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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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 Dec 12, 2017 5:50 pm

I’ve probably written this log entry a dozen times in my head, but I never seem to get around to actually typing it. I’ve told myself though, that I’m not allowed to watch another episode of Estoy vivo until I do. That show is fantastic. If your Spanish is up to it, you should watch it. It’s great. I’ve been savoring it, so I’ve only watched up to episode 5. After watching each episode, I read the transcript through and goldlist the unknown words. At this point, a lot of the unknown words seem to be regionalisms, slang, or creative terms for various portions of the anatomy. Those Spaniards are real potty-mouths, at least on TV.

The Goldlist Challenge is going well. I passed 6500 “lines” a few days ago, and have over 3500 entries in my headlist. Counting the words I’ve crossed off as “learned,” I’ve learned well over 1000 words and expressions so far. I feel like it’s really made a difference, but I’ve been doing it so intensely that I’ve hardly had the energy to do anything else. The experiment has converted me from skeptic to believer though. I’m still not sure that the Goldlist method is more efficient than SRS or that it takes less time. Of course, you cross off words, but you have to rewrite the others, so does it really take up less time than Anki where you don’t get rid of words you know, but the intervals get so long that you hardly ever see them and reviewing is as easy as clicking a button?

Anyway, the Goldlist method seems to work well for me. I had some troubles in the beginning, but that might have been due to the method being new and also I had a cold for two weeks and my brain wasn’t working for a while. Now I don’t usually have much trouble with it, and I’ve definitely learned a lot of new words. So, I think I will continue with it, or a slightly modified version, even after the challenge is over at the end of December. However, I will slow down a bit so I can work more on other things and just add words that I come across on TV, books, GLOSS, newspapers, etc. I’ve had to struggle to get enough words to add to make a strong showing in the challenge. I started out taking the hard words from LWT, but I ran out. I also took words from GLOSS exercises and from TV, but I don’t get through enough TV episodes or GLOSS exercises to fill up many headlists. So I’ve had to use various lists that I found and sometimes have even taken words randomly from the dictionary. This has led me to learning the names of several kinds of chisels and knowing three different words for earwigs. But if I ever find myself engaged in a conversation on earwig sculpture, I’ll be ready….. (to run).

So, I’m now convinced Goldlist works, but I don’t know that it’s better than other methods. For me, writing words down really helps me remember them, especially if I say them out loud as I write them and also visualize them or see myself in a situation where I could use the word. However, Goldlist has its weaknesses too. I’m not convinced that it takes less time than Anki because writing things out takes a lot of time. Like Anki, reviews build up. According to the creator of Goldlist, your brain naturally remembers 30% without effort, and the Goldlist method uses that by reducing each list by 30% with each rewrite or distillation, as it’s called. However, I find that there are some lists that my brain refuses to remember and I might barely recall 20%, which means I find it very difficult to get rid of enough words. Then there are other lists, most of them actually, where by the second distillation, I remember maybe 80% and I feel like it is a waste of time to rewrite all those words. So I am considering modifying the method after the challenge is over and making it more flexible. I will still write lists of words, but I won’t confine myself to the official format, and will instead rewrite the lists crossing off as many or as few words as I find I remember easily. One other problem with Goldlist is that errors can creep in. With Anki, or flashcards, if you make the original card correctly, then it stays correct. But with Goldlist, you might miscopy a word at any time. So even if you write it correctly the first time, you might later forget to cross a “t” that then turns into an “l” in future lists, or accidentally copy the definition from the wrong line, or make all kinds of tiny errors. And of course, Goldlist is a long-term method. You have to wait at least two weeks between each rewrite, so if you need to learn vocabulary for each week in class, it isn’t the best choice.

I think my real discovery of these few weeks of intense Goldlisting, is that I really need to do a bit of vocabulary study now and then. I tend to drill grammar until I know it forwards, backwards and inside-out, and then move on to native materials. But this has shown me that I would get huge benefit from doing some intense vocabulary work as well. I haven’t been reading much in Spanish lately because I’ve been exhausting myself with Goldlists instead, but I just tried reading several random passages from several different books and I feel like the difference from just a couple of months ago is huge. Suddenly my reading feels so much faster and smoother. I haven’t timed myself before or after, nor have I tried counting the number of unknown words, but subjectively, I feel the difference is amazing. And I noticed a number of words that I’ve learned recently and now understand with ease. (I even noticed a mention of earwigs in Harry Potter!)

Another thing I’ve learned from studying Spanish vocabulary is that pretty much every word in the language, no matter how innocent and everyday a word it is in one country, it probably means something dirty in some other country. Even the earwigs! :shock:

I also finally got around to reading one of the books set on Gotland that Jeff suggested. I read Mari Jungstedt’s first book and I’m already hooked. Unfortunately, the library doesn’t seem to have the second book, so I’m going to have to order it from another library. I have to read them in order, of course. Gotland sounds like a lovely place, apart from all the murders and serial killers, of course. It’s a good thing Jeff knows kung fu.

