Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

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schlaraffenland
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Fri Feb 02, 2018 7:36 pm

aravinda wrote:You have a solid French Attack Plan. :) And thank you for mentioning Mots et contexte: Thematischer Oberstufenwortschatz Französisch. Checking out that book, I found another nice book, Phrases-clés pour l'écrit et l'oral: Französischer Wortschatz für Textarbeit und Kommunikation from the same series. Unfortunately, I can't read German (yet).

That book looks great. I wish I'd known of that when I was starting out.

aravinda wrote:Now as your books have arrived, can you tell us the title of this book? ;)

Yes! Thank you for reminding me; I'd meant to update with that information. The book of idiomatic expressions is 150 expressions françaises illustrées et expliquées. It lends itself pretty well to learning a page a day (or whatever one wants). There is a sample at the publisher's website.
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby aravinda » Fri Feb 02, 2018 9:59 pm

schlaraffenland wrote:Yes! Thank you for reminding me; I'd meant to update with that information. The book of idiomatic expressions is 150 expressions françaises illustrées et expliquées. It lends itself pretty well to learning a page a day (or whatever one wants). There is a sample at the publisher's website.
Thank you. It's nice that the book has a dialogue for each expression. However, I was thinking of getting Les expressions idiomatiques with 2000 expressions. :shock: No preview though.
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Thu Feb 22, 2018 6:48 am

I spent several days out of town with my sister and granted myself a little study break. It worked too well: I barely touched anything the whole time, and I fell woefully behind on everything. I have returned to an enormous Anki backlog and a shameful pile of materials unread and un-listened to. Then again, my sister and I were massively sick during my visit and only made it out of the house a couple of times. There was to be no studying under such circumstances. I'll spare you further details!

Before the nasty illness hit, I visited a 書道 course -- boy, is it hard to control the brush, even after having practiced the characters thousands of times. The class was conducted in Japanese about 95 percent of the time, and it was nice to immerse myself again in the language, which I have not really heard live now for a good year. My sister's Kinokuniya is also more expansive than ours, which afforded me some excellent browsing and the opportunity to stock up on some stationery and other supplies. On a whim, I picked up this volume of practice questions for the JLPT N4-N5. I found the book's self-study format enticing (I simply can't say no to learning a convoluted, bespoke scoring system). I still don't see myself taking a JLPT this year, and maybe not even next year -- when would I even work in the time necessary to use this newly purchased book? -- but I like knowing what things look like out there. And I like reaffirming, through experiences such as the above, that this is still a language to which I want to make a long-term commitment, no matter how slowly I progress.

On the French front, still slogging my way through Dans quelle France on vit, which I began early in January. "Slogging" is not really kind, as I find the book really interesting, and I like and learn from Nivat's prose. But the ebook format really puts me off, as I've complained about before. I've learned from that mistake and have paperbacks lined up after this. I believe I'm down to the last 35 or so pages out of approximately 500 of this work.

During the hours and hours I spent driving in the last few weeks, I listened to the German audiobook translation of Das Leben des Vernon Subutex 1 after having read that this version in particular had won accolades for the performance. I did find that nice, but the work itself hasn't captured me as much as it seems to have done for some readers (though a family member who is a musician was mentioned in the narration, hee hee!). Haven't decided if I will buy part 2 later as well. I still have QualityLand and Der Tod in Venedig lined up as far as audiobooks, and a whole host of other things for German reading.

I guess I'll give myself the rest of the evening off. Those on'yomi compounds aren't going to stick tonight. Back to the grind tomorrow!
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Thu Mar 01, 2018 9:02 am

February 2018 Statistics

French
Learned 297 words.
Read 174 pages.
Consumed 786 minutes of AV material.

German
Consumed 656 minutes of AV material.

Japanese
Learned 91 on'yomi compounds.




I lost a couple of weeks this month due to travel and illness, and my progress is commensurately less well developed. But I think I held out OK and didn't fall behind as horribly as I'd feared. I'm looking forward to the next couple of months of learning, not least because Spring will finally return.

