Expug's 2017 Log - It's now and forever

[Tristano]

Hi Expugnator,
I saw that you're also doing the Clozemaster course for Romanian, and then I read that you're also doing multiple other courses.
You probably already wrote something about it... but do you have a general strategy? like laddering, reverse exchange etc? Do you use it in an alternative way?

I'm following only the Romanian course for now and I'm stable at the first position in the last weeks in the "weekly" leaderboard, but also planning to use it with all my next languages.

[Expugnator]

Hi Expugnator,
I saw that you're also doing the Clozemaster course for Romanian, and then I read that you're also doing multiple other courses.
You probably already wrote something about it... but do you have a general strategy? like laddering, reverse exchange etc? Do you use it in an alternative way?

I'm following only the Romanian course for now and I'm stable at the first position in the last weeks in the "weekly" leaderboard, but also planning to use it with all my next languages.

Hi Tristano! Check this post.


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I'm enjoying the book Vindeltorn. It's a nice fantasy. Now I'm more familiar with the story and so I have less trouble listening-reading.

Lingvist just launched Essential Estonian. Finally. I was about to give "learn French through Estonian a try".

Another resource completion: the audiobook Nudge, by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. The book has useful insights, although I might not agree on the premises of libertarian paternalists and how they find the State evil until they realize they need it but still want to act like they don't. But that's politics. Now I'm listening to Quiet: The Power of Introverts, long standing on my to-read list and which I will finally access thanks to the audiobook availability. This will probably be my final non-fiction audiobook in English for a will, and I will try to bridge the gap between my written and heard German, even though I'm still not fluent at the former. Another possible use would be Basic Estonian drills, though I'm not sure I'd have the required attention span or even the vocabulary level to be able to just learn grammar from that.

[Tristano]

Fantastic thanks! I answered there.

[Expugnator]

Change of plans, no morning classes, so no walk to work and no Argentinian podcast. I've started the genitive case in Russian in Exercises, and I think the cases are starting to fall into place, at least for noun declension in the singular. When we get to adjectival declension and the vowel salad things get much more confusing for memorizing (I do understand the usage and now I lack memorization mostly).

Mandarin is not doing bad. The vocabulary at the Narnia book is becoming more transparent, and so I'm not totally lost anymore and I can focus on using Pera-pera on fewer words. Sometimes I can red through full known sentences in advance and thus have time to look up unknown words and still catch up with the audio. Longer sentences still cause trouble because the time is too short to figure out the whole set of determiners in the language's extreme left-branching.

Finished the last film of Marcel Pagnol's autobiographic series, Le Temps des Amours. Now I look forward to reading fiction novels written by him.

I'm enjoying the book 'Quiet'. I'm not 100% introvert, that's for sure. I need social contacts, even parties, for recharging, while feeling socially tired after a while. That changed over time, actually, and nowadays I need socializing more than before.

Today I anticipated my routine since I didn't have classes, but I got busy with other stuff and didn't actually save up much time. Just as usual, finishing with Clozemaster.

[Expugnator]

I'm noticing remarkable progress with Mandarin in general and particularly with the series "The Name of People". I better become familiarized with all the vocabulary, because I only have English subtitles up to episode 7. The standard Chinese subtitles are hard-coded and I can't find a place to download them as subtitle format. That could have granted me machine translation after episode 7, at least.

I'm about to finish TY Greek (old edition) and although I feel I need more grammar-translation (I'm also listening to the audiocourse by the Kypros portal), I don't know what to do next. I have to check previous notes. Actually I wish I could do native materials, but my vocabulary isn't enough yet to make them comfortable as comprehensible input.

I'm slowly getting back to the pre-holidays rhythm of study, finishing my tasks much earlier than the end of the day. Today I even spent the first 1 1/2 hour just talking and still manage to finish everything in my routine almost two hours before.

[Expugnator]

The weekend was very productive. I separated some materials, anticipated much from the non-fiction reading - which will allow me to finish current book this week and move to the next one, luckily in French, read a couple pages in Italian.

I also took the time for listening to the Italian podcast I provinciali. It's not particularly easy to follow. Two guys who talk one over the other and make it sound like there are 10 people talking - being a Brazilian, I can relate to the feeling. They interestingly present some songs that became famous worldwide but no one knows that are Italian in origin, from the Sanremo's festival usually. An example is a song by Chico Buarque that was originally by Lucio Dalla.

As for Clozemaster, I finished - greened - the Estonian and Georgian decks. They're rather short, and now Clozemaster seems to have become smarter and started to put the words at 75% on priority instead of presenting words already mastered all the time. I still can't get through the bug of having some lists with only 1 word missing to be played. Now, what next? I should restart the deck through doing text input, but a) I think it's just going to be more of the same b) Georgian would be troublesome typing and c) my Estonian isn't good enough for production yet. I have a rather extense daily quota and I don't want to add more stress to the game at this point. Curiously, I've been getting error messages when attempting to play those mastered decks.

Another issue is that the 100 most common sets seem to have been ignoring their premise and throwing in rather obscure vocabulary. This is critical when dealing with text input.

The German series You Are Wanted has basically the same premises as one of Black Mirror's episodes.

