tangleweeds garden path log

[tangleweeds]

My studies continue to be very app-tastic, as even my audio files are on my phone and tablet, accessed via the (iOS) app AudioStretch, useful in both music and language study for its ability to loop and slow down selected phrases. Prompted by LingoDeer in Japanese, I realized that I hadn't been speaking at all in my Irish studies, just concentrating on listening, vocabulary, and grammar, so I've remedied that by repeating then shadowing the phrases I've been listening to. Gosh, but my tongue is a lot clumsier than that clever voice in my head! This is where the slowdown capabilities of AudioStretch have begun to come in handy--I had considered it cheating to slow things down for listening, but actually, combined with repeating and shadowing, it's made my listening much more fine-grained, in that I'm noticing a lot more unexplained grammar. :

I've also found a series of iOS Japanese apps I'm liking a lot, by the developer Howell Peebles. One currently has me drawing my kana and will do grammar later, and the other is a kanji learning app. There is also a full language app by the same developer, but its beginning is very much review for me; it also uses some romaji until it teaches you the kana to replace it. I've been trying, as much as possible, to keep my romaji to a minimum, and have been experiencing a lot of success in reading without much effort hiragana and a few kanji I know; LingiDeer facilitates this, as does Minna no Nihongo, and actually so does Japanese: The Spoken Language when the Japanese language supplement is used in place of the romaji textbook. Used this way, the repetition drills also become kanji/kana reading re-enforcement drills.

I particularly like this developer's other apps because their frequent repetition and review spacing is very compatible with my learning style, more so than Anki, which deesn't repeat enough at the beginning, or review soon or frequently enough for my very bad memory. I can reliably and effectively drill things through my thick skull via flash card methods, and they will stay there, but it takes a lot more repetition and review than more optimized spaced repetition strategies think. This is also why Memrise's repetition and review frequency work better for me than Duolingo's.

I've also found kindle format grammar ebooks for both Irish and Japanese. In Irish, I have Teach Yourself's Essential Irish Grammer, and in Japanese I have Practice Makes Perfect's Complete Japanese Grammar.

The prevalence of apps and ebooks is partially because I do the majority of my studying on my stationary recumbent bike. As I mentioned in previous posts, I'm recovering from an extended and eventually very serious bout of ill health, prompting me to reform my previous no-effort diet and sedentary ways. The recumbent bike is probably my most comfortable piece of furniture, helping me sit up up in a non-exhausting position, and it enables me to gently pedal away for hours at a time, greatly increasing my energy and concentration. It's much easier to use a single app while pedaling than it is to juggle phone-based audio and flippy-paged book while pedaling (I use a lot of page flags and bookmarks in the books I do use on the bike).

I'm continuing to have great success with my lackadaisical methodology of studying only until mental fatigue first strikes, and then moving on to physical tasks during which I ruminate over the material just studied, bringing up material I would have struggled to memorize consciously. Having a neatnik roommate who inspires me to clean up after myself rapidly, there aren't enough household chores for doing this, so I've instead been doing mindless knitting on the stationary bike to achieve the full active/meditative hamster wheel effect. But I can only do so much time/mileage on the bike before my knees protest (actually quite a bit, but after 30 miles/day wear and tear hits). So I've decided to resume doing counted cross stitch, where all the decisions have already been made, and only mindful execution is necessary. This makes it very good for doing back burner mental work.

I haven't really been Anki-ing, probably because it requires more time on the laptop, but I'm missing an odd part of it, the prep. The part where I slice up my audio file and type in the L2 material was remarkably effective in getting L2 details into my head. Other than that, the main thing I appreciate about Anki is the ability to easily record myself listening and speaking answers. Because its SRS is not optimized for my lousy memory, I have to get under the hood to tweak it to work for me, and its under-the-hood interface is non-intuitive, to say the least; as my brother says, it makes my brain bleed. I'm not saying it's not workable; it's just ugly and vexing. So I've been procrastinating re-learning how to tailor Anki to my personal needs.

[tangleweeds]

I've been working on my languages again for some time now without updating my log, as the health issues that have complicated my studies have been too tiresome to explain. So I'll just lightly edit something I posted in another thread:

A couple of years back I seem to have had a small stroke in my language centers as a result of a ghastly reaction to MRI dye, ironically during attempts to diagnose an entirely different neurological issue. Afterward, I would have seizures whenever I needed to speak much, making it difficult to describe to doctors what was going on, all highly inconvenient to say the least. And heartbreakingly, I could barely read anymore. Since I'd just had an MRI, crazy US insurance wouldn't authorize another one so soon, there was a 6-month wait to even talk to a neurologist about it, then another year to authorize a second opinion, etc etc etc, so I was on my own rehab-wise.

