneak in? For these languages, it boils down to happenstance. The victim of this happenstance is my relationship with Swahili.

My dilemma is now that I’ve point-blank asked myself this question, what am I going to do about it? I’m satisfied with how I can juggle 3 languages. But, 4? I don’t know. I have some decisions to make.

The first decision is already made ― I will begin Swahili in 2020. Otherwise, years turn into decades, decades turn into half-centuries, and half-centuries turn into never. And, I don’t want that.

Pending decisions: Do I ditch a language? Japanese is not negotiable. It’s my forever-language. Fair enough. Then, do I drop French or Thai? I don’t want to, but if I have to... Which one? French, perhaps? It would be the easiest one to resurrect. But, then again, I don’t really have any goals with Thai? I’m just having fun with wherever it takes me. Ah, but what about all the effort I’ve already put into Thai? もったいない! Could I manage 4 languages? Or, would I just get frustrated with the lack of progress in all of them, in turn zapping my motivation for any of them? What if I start Swahili slowly, like I sort of did with Thai? Only about about 15-20 min/day and see how things progress from there? I will be a false beginner, Take 3, so this may have merit. Or, for the next 6 months, do I put a lot of effort into Thai to get it up to a decent level where it will be easier to have exposure on the fly? Then again, I’d probably still be at a level that would require continuous attention. Maybe it would be smarter if I had a blitz with French instead? I could probably make relatively huge gains in French for the same amount of effort? Propelling me to a competency level that is easier to maintain? To do this, though, I would have to back off a bit on my Japanese reading. But, is this good? I’m in the zone with reading right now? yadda, yadda, yadda....

This is not wanderlust. I’ve felt its lure. This is more serious. Swahili has been a aspiration long before Japanese.

[tuckamore]

I found a great new resource for Thai over the weekend. While heading over to http://www.selfstudythai.com to see if I feel ready with work with the VOA articles provided on that site (an aside, this site is extremely well done), there was an update on the main page about a new project called StudyThaiSubs. It has line-by-line audio with Thai and English subs from Thai movies. This new site is filling in a much needed resource for Thai leaners.

A couple of other golden resources that I’ve found over the last few weeks and are in my resource queue (no particular order).
Score #1: See above for http://www.studythaisubs.com.
Score #2: http://www.sealang.net has parallel text for the Wizard of Oz and the Youtube channel, Thai Audio Books for the Blind, has the audio for the Wizard of Oz. So, when we put these sources together, we have a Thai parallel reader with audio! It’s a good 4.5+ hr of audio. Seems like a good fit for L-R. Bonus, I’d love to read the book, anyway. We were read parts of it when I was in grade 1, and ever since I’ve been curious about the book but never acted on it. I find sealang.net a bit buggy to work with, but it is a treasure chest of Thai-English parallel texts. There are other great books on Thai Audio Books for the Blind, but I’ll start (whenever that may be) with the one that I have parallel text for.
Score #3: The same http://www.sealang.net also has parallel text for the readings in Mary Haas’ Thai Reader, and http://seasite.niu.edu/Thai/ has the audio. So, again, scraping together what’s available from two websites, we have parallel text with audio for a graded reader. Seasite.net also has isolated audio for new words, which I’m finding helpful. I started working with the first unit over the weekend. My run with Thai has slowed down, so it will take a while to get through this resource.
Score #4: I have had my eyes on SEAIllustrations created by @bakunin, available over at http://www.aakanee.com. His website has audio, Thai transcripts, and images to help the listener follow the story. Great, right? What else do you need? Well, the cherry on the top is that http://www.thai-language.com has English translations for some half-dozen of these stories!

Common dominator among all the resources: Thai audio + Thai transcript + English. This will the magic combination for Thai for me. (This also holds true for the Maanii Readers and VOA articles on selfstudythai.com, which I didn’t include in the list above because I’ve know about them for while.) There is enough here to keep me busy for a long time and hopefully advance my Thai at the same time. And, it’s all free! With access to these sorts of high quality free resources, I cannot complain about the relative lack of beyond-beginner traditional courses.

Still moving along with reading in Japanese and vocabulary learning from Kanji in Context. Oh, I found a bit of an annoyance with Excel and Japanese input. I started to keep track of what I’m reading in Excel and the sum() function does not recognize numbers if I use Japanese input to type the page numbers. Minor annoyance, as I have to remember to switch the keyboard back to English after typing the title and author in Japanese.

Continuing off of last week’s post of my options for adding another language, I am leaning towards putting some solid effort into French over the next half-year to bring it up a couple notches. I’m still working out my game plan. My listening habit is fully developed. I still suck, but daily exposure is a step forward. There is an Alliance Française around the block from me. Ah, OK, I exaggerate; it’s actually 3 short city blocks. Anyways, it’s on my to-do list to check out their physical library and see if it is worth the membership fee. The convenience cannot be beat — closer than my neighbourhood library (which is 1 block beyond).

