Ingaræð's Language Labyrinth (DE/FR/RU...)

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blaurebell
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Re: Ingaræð's Yellow Brick Road (DE/FR/RU...)

Postby blaurebell » Tue May 02, 2017 11:20 am

Ingaræð wrote:Well, that's defintitely a step up from playing Spyro the Dragon in French and pretending that it's productive...

Seriously, though, all your intensive receptive-skills work seems like semi-immersion, which has to be a good thing!


Haha, at least Spyro the dragon has some dialogue :D Not quite as productive as some point and click game, but it's a start! :D

And yeah, semi immersion is definitely the aim of having fun mostly in my B2 languages. That way I can relax and learn at the same time. It's probably less effective to do it with two languages at once, but I think it helps nonetheless! If only I had my Russian already at this stage!
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Ingaræð
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Re: Ingaræð's Yellow Brick Road (DE/FR/RU...)

Postby Ingaræð » Wed May 31, 2017 12:10 pm

I could have updated my log over a week ago, but every time I thought about doing it, I decided to go do some language study instead. :D

After a week mid-month of not having done anything with LWT, I finally pushed through to the end of La Belle et la Bête. The audiobook is just over 30 minutes long, but it took me 25 hours and 15 minutes to go through the whole thing in LWT! I'm glad I started with a short story rather than jumping into a novel: it's a bit of a slog entering all the words that I already know, so the end was at least actually in sight the whole time! In an effort to keep things simple and efficient, I don't use status 2 or 4, and in the "romanization" box I put the definite article and/or the infinitive verb. I enter tags for tenses until I recognise them straight away.

I also started watching Kaboul Kitchen, but with English subs as I didn't want to miss plot points... :oops: I dropped subs for Kaamelott a while ago, and I can hear almost all the words, I'm just not getting the meaning. Some episodes I can understand most of the plot (but few of the jokes), others I don't have a clue what's going on. But overall, there's definitely some improvement in my listening comprehension! :D

About 2 weeks ago, I had some serious Italian wanderlust. Apparently, watching the Giro d'Italia not only makes you want to pick up Assimil, but also pack your bags and up sticks to the Italian countryside! Eventually I gave in, and picked up Italian without toil. 5 minutes later, my brain was like, "ok, let's go back to French now". :roll:

I finished La Belle et la Bête 10 days ago. What have I been doing since...?

...Russian! Yep, I caved. :mrgreen: French was feeling like a bit of a chore at that point, and I basically thought, "stuff it, I wanna do Russian!" :lol: So, I've returned to Russian without toil. Last October/November I made it to lesson 24, so I've been working my way through a review of those. I'm surprised and pleased by how much I can remember!

How I'm reviewing... I've been inspired by smallwhite's intensive listening method and Ari's Chinesepod method. First, I kind of L-R the lesson, with added comparison of the Russian/English sentences, and looking at the notes. Then I just listen to the lesson on repeat for a while - maybe for half an hour, maybe an hour, maybe more, depending on what I'm 'multi-tasking' with. The goal is basically a lot of repeat listens. (I feel like a language magpie: instead of shiny things, I pinch other people's methods! :lol: )

So far, I think this is proving to be effective. I feel like my listening is better than last time, and I'm starting to picture words in Cyrillic, rather than my brain's own personal transliteration. Initially, I wasn't happy with not completely automatizing each lesson, but I've realised that I shouldn't worry about that right now: let my brain absorb whatever it can, keep moving forward, and the subsequent repetitions/waves will take care of the rest. At this point, I'm aiming for a minimum of 3 lessons a day. Yesterday I finished with lesson 22, so that should mean I'll start a brand new lesson later today. Yay! :D

Interestingly, FwT, GwT and IwT recommend one lesson a day. RwT, however: "You may very well study several lessons together, if you wish or have the time to". :shock: Basically: crazy enough to take on Russian? Go hard, or go home! :lol:
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blaurebell
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Re: Ingaræð's Yellow Brick Road (DE/FR/RU...)

Postby blaurebell » Wed May 31, 2017 1:01 pm

Ingaræð wrote:Basically: crazy enough to take on Russian? Go hard, or go home!


Welcome to the madness :D I'm taking it easy right now and only doing LWT for Russian! I burn out super fast otherwise.
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Ingaræð
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Re: Ingaræð's Yellow Brick Road (DE/FR/RU...)

Postby Ingaræð » Sun Jul 02, 2017 12:43 pm

I finished lesson 38 of Russian without toil, then my brain was unable to cope with any more (it's so annoying how much female hormones mess with cognition!). :roll: At that point, I wasn't really remembering the new vocabulary, but I feel like I was internalizing the grammar/syntax side of things pretty well. In the extra exercises for practicing the cases, I couldn't really identify the cases by name, but I always understood the meaning of the sentence first time. I'm happy with that, as at this point I'm aiming for instinctive comprehension rather than linguistic analysis. Hopefully my brain is now busy consolidating all the new stuff I've learned, and will be raring to go when I next pick up Russian again!

