A Words Enthusiast

[Axon]

I've been reading Un paseo por el bosque and enjoying it quite a lot. Here is one of my favorite excerpts, right from the beginning of the book when Bill is buying a backpack from Dave, the owner of an outdoor goods store. Bill's son works in the store, and so to avoid embarrassment he has promised not to do anything stupid, including saying "Are you shitting me?" when quoted a price.

https://vocaroo.com/i/s1h9B2bCupSR

I can hear some places where my accent slips and some places where it jumps around the Spanish-speaking world. I would really appreciate any suggestions about things that sound particularly unnatural or jarring.

[Axon]

More to do means less time for Spanish reading, at least not when that reading still kind of counts as study for me and not pleasure.

I keep feeling pretty good about my Polish listening while at the same time terrified of doing any writing. I'm actually able to understand the gist of Gonciarz' videos with Polish subs, and repeated listening to the same handful of Easy Polish episodes on the train slowly reveals more and more of their content. I can also understand the gist of Wikipedia articles in Polish. Actually I can read Polish Wikipedia faster than Russian Wikipedia, and I figured out why: the Latin script makes loanwords transparent, while the Cyrillic obfuscates them enough that I have to sound them out before I realize what they are. Even more so for long loanwords, like, you know, most of them.

I reactivated my Glossika subscription during Black Friday and have been using it most days for Polish and sometimes for Spanish too. At the beginning of a Spanish session I'll feel tongue-tied, and at the end I'll be fluently reciting the lines, giving myself a steely gaze in the mirror and feeling like I'm Antonio Banderas. Don't judge.

Another foreigner that I'd never seen before got on the elevator with me the other day and said, perhaps out of habit, "Bonjour." I replied automatically in kind, and we had thirty seconds of French conversation in which he spoke as fast as humanly possible and I frankly shocked myself with my ability to handle a simple introduction in French with no preparation. I haven't touched French for weeks but it's still there. When the 6WC is over I'll put French in a regular listening slot.

There are a number of free apps in China that are full of unlimited ad-free music, podcasts, movies, and TV series. The ads are unskippable right when you start the app or if you view on your computer, but on your phone it's an uninterrupted experience. That combined with a desire to blow on the embers of my nascent Chinese literacy means I've been spending more time watching and reading in Chinese. Usually I read clickbait headlines or social media posts, and for these I can understand and pronounce probably 98% of the characters I see. Today I found a travel podcast episode about my home state of California and listened to it three times - the second at 1.75x speed just to see what would happen. I understood more and more each time, even guessing the general meaning of an idiom from context.

I've actually been at a level for some time where I can guess new characters from context, so I've been testing myself more on pronunciation so I don't come up with some wrong subvocalization that sticks (plenty have already). I also regularly read the Glossika blog in Chinese to keep up my traditional character recognition. Those articles are often translated from English, and the writing style is clear enough that I can keep up even when I miss a lot of the specifics. I can get in a reliable 20-30 minutes of Chinese conversation each day if I try, and some days I have meetings where that extends much longer. I had a big employee event the other day that was all in Chinese (I honestly can't remember which parts if any were in English) and that left me totally drained. I thought I'd have more stamina for long Chinese conversations by now, but I suppose that's a skill I'm not really working on.

[SGP]

Actually I can read Polish Wikipedia faster than Russian Wikipedia, and I figured out why: the Latin script makes loanwords transparent, while the Cyrillic obfuscates them enough that I have to sound them out before I realize what they are. Even more so for long loanwords, like, you know, most of them.

If you compare that to English loanwords in Arabic, they could sometimes be even more non-obvious. As we know, the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are closely related. Still, many people understand them without any additional thinking.

Example:

كاريكاتير
phon.: kaareekaateer
meaning: caricature

[Axon]

Example:

كاريكاتير
phon.: kaareekaateer
meaning: caricature

Oh gosh, that's rough! I've also heard that McDonald's is something like makdoonaaldz, is that right?

At this point in my learning, I'm very much into listening and repeated listening as an introduction to new vocabulary. If/when I begin to take up MSA, I imagine there will be quite some time spent with virtually no reading at all beyond a cursory knowledge of the alphabet. I believe this will help me to associate the written forms with their meaning more easily than starting from scratch with listening and reading simultaneously.

Loanwords in Chinese, by the way, are usually written with a handful of "phonetic words" - not an official alphabet like katakana, but a set of characters that through tradition are often used to transcribe foreign names. Darth Vader, for instance, is 达斯·维达 (Dá sī·wéi dá). These characters all have meanings and are used in Chinese words, but whenever I see a 达 the "probable name/foreign loan" thought process is triggered.

[Axon]

This past 6WC seemed to take much longer than the last two. I wonder why that is. I've been very busy these last two weeks and finally have the opportunity to just relax with my laptop and guitar.

As I became busier I cut my Polish study time way down. I didn't do two iTalki corrections, I just did one, and I tried to do a little video but couldn't even get off the ground. Nevertheless I have significantly improved my Polish listening skills and picked up some new and useful vocabulary. It's probably not hard to improve your listening skills in anything if you just listen to the language for thirty or forty hours over a few weeks. I did a lot of repeated listening and a very small amount of reading - and my reading material was often YouTube subs in Readlang. I can certainly not say that Polish is a language I "know" in any real sense of production, but I can follow vloggers and some Wikipedia articles and I'm confident that if I ever get back to Poland it won't be hard to be a tourist.

