A Words Enthusiast

[Axon]

Warum?

Liebe.

[Axon]

Relatively long silence here, because for a couple of reasons I stopped being as obsessed with this website and language learning for a while. Definitely didn't stop learning, heavens no, just kind of kept doing my own things and wove languages into them.

Got more into music, for one, since some of my hometown friends interested in music put it on themselves (and me) to make February into Four Song February for "the band." Turns out they're all real good at writing songs, but I was happy with the one I finished. This was a great excuse to sing in various languages, and so I worked on a few covers in Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Spanish.

Also, a very good friend from college came all the way to China to see me, and so we spent two solid weeks wandering around Kunming and environs. I'd told him that Kunming only has about three or four days of things to see tops, but both of us are the type to just walk around a city and delight in the small things. His phrasebook Mandarin from the last time we were in China two years ago came right back, in an interesting counterexample to the prevailing theory that if you don't reach an intermediate level, it's easy to fall back to zero.

I got to use quite a lot of Mandarin being an Outstanding Tourist with him. I was calling hotels, visiting hospitals to fill his prescriptions, reserving train tickets, and hiring drivers all in Chinese and all with virtually no problems. I really enjoy being a tour guide, especially for a city that I've come to really like. If you're in some all-in immersion situation and worry that friends visiting might set you back, just get friends who barely know the language.

I also had one of my language fantasies come true, as nerdy as that is. I've always wanted to be talking with someone I know and then answer a phone call in a language they've never heard me speak - the kind of thing that would be in a movie to show how cool some character is. I was at a restaurant with him, had just finished ordering in Chinese, and had a surprise phone call in Indonesian! It's a surprise to me that my Indonesian hasn't gotten rustier. I had to search for some words during the call, but there was plenty that was still automatic. I only occasionally listen and read in Indonesian, though in February I wrote a bunch of articles about it.

In general, I've kept up a fair amount of Spanish, German, and Russian regular listening. I may have some opportunities over the next few days to speak some Russian, since my neighbor seems quite happy to speak it with me. Maybe he doesn't realize how bad I am yet. I got slightly further with Tamil but haven't listened to it much recently. Even if I have no active ability, at the very least I can now quickly identify that sound-stream as Tamil, instead of being embarrassingly ignorant of all the Indian languages. A2 by 2021 still seems reasonable. Thai continues not to motivate me, but I've watched more stuff about MSA and Japanese (micro-learning, if you will).

I'll try setting some goals for a change. Let's see, I'll try to:

1. Have a language exchange in Spanish or otherwise communicate in Spanish before April
2. Be reasonably comfortable with the Tamil OR Arabic scripts before May
3. Write 500 words of German before April

Easy, achievable goals - that's the way to progress.

[Axon]

All right, well my neighbor definitely realizes how bad I am at Russian but that hasn't stopped him from being extremely patient and helpful when we speak. We've been meeting up for football (living abroad for so long I no longer call it soccer) three or four times a week and speaking a good deal of Russian each time. Occasionally I will produce a correct sentence. Mostly he guides me through what I want to say, slowly activating my mostly-passive vocabulary of a thousand words or so. As I search for words, their equivalents in Chinese and Indonesian float by, taunting me. I keep telling myself to review declensions and then end up not reviewing declensions. I know many of them automatically and many others not at all. He speaks barely any Chinese and so I've been able to return the favor by helping him get his phone fixed and showing him how to order things on menus without pictures.

I have not yet written anything in German and a recurring health problem has made it rather painful to speak much, so the idea of a Spanish language exchange hasn't materialized yet (it's not as bad when I'm speaking Russian in the morning, but by the evening it's uncomfortable). I have started on the Tamil alphabet. Like, an hour ago. It reminds me of Thai and Javanese, which makes sense as they're all distantly related.

I have though not ignored German, revisiting some of the harder Die Frage episodes, reading some fiction, and again listening to Krieg der Sterne. I began reading Emil und die Detektive, and found that although I had to put effort into reading it, it made sense. I look forward to reading more.

I'm inching toward the halfway mark in my Spanish book. Unfortunately my habit of reading before bed means that I get sleepy after only a few pages. Audio doesn't do that though, so I can stay focused when I listen to Spanish on the metro.