I seem to have a real problem keeping a habit of regular grammar practice in French right now. I like the book just fine, and it's not difficult, but I haven't given it the priority it should have in my studies. I will really try to fix that in the coming three months. I find that I enjoy using Anki to procrastinate, then I act like I'm "done" for the day because I've already put in a good effort in one aspect of the language. I guess the way to fix this is not to permit myself to use Anki for French until I've done the workbook stuff. I think the AV and reading aspects are going well, in any case. Neither activity is that opaque compared to six months ago. I'll definitely devote more attention to reading in March, since what I accomplished this month is really on the low end of what I'd like to see from myself. I bought some Houellebecq and some Baldwin (translated, of course) to begin with.

I miss German and having excuses to devote more time to it. I might do the two-week Tadoku in the latter half of March (if I understand the revised schedule correctly?) just to challenge myself a bit. I'd love to get through a few hundred pages of what's on my shelves. This evening, I began Der Tod in Venedig. I've never read Mann in German and find him suitably challenging and stylistically enjoyable, especially compared to contemporary authors. I feel once again like I really need to concentrate on the text instead of just being able to breeze through at my English reading speed.

In Japanese, I think my mind is settling better into the rhythm of learning on'yomi compounds. My success rate jumped and stabilized, and I discovered -- what a revelation! -- that it's actually not a good idea to begin learning challenging material after 11pm, so I try to get started way earlier in the day. I'm becoming more curious about the extent to which RTK 2 will overlap with vocabulary necessary for the lower-level JLPTs. It's pointless to try to guess or compare lists this early in my learning process, but I'll be very interested to see where I stand maybe 6 or 9 months into 2018. I mean, I know that on'yomi compounds won't help me a bit when it comes to the majority of common words in circulation, especially when many common words are etymologically Japanese, even when they're written with kanji. But still! Perhaps I will have inadvertently learned some small but good chunk of vocabulary necessary for the N5 or N4. We'll see. I will be on the road again for about a month in early Spring, which is a perfect block of time for learning the material in my newly purchased N4-N5 practice book. I may try to get that finished neatly within four weeks.
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Sun Apr 08, 2018 9:10 pm

A rather late summary...

March 2018 Statistics

French
Learned 430 words.
Consumed 1,485 minutes of AV material.

German
Read 575 pages.

Japanese
Learned 124 on'yomi compounds.




I've had to take another time out from daily life stuff for a few weeks and am returning to find a horrific tally of cards due in Anki, naturally. I'm not as unhappy about that as I might've been in the past, however. I will get through it all eventually. I regret that I didn't quite hit any of my goals again this month, but it wouldn't have been possible. I haven't been well enough to do much but rest, and for once, I'm listening to myself on that. I generally feel so foggy that I find I am having trouble recalling very basic things, whether it comes to kanji stroke order or the name of family members (!).

I'm surprised at how well the first half of the month went, in any case. The nearly 600 pages of German reading were all practically accidental. I decided I wanted to plow through several shorter books on my shelves, some of which I had bought up to four years ago. I read:

Abschalten, Martin Suter
Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse
Die Physiker, Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Die Inszenierung, Martin Walser

I regret to say that I wasn't particularly struck by any of them. I mean, I'm glad to have gotten through them, but nothing really stuck with me. But it was smooth sailing, and I've made room for more books (which are, of course, on their way via post).

No French reading in March except for brief newspaper and magazine articles. I have material, but I would prefer to save it for the prospect of the Super Challenge. I doubled down on listening and feel quite comfortable with the pace of speech in France Culture recordings, or with YouTubers, even if I don't always understand the slang of the latter. I also completed watching La Légende de Korra and am genuinely sad to bid farewell to this universe! It was a really wonderful show. Out of curiosity, I watched some clips of it in English for the first time, and -- I swear it's not just my bias from having watched it entirely in French -- I honestly feel like so many of the English voices just aren't right for the characters, especially compared to the French voice actors. Like, it feels frequently as if the American voice actor doesn't approach the character with the proper gravitas. In short, I'm glad that my roundabout path led me to this series via French first and not English. And, actually, I still have a season and a half of Avatar to go, so I am looking forward to that continuation.

Learning on'yomi gets easier and easier, especially because I recognize many of the compounds out in the wild now. I'm not thrilled about my progress; I would have liked to be learning more like 200 compounds per month. But again, it's not a sprint. I will probably finish RTK 2 about a year from now, realistically, given that I cannot anticipate further necessary interruptions to my learning schedule.

