Mork's Log 2017

[MorkTheFiddle]

Today in the mail from Saint Maur des Fosses comes L'Apparition du livre by Lucien Febvre et Henri-Jean Martin. This book is beautiful not because it is shiny, glossy and new, but because it has an intact but soiled paperback cover, old not-quite-yellowing pages and an ever so slight odor of mildew. It is a match for Le Temps des cathédrals by Georges Duby, which came a few days ago. Both appear as two of the small number of non-English sources that Peter Watson gives for his Ideas. Only a few pages into Le Temps des cathédrals, the writing of Duby has impressed me. The title is clear enough, but the book covers a lot more ground than just cathedrals.

Understanding spoken French. My understanding of Hélene et les garçons is a bit in retrograde, but not alarming and I still am enjoying.

Understanding spoken Spanish. After trying and rejecting Águila rosa (Spain) and Mujeres asesinas (both Mexico and Argentina), I hit upon Cuentame cómo pasó and liked S01E01 very much.

Ancient Greek and the Learning More Vocabulary

Here is something I did. Convert as many Greek texts on my computer to txt files and gather all these files into one directory. Using FrequencyWordsHelper.exe, generate a list by frequency of all the Greek terms in those text files (word, frequency). Alphabetize the list and compare it to An Aid to Greek at Sight by E. C. Ferguson (1889). One significant chunk of Ferguson's book lists Greek word families. One such family, for example, is a group of words connected to ἀγα and a generic meaning of "glory, envy." Words in the family include ἀγάλλω, 'glorify, exult', as well as a couple of compounds, ὑπεραγάμαι, 'I am exceedingly pleased,' and ἐπηγάλλετο, 'he gloried in, he exulted in.' Finally, I can use the list of terms in LWT to find meanings.
Who would have thought that learning 6 or 7 words at a time would be easier than learning only one? Two bonuses: the words are from the texts that I myself am reading, not the whole corpus, and in this particular case, I learn that each word from this family is used only one time in the whole set of texts.

The number of words in the generated list was over 90,000 words (slightly less than 10% of all the words in the Perseus Greek corpus (9,141,581).

Notes: (1) Ferguson's book comes from either archive.org or google books.
The Greek texts are these: all Herodotus, some of the works of Plato (incl The Republic), Procopius, a few works of Plutarch, a few by Lucian, a few by Diogenes Laertius, and some Diodorus Siculus, Appian and Dio Cassius, many of the works of Xenophon (incl Anabasis) and all of Thucydides.

[Carmody]

How are things with La Peste. I have the book but am not sure if it is too depressing to read.

[MorkTheFiddle]

How are things with La Peste. I have the book but am not sure if it is too depressing to read.

I finished listening to the audiobook. The dry style of the narration fit the topic and the mood, but it grows a bit tedious toward the end. You no doubt know that Camus is never a barrel of laughs, but behind his serious poker face sometimes lies a grim sense of humor about the ineptitude of bureaucracy. So many horrible things have happened in real life since the novel appeared, they have dulled its force. It's an engaging and thought-provoking book, and I recommend it.

[Carmody]

Many thanks for the speedy and comprehensive answer.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Using subs2srs and Anki with Almodóvar's Volver, starring Penelope Cruz, and Zemeckis's Allied, starring Marion Cotillard and Brad Pitt, is turning out well.
For whatever reason, perhaps user error, the subtitles that I used for Allied left off the last 25% or so of the film. All the cards are finished and the murky ones suspended. I made a filtered deck of the rest and can proceed smoothly through them. I can understand a fair number of them. One thing i noticed is that native French say some syllables faster than I do. I noticed Cottillard's pronunciation of 'peux' was a very short 'puh' except without the 'h' sound and without any plosive sound at all, which makes my spoken 'peux' longer. Something I need to work on.
Volver has a full complement of subtitles. Somewhere in the process, though, utf-8 failed, so there are a lot of gobbledygook squares. Not a real problem, because the disfigured letters are simple enough to figure out, mostly accented vowels, the n with a tilda and the upside-down exclamation points and question marks.
Iberian Spanish is proving harder to understand than I expected. Is it the lack of purity of vowels in more colloquial speech? I don't find the 'th' sounds distracting, as I certainly did in the episode of Áquila Rosa that I watched and gave up on. Sound quality of the movie? Does converting the sound to mp3 cause a deterioration in the sound? Don't know.

