Brun Ugle makes plans and then ignores them – diary of an easily distracted tortoise 2017 (ES, DE, FI, EO, JA, NO)

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Re: Brun Ugle makes plans and then ignores them – diary of an easily distracted tortoise 2017 (ES, DE, FI, EO, JA, NO)

Postby rdearman » Tue Jul 04, 2017 3:19 pm

Brun Ugle wrote:I blame summer and that horrible sun.


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Brun Ugle
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Re: Brun Ugle makes plans and then ignores them – diary of an easily distracted tortoise 2017 (ES, DE, FI, EO, JA, NO)

Postby Brun Ugle » Tue Jul 04, 2017 5:53 pm

rdearman wrote:
Brun Ugle wrote:I blame summer and that horrible sun.



The poor thing!!!! :cry: I know just how he feels. It's supposed to go up to 20 again on Friday. I'm going to melt. I didn't move to Norway for sunshine!!!!!
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Re: Brun Ugle makes plans and then ignores them – diary of an easily distracted tortoise 2017 (ES, DE, FI, EO, JA, NO)

Postby tiia » Thu Jul 06, 2017 9:35 pm

Brun Ugle wrote:For Finnish, I’ve started using Yksi, kaksi, kolme which I picked up in Vienna. FSI was a little too much. I’ll need to leave that one for later too, I think. And the same with the rest of Assimil.


That's the book I used, when I started Finnish 10 years ago. :) They recently released a new edition with quite some changes, like 16 lections instead of 12. I remember some discussion about the new vs. old edition on facebook when it just came out and I'd find it interesting to read what you think about the book later on. Otherwise I only know people who started still with the old edition or a completely different book.

For the Finnish audio I suggest you also taking a look at my list of the Super challenge as I don't list anything there with subtitles only. (Though I did use a lot of Harry Potter audiobooks, so it's not only films.) Quite some of the stuff is available on youtube. Or you might try using areena.yle.fi. There's somewhere an option to only display the media that is also available outside of Finland.
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Re: Brun Ugle makes plans and then ignores them – diary of an easily distracted tortoise 2017 (ES, DE, FI, EO, JA, NO)

Postby Brun Ugle » Fri Jul 07, 2017 6:21 am

tiia wrote:
Brun Ugle wrote:For Finnish, I’ve started using Yksi, kaksi, kolme which I picked up in Vienna. FSI was a little too much. I’ll need to leave that one for later too, I think. And the same with the rest of Assimil.


That's the book I used, when I started Finnish 10 years ago. :) They recently released a new edition with quite some changes, like 16 lections instead of 12. I remember some discussion about the new vs. old edition on facebook when it just came out and I'd find it interesting to read what you think about the book later on. Otherwise I only know people who started still with the old edition or a completely different book.

For the Finnish audio I suggest you also taking a look at my list of the Super challenge as I don't list anything there with subtitles only. (Though I did use a lot of Harry Potter audiobooks, so it's not only films.) Quite some of the stuff is available on youtube. Or you might try using areena.yle.fi. There's somewhere an option to only display the media that is also available outside of Finland.

Thanks. I'll be sure to post updates and mention what I think of the book. It's meant for classroom use and there are exercises where you're supposed to talk to your classmates, but I think there will be enough other stuff to make it useful to me, or I could modify those exercises a little. I've only done the first two chapters, so it's still very elementary and nothing yet that I don't already know, but it looks to be fairly practical in what it teaches.

I'll have a look at your SC list. I do like when people list everything they read and watch so I can get ideas. I did watch a bit of YLE the first time I studied Finnish. I should do it again. I used to set it so it would just list the shows available outside of Finland in Finnish with Finnish subtitles.Mostly I watched Uusi Päivä, I think it was called. It wasn't the best soap opera and not nearly as addictive as some of the Spanish language ones I've seen, but because of the nature of soap operas, I was able to follow it reasonably well considering I'd only studied Finnish for a couple of weeks before watching. I should get back to watching more TV. I'll probably wait until rdearman's project starts though, because then I might not be allowed to do regular study, and I thought I should cram in a little before then.
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Re: Brun Ugle makes plans and then ignores them – diary of an easily distracted tortoise 2017 (ES, DE, FI, EO, JA, NO)