Almost no Spanish except a few hours reading Un Paseo por el Bosque. Nearly a third of the way through.

Almost no German except some reading and listening to the podcasts and audioplays I have on my phone.

I read an entire short-form article in Chinese the other day without looking anything up! I'm still actively trying to learn new vocabulary and a lot of new words stick after just one exposure. If I spend the morning listening to English, though, it takes several minutes of conversation before I can warm up. Fortunately there are tons of free streaming podcasts out there. The one I've been listening to most is 地理狗看世界. The audio quality isn't fantastic but the content is great. Each episode is about ten minutes long, giving a broad overview of the tourist destinations and history of different countries. The narrator uses more idioms and specific words than most of my speaking partners do, which is a great push to keep improving.

Lastly, I read, watched, and text chatted a bit in Indonesian. Yesterday I flipped through a copy of Tuttle's Instant Indonesian and was very impressed. It's not enough to be an introduction to the language, but if you've already studied a little bit and you're going to Indonesia, I absolutely recommend it.

[Axon]

I had a boost in German recently as there was the possibility of tutoring a local student. I spent several hours reading and listening, reviewed a bunch of grammar and vocabulary, and even recorded some self-talk - and then it turned out the student wanted to learn medical German, and so the opportunity evaporated.
As part of this, I finally got around to listening to the last Star Wars radiodrama (Hörspiel) in German. Unfortunately the quality of Rückkehr der Jedi-Ritter was significantly worse than the other five. Poor audio mixing, jumbled editing, and very strange asides by the narrator. If it had been the first one I sampled, I would have given it up and missed out on a really fantastic six hours of German listening. Die Rache der Sith nearly moved me to tears.
Aaaand I just learned that the other, newer Star Wars movies have radiodramas too.

Other than that, with the 6WC over I don't feel guilty about using my listening time on French or Russian. So I've listened to more Russian Progress episodes and some audio rips of Nota Bene videos from YouTube. I feel that my French and Russian are kind of just going around in circles as I rarely have the sense of picking up new words. These are both languages that have shown time and again to be useful to me well outside countries where they're normally spoken. I'm planning some vocabulary boosting projects for the next year and I think another 500-1000 words and phrases would do wonders for both of these.

Still reading a little in Spanish most days. My Kindle shows about 100 words per screen, and I usually have to look up about five of them. I'm definitely going to make a big list when I'm finished as my Kindle is aging and it would be a real slog to use its flashcard feature. With a book at this level of difficulty, I'm only learning a handful of words "naturally" as they reoccur during the text, and I doubt that so far I've internalized any to the point where I could use them in speech. Here are some of the words I've looked up recently:
estufa - stove
ronco - hoarse
posaderas - backside, butt
naufrago - shipwrecked
mugido - moo
asarse - to be roasting (be very hot)
callado - quiet (this should have been obvious not only from context but also the exclamation callate!)

And finally, today I spent some 40 minutes on Vietnamese, picking out vocabulary I didn't know from the first three chapters of both Elementary Vietnamese and Teach Yourself Vietnamese. I've always known there's a lot of Vietnamese words that don't stick, but this really drove home just how little is in my active OR passive vocabulary. I got 121 words so far, plenty of them words I know I've seen a dozen times but never really remembered. Simple stuff like:
thấy - to see
bàn - table
định - to plan, intend
tìm - to look for
At least a lot of Chinese loans are (if not transparent) easy to recall just by linking them to the Chinese word I already know well. I figure if I can really internalize even 500 of the words from these two books, I'll finally be able to start deciphering more natural Vietnamese.

[SGP]

Example:
كاريكاتير
phon.: kaareekaateer
meaning: caricature

Oh gosh, that's rough! I've also heard that McDonald's is something like makdoonaaldz, is that right?

The exact (phonetic and written) transcription could even vary sometimes. Not everyone would use the "official one", if it exists anyway. But roughly, yes, it is like that.
As for those who fully stick to MSA, or speak a dialect that doesn't contain any O [like the Spanish Single Vowel], they would use a U instead. So it could be "Mak Duunaaldz" even.

[SGP]

Still reading a little in Spanish most days. [...] With a book at this level of difficulty, I'm only learning a handful of words "naturally" as they reoccur during the text, and I doubt that so far I've internalized any to the point where I could use them in speech.

In case you feel that you only slowly advance with Spanish with some particular learning methods, then, well, I currently experience something similar. After we already would have connected very many dots, it could be more difficult to spot the remaining ones. But it still is something doable.

[Axon]

The last week roundup:

Continued reading Spanish and Chinese pretty much daily. Glossika in several languages. Spanish reading is slowly getting easier, and I notice that I am actually picking up vocabulary.