[tuckamore]

The last week has been more of the same with my language learning/exposure. It just dawned on my over the weekend that summer = reading, while winter = watching. This is a simplification as I’m not a big TV/movie/etc watcher any time of the year, but I definitely do more watching during the winter than summer.

I’m on to my next book in Japanese — 血とバラ written by, no surprise here, 赤川次郎。I may be wrong, but I think it is composed of 5 short stories. It is a denser book in both terms of language (at least this first story) and density of text on the page. I’m finding the change of pace in language refreshing — right now it’s mostly conversation between two older individuals and they consistently use a lot more keigo than any two characters in any of the previous books I’ve read. If I wanted to focus on advancing my keigo skills, I think I would seek out books like this where characters use keigo a lot. Just 25ish pages in and I feel my Japanese thought process (what little of if I have) becoming more and more respectful and humble.

The book I finished over the weekend was also a refreshing change in the type of language used. The main characters were 3 young sisters, and right off the bat, it had a different vibe in terms of language use than the previous books. I enjoyed it. Although, as with almost all the Akagawa Jirou books that I’ve read, the ending was a cliché and the motives far-fetched.

The lesson I’m learning here is that it’s beneficial and enjoyable to be exposed to different registers. And, this is all from one author. Just wait until I switch authors!

I wonder if more exposure like this could eventually make me feel the different registers rather than just knowing them. For example, I know when to use and can use -ます/です/etc versus plain/casual forms appropriately (for the most part), but I don’t really feel the difference. Let’s say I’m watching something in Japanese and someone junior is questioned/scolded about their use of tameguchi towards a senior. I don’t even notice this language use until after it is brought to my attention with the reprimand. I would love to feel this difference intuitively. It just dawned on me as I write the above that I should declare doing exactly this as one of my long term goal with Japanese. If I were ever to accomplish it, I would declare unbridled success in Japanese.

I started to notice an interesting phenomenon this past week when listening to French. When I hear a phrase or word that was used in Assimil — the Assimil voice actors’ line play vividly in my head. I haven’t listened to Assimil for over a month and even then I quickly went through the book & audio as a refresher. But, back when I was thoroughly studying with it, I listened to the dialogues repeatedly, over learning them. It’s interesting that weeks after my last contact with Assimil that these lines are vividly popping up when triggered by listening to something else in French. Makes me wonder about the possible virtue of over learning some audio material for learners. I think the animated voice acting of French without Toil is key though — it creates an emotional connection. I haven’t heard the likes of this sort of well-done, dramatization in other courses, though.

I never experienced the above with Japanese but I’ve never used much audio geared to learners in my studies. Man, this begs the question, what did I use...? Was it just native materials? .... I think it was. Wow! I never realized this until just now. I hardly used any audio resources made for learners in my Japanese journey. The notable exception would be the audio portion of the Read Real Japanese books. But, I wouldn’t put those recordings in the same league as audio from courses such as Assimil, as they are basically just audio books. No wonder my listening is stronger than my reading — I just dived right in. How brave of me!

I should heed this reflective discovery and dive stronger into native Thai materials. No sense holding back as I’ve history under my belt. (It blows my mind that I never realized until this very moment that I hadn’t used learner-geared audio for Japanese. Clearly I don’t reflect enough!) With Thai right now, I’m focusing on Mary Haas’ Thai Reader resources I described in my last post. In her log, @Morgana makes the astute observation that memorizing a foreign script does not result in actually being able to read in that language. She justifiably calls it a trick. This is where I am in Thai. Yes, I can read, but super slowly as I sound everything, but the most common words, out one syllable at a time. Drives me crazy when I see things like you can learn to read Thai or hiragana in two weeks! Yes, you can learn the script. Yes, it is a prerequisite to reading. But, that doesn’t mean you can actually read. Reading in a foreign script takes repetition and exposure, and thus time. The misnomer of knowing components of script = reading is a pet-peeve of mine.

While I’m at it, I’ll voice another pet-peeve regarding learning Thai. If you google “learn Thai tones” 9 out 10 results will recommend learning to read in Thai as the way to learn the tones. But, learning to read does NOT equate to learning Thai tones. The tones are aural. You have to learn to hear them. Yes, if you learn to read, you will be able to name which tone a word has. But, that doesn’t transfer over to actually knowing the tone. Reading in Thai will only help with assimilating tones of new words after you know what Thai tones sound like. It baffles me how much ‘learn to read Thai’ is promoted as the answer for learning Thai tones. The answer should be something more akin to ’listen to more (comprehensible) Thai’.

With that I will step off my soapbox.

