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

[Expugnator]

I'm so willing ot read Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Georgian next, but only the audiobook is available, and not the book, and since it's probably highly abridged (as to my experience with current Paulo Coelho's book), I'll have a hard time following it alongside with the Spanish original. Still, I might give it a try. Each audiobook costs around 2 dollars.

EDIT: I just found that at buki.ge the book Crónica de una muerte anunciada is available legally (a gov-owned site) as a .doc file. Other classical authors that might not have the epub for sale at the bookstores might be found at that website.

Still a day of catching up. Some issues in the morning and the studies falling behind. I read more from the non-fiction than planned on the bus commute, a time I could have spent on reading in Italian and Estonian.

Continuing the completion trends, I'm now done with the book Effektive kommunikasjonsferdigheter. It was more interesting than I had expected, with good vocabulary learned. Now I'm back to fantasy and listening/reading. I was about to finally buy Tone Almhjell's book and audiobook when I got the same error message that I don't have a Norwegian address, even though they had fixed it that day. This is frustrating.

The day isn't just about problems. I had a good day with the unsubbed Norwegian soap operas. The moment I was focusing (which was about 6 minutes) I could follow almost everything, enough to find the story funny. Even when I was browsing away I could still get the hang of it. That's a new development.

Another completion: the film Le Temps des Secrets (it overlaps a lot with Le Château de Ma Mère, which I bet doesn't happen in Pagnol's novels). Now the final film, Le temps des amours. I hope to read more by Pagnol after finishing the films based on his autobiographical novels.

For languages like Chinese, even having properly translated subs and machine-translated ones makes a large difference. The final episode of the TV series I'm watching is being much more productive. Overall though, I think I'm seeing some progress even at the Narnia listening-reading. Maybe it's time to change my Clozemaster approach and make it more aggressive, by using text input on my next sequence of rounds, and going through HSK. I just find it not so practical to either input pinyin on GT and then post it at the Clozemaster tab at the desktop or input pinyin directly on the phone app.

Just found the Italian word 'rione', assumedly a cognate to the French 'rayon'. The book by Elena Ferrante isn't challenging so far. Some new words, which is expected when starting a new author and a story that takes place during World War II. It puts me in the same mood as Pagnol's novels.

The Kypros greek course treats aspect in Greek as just the equivalent of simple and continuous forms in English (for the future and past alike). Coming from the background of a language that allows for both continuous tense expression and for distinction based on aspect, I'd say this is a bit too stretched. Well, if it can apply to the basic situations then it might be useful didactics.

Anyway, the course was brilliant at contrasting perfective and imperfective future, by alternating full paragraphs of activities with more or less the same verbs. Useful both syntactically and morphologically. I still advise to get down to this course after going through some basic textbooks first, in order to make a better, optimal use of it.

The expression "no vaya a ser que..." has no cognate in Portuguese. I wonder how widespread it is in the Hispanic world.

I did catch up with my studies for the rest of the day, but not enough to be able to envisage doing anything besides Clozemaster. I'll get there, eventually. I'm more effective at reading Georgian, Estonian and Italian now. Russian and Norwegian are audiobook-limited, so there's not much room for improvement, but yet the better I get at understanding, the less likely I am to zone out while listening-reading and having to pause and recap.

[Expugnator]

At the weekend I did the usual Clozemaster activities, which were quite productive. I did the first set of text input rounds for Mandarin, for HSK 1. It was fun! I think it's going to work and will turn out quite helpful for finally activating my Mandarin.

Another language that needs activation is German. I managed to watch a few minutes from a TV series on Netflix (my profile is set to German) and I noticed I'm reading subtitles much faster now, even though there are still some unknown words that leave me a bit willing to know the story more in detail.

As for material gathering, I prepared a few more audiobooks in German, but I tested and I still understand too little from them to be able to just listen extensively and follow the story. I'm going to make use of the podcast Slow German then, which I was planning on using intensively, but since my overall reading has improved while my listening hasn't caught up yet, it's better to use it as a listening training, with less unknown words and narrower contexts at each episode. I'm going to have another language option for when I'm walking on the street and therefore am only able to do listening.