A little side project for mid-April to mid-May: I bought Assimil's digital download of Guide Indonésien and will practice with it for about a month. No pressure, no goals, no deadlines. I just want to see where I would be with things after roughly 30 days. I have no prior exposure to languages from this family, except for hearing lots of Tagalog throughout my life and picking out words in Malay from Singaporean street signs. I'm interested to see where it takes me.

Well, I guess that's it! I'm excited for what lies ahead, even if I don't always know if I can tackle it to the extent I'd like.
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Mon Apr 23, 2018 2:36 pm

Slowly, slowly clawing my way back through my Anki backlog. I have only introduced new cards in French so far this month, so I feel quite behind. I hope to have caught up with my on'yomi cards and to have introduced new ones by the end of the month.

That being said, I decamped about ten days ago to a different city for a change of scene and some much-needed sunshine for health purposes. I am lucky to be in a city with services at least as good as, if not better than, my home region: there's a Goethe-Institut and an Alliance Française here, as well as lots of Japanese expats and tourists, along with the businesses and restaurants catering to them. For the last ten days, I've had far more practice reading Chinese characters in the wild than I get around my home, and I've really enjoyed that. Because everything I see is written in simplified characters, unlike in my home area, I'm learning to match up the corresponding adaptations that the Japanese made for the jōyō kanji. (Not always with pleasure: sometimes, I have to think, "That's what the postwar mainland Chinese decided to do with a character like ___?") One neat side effect of having a few hundred on'yomi under my belt is reverse engineering the pronunciation of phonetic adaptations into Chinese. That's a poor description, but I mean something like this: if I see a place name here in Chinese, and if I happen to know some of the on'yomi for all the characters in the name, I'm in a position to glean roughly whether the Chinese name was conjured up based on phonetically approximating the place name, or whether the name is actually a description of something about that place or a historical event that happened there. Well, that's still not a great job describing things... oh, well.

I went by the local Goethe-Institut today after having scoured the website looking for opportunities for tandem partner activities and to see what cultural events they had on the docket. In fact, there was next to nothing on the website about either thing, to my dismay, and the secretary up front acted perplexed by my questions and as though they were out of left field. Aside from weekly films, the local Alliance Française also doesn't seem to have a lot going on, despite the fact that there is a French cultural festival running most of this month here! (Among the few affiliated events being put on: a lecture, in English, about marketing. Hmm.) So I guess it's a wash during my time here as far as hoping to make myself at home at these two institutions. They appear to focus almost exclusively on language instruction -- which I understand, but since my home affiliates of these two places are always putting on multidisciplinary events and such, I guess I thought it would be pretty much the same at all foreign outposts. Not a big deal, though. I brought (and am eagerly devouring) a lot to read in each language. And homebody me would always prefer an opportunity to read quietly in a public place on my own over meeting a new person and doing all the smalltalk stuff, no matter the language. :oops:

The little N4-N5 practice book is kicking my tail. The first week's results were perhaps unsurprising: Kanji: 29/30. Vocabulary: 10/30. Grammar: 11/30. To be fair, I missed so many of the latter two sections because I have never yet been taught the things the book was quizzing me upon. I have no timeline when it comes to learning the material, and the book foresees three iterations, so I plan to spend a month on it each time and just see where I am after that's said and done. To the book's credit, I have learned more from it in this one week than I did in ten weeks at my language school in Kyoto, but there are various reasons for that.

Looking forward to the Super Challenge. I brought a French novel with me and have ordered a further one through a local bookstore. I'm holding off doing much reading in French until May 1st for that reason.

And now, more German long reads and bed!
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Wed May 02, 2018 4:41 am

April 2018 Statistics

French
Learned 214 words.




Boy oh boy, last month was not a month to be proud of. Then again, there have been perfectly valid real-life reasons for that. Still, I managed to begin introducing new French vocabulary again. I was also consistent with listening to French, even if only in short snippets (Brice Coutourier's daily five-minute commentaries). I read very little at all outside of a couple of news articles, knowing that the Super Challenge was on its way in May.

I actually did read a few hundred pages of long reads in German (Reportagen, news magazines), and I tend to listen to about twenty minutes per day of news or current affairs. But I am moving away from tracking German as much, since it has become such a normal part of my daily life at this point.