Postby Brun Ugle » Sun Jul 16, 2017 6:24 pm

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last update and things have been a little up and down. I was taking a walk a couple of weeks ago and stopped to talk to a couple of people, one of whom was Swedish. The other was from around here. We were talking for a few minutes, the Norwegian and I in Norwegian and the Swede in Swedish, like Scandinavians do. I’d asked the Swede a question and his reply started something like, “As a Norwegian you should know….” I was a little surprised, but since he was Swedish, I figured he might not have noticed my accent. But when I said that I wasn’t Norwegian, both he and the Norwegian lady seemed surprised. She almost seemed not to believe me at first.

Of course, the week after that, I had one of those days where every little thing goes wrong. You know the kind, I’m sure. Nothing really bad happened; it was just that a bunch of tiny things went wrong. That afternoon, I went to see an apartment. I was already pretty sure I didn’t want it because it was a bit expensive, but I wanted to see it. There must have been at least ten groups of people looking at it, so it was a little crowded and uncomfortable. Anyway, I asked to see the storage room, which was in a different area, a different part of the same building, it turned out. Except, I didn’t realize that and the realtors instructions on how to get there confused me a little so I got lost. I ended up having to go back twice before finding it on the third try and it was very frustrating and embarrassing. So afterwards, I was tired and not in the best of moods. But on my way home, I saw a sign for another apartment being shown near where I live. I figured I should go look, so I followed the signs to the apartment. It turned out to be only one bedroom which explains why I hadn’t seen it online as I’d filtered those out. It was also on the ground floor and near the same noisy street I already live on, but I was the only person looking at it, so I had a good look around. Just for practice. I talked to the realtor a little, but after a long and frustrating day, my Norwegian skills must have disappeared and he asked me what country I was from. My only consolation is that my Norwegian wasn’t so bad that he was able to guess what country I was from.

So, in the course of a few days, my Norwegian went from being good enough to fool a Swede (I could make a Swedish joke, but I won’t) and an old lady, to being obviously broken and foreign. Whenever I see those questions from beginners asking how long it takes until you can speak a foreign language as easily/comfortably/perfectly as your native language, I always think, “Oh, you poor thing, I don’t want to disillusion you, but the answer is NEVER!!!!” Of course, I can often speak Norwegian without noticing I’m speaking it, and then it goes reasonably well, but if I’m tired or stressed or I feel a little uncomfortable about something, suddenly I can’t speak it anymore, even after all this time. (Well, that’s a slight exaggeration. I can speak it, but it just sounds horrible.)

Today, I’ve spent most of the day trying to install the software for Rdearman’s study. That hasn’t gone entirely well either. First of all, I hardly got any sleep because it was a sweltering 18°C yesterday. So I wasn’t in the best shape for software installation. It was going OK though until Windows decided that it needed to update and that took forever. And then I got to the part of the instructions where they just referred to the instructions on some webpage. Then I got stuck. So, I’m going to need to try this again – probably after some sleep and chocolate. This software had better be worth it!

Yeah, I did actually study a little too, but not much, so who cares. I’m still going through Glossika. The 6 week schedule is a little frustrating because sometimes the B-files for testing come before you get to do the GSR files for those sentences. I’m also looking forward to being done the Spanish and moving on to German. I haven’t quite decided yet which schedule to use for that.

I also wanted to watch the new season of El ministerio del tiempo before it was removed from the net and was going to have a little binge session, but it’s blocked here. :( Meanies. Actually, that was one of the things that went wrong on the day everything went wrong. First, I spent a long time trying to find the first episode of the season and couldn’t find it on the app or the web. After a lot of time wasted on that, I decided to skip it and watch the next episode which turned out to be blocked. Just to rub salt in the wound, they made me watch the commercial before telling me the episode was blocked.