I'm hoping I can get the hang of the Chinese series so I manage to watch it only with Chinese subtitles. The key dialogue sentences seem easy to follow, but when a character has to explain complex situations involving characters not present at the scene, things become more complicated.

At my Curso de Español Comercial, I'm currently at Contabilidad. No way I'm going to read all the names of all the accounts. Even in Portuguese I found it annoying enough when I had to study it.

With this I conclude my day of studies. I was feeling ill, even had to stay home during lunch hoping to recover. I'm not 100% yet, but I manage to perform my tasks.

[Elenia]

Still on Clozemaster, Esperanto decks are starting to feel easy. I'm learning the logics of the language just through the text-input exercises. Maybe I can think of doing the random mode the way I do with easy Romance languages. The Esperanto deck is pretty large, and while I'm already at the 2nd level it might take decades till I reach the upper ones, a time by which all the sentences will feel easy. This is a feeling I have with German, too. Working on the first level for text input means I'm dealing with too simple and repetitive sentences.

I have that problem too, compounded by the fact that I am not consistent with Clozemaster. What I've decided on doing is moving on to the next level up when a deck gets to easy, only to return to the lower level when I've mastered all the played cards. I also play three levels concurrently for German and Swedish (although I am only going one level at a time for new and harder languages). This way, I hope to maybe get halfway through Clozemaster in my lifetime! But of course the second approach takes up lots of time, even for me (and I am unemployed with no kids!)

Hope you feel better!

[Expugnator]

I already am, not 100% but almost there! Thank you Elenia.

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I wasn't going to write here because I thought it was a minor leech, but now I realized I can stream most videos in the sites I stream from. Tested with the Estonian series, and now NRK is playing too. This will save me some downloading as well as having to play on app screens.

Viki has several TV series with English and even Portuguese subtitles, but they don't allow you to find the original subtitles - or download them. They are removed from the screen, and you need to have a Viki Pass in order to display them alongside with the English ones. You can't have Chinese-only. The way out is finding another source for the subtitled video in Mandarin.

Still watching Anzhelika, it's boring now and I'm not understanding much from the episodes. I feel like drifting away as with other series which lack subtitles.

I'm enjoying Kypros' current format. It's similar to my most favorite textbooks, and it makes me feel my Greek is reaching an intermediate level, as those are the intermediate lessons. The lessons start with a dialogue, not really dumbed down or simplified. Then come the grammar explanations and the dialogue is repeated at the end. I had trouble following the dialogues with a lot of new words, but lately I can absorb them on normal rhythm, not having to pause and catch up. Today's lesson has an interesting explanation on the verbs that translate 'to try':

They both mean I try, but with a difference. Προσπαθώ means I attempt, I make an effort. In δοκιμάζω there's usually no effort implied. It's simply finding out. It can be applied to drinks, for example, in the sense of taste

[Expugnator]

While obtaining the book by Jeremy Rifkin, I became familiarized with Les Liens qui Libèrent, a French publishing label that has books dealing with the changes in the world - debts, crisis, how to cope with consumerism. since the authors are not necessarily French, it's a chance to find more non-fiction read in other languages. By the way, I haven't started this book, The Third Industrial Revolution, but I also figured out his last one is available in Modern Greek. Trying to read it in Modern Greek, even with the translation by side all the time, would be a real challenge, but one I'm really looking forward to. I have the impression Greek will be closer to Portuguese and English in the technical registers.

Not much else; I have yet to update my Wanderlists with the whies I should be stuyding Hebrew, Indonesian, Turkish, Esperanto, Romanian, Czech and Catalan by now.

[Expugnator]

Greek seems to make the same usage of the pronoun που as the 'que' when used informally in Portuguese, that is, it replaces that, which, whom and even whose.

Today was another atypical day. I had to run some errands for some house suplies; spent a little longer at home during lunch because one of the girls would only sleep if I lulled her; then spent a good couple of hours configuring my new phone, to replace the one that is giving me trouble to charge. Now I no longer will have to rely on bluetooth speakers.

So now it's time for wanderlust and why I should fall into this trap again, sorted by language:

Turkish - It has all the cool resources; I'm learning some bits from Clozemaster, so it's like an A0.1 headstart.

Hebrew - I'm a member of a cool Whatsapp group with other Brazilian learners, so I can have support all over the learning process.

Czech - I'm learning a lot from Clozemaster and I have the feeling it will be much easier than Russian, thanks to...Russian.

Romanian - I'm turning it into transparent and I have cool audiobooks to use. It'll be almost like learning Spanish.

Esperanto - My active skills are improving surprisingly fastly at Clozemaster and I could make a good use of native materials for increasing my vocabulary and finally turning it into a transparent language; it is a language that could make use of a podcast, listening-only slot.

Indonesian - I am a member of a few Whatsapp and Telegram groups and the more I postpone it, the more I may lose momentum, like there is another Brazilian learner who could be helping me.

Hindi - I meet two native speakers daily. It's the language of India with most resources.

Catalan - transparent language. The fun of going through some cool textbooks and then reading native, not translated literature right away.

Wanderlusting doesn't mean I don't enjoy my current languages; actually, I look forward to each new step in each of them, like I mentioned about Greek yesterday, where I can't wait to start native materials.

That's all for today, folks!