[Spoiler Alert: the rest of this post contains spoilers for the movie.] In a note on the content, yesterday and today I listened to Cruz sing a song for the cast at a wrap party. The song she sang was the namesake of the movie, "Volver," a tango tune written and popularized by Carlos Gardel in the 1930s. A very famous crooner in the Spanish speaking world, Gardel wrote a number of tunes before he died in a fire caused by planes crashing into one another on the ground. The fire accident ties into the movie because Cruz's mother and father died in a fire. "Volver," which means 'to go back,' recurs as a theme in the movie, even including Cruz's mother, who returns from the dead (she got lonely). Some of Almodóvar's critics don't give him enough credit for the depth of some of his movies.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Last night I finished S01E20 of Hélène et les garçons. Joanna was beginning to be a wee bit tedious for me. The writers may have had the same feeling, for E20 departed a lot from a focus on her. I still can't tell that her French accent is American, but I can now tell that it is different from the accents of the other actors. They are all native French speakers. I'm getting 70-90% of the dialogue, depending mostly on how fast the characters talk. I've watched a couple more episodes of season 1 of Eureka, with say 95% comprehension. Looks like I might have to shell out some more money for more seasons soon. I also watched S01E04 of Cuéntame cómo pasó. A bit lost , I switched to RTVE's site, which has subtitles and a transcript, both in Spanish. A better experience.

Nearing the end of La Última Página, I find it ever more intriguing. In LWT I continue with Latin, maybe one word a day from Tacitus' Annals; French, a few words a day from Régnier's poetry (various); Spanish, a few words a day from Marsé, Últimas tardes con Teresa; Ancient Greek, a poem a day from The Greek Anthology.

Still plodding through Volver and Allied, and through the 5000 most frequent words of the Ancient Greek texts that are on my computer, and correlating them with the word families from Ferguson.

[MorkTheFiddle]

I finished La Última Página. Thanks again to Iguanamon for recommending it. While reading it I was also reading Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway handles the reins of the wagon a little better than Martinez-Belli, but compared to her wagon, his wagon is empty.

The paraphernalia of language learning begin to wear me out. I am tired of endless clicking on LWT, tired of tracking how many words I know, tired of reserving X number of minutes per day for each language I concentrate on. I am also tired of dealing with Latin "literature," 99% of which is deadly dull for me. The language is too hard to learn except for bragging rights. I was plugging along so I could read Tactius' Annals, but they are just not worth it.

LWT is useful for Ancient Greek, and I want to finish Régnier's poetry, but after I finish looking up the unknown words in his poetry, I'm done using LWT for French and Spanish. I'll read real books for the pleasure of it and for getting away from various computer surfaces, all of which have too much glare. My new Kindle is still a good alternative, too.

[Carmody]

Yes, it is easy to get "tired." I often do. Do you ever schedule a couple of days of for r & r?

[MorkTheFiddle]

Yes, it is easy to get "tired." I often do. Do you ever schedule a couple of days of for r & r?

I saw your question last night, but my eyes were too tired to think about an answer.
No, I don't schedule breaks, but from time to time unscheduled breaks force themselves on me. Many, many months ago Ancient Greek and Latin so thoroughly exasperated me that I just up and quit studying them. Then several months ago I got sucked back in again, with renewed enthusiasm. Now the enthusiasm for them has died again. But I think the real culprits are Latin and LWT. LWT is an excellent way to study, especially for learning new words. But the routine of looking up hundreds of thousands of words just is getting to me. I never tire of French or Spanish. I think that is because (1) they are easier and (2) there's lots more interesting materials to read in them.
This morning I cleared out my LWT app of Latin texts, and I downloaded the vocabulary files for Latin and erased them from LWT. I feel relieved.

[Carmody]

Congratulations; sounds like you have everything under control.