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

[Tristano]

Good luck with Hebrew! It's a cool and beautiful sounding language. I failed in getting the motivations to learn the language before being able to read it (for me languages that don't use an alphabet are a big deal) but I'm confident that it won't be a problem for you.
I look forward to read the experiences (together with the ones in romanian). Mazal tov!

[Expugnator]

I didn't think starting Hebrew would raise so much interest!
@Josquin: I have yet to catch up reading everyone's logs, but I'll surely read about your studies.
@Tristano: magari lo riprenderai ancora più motivato! È la seconda volta che provo ad imparlarlo, ma adesso ho più esperienza.

It feels great to finally get down to Hebrew. As with Greek, I've been willing to start it for too long. I'm moving slowly, just enjoying the first contacts with the language. Now there are very few languages I'm really passionate about starting to learn, and the list remains stable.

Iron Fist has only 13 episodes, so despite having it fully in Georgian I might watch it in German instead.

I'll like any post even remotely related to kungfu (no matter how fictitious the character or how mythological Kun Lun is).

I'm afraid I'm not a qualified person in the least to report on that, but that's one more point for my preference to starting with that series.

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Today I commuted by bus and so I had more time for reading. I consolidated my German reading at nearly Romance-sister-speed.

An European road movie is really fascinating. Eyjafjallajökull covers over 2000 km from Munich to Greece. I want to drive in Europe next time I go there. Last time I didn't have my license yet and that limited our tours considerably.

I'm watching a series of videos from Yabla that are just Chinese lessons, in English, with a couple of sentences being taught at each video. The content is interest also culture-wise, but they had better explain it in Chinese with English subtitles. Or else it misses the point of Yabla's videos. Anyway, I'm no longer in the mood for beginner's resources, even if my Mandarin is far from great;

I've passed the test for listening to an audiobook while driving. I could follow the story pretty comfortably (it is French) while driving carefully. I should buy a cable to transmit the sound from my phone to the car's sound system, because the volume of the phone is still low. Wearing earphones is of course forbidden, but it's nice to know I can understand French audiobooks without earphones.

[Expugnator]

First day of commuting by car. I'm listening to the Argentinian podcast longer than usual. If I notice it's somewhere around 40 minutes, I'll probably split it into 2 slots for two different materials. I wish I had more interesting stuff to listen to. The percentage of books I want to read which are present as audiobooks is minimal. So, it doesn't make sense to listen to less interesting resources just because I have much more listen-only time now.

Russian in Exercises has now some exercises on changing from one case to another, like from accusative to prepositional or dative. That's a serious thing!

The 6th Narnia book is going to a fun part. Besides, my comprehension of Mandarin is improving considerably, making the whole activity much more enjoyable.

After several days, I've read in German intensively again today. Not much difference in terms of vocabulary acquisition, which is already done fairly well through context. Only more refining on meaning.

I'm on lesson 05 of Le grec sans peine (I've already been through Le nouveau grec sans peine), and I expect a lot from this "second wave". I think I'll manage to both fill in the gaps on vocabulary and basic grammar and to activate my existing Greek, placing it near the B1 range and preparing me for tackling native materials more comfortably.

[Expugnator]

Russian gets serious and serious. Now the instrumental cases. A lot of endings to tell apart.

Today's Narnia's chapter was the most inspiring metaphor of the global collective hypnosis we live in and the total denial of anything that can't be directly perceived by the ordinary senses. Quite inspiring.

Vamos supor que então que esta fossa, este seu reino, seja o único mundo existente. Pois, para mim, o seu mundo não basta.

Today I finished a long-lasting resource. The 121-episode Norwegian comedy TV show Mot i br8stet. I didn't always pay attention to what was going on (most of the times I didn't), and yet it helped me a lot with Norwegian listening comprehension. I can't say I can watch it properly now, but I can understand a good deal of it when I'm paying attention.

Now I'm free to just resume and enjoy the Norwegian series on NRK. They have few episodes, so I have to always have one lined up after the next. I'll be having subtitles again and I hope this will help with both listening training and vocabulary acquisition.

Eyjafjallajökull is now in Salzburg. I was glad to recognize the place. I think the film presents the beginning of the start of transport by bus in Europe taking the way and becoming a slow and cheap alternative to trains and planes.

Abridged editions are the evil of Georgian audiobooks. That kills what otherwise would be a wonderful exercise.

At the previous Assimil Grec edition, I saw some Greek lines in cursive scripture, with ligatures. Would be quite useful to learn.

[Expugnator]

Thirty minutes of Argentinian podcast while driving in the morning. The advantage of listening to the phone air-open, no earphones, is that I'm being prepared for understanding normal utterances at normal volumes surrounded by street noise.