And I'm always working on getting more Chinese vocabulary. It's an easy workflow to read through a light article, copy it into Pleco, read it again with lookups, and make flashcards for all the unknown words. I spent a couple of hours manually copying out some 250 of those words that remained unfamiliar after months of flashcards, and now I find myself able to put them into active vocabulary more easily. Although I have and use HSK 5 and 6 books, I figure the articles that I read aren't going to have anything super-obscure even if they're off the HSK lists. It turns out about 10-20% of the words in every article that I read are not in the HSK lists. Sometimes they're easy to figure out, and other times I guess they're just rare enough to stay out of that set.

My ability to actually express myself is growing all the time, though slowly. No big breakthroughs at this stage, and I don't expect any. Being able to use more precise vocabulary is a clear benefit now. I would love to be able to tackle some heavy-duty Chinese literature but my mind wanders too much for the desk study that such a task would require. A couple of years ago reading anything in Chinese was hard, and now only most things are.

[Axon]

My goals were in fact too hard and too unachievable. I didn't manage a single one: I communicated only in English, Russian, and Chinese in March, I wrote just 280 words in German (and only in the last few days) and I learned only a handful of Tamil letters. At least I still have some time on that last one.

Writing in German was quite an experience as my brain really wanted to write in Chinese. At times I felt like I was translating my composition from Chinese to German in my head. Here's my composition, having revised it briefly but not checked any reference materials:

Indisches Essen in Asien

Obwohl ich nicht so viel Erfahrung in diesem Bereich habe, ich habe gerade bemerkt, dass in die zwei Städten, in den ich diese zwei Jahre gewohnt habe, gibt es ganz genau ein indisches Restaurant.

In Yogyakarta, gab es ein Restaurant namens Taj Palace. Es war auf zwei Grunden aussergewöhnlich, nämlich, dort konnte man Alkohol und Joghurt kaufen. Es gibt ein Sort Joghurt in Indien, das Lassi heisst, also ist Lassi in praktische jedem Indischen Restaurant verfügbar. Aber in Indien sowie in Indonesien gibt es viele Leute, die (aufgrund ihren Glauben) kein Alkohol trinken dürfen. Deshalb war ich ein bisschen überrascht, als ich die Weinkarte sah. Joghurt auch, übrigens, ist in Indonesien nicht leicht zu kaufen.

Jetzt wohne ich in China, in einer Stadt, die Kunming heisst. Es gibt auch ein indisches Restaurant hier, Yin Du Cai Cai. Nach dem Chinesischen Neujahrsfest ist dieses Restaurant umgezogen, ohne Bescheid zu geben, und ich war kurz davor zu weinen bevor ich sie telefonierte und fragte, wo sie gegangen sind. Jetzt befindet es sich auf dem hohesten Stock der grössten Malls in Kunming. Eigentlich war es eine gute Entscheidung, weil jetzt gibt es immer eine Schlange der Kunden. Die haben auch Alkoholische Getränke, aber in China, natürlich, ist es nicht aussergewöhnlich, Alkohol zu trinken.

Im Bezug auf Essen gibt es nicht zu viel zu vergleichen. Die beide sind relativ teuer im Vergleich zu andere Restaurants in der Nähe. Beide haben tradizionelle Indische Gerichte und Getränke, auch ein Art Reis, das länger und teuerer ist, als der Reis in andere Restaurants. Keiner in beiden spricht Englisch. Vielleicht is das Essen in Taj Palace ein bisschen schärfer, und die Gerichte ein bisschen grösser, als in Yin Du Cai Cai.

I know it's kind of long (500 words is a LOT!) but I would like it if anyone made any corrections or suggestions. Particularly when I wanted to express "Nobody in either [restaurant speaks English]"- I've never made such a construction in German and perhaps I went about it the wrong way.

I found the other day that I could easily read an article in Mandarin about profanity in schools. I thought it was hilarious because the attitudes expressed in the article were very pearl-clutching and totally opposite to how much people care about it in the US. I was going to translate it but lost the URL. Although there were very few unknown words, I still didn't have the endurance to read it fully and ended up skipping the long middle sections where the teachers gave their grave opinions of the matter.