Today is the first day of the new routine. I have to pick the girls at school (it's at walking distance from work), take a taxi and bring them home, then have lunch and then walk back to work. The whole is probably going to take 1 hour and a quarter, less than expected, but since I'll be coming back home after lunch by foot that means I'm going to have some 45 minutes less of desktop study. At the practical side, I'll be walking for some 90 minutes a day and over 8km. This is supposed to be good for exercising, but I already run on a treadmill while at the gym which is more effective and less exhausting.

I still don't know how to reschedule my study in order to make up for this reduction of 45 minutes of desktop study. I had already been having time constraints the past days, as I noted here. What I can do is finding ways to make a better use of those 25 minutes I'll be doing listening-only from now on. I might create a German-podcast slot for when walking back home or just stick to the lunch-slot and listen to the English audiobook. So far I'll be doing the latter, since in net time I'm only having 10 minutes more of listening time than my usual lunch when I stay close to work.

I'm still at one episode without subs of the Estonian soap-opera. I'm starting to pick a quite deal of words and sentences now.

At Russian in exercises, the dative is finally falling into place. The adjectival declension keeps reminding me of the singular instrumental, but now I'm starting to compartimentalize each in my brain. I shouldn't complain, it could always be worse: the genders melt in the plural, while in Greek they don't (Modern Greek declension is much more straightfoward, but you get my point).

My experience with Russian cases now is another evidence that it's nearly useless to learn morphology in detail at the beginning, while you lack the repertory. Now it feels natural to me that it's знакомому but старшему, but it just felt random at the beginning.

I finally managed to buy the new Norwegian novel I'm going to read next, ebook and audiobook. So far, I could only open the epub, and I get an error when trying to download even my previous audiobooks, so I bet it's a technical rather than transactional error. I'll be using the page count at the iBooks on the old iPad but I'll be reading at the desktop. I have the English translation which I converted to pdf as the app I use on Firefox won't open two epub files at once, and the one I tried on Chrome wasn't that practical. The book might not be that hard, though. Only the beginning with a lot of description and many new words caused more trouble.

I wonder if using non-matching audio, subtitles and L1 subtitles increases one's ability for paraphrasing in L2? Because that's what I have been doing with German watching, and I have the feeling I'm constantly learning more ways to say the same thing. The easier it becomes to simply understand the language, the more likely I am to pay attention to those details, almost like dealing with both texts at once (dubbed audio and L2 subs).

Continuing the resources completion, today I saw my last episode of the Chinese TV series "My Amazing Boyfriend". Not bad. Started cheesy, but got less so. The scenes are nice, so is the video quality. Most dialogue lines are still over my head, and it didn't help that some episodes lacked English subtitles altogether and I had to rely on machine translation. Now I want to start a series where I can work on actual Chinese/English translation pairs.

Finished also the second season of Анжелика; my comprehension hasn't been that high lately, especially today as I'm feeling tired, but

This first day I couldn't finish all tasks; the Kypros Greek course and the Spanish textbook were left. I still think I can make it on an ordinary day, though.

[jeff_lindqvist]

(...)that means I'm going to have some 45 minutes less of desktop study. At the practical side, I'll be walking for some 90 minutes a day and over 8km. This is supposed to be good for exercising, but I already run on a treadmill while at the gym which is more effective and less exhausting.

I still don't know how to reschedule my study in order to make up for this reduction of 45 minutes of desktop study.

I recently started taking 45 minute long walks while shadowing target language audio. Either activity motivates me to do the other, and the distance/time is perfect. Even if you don't like shadowing, you could always listen to a podcast or an audiobook.

[Expugnator]

@jeff_lindqvist: that's what I usually do: a podcast in Spanish in the morning, an audiobook in English during lunch and an audiobook in French in the evening. I could try and add more, but the amount of materials I'm dying to listen to, in the form of podcasts, is much less significant than my to-read list of books or my to-watch list of series. Besides, I either understand everything and the listening exercise misses the point or I don't understand enough (which would be the case if I tried Norwegian or German audiobooks).

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Yesterday I could successfully get hold of the Chinese House of Cards, In the name of the people! I got 7 episodes with double subtitles and the English subtitles for 7 more. Ideally I'd need soft-coded Chinese subtitles so I can machine-translate them for when there are no more English subtitles available. Yet I don't think Chinese has websites where you can download just the subs, as everything is subtitled by default.