One point to the Russian case system: it doesn't have double declensions as in Georgian. An attribute in the genitive remains in the genitive while the main noun changes.

My daily study is much more interesting now that I've resumed watching Side om Side. The 5th season will start airing later this month, by the way.

Today was the best day in terms of Russian listening comprehension. I could actually follow the plot and almost all sentences. Thanks to a neverending meeting, I had to read the Russian non-fiction in parallel, which allowed me for a more focused effort on understanding the text than in my usual listening-reading exercise when I tend to wander.

[Adrianslont]

Hi Expug. I just did a search of the forum for "Indonesian" because I am learning it and i occasionally do that search to see if anyone else is doing so (usually I find that people have it in their wish lists). Anyway, I saw your reference to doing some Indo in Clozemaster and you said something about an "initial shock". You've made me curious - what kind of shock?

[Expugnator]

Hi Expug. I just did a search of the forum for "Indonesian" because I am learning it and i occasionally do that search to see if anyone else is doing so (usually I find that people have it in their wish lists). Anyway, I saw your reference to doing some Indo in Clozemaster and you said something about an "initial shock". You've made me curious - what kind of shock?

I was shocked that I couldn't understand or figure out anything, not even the role of each word in the sentence. Having dabbled in the language a few years ago, I was expecting I would be able to recognize a couple of words per sentence, but everything seemed so opaque. It did get better after the repetition within the first level. I've put my dormant words to use and started learning new ones. Even so, Clozemaster is very limited for starting from scratch on a opaque language. One has no clues about grammar relations. Some of them start to make sense after a while, but it takes much more time than simply studying from an elementary textbook with explicity rules.

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The weekend was dedicated mostly to the forum. I started to get rid of my backlog of unread posts, especially at the logs forum. I also did the usual Clozemaster and Italian podcast.

My Estonian watching time was of a different mood: for the first time, I had subtitles in Estonian but couldn't download them so I'd put them on GT. So, today I watched in Estonian with Estonian subtitles, and I'm happy with the result. I could understand most of the story. It could have been better if I weren't so tired, almost dozing off. It's not a day I was supposed to work (tomorrow is a holiday). Well, at least it's one more language study day.

Side om side is a lot of fun but still has some unknown words, so I thought I could look them up. Since there aren't so many words and there are subtitles, I just split the screen and adde Google Translate on the other half so I can look the new words up without even pausing the video. It's been useful today.

Doing the translation exercises for Assimil Le Grec. Now my Greek is being somewhat activated.

Finally got down to writing translation exercises in Hebrew. I haven't learned all the letters that have been taught yet up to lesson 7 (and I might be totally missing on the written ones), but I'm starting to get the hang of it. I expect to review the alphabet through other sources.

[Adrianslont]

Hi Expug. I just did a search of the forum for "Indonesian" because I am learning it and i occasionally do that search to see if anyone else is doing so (usually I find that people have it in their wish lists). Anyway, I saw your reference to doing some Indo in Clozemaster and you said something about an "initial shock". You've made me curious - what kind of shock?

I was shocked that I couldn't understand or figure out anything, not even the role of each word in the sentence. Having dabbled in the language a few years ago, I was expecting I would be able to recognize a couple of words per sentence, but everything seemed so opaque. It did get better after the repetition within the first level. I've put my dormant words to use and started learning new ones. Even so, Clozemaster is very limited for starting from scratch on a opaque language. One has no clues about grammar relations. Some of them start to make sense after a while, but it takes much more time than simply studying from an elementary textbook with explicity rules.

Thanks for the reply, Expug. Your answer was pretty much what I expected but I was interested to know exactly why you were shocked for two reasons.

1. You are an experienced learner of opaque languages, including languages with different scripts. Different scripts intimidate me (I should probably get over that) with the exception of Greek, and Indonesian just seems incredibly less intimidating to me than any language with a different script. That said, I thoroughly appreciate that the vocabulary of Indonesian makes it very opaque and the grammar is fairly simple but if you can't recognise a verb it would get harder very quickly.

2. So many people say how easy Indonesian is - both native speakers and foreign learners - but I think that it is a myth, and I'm pleased to say, so does the FSI. I think the above mentioned vocabulary is what makes it hard. You get some English, Dutch, Arabic, Chinese dialect cognates but really very few.

So, I guess I was asking you to confirm my opinions about the difficulty level. Thanks! - Though it's obviously doesn't present the challenges of Chinese or Japanese.

The great thing about Indonesian is that when travelling there, the people are so appreciative of even a low skill level of their langauge.

