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

[Systematiker]

I'm glad you're back, by the way

[Brun Ugle]

I’m still not back to intensive studying or intensive anything else really, so I feel like I don’t really have much to report. I’m working mostly on Spanish right now. I’m slowly making my way through the second Harry Potter book in LWT. I could read it fairly easily without LWT, but I’m using it to add more words to the database. I think starting with something really hard would be frustrating because of the high percentage of unknown words. Even in Harry Potter, there is a pretty good vocabulary.

Last Friday, I tried doing an iTalki lesson. It was very awkward because I haven’t spoken Spanish at all since spring and haven’t even watched much television or done anything else with it. So, I was very rusty. I really ought to get back to my output challenge. That was helping a lot, but it always seems like so much work when I’m tired (ie all the time), and so I never get around to it. I have no hope now of actually completing it this year, but I could still get some practice.

After not watching any Spanish TV almost all summer, I decided to go back to watching Aquí no hay quien viva. The first half of the first episode I watched felt really hard, but then something clicked and the Spanish lobe of my brain turned back on and I could understand almost everything again.

I recently finished a Norwegian novel that I’d like to recommend, if any of my readers are learning Norwegian. It’s called Frikjent by Ole Kr. Ellingsen. It has something of the feel of a Dan Brown novel. It starts when a woman working in the National Library in Oslo receives a package from a mysterious old woman. The package turns out to contain the cover from the Book of Kells, which was stolen in 1007. (The manuscript was recovered, but the case that contained it disappeared.) A reporter with an interest in the Book of Kells, decides to try to find out where the cover has been and how it ended up in Oslo. His digging uncovers dark secrets from WWII and some people will do anything to keep those secrets hidden. The book explores a terrible period in Norwegian history and brings up questions that people are maybe still not ready to have answered.

I keep meaning to pick up a book by one of the authors Jeff told me about, but I keep forgetting the list every time I go to the library. So I end up picking something at random each time. So far, I’ve been lucky with my random selections though.

I’ve also been continuing the drawing class and my volunteering with immigrants. In addition to Norwegian, I occasionally help some of them with English, math, and science. I try to limit it to a few hours a week though so I don’t get too exhausted. Unfortunately, one of the refugees seems to have developed a crush on me, so I’ve been trying not to spend too much time around him so that he can forget about me. Excessive loneliness can be a big problem for some of them.

I’m enjoying the new Glossika site. I still hope that they let us have something similar to GMS where we can open up a list of sentences and run through them in quick succession. I miss that. And I’m also hoping they will figure out the offline mode soon. But otherwise, I’m enjoying the new system more than I’d expected and they seem to be pretty responsive to requests for changes. I’ve been doing Spanish, German and Japanese on the new site. I’d like to add in some other languages, but there are only so many hours in the day. Even with only three languages, I don’t always get through all of them every day.

[Brun Ugle]

I don’t have a lot to report. My house-hunt continues. I saw a place that was in the right area and the right price and generally very nice, but the garden was very steep and the house has a zillion stairs, so I’m a bit hesitant.

Last weekend a friend of mine invited me over for drinks and we spent the evening watching TV and talking. He’s from Iran and kept trying to tempt me into learning Persian, as if I really need the temptation. I’m trying to stick to my plan though and limit my languages for now. Once I get my current languages up to snuff, maybe I should do like my friend Ellen and try to learn all the languages spoken locally in my city. Of course, she lives in NYC, so that doesn’t really limit her much, but even here in Steinkjer, there are quite a few languages. It’s just that I have tended to go for languages that aren’t all that common around here. If I went for things like Persian, Tigrinya, Amharic, Arabic, Russian, Polish and Thai, I’d have lots of opportunities for practice.

LWT is gradually getting easier as I add more and more words, but it’s still very slow. I also have to be careful not to spend too much time at the computer. I don’t think it’s doing my back much good. I’m hoping that in another week or two, I will have enough words in the database to be able to get through a chapter per day, preferably without giving myself a headache.

With only three episodes left, I’m getting very close to the end of Aquí no hay quien viva, so it’s almost time to find a new show to watch. I have several under consideration, mostly gleaned from other people’s logs, especially Cavesa’s. I could give Águila roja another try. I think it was about two years ago that Cavesa and I decided to watch it, but it was a little too hard for me at the time and I gave up after about three episodes. And the show she’s currently watching, Estoy vivo also sounds interesting. And then there’s Cuéntame cómo pasó, Isabel, Gran Hotel and various others that seem to be popular among our members. Or, I could return to the other side of the Atlantic again for my next show. I had been thinking to try to watch shows from all the Spanish-speaking countries if I could. So far I’ve hit Spain, Mexico, Colombia and Argentina. Does anyone have any suggestions for interesting shows from Latin America that are freely and easily available on YouTube or some other non-virus-infested medium? I have no desire to watch a bunch of drug barons shooting each other, but I’m open to less violent crime shows, romance, historical fiction, fantasy, science fiction, comedy, etc.