I also watched the first episode of Кухня (with English subs) and 20 episodes of Маша и Медведь (with Russian subs), which is totally adorable! I'm wondering if 'ой' is something that only kids say, or can adults use it too? I quite like it as an interjection. I also found the 520-odd episodes of Sunset Beach that were dubbed into Russian (and watched the first 7). This soap was huge when it was broadcast in the UK, and I can remember pretty much all of the storylines. So, I have 360+ hours of 'so bad/bonkers it's awesome' TV to sink my teeth into! :D

Mid-June I suddenly had the urge to do some German. I haven't done any since last November, when I was using German without toil and German with Ease (I could have sworn I'd also reached Pimsleur German IV, but I don't appear to have made a note about that...). I've revised GwT to lesson 41, then carried on to lesson 61. I've sort of stopped it over the last week or so: the lessons in the middle of the book have several shorter texts rather than one long one, and although they're still enjoyable in terms of content, it's easier to 'get into' one longer text.

A couple of weeks ago I prepared a DE-EN parallel text of the first Discworld novel using LF Aligner, which is an amazing bit of kit (I've also grabbed some of Farkas Translations's pre-prepared texts). I happened to have re-read this book earlier in the year, so the story is still fresh in my mind. I intended to do L-R with it, but after reading the Best approach to learning more words thread, I was umm-ing and ahh-ing (not that I'm developing a pattern here, of course... :oops: ). I tried LWT, but it felt a bit labourious. So I've decided to go old school, and am mainly using my paper dictionary with the parallel text and audiobook (and the occasional internet look-up). It took 2h 15 min to do the first page. :shock: I think that's down to the combination of descriptive language, long sentences, and Pratchett being difficult to translate. I dread to think how long it would have taken if I didn't already know the grammar! I've decided to use the graded readers I have at the same time, as they're a doddle in comparison and will improve my reading ability.

Despite the 'toil', I'm really enjoying this method. It's nice to be doing German again, and it always feels very familiar to me - like English, but with a shedload of words that I don't know. Similar to reading a technical document in English on a subject I'm unfamiliar with. And I'm catching myself thinking in German without consciously trying to.

I'm also watching Kommissar Rex (I think Rex is almost as adorable as Маша :D ). I've discovered that having English subtitles appear 1.5-2 seconds early will miraculously turn most of the dialogue into comprehensible input! It's too fast for me to be able to internalize new vocabulary, but one season in, I'm starting to decipher the Wiener accent at least. :D

And after 7 months, I've finally covered the three languages in my log title! :lol:

(Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was on TV yesterday. I've come to the conclusion that if I can't even sit through the whole film, struggling through the books for language-learning purposes is probably not worth the time or effort. There's plenty of other literature out there that I'd rather read!)
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Re: Ingaræð's Yellow Brick Road (DE/FR/RU...)

Postby aaleks » Sun Jul 02, 2017 5:01 pm

I'm wondering if 'ой' is something that only kids say, or can adults use it too?

No, it isn't a kids word, adults use it too, but probably mostly women. It's just a exclamation, like 'oops' (the funny thing about modern Russian language is that in our daily life we use the both words: 'ой' and 'упс' (oops) :D ). But 'ой' can has other meanings, for example like here*: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpvyZrkattI at 2:06 min (before милый)

*Don't pay an attention to the video itself. It's just a fan-art based on a movie of 1987.
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Ingaræð
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Re: Ingaræð's Yellow Brick Road (DE/FR/RU...)

Postby Ingaræð » Sun Jul 02, 2017 6:04 pm

aaleks wrote:No, it isn't a kids word, adults use it too, but probably mostly women.

Cool, thank you. I like the sound of the word, but I wouldn't want to use it without knowing whether I'd get funny looks. :? :lol:

I definitely need to work on my listening comprehension, because I can't hear an 'ой' in that video... :oops: It's weird but funny how they randomly start singing the background music!
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Re: Ingaræð's Yellow Brick Road (DE/FR/RU...)

Postby aaleks » Sun Jul 02, 2017 7:20 pm

Ingaræð wrote:I definitely need to work on my listening comprehension, because I can't hear an 'ой' in that video... :oops:

It's really hard to hear an 'ой' there, because she is simply breathing it out. I guess the video could be too hard for non-native speakers, but I just wanted to use it as an example of usage 'ой' in a different way than it's used in Маша и медведь :)
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Ingaræð
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Re: Ingaræð's Language Labyrinth (DE/FR/RU...)

Postby Ingaræð » Thu Jul 13, 2017 3:26 pm

Another log name change: I'm chopping and changing what I'm doing all the time, switching to new methods, going back to previous ones, and I still have no idea whether I'm going in the right direction... Although the foes hindering my progression are not David Bowie-shaped. :D Plus, I think I've only managed to sit through The Wizard of Oz once, whereas Labyrinth is a really good film.