Other than Spanish, everything is going pretty slowly. I’m still slogging through the French Phonology course and some Czech pronunciation videos and things. I’ve also done a few of the A files from the Glossika courses for both French and Czech, just to get some practice with the pronunciation. The French one seems pretty nice. The guy has a nice voice and while there are some minor mistakes in the IPA, it is still very helpful. The Czech course is probably OK too, but I really don’t like the guy’s voice. It’s rather high pitched and he sounds annoyed or whiny or something. I guess I’ll get used to it, but I wish he had a nicer voice.

I’ve only done one more chapter in Yksi, kaksi, kolme for Finnish. The first few chapters haven’t been much, but I think it looks like it will pick up and get more interesting now.

The only German I’ve been doing lately also comes from the Finnish textbook since it is for German speakers. And I haven’t done anything with Japanese or Esperanto that I can remember at the moment. Well, just occasional things that I stumble across online, but that’s almost nothing.
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Re: Brun Ugle makes plans and then ignores them – diary of an easily distracted tortoise 2017 (ES, DE, FI, EO, JA, NO)

Postby the1whoknocks » Tue Jul 18, 2017 11:24 am

Hey Brun Ugle,

I’ve been following your progress through Glossika’s 6-week Intensive training, and have been wondering about a few things:

-1. How have you been using the GMS-C files? From the instructions I see, it looks like you’re expected to just listen to these files, and do dictations only, “if you have time.” Does that interpretation sound right to you?

-2. Are you doing any recordings?

-3. With the B files, are you just listening and answering verbally, or do you write the answers?

Also, when referring to the B files, I like when they say,

“don’t worry if you make mistakes or miss a few. It shouldn’t be frustrating. Try to have fun with it. You’ll probably miss a lot in the beginning and that’s okay […] and makes sure you’re making lots of progress even if your tongue and brain are stressed.”


Although, I admit that it would be interesting to know their reasoning behind placing B sentences before some GSR ones, and not others. I hope to read your thoughts after finishing the course.
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Re: Brun Ugle makes plans and then ignores them – diary of an easily distracted tortoise 2017 (ES, DE, FI, EO, JA, NO)

Postby Brun Ugle » Tue Jul 18, 2017 5:38 pm

the1whoknocks wrote:Hey Brun Ugle,

I’ve been following your progress through Glossika’s 6-week Intensive training, and have been wondering about a few things:

-1. How have you been using the GMS-C files? From the instructions I see, it looks like you’re expected to just listen to these files, and do dictations only, “if you have time.” Does that interpretation sound right to you?

-2. Are you doing any recordings?

-3. With the B files, are you just listening and answering verbally, or do you write the answers?

Also, when referring to the B files, I like when they say,

“don’t worry if you make mistakes or miss a few. It shouldn’t be frustrating. Try to have fun with it. You’ll probably miss a lot in the beginning and that’s okay […] and makes sure you’re making lots of progress even if your tongue and brain are stressed.”


Although, I admit that it would be interesting to know their reasoning behind placing B sentences before some GSR ones, and not others. I hope to read your thoughts after finishing the course.

I'm just doing the lazy method. The 6-week schedule is made so that each Fluency set gets approximately two weeks. I've just started week 5, so I'm now starting Fluency 3. The first four days of the two weeks you do 5 GMS-C files each day and 3 GSR files. The rest of the time you do 2 GMS-B files and 3 GSR files.

As I said, I'm doing the lazy method. In part, this is because Spanish is one of my strongest languages and I feel like it would be a waste of time to go full Glossika on it. I think it would be better in my case to go through Glossika quickly to hopefully increase my fluency a little and then get back to GdUdE and GLOSS to really improve. I don't think I'm likely to come across anything really new and difficult in Glossika, so I'm just using it for better fluency, a bit like training scales and etudes in music. The other reason I don't want to spend too much time on it is that I don't want to deeply ingrain something that might be wrong. The Mexican Spanish course is full of mistakes. Many of them are minor errors like missing accent marks, but there are also bigger mistakes. In two separate sentences they mix up casado and cansado. In one case they use casado instead of cansado and in the other, it's the opposite. The mistake is clearly due to the extreme lack of proofreading that went into the course, but it is actually confusing when you listen to the GSR files and hear the same sentence over and over where the English voice says "married" and the Spanish voice says "cansado." It's already easy enough to accidentally say the wrong thing without reinforcing it like that.