[Brun Ugle]

This has been a pretty good week for me. I finished reading Harry Potter y la cámera secreta, I finished watching Aquí no hay quien viva, and I even managed to do a drawing of my friend in our art class that actually looked like him. Oh yeah, and I bought a house! It’s little, but has three bedrooms, so I can have an office and a guest room. It also has a tiny garden that should be big enough for me to enjoy puttering around, but not so big as to be a lot of work. And the neighborhood should be pretty quiet. It’s in good condition too, so I don’t really need to do much fixing up, which is a good thing because I’m suddenly feeling rather broke. When I was out walking this morning, I saw two drinks cans and I picked them up to return for the deposit. A couple million more, and I’ll have almost made up the cost of the house.

I probably won’t be moving until March because the previous owner can’t move to her new apartment until February, so that means I can just take it easy all winter. I don’t mind my apartment so much in winter. There aren’t so many people out on the streets at night laughing and talking, nor are there a lot of motorcycles and I often have the windows closed in winter, which also cuts down on the noise. I’m hoping with a whole winter with nothing special to do, I can finally relax a little, get back into shape and make progress in my languages. Maybe my hair will even grow back.

I didn’t really get a lot of other stuff done this week because of all the excitement. I think I only got in two-three days on Glossika and added another 1000 or so words to LWT. Sometimes it feels like I’ll never reach the point where I can just read without having to add another couple hundred words per chapter. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised at that. Spanish has a lot of verb forms. Every verb has potentially about 200 forms and LWT counts each as a separate word. I still occasionally come over new forms of even the most common verbs like “ser,” “estar,” and “tener.”

[MamaPata]

Congratulations - sounds like it's worked out well! Glad you found somewhere that suits you!

[Elenia]

I didn’t really get a lot of other stuff done this week because of all the excitement. I think I only got in two-three days on Glossika and added another 1000 or so words to LWT. Sometimes it feels like I’ll never reach the point where I can just read without having to add another couple hundred words per chapter. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised at that. Spanish has a lot of verb forms. Every verb has potentially about 200 forms and LWT counts each as a separate word. I still occasionally come over new forms of even the most common verbs like “ser,” “estar,” and “tener.”

I'm back into LWT and I know what you mean - even more so because I split my texts up really small and only have about 1,200-1,300 word forms in my database. I don't know how to import, or where (for that matter) I would import from!

[Brun Ugle]

I didn’t really get a lot of other stuff done this week because of all the excitement. I think I only got in two-three days on Glossika and added another 1000 or so words to LWT. Sometimes it feels like I’ll never reach the point where I can just read without having to add another couple hundred words per chapter. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised at that. Spanish has a lot of verb forms. Every verb has potentially about 200 forms and LWT counts each as a separate word. I still occasionally come over new forms of even the most common verbs like “ser,” “estar,” and “tener.”

I'm back into LWT and I know what you mean - even more so because I split my texts up really small and only have about 1,200-1,300 word forms in my database. I don't know how to import, or where (for that matter) I would import from!

Actually, I forgot a couple-- It should be more like 300 forms, but I'm not likely to come across all of them. Vos forms are probably not too common, for example.

I split my texts up really small in the beginning because whole chapters were too discouraging. It's not so much fun taking weeks to get through a text. But now that I have over 9000 words in the database, I'm doing whole chapters at once. I'm working on the first chapter of HP3 now, and when I put it in, it said it was 26% unknown. I started it yesterday and probably won't finish until tomorrow, so it still takes me a long time.

[Brun Ugle]

I decided to give the 70 Day Goldlist Challenge a try. It starts today. I tried Goldlisting once before and didn't get very far because the only notebooks I could find that had enough lines to do the lists according to the official numbers (25-17-12-9) were notebooks with graph paper instead of lines and I hated writing in them and found it hard to read what I'd written. So, I asked David James on his Goldlist Facebook group if I could do the lists 20-14-10-7 instead, and apparently that was fine. So, I'm going to give this another try. It seems a little far-fetched, but a lot of people swear by it, so it must work for them. Maybe it will work for me too.

The 6WC is also coming up. I didn't join last time because I was stressed out and busy with house-hunting and other stuff, but except for signing my contract on the first, I should have a relatively stress-free six weeks this time. I'm really looking forward to a winter of language-learning, reading and not being stressed about anything.

[zenmonkey]

I decided to give the 70 Day Goldlist Challenge a try. It starts today. I tried Goldlisting once before and didn't get very far because the only notebooks I could find that had enough lines to do the lists according to the official numbers (25-17-12-9) were notebooks with graph paper instead of lines and I hated writing in them and found it hard to read what I'd written. So, I asked David James on his Goldlist Facebook group if I could do the lists 20-14-10-7 instead, and apparently that was fine. So, I'm going to give this another try. It seems a little far-fetched, but a lot of people swear by it, so it must work for them. Maybe it will work for me too.