Other than that, I haven’t done a great deal. I haven’t even done German every day, and when I do do something with it, I just do Glossika or watching Kommissar Rex. And I’ve put Japanese aside again for a while.

Oh, I also had one Skype session with my Spanish tutor a couple of weeks ago, but it was so frustrating. I’m thinking of giving him one more chance and then finding a new tutor if he doesn’t improve. He was one of the best tutors I had in the beginning when he was willing to just chat, but then he started getting it into his head that he had to teach me stuff. So he keeps making me do exercises that are far too easy for me “for review.” I’ve told him that they are too easy and the lesson before last, I even gave him a couple of points that I thought I could do to work on so that he could work on those with me since he is so keen on exercises. He agreed and I assumed he would dig out some exercises on those topics for me, but then when the lesson came, he wanted to continue with the same easy exercises we’d been doing. On top of that, Skype kept cutting the call every few minutes. The lesson was on a Friday night and I was so exhausted afterwards, that I could hardly even move all weekend. I was so tired, I thought I must have the flu, but it was just my usual post-talking-to-someone exhaustion magnified a few dozen times by my frustration. It seems like every time I find a tutor I like, they eventually try to turn into a “real” teacher and then they’re no good anymore.
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Yuurei
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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 Yuurei » Thu Dec 14, 2017 9:45 am

It was interesting to read your take on the Goldlist method - I only recently read up on it (after mostly ignoring all mention of it previously) and found myself intrigued to start with - I mean, any method that starts off by telling me to get a pretty notebook and pen already wins brownie points in my book - but I have to say I'm not patient enough to wait around for 2 weeks after first writing down the words would drive me mad. I'm not exactly good at this whole patience thing. :roll:
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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 jeff_lindqvist » Thu Dec 14, 2017 5:24 pm

Brun Ugle wrote:I have to read them in order, of course. Gotland sounds like a lovely place, apart from all the murders and serial killers, of course.


At the opening ceremony of the Crimetime festival here in town, they asked the Finnish author Mikko Porvali what he was looking forward to during the weekend:
-To get home alive. :D
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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 » Thu Dec 28, 2017 2:20 pm

jeff_lindqvist wrote:
Brun Ugle wrote:I have to read them in order, of course. Gotland sounds like a lovely place, apart from all the murders and serial killers, of course.


At the opening ceremony of the Crimetime festival here in town, they asked the Finnish author Mikko Porvali what he was looking forward to during the weekend:
-To get home alive. :D

Completely understandable. I've just started the fourth book in the series and it seems like Gotland has an extremely high number of serial killers considering the size of the population. Just about everyone on the island must be either a police officer, a serial killer, or the victim of a serial killer. On the other hand, all that Viking and medieval history makes it a very tempting place to visit in spite of the poor chances for survival.
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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 » Thu Dec 28, 2017 2:30 pm

Yuurei wrote:It was interesting to read your take on the Goldlist method - I only recently read up on it (after mostly ignoring all mention of it previously) and found myself intrigued to start with - I mean, any method that starts off by telling me to get a pretty notebook and pen already wins brownie points in my book - but I have to say I'm not patient enough to wait around for 2 weeks after first writing down the words would drive me mad. I'm not exactly good at this whole patience thing. :roll:

Yeah, you do need a bit of patience. Of course, you don't just wait; you keep writing new lists the whole time while you're waiting for the two weeks to be up. However, it is still a bit frustrating in the beginning because you really have to stick with it for at least 1.5 to 2 months to know if the method even works for you. I found it a little difficult to keep doing it every day when I wasn't at all sure I wasn't just wasting my time completely.

Oh, and I don't bother with the pretty notebook part. I buy the 3-for-29 kr notebooks (the cheapest I can usually find). I'm not spending 129 kr on a nice notebook that's just going to be filled with random words. And you quickly need a lot of notebooks. I've slowed down a lot, but even so, I'm already on my fourth notebook and will soon need a fifth. Can you imagine how much money I'd need if I went for the pretty ones? I do use pretty colored pens though. A good pen is essential. Otherwise, it's hard to write neatly and I use too much brain-power on trying to write legibly and then I don't remember the words 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 Brun Ugle » Sat Dec 30, 2017 7:41 pm

December feels like it has been a bit of a bust. I haven’t done much at all lately. I don’t really like December. The first two weeks are fun, but after that, I’ve had enough of Christmas and wish everything could go back to normal, but it just gets worse. I kept getting over-excited because of the changes in routine and all the excitement in the air, so I had to spend all of December fighting off mania. I couldn’t go to the stores because they were too full of people and I’d get too hyper. That also meant I couldn’t really concentrate on anything this month. I’m looking forward to Tuesday when everything will start to get back to normal.