[Expugnator]

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Indonesian is utterly hard. I just expected my dabbling to having been more consistent. I also expected to see sentences consisting mostly of very common words. It's not the way Clozemaster seems to work, though. It seems only the clozed word is a very frequent one, while the other words in the sentence can be of whatever frequency. Following this reasoning, you might get really complex words in the first levels, because they've only taken care that the prompted word is of high frequency. I see this happen at the Indonesian and at the Turkish decks. Other decks follow more of a pattern of both high-frequent words and easy sentences.

As for different scripts, you shouldn't let yourself feel intimitated. Whatever is a "normal" alphabet is just a matter of few days of getting used. And that opens up entirely new words. When you study a language with a different alphabet, you get almost instant gratification. You cease being an illiterate. This is blatant with cyrillic, greek but also with Georgian and Armenian. Even abjads have some of the highest returns on investment in the language-learning world.

And yet I find any opaque language on the latin script much easier than opaque languages with different alphabets. Estonian grammar is nightmarish, at least noun morphology, but vocabulary seems to stick more easily than, say, Georgian. I have the vague feeling that in 2 years of Estonian I learned as much as in 5 years of Georgian (this is also thanks to improved learning tecniques, but the alphabet thing also plays a role). That's why I think Indonesian might not be that hard in terms of vocabulary. Just opaque, but not harder than opaque languages on a different script with irregular spelling or non-phonetic ones. Maybe Mandarin on the latin script would have been easier, because I know that Indonesian adds a lot of complexity to its affixes, but in the real world I can only compare the Mandarin that has a script that gives very little phonetical clues to Indonesian which is almost phonemic. When you start a language, many words look alike; the longer they are, the worse the trouble. It remains easier to recognize different words - which differ only from one or two characters or phonemes - in the familiar latin script than in a foreign script.

Indonesian has the added difficulty of diglossy. It might be my first highly diglossic language - after my native tongue - or it might be Czech. Both are in the near future, I hope.

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Yesterday was a bank holiday. It was productive. I watched one more episode of Travelers on Netflix - dubbed and subtitled in German. I noticed I had been watching it with low volume, and when I raise the volume I can follow the audio pari passu with the subtitles. I don't use earphones.

I also got back to doing a second round on Clozemaster for Norwegian, Modern Greek, German and Mandarin. For all but Norwegian I could only do multiple choice last week. Yesterday I notice how effective those text input exercises on lower levels are for consolidating and activating vocabulary.

I've decided I'm going to purchase the third volume of Kathérine pancol's series as audiobook. I already have it as ebook, but I'm enjoying listening to the audiobook a lot so I think it's worth it. I found it available on the site Bookdoreille , which is a nice play on words. I hope I won't have any problems to create an account and purchasing it.

I thought I wouldn't make it to the gym the rest of the week, but fortunately I will be able to go. That will allow me to keep studying with a sharper mind, to feel well the rest of the day and to keep the cold away.

A friend has recommended Forum Babel , a place for discussing about languages but in our TLs. Probably it's been mentioned on that thread about other forums, but I'm saving it on my log for register.

I have the persistent feeling that I'm about to reach a critical mass in Norwegian which would finally allow me to understand and follow the language more easily, but I never seem to get to it, always struggling with too many words. I'm doing listening-reading, I'm watching TV intensively and working on text input on Clozemaster. yet I think I'm advancing much more in German in terms of receptive skills. Even though the German words tend to look more alike (fewer vowels), I have the impression that a more irregular spelling and a more complex phonology make it harder to memorize a word. The brain tends to store the TL words as simplified, native-phonemes only units and then, when it comes to usage, these instances are reconverted both for sound and spelling. A more complex phonology and a less regular spelling in Norwegian probably explain why it takes longer for words to stick in Norwegian than in German.

I've consistently finished my tasks around the same time in the pas days, despite the forced extended lunch break. I'm consistently having time for other serious things besides language learning.

About to finish book 3 on a series (Russian non-fiction), I just got the audiobook for the 4th book, which I was going to have to just read in parallel. Besides, I also got access to a new set of non-fiction audiobooks that might be interesting.

[Adrianslont]

Thanks again for the elaboration.

I think you are right about Clozemaster - with the Clozemaster approach you can get hard vocabulary even when the closed out word is graded easy. And I think that works together with what I was saying about getting few cognates - in many languages you're going to get some cognates in some of those Clozemaster sentences and that will help you. You get fewer with Indo.

And your point about similar looking words is interesting, too - I would get confused by menemukan, mengemukakan, mengemudikan when starting out! It must be harder in a different script!