Five Golden Trees

[lavengro]

Weekly status update: still plugging away at a modest rate

Italian:
- Duolingo, level 9, 19 units completed
- Memrise, finished Italian 1, working on Italian 2
- working through Coffee Break Italian podcasts
- started working through EdX Wellsley College archived course Italian Language and Culture: Beginner (courtesy of a
recommendation from the Italian study group thread)

Russian:
- still working on Cyrillic alphabet and pronunciation, including cursive

Japanese:
- still reviewing hiragana, finished Basic Hiragana 1, working on Basic Hiragana 2 Memrise user-developed courses, and still working
through a longer Memrise course which includes the compounds
- started studying the katakana

[lavengro]

This week's consistency reward: Giuseppe Jackson's Sono l'uomo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSEUlh-UGdo

[lavengro]

Weekly status update:

Italiano

Duolingo, 25 units completed and gilded. I am still finding it helpful to review when units de-gild (that is, the review is of utility rather than just a chore to keep the tree golden), so I will be continuing that until it becomes unhelpful from a learning perspective.

Memrise - still working through Italian 2. Regularly completing reviews from Italian 1 and 2 as they pop up. Pushed above the 2 million point mark. I note with some disappointment that Memrise has changed their rankings for the worse, in that they have gotten rid of the old ranking system (for example, Membrain, Meminence, Memporor, and instead now there are just some squiggly creatures. So it appears unlikely I will ever be a Meminence. (Frankly, it was unlikely in any event.)

Miscellaneous - worked through more Coffee Break Italian podcasts listening to each episode twice) and a lot more Italian for Lavengroes (audio course only).

Japanese

JFBP Kana Workbook - practising writing the katakana.

Memrise - working through Basic Katakana memrise-user developed course. Continued hammering of hiragana production and recognition, just to make sure recognition is fully internalized. Keeping up with reviews in all my kana Memrise courses as they pop up.

Russian

Still poking around at characters and character pronunciation in isolation via two Memrise courses, the pronunciation and cursive sections of Living Language Russian and some Youtube videos re: pronuniciation. Watched a couple of helpful videos on cursive characters.

[lavengro]

Consistency reward this week, for maintaining minimum daily study commitments of 1:00 Italian, 0:15 Japanese and 0:15 Russian:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxvkI9MTQw4

I Breederi, Sono lo ultimo spruzzo! (aka Les Breeders, Je suis le dernier "splash"; occasionally referenced as The Breeders, Cannonball)

[lavengro]

Weekly status update:

Italian, Japanese, Russian - some tepid efforts, mostly review

English - learned how to say "Pseudo-Jones fracture" and got in lots of practice saying "ouch" really loudly.

[lavengro]

Consistency reward for myself for this week? Nope, I absolutely do not deserve one, due to my poor effort over several days. Which is too bad, because the potential reward on deck for this week was the following, which strikes me as being squarely about language:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkN_qkN5JLQ

I say this is language-related for the following reasons:
- there is an ironic(ally incorrect) vocabulary lesson near the beginning
- there is a reference to atrocious spelling
- mention is made of a woman who "rolled her R's, her beautiful R's"
- there are variant examples of the pronunciation of "young" - the pronunciation offered at around the 1:40 mark cannot entirely be explained by the Maritime Canadian background of these lads
- and what will likely strike most on this forum as entirely antithetical, the following is suggested: " ... the point is not the grammar, it's the feeling..."

[lavengro]

Weekly status update:

Switched over this week from Italian to Spanish as a main course, but still noshing periodically on Russian and Japanese as an amuse bouche.

While I had to say ci vediamo dopo to italiano, I was able to get an unexpected final approx. 5 minutes of Italian language study last night at Vancouver's Bard on the Beach's production of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, set in 1959 Italy with occasional Italian phrases and a song thrown in for good measure. Bard on the Beach is a longstanding Shakespeare tradition in Vancouver between June and September, generally four plays staged per season between two ensemble casts, I try to catch them all each summer. In my opinion, well worth a visit for anyone visiting the area. I thought this production was particularly good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hdjU2XpujA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT2EJhbM7Mg

[lavengro]

Reward for consistent daily study: "Enzo Gorlomi" et al faking their way through Italian.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dojZx82n73U

"Omar [speaks Italian] third most...."
- "I don't speak Italian!"
"Like I said, third best..."