[tuckamore]

French

I had a couple great workouts in listening to French numbers the past week. Let’s me state straight off that I’m horrible at French numbers. I (infrequently) play with the app Foreign Numbers and score almost perfectly every test I do for Japanese and Thai, but fail miserably at the French. Anyways, lately, I’ve been listening to the podcast Sur les épaules de Darwin from FranceInter. My level is at a point where I can follow the podcast, but, for lack of another way to describe it, I wouldn’t say I understand. How well I can follow is a function of how familiar I am with the subject. In the program he sometimes unravels scientific discoveries in sequence giving the dates of findings. There were a couple episodes where I knew the publications well enough that if I could latch onto the years, I came fairly close to easy listening. And, this gave me incentive to really listen hard on the years given. Usually with numbers I cannot be bothered to listen so closely. It hurts my brain. In one ear, out the other. Which explains why I suck. So, this is progress.

Thai

Predictably, by devoting more time to French, contact with Thai is suffering. For the last 2 weeks I’ve only touched Thai over the weekend. It’s not ideal, but the reality is that this may be how it is for Thai for the foreseeable future. There are only so many hours in the day and I really want to level up my French over the next half-year or so.

I worked with the Thai Reader text and audio over the weekend. I learned that if I copy the sentence-by-sentence parallel text from SEAlang Lab and paste it into Excel, it becomes so much easier to use and the format is perfect. I should mention, though, when I do this, it automatically puts spaces between words. This has its pros and cons. Pros, of course, are that it makes it much easier to read and know where the word boundaries are; potential cons are that I will get use to these spaces and it will slow me down when I move onto untampered Thai text. Because of the ease of using these texts in Excel, it’s a trade-off I’m comfortable with for the time being. Also, when I first study this material I use the audio, vocabulary list and text from the SEAsite, which is written with normal spacing.

I’m still finding my way with how I want to deal with new vocabulary. Right now, I’m experimenting with underlining and bolding new vocabulary in the spreadsheet, printing the parallel text out, and then going back to review each short reading every so often, really focusing on the underlined vocabulary. In this way, the vocabulary is reviewed in the context I learned it in, I have a quick access to verification with the parallel text, and I might even be able to squeeze some review in during the week. Bonus, will be if I can work in the audio during some reviews, too. We’ll see how it goes. I’m borrowing this idea from when I was using French for Reading, where the author suggests just this — in each sentence, circle words you don’t know and review those words often. For the first unit of Thai Reader, I have ~70 new words from 5 short paragraph-long stories of ~600 words total. Seems like a perfect level for me. The question that I’m asking myself is whether I should do something else with this vocabulary list, for example write them out in a list, or make my own sentences, etc. Or, because of limited time, is it best if I just keep moving forward and make sure I review enough rather than get bogged down with the same handful of words for an entire month?

Japanese

Reading in Japanese is still going strong. (I added one of those nifty trackers in my signature to monitor my first goal of reaching 一万 pages in Japanese. I’m over 5000 for the year.）I’m currently reading 黒い森の記憶 by 赤川次郎. So far it is very different than any of the dozen or so of the other books that I’ve read by him. The first half is much more descriptive as the main character is a man that lives a solitary life in the woods. There is hardly any conversation going on. Fortunately for me at my current reading level, the descriptions are more of the run-of-the-mill type and are not very literary — descriptions of his actions, thoughts, daily routine, etc. They are easy to follow. We are now getting to more dialogue into the second half of the book.

I’m at the point where I still don’t know boat loads of vocabulary that I come across, but, with the aid of context and kanji, I’m picking up a boat load of new words just the same. But, this is in reading only. That is, I don’t know how they are pronounced. Kanji is bitter sweet in this way. I’m debating whether it’s worth interrupting my reading to take the time to look up how to read these new words or to just keep moving on like I’ve been doing. I mean, it’s not like I’m totally clueless, I can make a couple educated guesses at the reading, but I have these nagging doubts. Or, maybe it would just be better to listen to some audiobooks while reading along?

[MorkTheFiddle]

I might be imaging it, but I think my French listening skills are better than before I took a long hiatus from listening. If it is not my imagination, it’s either because all the reading I’ve done in the meantime has boosted my listening or taking breaks really can lead to some unexpected advances. I wager that any noticeable progress is not from my activities these past few week. Instead, I think these past weeks were just getting that itsy-bitsy part of my brain that knows a little French back into listening mode. The transition over a matter of weeks went something like this: “yikes, I know this is French, but @*$!?” to “OK, this is familiar territory. I haven’t regressed much during my break” to “Wow! I cannot believe my ears.”

Nope, you're probably not imagining it. Same thing happened to me once, including the "Wow! I cannot believe my ears" , and it has happened to others, too. The reasons are obscure.

[tuckamore]

Nope, you're probably not imagining it. Same thing happened to me once, including the "Wow! I cannot believe my ears" , and it has happened to others, too. The reasons are obscure.

Aren't our brains wonderful?