I ended up resorting to repurposing speed-reading apps + very familiar Jane Austen novels to bring back my ability to read. Yet an unexpected result was that I have a very difficult time reading from paper books anymore--they don't glow! But fortunately ebooks do The upshot is that, as a result of app-based language/reading rehab, my reconstructed brain now very much prefers doing as much language learning as possible via app. So there's going to be a lot of app comparisons/contrasts coming soon, I expect.

I'm just going to post this for now to get it done with, and get to the specifics of what I'm up to in a subsequent post.

[tangleweeds]

One odd and interesting thing about my post-stroke-rehab linguistic abilities is that I now hear the languages I'm studying far more clearly than I ever could in the past. I can hear broad/slender consonants in Irish very distinctly, as well as the rising/falling tonal patterns in Japanese, both which had notably eluded me when I studied these languages in the past. My suspicion (anyone have an fMRI I can borrow? ) is that the retraining of my linguistic skills may repurposed brain areas that had relatively recently been beefed up by my late adulthood musical training.

As you might imagine, all of this has renewed and deepened my already quite active interest in reading about neuroplasticity (well, audiobooking since reading isn't as easy as it used to be, but you know what I mean). If anyone is interested in modern stroke rehab, I recommend the book My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist who had and successfully recovered from a major stroke.

But, down to business. A month ago, I was concentrating on Irish, but at the moment my focus is on Japanese, and poor Norwegian has fallen back into wishful wanderlust status. I got halfway through rebuilding the master list of Irish/Gaeilge resources (i.e. I have a tangled mass of bookmarks reconstructed from old lists full of dead & broken links), but got slowed down by heat (100F/38C ugh!) and a renewed interest in Japanese.

A recap of my history with Japanese: My brother married a Japanese woman in the late 80's (the original anime romance--they fell in love translating old school pre-subtitle pirated videotapes for a university anime club), and has lived there for about 3 decades now. So 25 years ago I studied through third-year Japanese in a university program using Eleanor Harz Jorden's Japanese: The Spoken Language, very thoroughly implemented by a student of Marie Noda's. This meant that I ended up like most students of that program, reasonably well-schooled in spoken Japanese, but inconveniently illiterate.

25 years is enough time to do plenty of forgetting so I'm pretty much re-starting from the beginning, but with an emphasis on the written Japanese I had always lacked. Because the audio components of JSL were so deeply imprinted into my brain long ago, I'm again repurposing the old-school audio-lingual drills to incorporate the Japanese language typescript meant for the program's native speaker TAs, though I still refer to the excellent grammar/usage/cultural notes in the English language textbook (I studied linguistics, remember? Mmm, painfully detailed grammar & usage--I eat that stuff up!).

In the past I've also used Minna no Nihongo to maintain this focus on written Japanese, but I'm vexed that I don't have it with me here at my long-term COVID cat-sitting gig. I also recently learned that Minna has several more volumes than the two basic ones I already have, so I'm also struggling with irrational consumerist "complete the set--collect all 75 action figures!" urges.

Vocabulary and grammar have been resurfacing smoothly with renewed usage, so my focus has been turning off all romaji in all the many apps I've been enjoying playing with, and slowing down to make certain I 'm reading every possible scrap of Japanese script that appears, even when that's not the intended focus of the exercise, particularly as I'm buzzing through the early levels of various programs so it's all very familiar.

What I'm finding as I flit around between way too many apps (just as I found doing the same flititng between too many courses in the past, only more so!), is that the different but somewhat overlapping of sets vocabulary used between an assortment of programs creates an irregularly spaced repetition situation, so that I rarely need to make cards anymore. With all current my app wandering (gotta test them ALL out, right?), which seems like it should be inadvisable, I'm surprised to find that I've begun simply recognizing kanji without needing to squint at them while reading, make cards and SRS them, or write them down a bazillion times. Instead I'm reading along and simply recognize them at a glance: "Oh, it's you again." My brother's respone to that was: "That's how it's supposed to be." So yay!

[tangleweeds]

I think I'm going to have to resign myself to writing multiple single-topic (few-topic?) posts, as my attempts to describe doing ALL the things always get too unwieldy; I inevitably get distracted and wander off to do something else instead.