The 6WC is also coming up. I didn't join last time because I was stressed out and busy with house-hunting and other stuff, but except for signing my contract on the first, I should have a relatively stress-free six weeks this time. I'm really looking forward to a winter of language-learning, reading and not being stressed about anything.

I want to hear all about your gold-listing. I'm sitting over here being skeptic so I want to see what another skeptic pulls out of it.
I bombed out of the last 6WC because travel and family took precedence.

[Brun Ugle]

Oops. I disappeared again. I think it’s about three weeks since I last posted. I managed to get a cold the day before Halloween, and I felt just awful for two weeks. I was so dizzy that I kept walking into things and stairs were a nightmare. It meant a slow start to the 6WC too because I kept taking naps instead of studying. Now the cold is finally gone, but two days after it left, I managed to destroy my back again (the middle part this time), so now I’m in pain and still can’t get back to exercising. I’m turning into a sack of tapioca pudding from lack of proper exercise. All I can do is go for walks, do some floor stretches, and exercise a little in the pool a couple times a week.

I also signed the contract for my new house and met the lady who sold it to me. She seems really nice and she’s going to let me have some of her things because she’s moving to an apartment and can’t take everything. She won’t have a garden, for example, so she said I can have her garden furniture, lawnmower, and other garden equipment.

I’m continuing my Goldlist experiment. The Goldlist challenge goes to the end of the year and I’m doing reasonably well so far, at least as far as keeping up with the challenge goes. I’m a little skeptical as to whether or not I’m getting any benefit though. One of the problems with the Goldlist method is that it takes forever because you have to wait a minimum of two weeks between each distillation. At this point, I’ve distilled some of my headlists once. I can usually find enough words to cross off, but sometimes there are one or two that I feel I just sort of vaguely know. I feel like Goldlist might not be so much teaching me new words, as keeping track of words I want to learn. The ones I cross off are usually ones that weren’t completely unknown to me when I put them on the list in the first place, clear cognates of other words I know, words that I forgot that I’d written in the list and added a second time, or words that have come up again in my reading since I wrote them. I’m going to continue the experiment until the end of the challenge just to see if it gets more useful with further distillations, but I might reduce the amount of new words I add as time goes on. It seems to me a very time-consuming method and I don’t feel so far that it is more useful than other methods.

I was skeptical when I started Goldlisting, but I thought it might work because I always found that when I took notes that I usually didn’t need them because the act of writing things out by hand made me remember. However, maybe that wasn’t what made me remember, or maybe I’ve changed, or maybe it just doesn’t work like that for wordlists for me. I’m starting to wonder if there is an auditory element that helped me remember when I took notes. I was, after all, writing things that the teacher was saying. And when I’ve used Memrise, I find it works much better with words that have accompanying audio and not as well for words that lack it. Part of that might be that words with audio get more tests and different kinds of tests though, so I can’t really say for sure. I’ve been saying the words I Goldlist out loud as I write them, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference. Maybe it needs to be someone else’s voice. Or maybe, I’m just really bad at deliberate vocabulary learning. I think most of the vocabulary I’ve learned, I’ve picked up from reading or TV.

Goldlisting is taking up a tremendous amount of time, but I’ve also gone through several GLOSS lessons for Spanish. I’m working on the 2+ level and it is starting to feel very comfortable. In the beginning of the year, 2+ felt a little challenging, but it doesn’t usually seem that bad now. I plan to stick with this level a little longer, but I think I’ll be able to move up to level 3 in a couple of months. There are plenty of lessons in levels 2+ and 3, (over 80 lessons in each level), but levels 3+ and 4 don’t have so many, so I’ll need to get as much as I can out of level 3.

I’ve chosen Estoy vivo for my TV time. I agree with Cavesa -- it’s pretty cool. It’s also a bit scary. But I’m a chicken, so you might not want to take my word on that. I’ve only watched the first two episodes, but I’m trying to use them intensively. Since RTVE has subtitles and transcripts, after I watch, I read the transcript and note down any new vocabulary which I then look up and add to my Goldlist notebook. They sure do swear a lot on Spanish TV.

With all the time I’ve been spending on Goldlisting, I haven’t gotten in as much LWT as I was doing before, but I’m still slowly increasing my database of words. The chapter I’m working on now actually started at only 19 % unknown, so I’m finally down in the teens. I’m looking forward to single digits. Then my reading should speed up considerably.

I started on the speaking challenge that Johanna mentioned, but since I got sick right at the beginning, I never really got anywhere on it. I tried to catch up, but it was no fun being so far behind, so I decided to try again another time. I think they do it every month.

I feel like this intensive work on Spanish is finally paying off. I still struggle to speak many times, but something is starting to give. Maybe by next summer I’ll be able to relax a little on the Spanish and make German my intensive language. It’s slowly slipping away at the moment.

I started to try Goldlisting on German too, but it was too much work and I dropped it pretty quickly. So all I’ve been doing is Glossika. A couple of days ago, I started watching Kommissar Rex again. I was able to pick it up again without much problem, but that may say more about the simplicity of the show than my level of German.