Hedgehogs: Creatures of the Night (ES)

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coldrainwater
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Caffeine and MMORPGs

Postby coldrainwater » Mon Jun 26, 2017 5:47 am

The very two things I probably shouldn't combine. This weekend I stumbled upon a short film over Warcraft, a video game that I used to play. To my surprise, I managed to make it through a two-hour ES viewing. I later did some research and found that there are at least three active Latin American realms. Encouraged, I decided to press on and roll a new toon (in the interest of academic study of course). After boosting the new goblin up to starting level for the current release, I spent some time in the training area. I put the text in peninsular mode and was off to the training dummy. As best I could tell, the new context and content offer noticeable language learning value. Some players on the forums even went so far as to give the game honorable mention in helping them acquire EN. I am happy they have an all ES realm. Smells like immersion.

For those not familiar, RPG's tend to be recommended for language acquisition partly due to the detailed lore and storylines. Warcraft definitely offers both, and I can imagine character leveling to be a reasonable learning experience. There is also an in-game economy and rich microcosm for social interaction (I was basically a goblin in another life). In the long-run, I know that I need to be on the lookout for such introvert-friendly output platforms. For the more extroverted types, raiding with voice chat is often suggested as a means of improving speech and giving confidence for native group interaction.

I may only have a few hours per week to devote to Warcraft, but it is a nice addition to the existing language repertoire. It may be even more important for me to realize that I have finally found something like a cartoon that I can listen to on YouTube. I haven't the foggiest clue how I got from Alanxelmundo to Warcraft. Perhaps it is another case of 'technology has bias' and YouTube has some broad wings.
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Re: Hedgehogs: Creatures of the Night (ES)

Postby blaurebell » Mon Jun 26, 2017 12:47 pm

I tend to stay away from Warcraft because I get addicted to that kind of thing. I also think that the storylines are really infantile. They used to have much more depth according to some of my friends who played it when it originally came out, but when I played it about 5 years ago it was pretty silly already. I do like games for language learning though and tend to pick dialogue heavy adventure games. Steam is full of nice little adventure games dubbed in Spanish and French.
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coldrainwater
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Re: Hedgehogs: Creatures of the Night (ES)

Postby coldrainwater » Wed Jun 28, 2017 12:30 am

blaurebell wrote:I tend to stay away from Warcraft because I get addicted to that kind of thing. I also think that the storylines are really infantile. They used to have much more depth according to some of my friends who played it when it originally came out, but when I played it about 5 years ago it was pretty silly already. I do like games for language learning though and tend to pick dialogue heavy adventure games. Steam is full of nice little adventure games dubbed in Spanish and French.

I missed vanilla as well and arrived too late to enjoy the original content. In order to create mass appeal, many aspects of the game were dumbed down considerably. Interestingly (but not surprisingly), I acquired embarrassingly low fight skills in my ~2 years of play. A number of us attributed cases like mine to pure and simple lack of challenge while leveling and playing. I take that experience partly as a reminder that, especially when I am having fun, I need to make sure there is enough challenge to yield good language returns on the other side of those hours invested.

For me, the gaming addiction has a noticeable seasonal component. In the dead of winter, I can foster addiction decently, but not in the warmer summer months. I tend to care greatly about the challenge level and quality of what I read, but can ironically handle watching mindless action. That may play to my advantage with WOW (conversely I'll tend to select books that are far too challenging). I definitely would not expect much out of the story line but with the full economy and an absurd number of character items, I am expecting reasonable overall language coverage even though I may come out talking like something borne of fight club.
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Leer y el día de feriado

Postby coldrainwater » Sun Jul 02, 2017 4:44 am

Para el fin de semana del Día de Independencia, decidí dejar los libros de gramática al lado y leer mientras tengo tiempo comenzar una novela. Escogí una versión tapa blanda de El nombre de la rosa por Umberto Eco. Es una obra italiana traducida al español. El libro está ambientado en la edad media y aborde los temas eclesiásticos y filosóficos. He leído un centenar de páginas hasta ahora y diría que el libro ofrece buen material de aprendizaje de idiomas. El vocabulario y las similitudes entre italiano y español son muy interesantes, por no hablar de la inclusión de frases latinas que añadir la intriga y la sustancia. La versión doblada de la película con el mismo nombre será una delicia para ver.