Without my noticing, Lingodeer got my hiragana (and a few kanji) pretty thoroughly ingrained via the spelling exercises, but my katakana are weaker, so I've been reading from the first, katakana-only chapters of Eleanor Harz Jorden's Reading Japanese. I'm used to her mutant romaji from JSL, and while some of the expressions are bound to be dated, it's still reading practice plus it demonstrates how English mutates into katakana. It would be nice to have the newer Japanese: The Written Language, but I have higher language spending priorities at the moment.

But kanji, those pesky kanji. I'm enjoying Let's Learn Kanji, which uses the radical approach like WaniKani, but not on the RTK model, which has never really worked for me--other people's mnemonics strike me as so baroque and random they're harder to remember than the kanji themselves, and while I so something sorta-mnemonicy for some, it's definitely not baroque stories. Also, I have enough residual vocabulary that seeing example words is more effective for remembering readings than weird images or stories. And I have a pretty good visual memory (balanced, mind you, by major auditory memory deficits) so I simply remember the shape of most kanji/radicals under 7 strokes, and the ones with more are usually composed of several simpler kanji/radicals I can recognize within them. Chunking, yay chunking!

It probably helps that I like writing kanji too. I'm finding the animations on Jisho.com so inspiring that I've even resumed playing with my fude pens! Though actually I'm doing most of my writing practice in the app GoodNotes on the iPad w/ Apple Pencil, as GoodNotes gives me a pressure-sensitive brush pen that makes far less inky mess than a real fude pen. Plus I can disappear old practice (and mistakes!) as many times as needed to feel satisfied with what I've done. Poof, magic! A fresh practice sheet with no wasted paper.

[Digression: even in English, I take most of my handwritten notes in Goodnotes now, because it's so pleasant to write there once I found the perfect tip for the Apple Pencil. Plus the lasso tool makes it easy to move notes around to make room for additions in a way that's impossible on paper, and then of course my notes are immediately available on all my Apple devices, which is handy.]

[Another Digression: I'm still at my unexpectedly long-term cat-sit (COVID: my ex-roomie stayed on the East Coast to help elderly parents), but I've been retrieving ever more stuff from my apartment: Let's Learn Kanji, Minna na Nihongo, first spring clothing then summer clothing, fude pens and more... ]

My neurological issues make my eye muscle spasm so my vision has deteriorated, so I've had to purchase this clever largish (paperback book-sized) fresnel magnifier framed with LEDs to read the Japanese-only volume of Minna no Nihongo. Minna has a lovely font but it's wispy, plus kanji's size/complexity ratio can get challenging, so when I caught myself repeatedly muttering "textbooks printed for 18-year-old undergraduate eyes..." I took steps to smooth that obstacle, and now things are much better. I've also accumulated a couple more volumes of the many level-one Minna texts, ordered from OMGJapan/White Rabbit. Tracking showed they traveled quite the itinerary to reach me: Tokyo -> Hong Kong -> Cincinnati -> Seattle -> Portland--in only 4 days!

I've also been thinking about why the Luli Languages (or Howell, or Howard Peebles, attribution has changed) JLPT Kanji and general Japanese apps are so much more effective for me than WaniKani. In certain ways it makes no sense at all. WaniKani has wider aims and a more organized approach, but the proportion of what it teaches that sticks is very low, probably because I study at my convenience, not on SRS' command. The Luli one, despite using no mnemonics at all, makes things stick for me almost immediately, and they stick even if I ignore the app for weeks or months.

This is probably because it introduces far fewer kanji/words at once, then makes you seriously "overlearn" them in the introductory sessions, which is my natural learning style anyway. Yet it doesn't explain how/why kanji sound different in different words, they simply do, one copes, and moves on. Why do I have zero problems with this??? I can't comprehend why this works better for me, but written English is erratic too, and I cope with that daily as well.

The scientifically optimized SRS algorithm has never worked for me, no doubt because I'm not motivated to review on schedule. I use flashcards to kill time in waiting rooms, waiting in lines, waiting on transit, or between appointment (which also means I haven't been using them as much of late). Frontloaded overlearning helps me remember when I belatedly return to review, so in the past, I've had to dig deep into Anki to alter the algorithm to reflect the process (and prevent pileups). And that's a pain, not only because of Anki's spectacularly non-intuitive UI, but also because the way to do this has changed over the years.