Translated a very short article from Chinese to English without a dictionary. I used a dictionary to check a few words I wasn't sure of, but I had guessed correctly from context! It was really revealing about just how different the writing styles are between the two languages. Obviously I'll need to read many more articles to get a bigger picture, but for that example I ended up cutting out several whole sentences just because the Chinese was so redundant.

Listened to a lot of Russian and some German on the train. I actually spent several focused hours continuing to build my Vietnamese vocabulary and reading the Teach Yourself and Everyday Vietnamese books more thoroughly. I'm up through chapter 7 on both and this time around I can finally understand the majority of what I'm seeing in the dialogues, readings, and exercises. The chance of taking a trip to Vietnam sometime next year is getting bigger, though it looks like Japan is out.

Just last night I picked up some Indonesian nonfiction for the first time in a while. Indonesian has faded somewhat, but after a little warmup it was very easy for me to fully understand the article I was reading (about cultural differences between Indonesia and Australia). I still occasionally use Indonesian examples during my English lessons with a Chinese student who also speaks it.

The last year roundup:

I am very glad that I stayed focused on a limited set of languages this year. It was a large set but that was okay - I made progress in all of them.

Adding up the totals of my three 6 Week Challenges and thinking about other time spent (class hours in Indonesia, German translation, Glossika reps, chatting, passive listening, using languages in immersion) I came up with this list of hours:

Mandarin 255
Indonesian 200
German 75
Spanish 50
Russian 40
French 40
Polish 36
Cantonese 35
Vietnamese 35

That's 766 hours of total foreign language contact in 2018, give or take about 20 hours. That comes out to an average of just over two hours a day, which feels about right. I also spent between 5 and 15 hours each on Javanese and Japanese, and something similar on researching Arabic (not actually learning it). And of course when walking around in a foreign country you're near-constantly reading printed text around you, but naturally that doesn't count.

Languages and studying them are a big part of my life. I'm happy about that.

I did not put in the reading hours or achieve the reading ease in several languages that I hoped for at the beginning of this year. Reading is easier than it was a year ago in Indonesian, Russian, Polish, and Chinese, but still not easy in any of them except for certain topics and writing styles.

I picked up a lot of Chinese vocabulary this year in a very natural way. In terms of raw numbers it probably isn't too impressive, but the words I've learned were the words I found myself unable to come up with in casual conversation last year. And when I do hit the books or the flashcards, the words stick much easier.

I don't worry about juggling these languages. All of them have endured periods of neglect and come out fine later. I'm neither fluent nor advanced in over half of them, but that's okay because I enjoy the learning process and I enjoy using them when I can.

What's next?

The year ahead:

I want to add more languages. Who saw that coming?

I would like to explore Thai, Modern Standard Arabic, and Tamil for starters. Mongolian and Japanese also interest me and I won't stop myself from diving more into them. Thai is a big language in terms of Southeast Asia and the influence from Sanskrit and Chinese means I'll have a leg up there. I've had to write articles about the Arab world and MSA for several months now, and the longer I put off learning it, the longer these articles take me to write. Tamil is widely spoken by the Indian diaspora in Southeast Asia and there's a ton of content out there for it. It might not have a practical use for me for a while, but it's also a test of a language that, right now, seems virtually impossible to pronounce. What a nice challenge!

I knew a little bit of Mongolian once but I've forgotten it all. It sounds amazing to me, and although I got by with English and some Russian in Mongolia, I feel that I should have some knowledge of it since I did enjoy my time there a lot. I'm not particularly fascinated by Japan or its culture right now, but I'm actually interested in the community around learning Japanese. Lots of down-to-earth language learners who know a lot of stuff.

My goals aren't extreme. Being able to throw together some sentences and have some tourist-level reading in these languages would be perfect. Hitting A2 in, say, three of these five over the next two years would be a dream come true.

I'd like to do some experiments with vocabulary cramming and chorusing. At the same time, my desire for a "native-like accent" is much weaker than it was before. I want a good accent, to be sure, but there is simply no need for me to ever present as anything other than an American who speaks a foreign language well.

I've been thinking about starting each of these languages with a healthy dose of chorusing. They all have non-Latin scripts, which I historically haven't been great with, so I'd like to build up a pre-A1 level of listening comprehension before tackling the scripts.

I still want to improve my "core" languages, particularly Chinese. Fluent, connected speech on most topics is hard. I often see natives furrowing their brows the longer I try to express a complex idea. Quick and easy conversations go smoothly, and I'm happy about that, but when I compare to some of the foreigners on YouTube who can speak naturally and at length about whatever they're discussing, well, there's no comparison. I will dedicate more regular time to consuming native Chinese content, that's for certain. I will certainly continue reading in Spanish and German and use audio resources to slowly make progress with other languages.

We'll see how things develop over this year.

[SGP]

I also spent between 5 and 15 hours each on Javanese and Japanese, and something similar on researching Arabic (not actually learning it).

Now I am curious what your personal reason for also learning Javanese, in addition to Indonesian, would be. And how exactly did you do your Arabic research?

I would like to explore Thai, Modern Standard Arabic, and Tamil for starters.

What parts of MSA would you like to explore for a start? In case your answer would be "all of them" , then I'd ask you, "What would be the next learning step you weren't able to make yet?" instead.