Mi inclinación a estudiar etimología y temas secundarios se convirtió en una aflicción. El libro en rústica reduce tensión en mis ojos y apoya la lectura extensa. Sin embargo, me he desviado del camino en muchas tangentes interesantes. Me siento como un niño en una tienda llena de golosinas. Estoy seguro de que el vocabulario arcano será de uso máximo en mis aventuras día a día. Basta decir que mi lista de palabras no es tan pequeña como antes.
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SQL gets a Spanish Wordlist

Postby coldrainwater » Sun Jul 02, 2017 6:55 am

I downloaded the frequency list from RAE and imported it into SQL. The list at time of import contained 737799 records. You can see an example of 25 of them falling in the 30-40k range on the screenshot below.

https://ibb.co/n2v5QF

I then munged my existing personal worldlist and added it to SQL as a litmus test. Joining directly on the word gave very good frequency results for a small sample that I chose. Several frequency ratings on this list surprised me and I suspect it is worthwhile to reference this periodically to remove or prioritize my selections. As I read books, I may consider tagging the words I keep with the book title and later referencing what sorts of frequencies come out of different sources. For the sample below, I tried to pick at least a few that I know came from In the Name of the Rose.

https://ibb.co/cxuksv

The dataset is available for direct download here in case you end up wanting to try it out for yourself.

http://corpus.rae.es/lfrecuencias.html
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Gomorrita
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Re: Hedgehogs: Creatures of the Night (ES)

Postby Gomorrita » Sun Jul 02, 2017 9:04 am

It is interesting to read frequency lists of your own native language. Being from Spain I have heard the word "muesca" dozens of times and I don't think I have ever heard the word "cotejo" (I do know what it means because "cotejar" is a moderately used word). I guess my exposure to Spanish from other countries is very low.
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Re: Hedgehogs: Creatures of the Night (ES)

Postby coldrainwater » Sun Jul 02, 2017 4:13 pm

Gomorrita wrote:It is interesting to read frequency lists of your own native language. Being from Spain I have heard the word "muesca" dozens of times and I don't think I have ever heard the word "cotejo" (I do know what it means because "cotejar" is a moderately used word). I guess my exposure to Spanish from other countries is very low.

I agree. Before I chose Spanish as my L2, I recall that learning Latin was near the top of my list of interests due to my inclination towards investigating etymology at a hobby level. The roundabout path that my thoughts take can be seen below.

I looked up the related English keyword collation in my SQL server reference documents, expecting to find cotejar used descriptively in their formal definition (or at least in a footnote). Instead, they used the word intercalación (intercalate), which is a word that I have not heard professionally in my native English even though translate shows it immediately as a cognate (oops). Looking at it from the Spanish side, it is trivial to see that intercalación is related to the appropriately chosen calar where both words fall in the 40-50k range in the RAE ES frequency list. I then get curious and note that the Latin roots tell me that intercalar is to insert a day into the calendar from Latin intercalatus. 15 minutes later (while writing this), I note that I have heard intercalary before in some relatively obscure context and the lightbulb finally comes on.

Collation, as it were, comes up in my day to day business world whenever I join a dataset from Microsoft Sharepoint to one of my other datasets and forget to specify the collation of one of the columns (where the one uses Unicode and the other does not). One of the things I look forward to the most is working completely in Spanish in the technical business world as I will have many such experiences going forward. An otherwise dull, dry professional text in my native EN will have high interest value for me when read in ES. I can expect that to persist for some years, enriching three languages (Latin, EN, ES). I am already enjoying beginner level forays into introductory computer science material, and the effect of reading it in ES makes it incredibly interesting to me. I have long suspected that many academic subjects remain opaque to me due to boredom associated with getting past some of the introductory materials.
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Entre los planes y la realidad.

Postby coldrainwater » Tue Jul 04, 2017 5:55 am

Algunos días atrás, dejé la cafeína por completo. Durante los últimos diez días, tenía dolor de cabeza y estaba más cansado de lo normal. Escuché más de lo que leí debido a la presión frontal de mi cabeza. Finalmente, me siento mejor y soy capaz de abrir un libro una vez más. Espero que esa prosperidad dure.