I also flipped through my little HSK6 book and calculated that I know about 20 percent of the words, and I'd guess I know about 60 percent of the words in my HSK5 book. Then the idea popped into my head that if I learned 20 words a day, I'd know all ~6000 HSK words before September. Then I'd really know Chinese, or something. Although there's a lot that I can produce and understand comfortably, there's still just so much more vocabulary before I reach the point of truly easy media comprehension.

I worry a little that I'm not good at studying anymore. I don't have the regular study habits I did last year in Indonesia, even if I consume more TL content regularly than I used to. I've tried a lot of routines and nothing is anywhere near as easy as just lots of listening on commutes, and so that's what I do almost all the time (plus of course regular required speaking for my job). So while the figure of 20 words a day is reasonable for many people here, and practically expected for my IELTS students, I doubt that I'll achieve it. I'll try to do at least daily vocabulary work (active learning) instead of just the passive activities I do now.

If I have time off around May Day, I'll try to go to Vietnam with my girlfriend. I have so many materials all set for me to have a reason to get back into Vietnamese. Once the trip is booked, the motivation should come with it.

I still really like the idea of knowing Tamil, Thai, and Arabic but it always just seems like a better idea to focus on Spanish/German/Russian/Mandarin/Indonesian. I know I can't balance this sort of lazy, random practice with the goal of wanting to build foundations in new languages. Either my goals will shift themselves around my entrenched learning habits, or I'll put in the work.

[Axon]

我刚想起来一个让我提高语言水平的方法. 我在这个主题里写的每一个帖子以后就要包括最少一个非英语的句子. 那么简单!
I thought of a method to improve my languages. Every post I write in this thread from now on will include at least one sentence in a non-English language. So simple!

For the last week or so I've really been trying to read Chinese more and more. It's been an everyday thing for more than a year already, but there's always more for me to learn. So that means more flashcards and more intensive reading, and at this point I'm just beginning to notice an increase in ability compared to, say, last month.

I had a few quick chats in Indonesian and glanced through some nonfiction. I've still got it. It was particularly gratifying to watch an Easy Indonesian video and know all but one or two words - truly know in the sense that I can and do use these words correctly. Like many intermediate learners I still find it hard to follow rapid multi-person conversations on videos or podcasts, which is expected as I never experienced many of those to begin with. In contrast, I've spent hundreds of hours as an active listener to multi-party Mandarin conversations and they aren't terribly challenging now.

I continue to speak at least a little Russian whenever I meet up with my friend for football. He's very patient and happy to test me on varied topics. I usually study for about an hour before we meet, as if cramming worked. I'm sometimes surprised at how well I can express things with my very limited vocabulary, but I'm invariably appalled at my grammar. Like, I know what rules I should be following, but it's a constant stream of declension and conjugation errors that aren't fixing themselves no matter how long I spend thinking about them. Our last conversation had an exchange like this:
"Do you think it's important for children to read?" "Yes, of course what is very importance. When myself childs, reading very young. This was been good under my lifetimes."
Skirting the line between communication and word salad.

Vietnam seems to be out for the foreseeable future since my boss wants me to work on the one day right in the middle of my five days off.

But I'm likely to make it to Hong Kong again at the end of the summer (right when it's REAL hot) so I bought a short course for Cantonese through Mandarin. I find it pretty funny that the Cantonese through English books in the US are all long and involved, while here they're all tiny paperbacks with titles like "Cantonese: It's Just That Easy!" Mine is "Cantonese in 20 Days." Unfortunately these books invented their own Romanization which, while consistent, goes and orders the tones differently than Jyutping. Good thing it comes with audio!

Otherwise, some Glossika and some listening in Spanish and German.

[Kat]

... I would like it if anyone made any corrections or suggestions.

Indisches Essen in Asien

Obwohl ich nicht so viel Erfahrung in diesem Bereich habe, ich habe habe ich gerade bemerkt*, dass es in die den zwei Städten, in denen ich diese zwei Jahre gewohnt habe, gibt es ganz genau ein indisches Restaurant gibt.

In Yogyakarta, gab es ein Restaurant namens Taj Palace. Es war auf aus zwei Gruünden aussergewöhnlich**, nämlich,dort konnte man nämlich Alkohol und Joghurt kaufen. Es gibt eine Sort Art Joghurt in Indien, das der Lassi heisst, also ist Lassi in praktische jedem Iindischen Restaurant verfügbar. Aber in Indien sowie in Indonesien gibt es viele Leute, die (aufgrund ihresn Glaubens) keinen Alkohol trinken dürfen. Deshalb war ich ein bisschen überrascht, als ich die Weinkarte sah. Joghurt auch, übrigens, istkann man in Indonesien übrigens auch nicht so leicht kaufen.