Anyway, all I'm doing with the Spanish course is this: The C-files, I listen and repeat while looking at the book. The B-files, I listen to the English sentence and try to say the Spanish sentence before the voice. On some of the really long or difficult sentences, I sometimes have to pause the recording. The GSR files, I just listen to the English and try to start the Spanish sentence before the Spanish speaker, usually we overlap a little because there isn't a lot of time to get out the whole sentence before him. When there are new sentences on the GSR file, I just repeat after the Spanish speaker the first few times, pausing if necessary. Sometimes it takes me a few repeats to learn to say the sentence properly, but I usually end up able to say it a little ahead of the speaker after a few tries. I don't record myself, and I don't write anything or do dictation.

I'm planning to do the German course after I finish the Spanish one and I will do that more thoroughly because I can't really speak German yet, so I'm hoping this will make me ready to try talking to a tutor or exchange partner. I was going to do the 8-week course, but after my experience with Spanish, I'm thinking of doing either the 3-month or 4-month course. I don't think the 8-week one will be enough for German. I'm also thinking of doing the 5-month intensive for one of my beginning languages. That would be a real test of the method. Then I might make an effort to do some recordings and dictation as well.
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Re: Brun Ugle makes plans and then ignores them – diary of an easily distracted tortoise 2017 (ES, DE, FI, EO, JA, NO)

Postby the1whoknocks » Wed Jul 19, 2017 4:15 pm

Thanks a lot for the thoughtful response. Like you, I’m interested to see how much working through the course on one of their intensive schedules helps with fluency; what will really happen after ~ 30,000 reps?

A while back I worked through Fluency 1, and although I’m only on day 3 of their 8-week schedule, it’s nice to see that at least some of the mistakes have been corrected with the latest recording. When I get to the more glaring errors, I’ll just repeat the correct thing, but it is disappointing to hear that such obvious errors remain within the audio. Ultimately tons of reading and listening will help round everything out, I hope.

I will say that it’s much more enjoyable now that I’m already at least familiar with the grammar and vocabulary. Working with those longer sentences will be interesting.

Anyway, thanks again for your response. It’s exactly what I was looking for.
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Re: Brun Ugle makes plans and then ignores them – diary of an easily distracted tortoise 2017 (ES, DE, FI, EO, JA, NO)

Postby Systematiker » Tue Jul 25, 2017 4:10 pm

Brun Ugle wrote:I also wanted to watch the new season of El ministerio del tiempo before it was removed from the net and was going to have a little binge session, but it’s blocked here. :( Meanies. Actually, that was one of the things that went wrong on the day everything went wrong. First, I spent a long time trying to find the first episode of the season and couldn’t find it on the app or the web. After a lot of time wasted on that, I decided to skip it and watch the next episode which turned out to be blocked. Just to rub salt in the wound, they made me watch the commercial before telling me the episode was blocked.


Ahem, look on SeriesGato (and make sure your antivirus is on, because their redirects suck). I've been away a bit, but I did find that right before I left.
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Re: Brun Ugle makes plans and then ignores them – diary of an easily distracted tortoise 2017 (ES, DE, FI, EO, JA, NO)

Postby Brun Ugle » Fri Jul 28, 2017 5:35 pm

I just wanted to mention that I'm probably going to disappear for a little while. Something happened earlier in the month that got me really stressed out and I've been trying to deal with it and do all the other things I'd normally do and more, and it isn't going well. So, I think I should take a short break and just deal with that one thing without trying to hold myself to all my other plans. So, I probably won't join the 6WC this time, even though it's so much fun. And I probably won't start Czech on Tuesday as planned. And I might even try to spend some time away from the forum. Don't worry though, temporarily getting rid of all my other obligations, real and imagined, will probably make it much easier to finish the one thing I actually have to do these next few weeks and then I will be back.
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