All I’ve really done since about the middle of the 6WC is Goldlisting and a bit of TV and reading. I haven’t touched LWT or Glossika in a while and haven’t done anything at all with German. I think I was doing a bit too much Glossika and I got worn out by it, so I should probably go back to a lighter dose. I also got a bit tired of Kommissar Rex. It can be fun for a while, but it’s also kind of dumb, so sometimes I just have to take a break. In one of the last episodes I watched, they were actually comparing fingerprints over the phone! The one guy had managed to secretly get the suspect’s fingerprints and so he called in to the other guy back at the station and described it, like “ten lines to the left of the swirl” or something, and the other guy was looking at a print taken from the crime scene and said, “That’s it! It’s a match!” Somehow, I feel like comparing fingerprints is a little more difficult than that. :roll: Even Estoy vivo is more realistic. It’s about a police officer who is chasing a serial killer and gets killed, but he gets sent back to earth in a new body to continue his mission. And now he has superpowers, but so does the serial killer. :shock:

I was going to do a bit of a wrap-up for the year, but I don’t feel like I’ve done anything this year. I suppose I have, but it feels like so very little. It was a tough year with too many things that happened and got in the way of language learning. A lot of them were good things, like me finally being able to buy a house, but it was stressful and time-consuming. I imagine that next year will also be a bit hectic to start off with since I’ll be moving in March and I have to arrange all that, and I’ll probably be a bit discombobulated for the first couple of months afterwards. So realistically, I have to assume I won’t really make huge progress in the first half of the year. But come autumn, I’m going to learn all the languages! Fluent in 30 seconds! jk :P

I’ve been thinking a bit about my progress and plans and have come to the conclusion that I’m actually pretty bad at learning languages. Part of it is that I need to know ”everything” to feel that I know anything at all, so even at C1, I feel extremely awkward and at B2, I feel completely hopeless. I’m definitely not one of those who think they are “fluent” at A2. The other problem is obviously that I try to learn too many languages at once. I know it’s possible to do a bunch of languages and make progress in all, but I just don’t feel like I’m making progress. And then there are times when I have to cut down to only an hour or two a day and can’t fit in that many languages and end up losing the progress I made in the weaker ones. So, it’s probably best to stick to learning one or two at a time. Also, I feel like I need to attack a language from multiple fronts at once. I’ve notice that if I am working a lot on one area, like vocabulary, and don’t have time for things like reading or listening, I feel like I slide backwards in those areas. I don’t think it’s really as bad as it feels, because I always feel like I’ve forgotten everything. Even with Norwegian, if I don’t use it for a week, I feel like it’s gone completely. It’s not, of course. It’s just that I have a messy brain and things get lost in there really easily. It’s very frustrating because I always feel like I don’t know anything at all.

Anyway, I’m hoping that if I temporarily limit myself to Spanish and German, with maybe a teensy bit of Esperanto now and then just to remind myself of it, I will make some progress next year. I know as soon as you read this you are all going to try to tempt me with every language on the planet, but I’m not listening.

Anyway, thanks for reading my ramblings this year. I’ll be making a new log for 2018 sometime in the next few days, so I hope you’ll join me there. :D
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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 gsbod » Sun Dec 31, 2017 6:33 pm

Maybe it's time to ditch the Austrian dog detective and start watching Tatort. Different episodes are made by different regional companies, so, for example, the Vienna Tatort and Swiss Tatort is geoblocked, but most of the others that have recently been on TV are available on ARD Mediathek - you just have to wait until after the German watershed to watch them online!
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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 Dec 31, 2017 6:51 pm

gsbod wrote:Maybe it's time to ditch the Austrian dog detective and start watching Tatort. Different episodes are made by different regional companies, so, for example, the Vienna Tatort and Swiss Tatort is geoblocked, but most of the others that have recently been on TV are available on ARD Mediathek - you just have to wait until after the German watershed to watch them online!

I’ve thought about trying Tatort, but assumed it would be too difficult. My German is terrible. I haven’t actually studied it in ages. Maybe it’s time to get a little more serious and do some real studying. I think I tried to hop over too much, thinking German would be easy because of the Norwegian discount.
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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 gsbod » Sun Dec 31, 2017 7:00 pm

There is a large range in difficulty for Tatort. Try a few different investigators and see how you get on. Maybe avoid München and Berlin to start with.
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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 Dec 31, 2017 7:58 pm

gsbod wrote:There is a large range in difficulty for Tatort. Try a few different investigators and see how you get on. Maybe avoid München and Berlin to start with.

How connected are the episodes? Can I just start anywhere with any episode? With most shows I like to start at the beginning and go in order, but I know Tatort isn’t quite like most shows. I’m not quite sure how it works.
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