Jetzt wohne ich in China, in einer Stadt, die Kunming heisst. Es gibt auch hier ein indisches Restaurant hier, Yin Du Cai Cai. Nach dem Cchinesischen Neujahrsfest ist dieses Restaurant umgezogen, ohne Bescheid zu geben, und ich war kurz davor zu weinen, bevor ich sie anrief telefonierte und fragte, wohin sie gegangen sind. Jetzt befindet es sich auf dem hohesten im obersten Stock der grössten Malls des größten Einkaufszentrums in Kunming. Eigentlich war es eine gute Entscheidung, weil denn jetzt gibt es dort immer eine Schlange der von Kunden (alternativ: denn jetzt stehen die Kunden dort immer Schlange). DSie haben auch Aalkoholische Getränke, aber in China, natürlich, ist es natürlich nicht aussergewöhnlich, Alkohol zu trinken.

Imn Bezug auf das Essen gibt es nicht allzu viel zu vergleichen (alternativ: ...nicht viel zu vergleichen). Die bBeide sind relativ teuer im Vergleich zu anderen Restaurants in der Nähe. Beide haben tradiztionelle Iindische Gerichte und Getränke, auch eine Art Reis, das der länger und teuerer ist, als der Reis in anderen Restaurants. Keiner iIn beiden spricht niemand Englisch. Vielleicht ist das Essen inm Taj Palace ein bisschen schärfer, und die Gerichte sind ein bisschen grösser, als inm Yin Du Cai Cai.

*Um die Wiederholung von „haben“ zu vermeiden könntest du alternativ auch schreiben: ... ist mir gerade aufgefallen...
** Ich nehme an, deine Tastatur hat kein „ß“, deshalb habe ich das „ss“ überall stehen lassen.

Ich hoffe, die Korrekturen helfen dir weiter. Wenn dir etwas unklar ist, kannst du gern fragen.

Insgesamt versteht man deinen gesamten Text sehr gut. Meine Änderungen betreffen hauptsächlich die grammatischen Endungen und die Wortstellung. Manche Dinge würde ich vielleicht ein bisschen anders formulieren, aber das ist Geschmackssache.

An einigen Kleinigkeiten sieht man, dass du englischer Muttersprachler bist, z. B. an der Groß- und Kleinschreibung (indisch, chinesisch usw.) und an der Kommasetzung. Für mich ist das interessant, weil ich im Englischen die gleichen Kommafehler mache. Genau die Kommas, die du im Deutschen zu viel setzt, lasse ich im Englischen versehentlich weg.

Particularly when I wanted to express "Nobody in either [restaurant speaks English]"- I've never made such a construction in German and perhaps I went about it the wrong way.

Es gibt viele verschiedene Möglichkeiten, zum Beispiel:
In beiden (Restaurants) spricht niemand Englisch.
In beiden (Restaurants) spricht keiner Englisch.
In beiden (Restaurants) wird kein Englisch gesprochen.
In keinem der beiden (Restaurants) wird Englisch gesprochen.
In keinem der beiden (Restaurants) gibt es jemanden, der Englisch spricht.

[Axon]

Terima kasih banyak, Kat! Semua yang kamu sudah menulis sangat membantu.
Thanks very much, Kat! Everything you wrote is very helpful.

He sido solamente dos semanas desde el último puesto, pero me siento que he estado haciendo muchos actividades en varios idomas.
It's only been about two weeks since the last update, but I feel like I've been doing lots of activities in several languages.

I wrote two short Chinese iTalki posts, one terrible and one okay, and got good feedback. Then somebody added me to their WeChat language exchange group, which turned out to be mostly Chinese people chatting amongst themselves. I mine tons of stuff for new vocabulary and regularly review my Pleco flashcards.