Still at the subs matter, I've started another Estonian episodes, now with subs again (most do have it). This one had a lot of arguments so I learned how people argue and shout at each other at Estonian. One advantage of such a long-running soap opera is that you get to learn important situations on human relationships.

Finally got hold of the audiobook for Vindeltorn. It's always more fun this way. Looks like it is going to be a cool fantasy story (the first in a trilogy yet to be finished, actually).

I got delayed today mostly because of time spent dealing with some issues. The actual study has been quite productive. Georgian, for example, had two chapters with audio just slightly abridged and an overall high level of comprehension. I believe that once my new life routine falls into place I'll be able to study at a better rhythm, because all of my languages have seen remarkable improvement in reading skills. Anyway, still managed to study everything including the Spanish textbook.

[Expugnator]

- Italian is pretty easy, I speak Portuguese, I know French, Spanish and English I can read Italian effortlessly.
- Yeah, right. So how do you explain that you took a jump of 50 pages in the novel you were reading and didn't even notice it?

That was me yesterday. I only realized I had taken that leap at Elena Ferrante's novel, skipping through 40 pages, when I tried to bookmark the same page at the phone that I was reading at the iPad =D

Finished the 5th book of Narnia (reading through the order of the actual substories). It was the one I liked the most so far, a very light-spirited one. It was not that long either, with only 16 chapters. Now I'm keeping the same audiobook reader for the next one. I'm used to her voice.

I'm getting used to the rhythm of the Kypros Greek lessons. I can follow the audio and read the sample sentences both in Greek and the machine translation almost in real-time, pausing just a few times to check meaning and catch up. I just have to be fully focused, because at the slight distraction I still lose track. Those are natural steps in learning to read a language, though, and I'm glad I can recognize them on my Greek because it means I keep making progress.

The day was calmer, but I still got distracted and didn't do anything besides Clozemaster once the schedule tasks were over.

[arthaey]

To be fair, I feel like I've had that experience with page-skipping in my L1 if the author was really bad or I was really tired.

[Expugnator]

The problem is I am actually enjoying the book, that makes things worse!



Yesterday I could do all my Clozemaster sessions. I'm glad I could do Mandarin through the HSK levels, text input. Level 1 is still easy but it's great to acquire more practice at swyping on the phone.

Now I can skim through Papiamento articles. I remember when it took me several minutes to read a single page. Even when the language is already transparent and you can get the couple of missing words through context, the road to reading automaticity is not over yet. At that time you start to progress in speed and in the ability of skimming, until the way you read becomes more like the one you do in your native language.

It's a good thing to have more time for my non-fiction audiobook in English. I'm about to finish the current one, then I have one or two lined up and then, if nothing pretty interesting shows up, I can turn this into a rotative slot, alternating from podcasts to audiobooks and from English to German to Norwegian. Maybe I should call it my Germanic Lunch Break.

The fact is I still need to improve in both Norwegian and German to reach a comfortable level so I can just listen to audio material and enjoy it while keeping progressing. In the case of Norwegian, at least active skills are catching up. The difficults are higher in German. I still haven't reached a reading level that would allow me for skimming, or a listening level for listening for the gist or following the story or a comfortable speaking level that wouldn't require the other part to switch to English. I don't think the issue is merely time spent, even: I currently read 10 pages in German, then watch TV for 15 minutes and then Clozemaster both multiple choice and text input. I'm probably missing out on an activity that would help me move one step further, and it could be listening/reading as intensively as possible. I learned not to underestimate the importance of the recordings of the text for allowing me to understand sentence structure. Audiobooks and listening/reading are not just about improving one's listening skills. Having someone read for me helps me split each part of the sentence in the meaningful, natural way. This is especially true for languages such as German, with a different word order to the one of the Romance languages.

For the time being, I'm stuck at Fremdschprachenlernen mit System. I read 10 (iPad) pages a day and only advance 1% At this rhythm I'm probably done at the end of the year. Well, at least my pace of reading is increasing, and the boring chapter on dictionaries is gone, and now I'm enjoying an interesting topic on listening. Ideally I should be able to read extensively in hidden moments, but I don't want to risk losing important information regarding language learning due to lack of a dictionary,

As for TV series in German, I finished watching Black Mirror dubbed. Now I'm giving 'You are Wanted' a try. It has built-in German subtitles and I could find the English ones as well.