My per-page reading time has (mercifully!) quickly reduced from 2h15 to 0h53-1h25, depending on the amount of description and dialogue. I'm pleasantly surprised by my reading comprehension - not in terms of vocabulary, but in how all the words are connected to one another. Definitely easier than French, in that respect.

I decided to use LWT 'alongside' the parallel text, as I want to keep a rough track of my vocabulary size, and it also functions as a recall test. I'm actually remembering new words! :D But now I don't really want to spend hours upon hours re-reading Die Farben der Magie before I've even finished it once (after which a second reading should be much quicker), so I'm dropping the parallel text. I also feel like I have proportionally too much English in my head when using it, and as the translation can differ quite a bit from the original, I'm not sure how suitable Pratchett really is for L-R. LWT is also better than a manual dictionary on days where my working/short-term memory is less than great. :roll:

The episodes of Kommissar Rex which were filmed in autumn/winter are quite refreshing in the 'heatwaves' we're having! My listening comprehension is improving slowly but surely, though I definitely need to log more hours as my vocabulary expands. I gave Radio Garden a whirl the other day - a fantastic site, if a bit of a pain to use when you don't want to allow scripts globally. I can pick up the gist of news headlines or discussion topics, but not much detail. Weather and traffic reports are easier, along with cheesy radio adverts. :lol: At least A1 graded-reader audiobooks are easy! I should probably have a nose around Deutsche Welle too. I did watch a few episodes of Deutsch Plus (ah, the days of recording educational programmes at 3 a.m. on VHS!), but I'm not sure I can suffer the immense irritation from Nico's naivety again... :roll: I may persevere with it on days when my brain is less co-operative.

Last year when I was working on my pronunciation, I think the only sound I was really having an issue with was /ɐ/ (my brain had obviously lost the ability to distinguish it from /ə/). It's definitely clicking now though, both in terms of pronunciation and listening, so in the future I think I'll just need to work on accent reduction. The other thing I need to work on is pausing when subvocalising/reading aloud: I automatically pause at every comma. Hopefully listening and reading at the same time will go some way to fixing this.

I had quick read-through of Gabriel Wyner's book Fluent Forever. I'm not sure I could front-load vocab like that (although I might experiment one day), or that I have the patience to make so many cards like that myself. Although I think drilling gender and plural forms will be a useful exercise for nouns whose meaning I already know. So yay for LWT exporting terms to Anki with just a few clicks of a button! :D (I also like the sound of Smallwhite's suggestion for drilling conjugations.)

I'm also having my annual 'I ought to learn Welsh, but I'd rather do another language right now' thoughts. I remember so little of what we were taught in school (part-teaching method, part-classrooms with strong fluorescent lighting :roll:), I guess it would be a good candidate for a proper L-R or Wyner experiment...
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Re: Ingaræð's Language Labyrinth (DE/FR/RU...)

Postby blaurebell » Thu Jul 13, 2017 4:20 pm

My Wyner experiment with Russian went to hell pretty fast, because Russian has oh so much vocabulary and it turns out that I hate anki with a passion. I do like his pronunciation first approach though, that helped me a lot with French and it's still helping with Russian! His pronunciation trainer is usually my source for minimal pairs listening drills.
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: 8 / 72 Duolingo reverse Spanish -> German

Ingaræð
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Re: Ingaræð's Language Labyrinth (DE/FR/RU...)

Postby Ingaræð » Thu Jul 13, 2017 5:19 pm

blaurebell wrote:My Wyner experiment with Russian went to hell pretty fast, because Russian has oh so much vocabulary and it turns out that I hate anki with a passion.

Yeah, maybe not an ideal combination there! :lol: My brain loves repetitive stuff, so I think I'll be fine with Anki as long I make sure I'm not spending too much time with it. I did a test run of noun gender/plural forms using the first few pages of Die Farben der Magie, and it seems to be effective. I think Anki would be useful for drilling/overlearning/revision, but for new words/concepts I really need context to cement things. I tried flashcards for new French words when I was studying for my GCSE, and it was a complete waste of time (the same goes for wordlists). I still ended up with an A/A*, though I'm not sure if that says more about me, or the exam. :lol:

I do like his pronunciation first approach though, that helped me a lot with French and it's still helping with Russian! His pronunciation trainer is usually my source for minimal pairs listening drills.

I completely agree about pronunciation/sound systems being learned first. I can see the huge difference that has made for me between German and French (thank you Oma! :D ). I did a lot of IPA analysis when I started back with Russian, and so far I think the only minimal pair I have any real difficulty with in terms of listening is ш/щ. And of course, this is the one pair that Modern Russian doesn't appear to cover... :roll: :lol:
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