I've also been using this very interesting app for Mandarin called 普通话测试. It's meant for native Chinese speakers that want to improve their standard Mandarin in order to get jobs as broadcasters, teachers, and so on. The 测试 (exam) mentioned is the 普通话水平测试, or the Standard Mandarin Proficiency Exam. The exam is broken up into four stages, each one exponentially more difficult for a foreign learner. In the first stage, you read out single characters. Not too bad. Stage 2 is reading out two or three character phrases. Harder but still doable. Stage 3 is reading a 400-character passage aloud, which is hard for lots of native speakers to do smoothly and extremely difficult for learners. Stage 4 is recording a 3-minute monologue on a topic like "My High School Days" or "My Daily Routine."

If you pay a small fee, you can do unlimited mock tests for Stage 1-3 that then get scored by a computer. You can take the full test with human scoring for another fee. I'm "proud" to report that the computer currently scores me at 76/100, where a score of 60 is failure. At my level "there are mistakes in pronunciation and grammar and the dialect influence is obvious." Above 87, you can be a teacher at big-city schools, and above 97 you can be a broadcaster. I have no illusions about mastering this test, but I do feel that using the app helps me focus on my pronunciation more than I did before. Plus it pushes me to sight-read Chinese, which is a huge mental workout for me.

Also here's me singing in Taiwanese.

A few days a week I also do focused Russian study, usually Glossika, shadowing and reading aloud a couple of articles from Russian Progress. I'm definitely getting better there, and sometimes the grammar falls into place when I output. Although my speaking partner is, as I've said, extremely generous with his time and corrections, he did express visible surprise when I told him I didn't run into many language problems in Russia a few years ago.

And besides that, I'm dabbling with Korean. I mentioned in the Korean Study Group thread that a new cafe with Korean owners opened right nearby, so I downloaded some YouTube videos as mp3s and slowly got an idea about forming basic sentences. I was ambivalent about learning much more than "thank you" until, upstairs in that cafe, I found a copy of Barron's FSI Korean. It must be a sign.

I'm not disinclined to learn Hangul, it's just that I have at least ten hours a week of commutes for listening and I want to get a solid audio base in my head. I noticed with Tamil recently (I'm at about 30-40 hours of passive listening) that I can read romanized YouTube comments in my head with a pretty reasonable Tamil voice. That's what I want before I use Korean stuff with no audio.

Speaking of restaurants near me, learning a little Korean makes me want to learn more Thai. The folks at the Thai restaurant nearby have less Mandarin than the Koreans do, and last time I went I looked up a few phrases and accomplished pretty much everything with no Mandarin. The method is the same for now: look up YouTube videos about Thai, download them onto my phone, and listen on the go.

[Vladimir]

This text for man, who want to study Russian. If you know Engleesh well i need your help. Russian is my own language, because i born and live in Russia. I can help you to learn Russian and you can help me to learn English. If you like it, you can connect me there or on Facebook. Thank You!

[Axon]

Thank you Vladimir! At the moment I'm not looking for other Russian language partners, but good luck with your studies .

Ich habe eine alte Aufzeichnung auf meinem Computer gefunden, die nur ein paar Monate nach meinem Anfang mit Chinesisch gemacht war. Das ist jetzt ein bisschen mehr als vier Jahre her.
I found an older recording on my computer that I made just a few months after I started learning Mandarin, slightly more than four years ago now.

I wasn't doing any free talk unfortunately, just repeating after a native speaker on a Skype call. I was better than I expected to be after three months, but what's interesting to me is that some of my vowels are really wrong, like immediately obvious as someone applying English pronunciation to Pinyin spelling. At that time I'd already been using audio-based courses and repeating aloud from day one. Painful as they may be, I think it's good to have benchmarks of your progress.

Here is a zero-prep sight reading of a random comment I just found on 百度知道, kind of like Yahoo Answers. I haven't even looked at it, so I'm absolutely going to falter and stumble and probably even not recognize some characters. Leggo.