Meanwhile, I've also been reading all the simple Japanese I can find, from web courses, textbooks, apps, beginner reading exercise ebooks, whatever, harvesting kanji that trip me up while learning others by osmosis/exposure. I've also been listening to simple podcasts, but finding simple enough one to approach n + 1 is hard, so I've been using similar sources for listening as I use for reading. I tend to do listening first, because, as mentioned above, I have such a crappy auditory memory that they go in one ear and out the other, even when it's such a nice n+1 that I understood just what they were saying. So all I need to do is pause a bit before reading, and it's as if had I never listened at all!

[tangleweeds]

This is a long post about achieving absolutely nothing, and trying to work my way out of a very stuck space. Any suggestions you might have would be very welcome.

OK, so I have both PTSD and CPTSD diagnoses due to bad things that happened when I was young, which makes me prone to additional PTSD episodes. I've made massive progress since they started using evidence-based therapies--CBT, MBCT, DBT, EMDR, AMA if you have questions about any of them (this in stark contrast to decades of generic talk therapy that achieved little at great expense, but that's another rant).

But I had a massive setback earlier this year when the militarized responses to the BLM protests here in Portland reactivated old memories of the 1967 Detroit riots when I was a kid. That probably primed me to generate a whole new PTSD response to the massive wildfire smoke and evacuation situation here just a few weeks ago, when our southern exurbs were either evacuated or burned (news story showing how bad things were: how an entire town was abandoned to burn due to lack of firefighters, but saved by residents), and we had the worst air quality in the world.

I had a number of additional stresses due to a very sick cat I'm house/cat sitting for, who kept jailbreaking into the smoke despite her pneumonia, plus transportation issues that made potential evacuation (not to mention getting groceries, medical care, or indoor air quality remediation supplies) very stressful.



Anyway, the friend whose house/cats I'm taking care of says I handled things like a champ, but as usual, I'm great during emergencies, but melt down completely once they're over. When the smoke cleared, I started coughing up bloody green goo, my neurological issues all returned, and I went into complete mental paralysis. Inconveniently, the therapy & coping skills training program I'm currently enrolled in hadn't yet reached the modules for this kind of crisis, and I was flailing for a few weeks until I could reaccess EMDR, which focuses on PTSD/CPTSD.

Also, I'm one of those part-time smokers who starts under stress (cf riots above), and generally quits quite easily (go ahead and hate me). Well, clearly my recent wildfire/suburb-fire smoke inhalation adventures made it urgent to quit (cf bloody green goo) but I was having unusual difficulties with it, at least until I recognized the PTSD component. Even then, I responded to quitting with unusual & imprudent rage-spending--on wanderlust language learning materials of course, in this case Norwegian and Vietnamese. And then that turned out to be stressful and unrewarding due to (bad spending karma) various shipping and wrong-item-sent snafus (one for each language), so no catharsis there (poop!).

So while I'm finally beginning to chill out, I'm still completely lacking intellectual traction. Y'know how, even if you have a hard time getting started, once you do, intrinsic interest usually takes over and you get drawn in deeper than you expected to? Well, not me, not anymore. I do a little, put it down, and go right back into flat disinterest. So I'm very frustrated and unhappy, because one very clear therapy data point is that my life satisfaction is directly related to the depth & duration of focus in my studies. And I just can't seem to gain traction in anything I try to work on. I'm doing my best to resume meditation, breathwork, and running again, which seem to help, but progress is slow.

I tried switching language programs (thank you MultCo library for the depth/range of your Pimsleur resources), which usually helps, but nope. Then I tried wanderlust, which is admittedly undisciplined but usually even more motivational, but that's not working out either.

Haaalp???

[guyome]

Hi tangleweeds,

What about consuming media from/about the countries in which your target languages are spoken, but doing so in English? That is, watching Irish TV shows with English subtitles on (or even Irish TV shows in English), reading English translations of Japanese books, etc. Basically anything that is not language learning but may help rekindle your interest in the language/area.

[tangleweeds]

Oh, and I forgot to mention, a friend who set up the GoFundMe after I was hospitalized died during smoke crisis. Not from the smoke: he was across the country waiting for a transplant that never came in time (fill out your organ donor cards, folks!! Plus make your desires here very clear to your loved ones--it's often the grieving family that blocks the dead person's final wishes on this (grrrr)).

Anyway, I was pretty wrecked by that, weeping on the kitchen floor level of shattered (why do I always end up on the kitchen floor when in shock? I've ended up crawling around there in anaphylaxis and toxic spider bite situations too (????) <shrug>). I'm still in shock, probably because with everything else going on, I hardly had space in my brain or heart to begin to process it and mourn.