I shelved my little Indonesian project. In truth, I had preferred to study Malaysian at some point but found almost no physical resources at home, so I settled for Indonesian, which was much better represented online and on the shelves. As it turns out, I have found quite a few Malaysian resources in my peregrinations lately, so I am going to buy things and have them ready for later.

By coincidence, I had about a five-minute conversation in Japanese with a family sitting next to me at a food court the other day. That showed me how horribly rusty I've become, but there was a little rush that I haven't felt in a while. It was good to practice.

The first day of the Super Challenge went just fine. No listening or watching, but I read about 40 pages of La Possibilité d'une île, which is so far as misogynistic and cringe-inducing as I had expected. But, hey. I should have this one finished in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, the local bookstore has ordered Alexandre Jollien's Vivre sans pourquoi : Itinéraire spirituel d'un philosophe en Corée for me, and I look forward to that after having read an interview last year with the author.
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Sun Jun 10, 2018 8:33 am

May 2018 Statistics

French
Learned 372 words.
Read 667 pages.
Consumed 1317 minutes (~22 hours) of AV material.




Well, I'm not proud of my progress in languages other than French for last month. I am treading water. I fell behind a lot in Japanese and put other new projects on hold. I am nearly caught up with kanji review, at least. I read a decent amount of German in fits and starts (Reportagen, Der Spiegel, Süddeutsche Zeitung Langstrecke). I won't linger too much on the bad stuff for now, I guess. There's a lot going on, but I'll catch up when I catch up, and then I'll be able to put it down here.

French is holding out steady. A double Super Challenge doesn't seem like it'll be too difficult to maintain if I can keep things going at May's pace, which wasn't at all exigent. I was lucky to have a very long plane ride during which I could watch a lot of films dubbed into French (Wakanda pour toujours!). I also made sure to keep up with my political podcasts on my long walks. My frustration comes, though, of how much lower my comprehension is for French-dubbed films and TV, when I would say that I catch 50 to 60 percent of what's being said. And it's not because there's too much slang; I simply don't seem to process what I'm hearing until several seconds later. There is no such "tape delay" when I am listening to a discussion about European politics or phone interviews with French expats about their experiences. I realize that this matter of comprehension has been discussed thoroughly here on the forum, and I've read those posts with great interest. I am trying to acclimate myself to my discomfort with listening comprehension and hoping that after several dozen more hours of listening, I will have had a breakthrough. I couldn't have imagined that my listening comprehension would diverge so much from my other skills at this level, and that's a pain.

I'm back in the U.S. after my sojourn away. Seem to have traded places with two controversial heads of state, who are about to meet a couple hundred feet away from my favorite beach lookout point :lol: I picked up Teach Yourself's book on Malay for someday. I also got an interesting coffee table book: interviews with Lee Kuan Yew about his experiences learning Mandarin (and Hokkien) as an adult. First of all, I had no idea that he had learned as an adult; I had assumed all along that he had grown up learning at least some Chinese alongside English. Second, it is edifying to read of an adult learner's experiences. There are many points that parallel and validate completely the experiences of people here on the forum. But there's also a lot of silly dogmatic drivel in which Lee extrapolates a universal rule from one of his own experiences and pronounces it as though it were the law of nature. And those pronouncements fly quite contrary to the experiences of many people on the forum, in fact. Anyway, I'm nearly done with the book and will write a little bit more on it here soon. It's interesting to hear of the language-learning experience of a former head of state, especially that of an adult, non-hobby learner.
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Sun Jul 15, 2018 8:08 pm

June 2018 Statistics

French
Learned 149 words.
Consumed 921 minutes (~15 hours) of AV material.
Read: Le Pont de la rivière Kwai, Pierre Boulle
La carte et le territoire, Michel Houellebecq
Vivre sans pourquoi, Alexandre Jollien




I finally finished the Langenscheidt Grundwortschatz Französisch last month! It's nice to have that out of the way. I would call it a solid reference for anybody trying to learn French by way of German, though there are several errors and outdated entries in the text -- but those are minor complaints. When I add up all Anki entries that I had tagged according to the Grundwortschatz's chapters, I get 3,846 words, for those wondering how many it contained. I would call this accurate to within plus or minus a hundred words. There were many cases of words repeated in separate chapters, and I usually combined those into one entry. But if the meanings differed significantly enough, I kept them separate (e.g., separate entries for la glace as ice cream and la glace as a large mirror). Strangely, although it was revised just last year or so, the book uses terms to refer to French public institutions that were abolished or combined into other institutions about a decade ago. Again, not a huge deal, but I found myself culling a few entries, and adding other words that seemed conspicuous by their absence.