你好

我是英语系的，我们专业的老师都特别负责，学英语特别是口语很有一套，比如大二会开辩论课和演讲课，是必修，这是很多学校没有的，这两个课真心教会了我很多东西。

你说的小语种的话我不太了解但是大体上学风很好，专业课逃课的不多。

假期是有作业的假期是有作业的假期是有作业的而且不少而且不少而且不少，想报语言系的学弟学妹们请大胆地报。 其他系的请慎重

然后呢我再说一下学校的整体构造

首先放上经典的小铁路

https://vocaroo.com/i/s1OoBBZlKOTV

Okay that went about as well as I expected. Did not see the repeated sentences coming. I also stopped when I realized that the post actually continued much longer than I thought. Looking up the words in the dictionary, I:

-did not know 辩论, 构造
-knew but misread 演讲, 必修, 小语种, 报, 慎重,
-read correctly but not very familiar with 真心, 教会, 大体上, 学风, 逃课, 铁路

A free translation:

Hi,

I'm in the English department. Our department teachers are great. They really make you speak English, which is very important. For example, second year students have debate and speech classes as required courses. Lots of universities don't have these, and they really helped me learn a lot of things.

I don't quite understand what you mean about less commonly-studied languages. But in general, the school has a great atmosphere and nobody skips class too often.

VACATIONS HAVE HOMEWORK. VACATIONS HAVE HOMEWORK. VACATIONS HAVE HOMEWORK. NOT A SMALL AMOUNT. NOT A SMALL AMOUNT. NOT A SMALL AMOUNT.

Anyone that wants to apply for the foreign language departments please do so. Think carefully before applying to other departments.

Lastly, about the overall layout of the university:

There's an old railway line running through campus.

[the author goes on to show more pictures, end of extract]

Another sight reading after practice.
https://vocaroo.com/i/s14MYQ1w0q3s

At first I misread 口语 as 开口, and I had to correct/start over more than I thought I would. Still not super pleasant to listen to, but it's all progress.

This post is getting kind of long and I mostly just studied Chinese this week anyway. Less than an hour each of German videos, Spanish reading, Indonesian reading, and Russian listening.

I did want to share an interesting experience with Italian. I visited Italy in 2009 and 2012, the latter trip just before I started to really get interested in languages. Here in Kunming I heard about an excellent Italian restaurant run by a man from Italy, and I went across town to visit but it happened to be closed for just that one day. I amused myself on the way back by trying to remember any Italian curse words and angry phrases I knew, then forgot about it.

A few days later I went back and had a great meal. While waiting, I began idly thinking in Italian and was pretty shocked that suddenly whole sentences and phrases were coming to mind: Vorrei riservare un tavolo... ho riservato un tavolo... quanto questa ... quattro formaggi... (Double-checking now, I see that I should probably use prenotare, but alas, that was not in the lexicon of 14-year-old Axon's tourist Italian.) How strange that ten or fifteen minutes of casual effort to recall some words could have a dramatic effect on the ability to use a long-forgotten language days later.

[Axon]

感觉最近特别忙, 好像没有什么可以写.
I've been really busy the last few weeks. Seems like there's nothing I can write.

Still getting quality listening time in for German and Mandarin. I called an office in Malaysia and used Indonesian because the other party's English wasn't up to the task. I would have guessed that my Indonesian would be totally gone by now since I very rarely use it, but it's still there and still surprisingly comfortable to use.

I had one of my best Russian language exchanges yet, where it really felt like I was actually communicating. This is what happens when there's no break for football between meeting my study partner and speaking Russian with him. Sometimes I'll listen to Russian Progress and it will be entirely transparent, though that only really happens with the episodes I've listened to many times.

Just yesterday I was playing pickup football at the nearby university and thought to myself "that guy is speaking the strangest dialect of Southwestern Mandarin I've ever heard." He then spoke to somebody else and it was entirely unintelligible, so my "language identification" switch went on in my brain. Clearly mainland Southeast Asian, maybe Thai, no, wait - it's Vietnamese! I chatted with them in Vietnamese for a little bit and they took it totally in stride - far less surprised than people in Vietnam who heard me speak it. Then during the actual play I enjoyed being able to understand what they were calling out: "Two people coming! Here! Me! Over there!" They were fun to play with, too, I hope I run into them again.

I was giving a speaking class online and my student told me that she thought I was "very clever" because I could speak Indonesian, Mandarin, and English. "So how many languages do you speak?" "Hmm, I can speak Indonesian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Zhuang, and a little English." Her Zhuang was quite different from the few words I had picked up before, but she said that she was able to go to Thailand and use a few phrases like "too expensive" when shopping. This gives me a chance to post this video, which was the very first piece of native Mandarin media I tried deciphering years ago.