Tristano's log 2017: Wanderland in the Netherlusts

[Tristano]

You should learn...Japanese It has oodles of native materials, lots of it of freely accessible and easy to find.

I wanted to note that you log title "Wanderland in the Netherlusts" sounds, umm... But maybe that was intentional.

Lol
It wasn't intentional
Japanese: NOPE

[Tristano]

I'm sorry to hear you are dropping Hebrew. Maybe you'll come back to it later.

Portuguese is my on again, off again love. I'm doing a blitz for a while to see if I can activate it again. Sleeping pretty profoundly for the moment.

I will indeed probably come back to it later as I actually like it. I could detect Israeli people speaking Hebrew in a train in Italy and thank one of them in Hebrew for letting me pass. Funny staff but I have more urgent projects now. Portuguese is like German a perfect filler since the related languages I know keep them grounded. I really can relate to the on again off again

[Tristano]

Romanian
Romanian (written) is becoming more and more familiar to me.
Although my pace is certainly not frenetic, the work I'm doing is producing pretty good results. Reading wikipedia articles about known topics doesn't present many difficulties to me, and the resources I'm using are not giving me any frustration (like I had recently with Pimsleur Hebrews).

With Memrise (2000 Romanian Words by Frequency) I'm at level 10. I'm ignoring the 90-95% of the vocabulary for it is mainly latin based or I assimilated the words previously with Clozemaster. As soon as I am confident with certain words, I also ignore those so that I don't have to maintain them, as I prefer use them in context. This allows me to learn new words with a much faster pace.

With Clozemaster (Romanian for English speakers) I'm following the Fluency fast track, having played 1066 sentences and mastered 61 (it takes time ). The fast track is 3229 sentences, which with the current pace I will have finished in 3 months (more or less).

With Duolingo I'm way behind , I've done just half of the first section. I'm not in a hurry anyway. This resource allows me to gain more insight about the language and to get some more useful vocabulary.

Portuguese
Since reading this language doesn't present difficulties to me (although I should certainly learn vocabulary that diverges from the other latin languages I know and are of frequent usage) I start the study of it (like I did two years ago with Spanish) directly with listening to the radio.
I downloaded a good amount of podcasts which I'm going to listen in the car during my commutes. I'll do the same with Romanian as soon as I'm satisfied with my understanding of Portuguese (it should not take more than 2-3 months I think).

[Tristano]

Russian is back!

I decided that doing also Memrise in addition to Duolingo and Clozemaster for Romanian was overkill, as I mostly get to re-learn the same words I studied with Memrise very soon or I have to put on ignore the 95% of the words. As a consequence, the Memrise slot that is free I now use for Russian. I decided to restart Russian in place of starting with Indonesian because I can use the sinergy between Russian and Romanian to boost each others learning. Indonesian can definitely wait until I'm done with Romanian. I therefore started the Memrise course Russian Frequency: First 2500 words. The course is incomplete, as it gives only the first 550 words but that is exactly what I need. Ones I mastered those words it will be easy to start Clozemaster.

My "learn a language in the car" slot is occupied by Portuguese. I'm listening to the podcast Estado da arte. The topics are on the very intellectual side and the language used reflects the topics being very formal. For Latin languages that is a big advantage because the more formal are the words, and the less they diverge from the other languages in the family. As soon as I get a deeper understanding of the spoken language I can switch to a more colloquial style. With my 0 hours of practice, I can understand between the 70 and the 80% of what is said. I would be pleased to reach a target of 80 to 90% in three months.

[Tristano]

Time for some early adjustment.
I'm going to change memrise course for Russian. Although the course I was doing had a good idea (testing only in English), I also found it rather annoying because I was forced to write definitions like "to, towards"; also, English and Russian seem to be a little bit too far away to make a sense of things that in English work horribly, like the prepositional system.