En otras noticias, casi me quedé sin podcasts y necesitaré cargar más pronto que tarde. Bueno, todavía tengo algunos documentales en la cola. Tendré que reflexionar un poco sobre qué tema elegir para los nuevos. Esa es una buena tarea para mañana, dijo el perezoso. Ahora, leo.
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Re: Hedgehogs: Creatures of the Night (ES)

Postby coldrainwater » Fri Jul 14, 2017 3:51 am

Unos cuantos libros pequeños pero notables han caído en mis manos hambrientas recientemente. Uno de ellos en particular ha encontrado un hogar caluroso y deja un gran recuerdo invitándome seguir leyendo cotidianamente. Stanley Appelbaum escribió (o más exactamente, traducido) un libro de lenguaje dual muestra algunas de las muchas obras de literatura de épocas pasadas. Aplaudo su elección de cuentos. Me lo da un sabor de las muchas riquezas para venir. No menos importante es El nombre de la rosa, del cual he leído unas 300 páginas hasta la fecha.

Como un disco roto, debo admitir que las distracciones dignas no me han escapado. Mi wanderlust me ha llevado considerar los campos de la programación y la informática. Tengo ganas de mejorar mis habilidades hacia desarrollo general y más ambiciosamente hacia las matemáticas. He satisfecho mi curiosidad últimamente durante la jornada sin extenderse demasiado en las horas nocturnas (donde preferentemente estudio el idioma). También he estado apuntando mi atención y repasando algunos diccionarios y varios libros sobre la gramática. Estoy inclinando elegir el texto de nivel C escrito por Aragones. Quiero algo escrito completamente en español que sea lo suficientemente rico para mantener mi interés. Y tal cosa creo que encontré vía El Uso.

Hasta ahora he terminado los siguientes seis libros en la serie "Practice Makes Perfect":

  • Complete Spanish Grammar
  • Spanish Verb Tenses
  • Spanish Conversation
  • Spanish Pronouns and Prepositions
  • The Spanish Subjunctive Up Close
  • Intermediate Spanish Grammar

Me tomó un poco más de un mes para acabar de leerlos (y por supuesto, mi comprensión de la gramática deja mucho que desear). Mis ojos cansados preferirían ver más español y menos inglés. Pequeñas incursiones en la lectura y la gramática son un refugio seguro.

-Erizo
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Actualización (mis garabatos epsañoles)

Postby coldrainwater » Mon Jul 31, 2017 6:31 am

He leído tantas disculpas que no estoy seguro de que pudiera inventar mi propia excusa digna por ser tan negligente en actualizar mi bitácora. Sin embargo, reconozco claramente que ha pasado mucho tiempo sin escribirse ni una palabra. He pasado las últimas dos semanas leyendo, si no vorazmente, por lo menos diligentemente. Acabo de leer El nombre de la rosa justo antes del comienzo de un nuevo mes. Mi copia de tapa blanda tenía 775 páginas incluyendo las notas al final. Incluso comencé a leer otra novela antes de que me diera cuenta de que debía hacer una actualización mientas el libro todavía tiene mi atención. Leí en una reseña que decía que no era posible leer un libro de Umberto Eco sin aprender una cantidad considerable. No me decepcionó en lo más mínimo en ese sentido.

Desde una perspectiva de aprendizaje de idiomas, compartiré algunas observaciones finales. Para ser honesto, sermones largos intercalados a lo largo del libro y otros puntos de tedio pusieron a prueba mi resolución de completarlo. Los comentarios del autor fueron quizás el material más difícil de entender para mí ya que eran los más inesperados. Mientras leía el libro, tenía una idea simple en el fondo de mi mente. Si pudiera terminar esta novela, podría terminar de cualquier novela sin aburrirme. La gran sorpresa para mí fue que el libro tuvo un gran impacto en mis pensamientos y me gustó mucho al fin y al cabo. Yo sabía de antemano que el libro era una obra filosófica, pero no esperaba que el autor compartiera tantos detalles sobre sus procesos de pensamiento escribiendo el libro. Siento que entienda mejor la escritura y los libros en general y definitivamente me probaré con otras obras escrito por Eco.

Seguí con mi escucha y he logrado mantener una regla informal de escuchar por lo menos dos horas de podcasts diarios. Además, me he diversificado un poco y disfruto documentales y otras historias presentadas por RTVE por la noche. De hecho, anoche acabo de ver un documental titulado Animales que cambiaron la historia. Las batallas entre los escarabajos son muy feroces. Puedo ver los puntos fuertes y débiles inherentes en cada nuevo tipo de contenido que agrego a mi creciente lista de material de escucha. Todavía se siente bastante extraño mezclar un segundo idioma en un mundo que habla sólo inglés. Es muy similar a vivir dos vidas a la vez y los días largos de trabajo casi sin español requieren una cuidadosa asignación entre leer y escuchar.

-Erizo
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