[Expugnator]

The Estonian deck at Clozemaster is very limited (only 1901 sentences), but it's remarkably useful. Many basic sentences are covered, actual daily life communication. There are some sentences I come accross which trigger the memory of a character in the soap opera saying them out loud. I'm developping a feel for the language. The deck is very rich in questions, which isn't so frequent in most corpora. Questions make a good deal of real-life communication, after all, dialogues usually revolve around them. So, in theory, sentence decks should have more questions. So far only the Estonian deck seems to have taken this into consideration to the extent it deserves.

Reading Georgian has been a lot of fun. I'm close to reaching basic reading fluency. Unfortunately the selection of audiobooks is still limited, with some classics involved, and the listening-reading remains critical to my progress. Once I reach a better level, I'm going to have a wider range of ebook-only titles to choose from, even Ya fiction and contemporary ones (I've read Amélie Nothomb in Georgian, for example).

So I started You Are Wanted. A good premise. Even though it now is native German and not dubbed, it actually feels easier to follow. It's not a long one, so maybe I can enjoy it and then replace it with the super-hero series I'm so lagging behind at.

The Chinese series In The Name of People started way over my head, but now I'm starting to understand both audio and hanzi. It still feels too much entangled in bureaucracy, though.

After complaining about time management, I've finally caught up. It's been two days that I finish the schedule tasks rather early, in spite of taking an extended lunch break for picking up the girls at school. So far I've managed to finish one hour earlier, and I've been using that hour on Clozemaster. Yes, that much. Clozemaster should be reserved for hidden moments, but in fact it's much more productive to do the typing at the desktop. Still, I have to think carefully on how to make the best use of my time as I have other priorities in language learning and in life.

[Expugnator]

I'm letting Clozemaster slip a bit at the weekend. No big deal really, this weekend we had guests at home. We finally managed to have a barbecue for the first time ever since we moved in three years ago. I was really looking forward to it and I'm glad it all went well and we had a good time.

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'm not sure if a breakthrough is on sight, but Mandarin finally feels more palatable. After 5 books of Narnia I can more or less follow the story in real time with looking up words with Pera-pera. I still believe that trying a novel with contemporary vocabulary might even be easier (like the ones I've read by Dan Brown).

To iguanamon: at the book Fremdsprachenlernen mit System I started a section called "Sichern Sie das Hörverstehen durch mehrkanalige Verarbeitung", roughly Ensure the listening comprehension through multichannel processing.

Accomplished Language Textbook: la Pratique Courante de L'Espagnol



A different book, a different format. I like its comprehensiveness, the way it points the reader to the idiosincracies of the language. The exercises are also helpful, and the language feels authentic. Most of the book is Castillian, but the final lessons cover Mexican Spanish. I recommend it.

Now comes the challenge of deciding what to do next. I wish I could avoid textbooks altogether and just enjoy native materials, but I need to know the normative language properly as it is considered an asset. Of the resources I had lined up, only Using Spanish and the business Spanish textbooks are missing. I checked Using Spanish and it feels like reading a dictionary, so I'm just not doing it. Business Spanish it is. I have Proyecto en Español Comercial, by Aurora Centella Rodrigos, which looks very good and has answer keys, and another one I have paperback at home. It all comes down to whether I find that other one or not. We'll know it by this time tomorrow.

Yet another day where all the extra time went on Clozemaster, and I still had three sessions to go. I have to work on it. Either I leave Clozemaster as my bedtime-study only or I add up some easy read on stronger languages for that time and keep doing Clozemaster during my desktop study time.

[Expugnator]

So I started Curso de Español Comercial, by Blanca Aguirre and Consuelo Hernandez. The topics so far are transparent, but I'm learning the important terms that are different in Spanish. One of them is paro forzoso, another way of saying desempleo, unemployment. The book is suited for self-learning as it has an answer key. I'm taking it easy, at about 4 pages a day.

The day was more productive than usual, but no significant study came after the Clozemaster sessions.