That gave me the idea to find a new course, this time made from Russian to learners of other languages. It looks like there is a pretty good course to learn Italian words "5000 главных слов итальянского языка". My guess is that Italian is much more similar to Russian in its structure than what English is. It would be great to have an opinion from a Russian speaker who is learning Italian (like Serpent )

Plus, I'm not very happy about the Portuguese podcasts I'm listening to.
The one I'm using currently (Estado da arte) is too focalized to religious topics, thing that I personally find boring. The other one that I downloaded is of very bad audio quality and too over the top (more for uneducated people let's say). It would be great to have some advice

[Tristano]

Het afgelopend weekend was ik naar een barbecue georganiseerd door het bedrijf van mijn vriendin. Ik heb een collega van haar ontmoeten, en toen ik ontdekte dat hij Italiaans kan spreken, heb ik hem getest en tschongejongejonge, hij kan perfect, vlekkeloos Italiaans praten. Uitspraak en intonatie precies zoals een Italiaans van Toscane. Gek en erg inspirerend. Hij vertelt me dat hij super enthousiast over de Italiaans e taal en Italië was en dat een vriendin in Italië had. Hij heeft ook een master diploma in romance literatuur en hij heeft veel gedichten gelezen. We hebben ook over Italiaanse dialecten gepraat. Als ik niets wist ik dacht dat hij Italiaans was. Het is de eerste keer dat ik iemand ontmoet die een vreemde taal kant op zo'n niveau!
Ik hoop dat in 10-20 jaren heb ik zijn niveau in het Nederlands

Tussentijds, ben ik altijd bezig met mijn huidige triplet, Roemeens, Russisch en Portugees.

Met Roemeens ben ik 51% van de fluency fast track en 32% van de hele collectie. Met Duolingo gaat het vrij langzaam, maar dat is de tijd dat ik ervoor heb. Wanneer ik klaar ben met Clozemaster Roemeens kan ik beginnen met Roemeense podcasts te luisteren.

[Tristano]

Russian is back in the backseat!
Learning a very little per day means that I learn so less that the retention level is too low and I spend endless amount of time for review.

Instead I'm going to dedicate my whole language study time to Romanian. My skills can be summarized as B1 passive and A1 active. I want to bring them to something similar to B2 passive and B1 active (in case it really means something). I can't write it at all, let alone speak it, but understand a good deal. I discover a new trick: if I go to wikipedia, put it in Romanian and press ctrl + shift + x I get redirected on a random article, allowing me to practice reading about topics I'm not familiar with. Great!

About my car time, I'm indecided if to follow the PortuguesePod101 intermediate and advanced courses, or focus only on Romanian and looking for useful resources to improve my listening skills.

[PeterMollenburg]

I vote Romanian for the listening skills. Romanian all the way, Portuguese later.

[Tristano]

I vote Romanian for the listening skills. Romanian all the way, Portuguese later.

And so I decided A 16GB sd card with a shitton of Romanian podcasts is in the car and will take me hundreds of hours to finish.

I found this website with an interesting list: https://florinrosoga.ro/blog/podcasturi ... ti-romania

I chose just to start:
- Burzcast
- Sceptici în România
- Istoria Culturală a României
- RFI România
- SBS Australia Romanian Special

The first one I go through, Burzcast, talks about computer science and technology, topic very familiar to me that gives me full of clues to get the gist and build vocabulary. Very safe choice.

My clozemaster stats are 72% played of the fluency fast track (43% in total) and 36% mastered, 94% correct, 6% incorrect.
As soon as I will be 100% of the whole course, I will start reading intensively.

I decided to go through Duolingo as fast as I can. Since I'm building comprehension more than grammar, I sometimes cheat here and there (for example testing out and use Google Translate for a help very interesting skills like numbers or units of measure or plurals of words that I already learned in singular form). I will go through the whole tree without maintaining and then I will start maintining it backwards, make the whole tree gold and then I will switch to the reverse tree (Learn English from Romanian), somehow like an active fase of Assimil.

[Tristano]

Studying Romanian is addictive for me.
For the first time in my life I'm enjoying studying a language without thinking compulsively about the next one. Yes, I have some project in my mind, like Russian, Indonesian and studying German from Portugese and Portuguese from German, but everything what is in my head is something like
- I'm going to finish the Duolingo tree and then I'm going to use the reverse tree for more writing practice, then I have to buy a grammar and write everyday on Lang8
- I'm going to listen all the podcasts then I have to find other podcasts then I have to find audiobooks
- I have to learn more articles or books!
- Assimil!!!
I am going to schedule a lesson to correct my pronunciation and do reading and translating on the fly practice.

Now I'm going very fast with Duolingo and clozemaster. With the first I'm half the course, with the latter I reached the 83% of the fluency fast track (played, 50% mastered). My target is to reach the 100% within a week (very doable, certain days I advance the 5%, in average the 2-3%), then I'm going to fill my holes finishing all the graded levels in order. I suspect it will take little time, as I immediately put on 100% mastered all the sentences that are completely trasparent for me. Once I finished it I will start to read intensively.