I feel the double Super Challenge in French is going well. My French reading speed for fiction is now pretty close to my English reading speed, and with few to no unknown words per page, at least of contemporary authors like Houellebecq. (Don't know how I'd fare with a nineteenth-century novelist, for example.) I also started playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf in French. I remember attempting this over a year ago and finding it far too full of slang for me to understand. Now it feels quite breezy, and I'm learning a lot of good turns of phrase from the dialogue, as well as the names of flora and fauna in French, which is really interesting to me.

My listening comprehension could be a lot better. When I listen to political radio shows, everything seems fine, but TV in French is another matter entirely. I do note broad improvement when I think about season 1 of Glow last year versus season 2 at present, but it is by no means as transparent or effortless as, say, German. I don't know what to do about this except to continue consuming as much material as possible and hoping that something will budge in the coming months.

I have been assessing the year in terms of the goals I set for myself at the beginning, of which I have fallen far short, alas. I will think more about all that and write it up at some point shortly. Things are going far more slowly than I would like at present, but that's just how it's going to be for a while. In spite of that, I think I'm doing all right at modifying my goals on the fly and making some sort of progress, however small.
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Wed Aug 15, 2018 6:50 am

I've blinked, and now August is half over... July was not a sterling month for progress, but I treaded water OK. I only got about 100 new French words under my belt. News in other language-learning endeavors has been so sparse as to be laughable. More offline stuff has been getting in the way lately. I had a slump at this time last year, too -- those dog days of summer. Maybe there's something about les vacances that's just not conducive to forward motion. But I have continued to read the forum every couple of days and enjoy hearing about what everybody is up to.

I can say this, at least: the double Super Challenge in French is going really well. I have set a goal of 15 hours of media and 500 pages of reading per month, and since May, I've generally met my quota by mid-month. Reading is going nicely. I tend to exceed the monthly quota by 100 to 300 pages without a hitch. I also got my sister to begin the Super Challenge in Japanese, and another friend is following its principles for Spanish (but neither of them is officially registered). I haven't sent anything to the Twitter bot this time yet. At first, I was waiting for the bugs to get straightened out, but it seems there are still some hitches here and there. I may just report a great wallop of pages and minutes every six months or so without worrying about reporting specific titles to the bot this time. In any case, I am keeping a detailed paper log, as always.

I have given some thought to plans for the second half of 2018 -- by this late stage in my planning, it's more like the final third of 2018 -- and how I should best use my time. I also want to plan ahead for the next (!) Super Challenge, in that I'd like to tee up a language now to be at around B1 level by mid-2020. In principle, this is quite simple, given so much lead time. As usual, however, I am overthinking things. I'm worried about boxing myself in by selecting a language for which it would be somewhat difficult to get lots of reading and AV material without going to great expense. If I want to have a lot of material at my disposal, it might make sense to stick to FIGS and CJK, both of which groups are well represented in my area's libraries and specialty bookstores. And it makes sense to improve my Japanese before going off on other flights of fancy. Yet I just don't feel much of an interest at present in unexplored FIGS/CJK languages, if I'm honest. So what do I want to study? I... don't know. I feel that I should pull from my shelves, where I have resources for half a dozen languages that I've either never touched or for which I am a false beginner, and all of which were interesting enough for me at one point to warrant me collecting resources for them. But nothing feels compelling.

Feel, feel, feel... perhaps I'm going too much on feeling, and I should make a practical choice, or use a random number generator to choose for me. Or maybe I shouldn't think about any new languages for now, and focus instead on continuing the Super Challenge and learning on'yomi compounds. The very fact that I feel restless, however, suggests to me that it wouldn't be the worst idea to add something new, at least for the sake of a challenge.
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