[lavengro]

Heading next week into my first continuing education (in person) class in quite a while: Spanish Beginners 2. Here's hoping it is not very similar to the class depicted in this youtube clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_Enbf78gD4

[lavengro]

September update

I focused last month on Spanish as my main meal, together with appetizer-sized servings of Japanese and Russian. My goal was to work on each language each day, with the following minimum daily targets:

Spanish - 1 hour (actual average this month: 48 minutes)
Russian - 15 minutes (actual average: 14 minutes)
Japanese - 15 minutes (actual average: spot on at 15 minutes)

Consistency in study has been a pitfall for me in the past, and I am hopeful that regular contact will be beneficial for me in driving material in deep. My main approaches this month involved Duolingo, Memrise and James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, Volume 1. I'm "Marpole" on Duolingo and "lavengro" on Memrise. I am up to 2,664,315 overall points in Memrise, which puts me at level 13 with a hard-earned badge looking like some childish squiggle of a space alien wearing a helmet which I am pretty sure would be an impediment to conversation efforts. I have adopted the approach for now of being scrupulous in staying current with reviews as they pop up on Memrise, with the exception of Italian, which I am equally scrupulously avoiding to try to eliminate interference with Spanish, and one of my Russian memrise courses which I have stopped on account of not caring for it.
________________________

SPANISH

Working on Duolingo as well as Memrise; almost finished Spanish (Mexico) 1. Lots of listening to a number of spanish learner podcasts (Coffee Break Spanish, Spanish by Choice mostly) and occasionally listening very passively to an audio narration: Las aventuras de Sherlock Holmes. Also a few videos from Destinos, though I do not have any of the associated written learning materials.

Started an immersion-based low level Spanish conversation class this month (one two-hour class per week); not really my wheelhouse because it involves dealing with humans, but the teacher was animated and the class looks like it could be both fun and of benefit. I am not as advanced as most of the other class members (this is a Beginners 2 class), so I have some trabajo to do.
________________________

RUSSIAN

I have comfortably internalized the Russian Cyrillic alphabet (русский алфавит) and am working at getting comfortable touchtyping in Russian on the standard windows Russian keyboard. Still hate Russian cursive (рукопи́сное письмо??). I learned the cursive characters and understand I will need to be really comfortable with them at some point, but have given myself permission to hit the pause button for now on working with cursive material, apart from Memrise reviews as them pop up on material already learned.

I was not intending to move to Duolingo this early, but gave it a try and much prefer it over my next Memrise course. Up to level 3 on Duolingo, and enjoying it. Duolingo levels are exponentially-staged, so Level 3 was pretty easy to achieve.
________________________

JAPANESE

Memrise for kana review, and Heisig, Remembering the Kanji together with a related Memrise course for learning the principal approx. 2000 kanji. I had worked through more than 200 of the initial kanji years ago, so the review is going easy for now, but I am deliberately taking a slow approach. Review 5 kanji a day for three days via Heisig, then move on to advance those 15 characters in the related Memrise course ( https://www.memrise.com/course/43670/remembering-the-kanji-volume-1/) for regular review.
________________________

HOW SOON IS NOW?

Yep, still hands down one of my favorite songs of all time. Although I cannot endorse the potential social indifference in the following comment from the Youtube viewer comment section, thinking back to my university days I completely understand the comment: "This is my neighbours' favourite song, whether they like it or not."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnpILIIo9ek

Soy el hijo y el heredero
De una timidez que es criminalmente vulgar
Soy el hijo y el heredero
De nada en particular
Tu cierra la boca
Cómo puedes decir
Que hago las cosas de manera equivocada
Soy un humano y necesito ser amada
Igual que todos los demás
...
Hay un club si tu quisieras ir tu
Podrías conocer a alguien que realmente te ame
Así que ve, y apáñatelas por ti mismo y
Sal de ahí solo y ve a casa
Y lloras y quieres morir.

As nice as Spanish sounds as a language, I gotta go with the original English lyrics.
________________________

WHAT ABOUT THE FUTURE?

In October, I hope to gear up Spanish a little more by actually hitting my daily target of an hour, to continue in Japanese with Heisig on the basis of 15 characters every 4 days and probably to continue with daily short Duolingo Russian sessions.