I've had relatively more free time these days to hang out and study. A boring yet lucrative translation job is coming up ... any minute now...
It's been close to three years since I regularly used Memrise, but I believe I've picked up the habit again for
Chinese. It's worked extremely well for me in the past, perhaps even more so for Chinese because each card gets double reviews when you get tested on pronunciation too. It's easier and easier for me to read formal connected text in Chinese. Last night I picked up a linguistics textbook and got a ways through the introduction before the unknowns started to pile up. If I skip around I can get a lot more.
I'm "attacking Chinese reading on two fronts" in perhaps the laziest war ever waged. One front is an HSK 5 deck on Memrise, where I skip all the words I know already but usually keep doing the pronunciation tests to make sure I know all the character readings. I normally do this for about five or ten minutes a day. The other is manually re-typing all the example sentences from my HSK 5 study book into a Google doc.
Yesterday I made a list of a bunch of weights, measures, and materials that I don't know but should. This includes words like hectare, milliliter, concrete, cardboard, fluorescent light, matte, transparent, and so on. Stuff that every native speaker can talk about and describe, and stuff that I see every day. Some of these stuck right away as I was making the list (i.e. I can still recall them now) and others I'll need to study more. I tried to import the list automatically into Memrise but that function didn't work for me. I'll keep working on it.
Continued to listen fairly extensively to
German and
Spanish on the subway. I'm just beginning to realize the power of easily downloading videos from YouTube as mp3s with the 4K Video Downloader I mentioned last time. Turns out there are a bunch of German Hörspiele on YouTube, including the audioplays for the original Star Wars films. The voice actors for
Eine Neue Hoffnung are fantastic. They really capture the feeling of the actors in the original - all except for Harrison Ford, so far.
CuriosaMente continues to be a fantastic production, and I barely even notice that they were originally produced as videos instead of podcasts. I love the host's energy and he speaks very clearly in an accent I'd like to have too.
There's a particular video in Teochew on Youtube that I really like. It's an
interview with a womanwho fled from Vietnam in the 1980s. I've watched it, oh, five or six times, and each time I think I understand more and more Teochew because I can kind of match what she's saying to the subtitles. I also have additional experience with other Southern Min varieties including having spent a handful of hours on Teochew specifically. Long story short, when I listen to this audio, I can pick out maybe five percent of the words, relying heavily on my memory of how the interview goes. Even my Vietnamese comprehension is better than that.
I mentioned the Pod101 listening comprehension videos in my last post. I'll expand about the Indonesian one: that's
exactly how people talk when you arrange things like renting a car, staying at a hotel, and filling out a gym membership. I think all the topics are the same for each language (beginner Cantonese and Vietnamese both start with the same scenarios at least) but it certainly seems they localized the dialogue well. They're all subtitled as well. They're divided into absolute beginner, beginner etc but I would call even the lowest-level ones "upper beginner." So far I have no issues with the content. The French male voice sounds like he has a cold, but I've never been picky about listening to a particular style of French and I figure it's just helping my comprehension.