What about consuming media from/about the countries in which your target languages are spoken, but doing so in English? That is, watching Irish TV shows with English subtitles on (or even Irish TV shows in English), reading English translations of Japanese books, etc. Basically anything that is not language learning but may help rekindle your interest in the language/area.

That's not a bad idea. I've already been watching youtube videos on learning and memory in general, and listening to audiobooks on similar topics (still audiobooks rather than text due to the lingering effects of my neurological injury, but I've linked to text versions below).

I'm finding this one particularly interesting:
Becoming Fluent
The authors use principles of cognitive science to explain how adults learn languages differently than children, and thus how to leverage adults' unique capacities to further their language learning goals. One of the authors was a diplomat who studied several languages at FSI before going on to become a psychology professor, while the other is cognitive psychology prof with a focus on linguistics.

I find it interesting how their findings, in line with those of FSI (see link below), are diametrically opposed to the ultra-Krashen-ite/MIA on one end, or Rosetta Stone on the other, "learn like a child" theories of adult language acquisition. Not that they don't recommend intensive consumption of native resources, they just don't recommend it as the first or only thing. Much of what they say is in line with the FSI findings enumerated here:
Lessons learned from fifty years of theory and practice in government language teaching

I'm also listening to
Proust and the Squid (ebook link here because the print version is super expensive, as it seems to be out of print)
about how the evolution of writing changed the wiring of our brains, relevant here as it addresses the issue of how different writing systems demand different changes to our neural wiring. But it raises similar issues to another of my favorite books about how media change our minds,
The Shallows (ebook link again, as other versions don't seem to have been revised, so their internet references are 5 years dated)
by media critic Nicholas Carr, which focuses on similar issues through the course of media history .

[oops, another "Submit" instead of "Preview" error. More cheerful news coming soon]

[golyplot]

Wow, I can't imagine what you've been going through. I hope things get better. I wish I knew what to say.

[jonm]

I'm so sorry for your loss, tangleweeds. And to hear about everything that you're going through.

I wish I had more to offer in the way of advice or support. Two of the activities you mentioned, meditation and listening to audiobooks, are things I turn to for solace when I'm overwhelmed, so it's good to hear that they're among your options. Sometimes I kind of combine the two in the form of guided meditations. And you mentioned exercise as an option too. I don't know if I can count exercise as something I consistently turn to, but when I do, it helps.

Also just want to say, I think it's totally understandable, and a good thing to be doing, to try many different things. It can be so hard to find something that's interesting but also soothing. It does sound like you've found some really fascinating audiobooks.

[tangleweeds]

Thank you golyplot and jonm for your condolences, they mean a lot to me. The friend who died was a(n even more than usually) annoying philosophy major/gadfly/devil's advocate, tormenting anyone who espoused any POV without a clear understanding of the issues it implied, and thus remained controversial among my alumni friends, with a number questioning why the rest of us were so devastated. But to tell the truth, he improved a lot during grad school, and even going so far as to apologize to some of his youthful opponents for his undergrad behavior.

Anyway, prompted by your condolences, I went back to his Facebook page to exorcise my inability to have mourned properly, which actually helped a lot, and I'm now feeling much more closure. Since I'd been there, yet more friends, co-alums, academic colleagues, and former students had posted eulogies as the news of his death spread. My favorite student post was: "He would let you turn in a paper a semester late, but never one that was beneath your abilities." I also loved how he had retained his love of heavy metal and tongue-in-cheek obsession with Vikings to the end. As he was a (late-life convert) cat lover (who even paid medical expenses for friends' rescue kitties) this was a favorite video eulogy:



Which led to this one, perhaps more relevant here:



Anyway, back to work. I've continued to listen to language & learning-related audiobooks, cut back on youtube as the ads were too annoying, and read and posted a lot more than usual here to keep the flame burning--usually this forum is among social media I ration, but I've made an exception under the current circumstances. This has actually worked, in that I'm organizing a lot of stuff for future study, sampling courses, ripping CDs, saving links and downloading stuff, overall planning angles of attack as my concentration begins to return.

• My original plan was/is to begin my tonal awareness skills with Norwegian before moving forward with Vietnamese.
• And then the 6WC popped onto my radar at this timely moment, so I'm going to target on Norwegian to get over that steep true-beginner hump.
• And so the next post will be all about my 6WC plans & prep, but I wanted to pop this post off the draft stack before I get started there.