tangleweeds garden path log

[tangleweeds]

I'm adding this information to my log so I won't forget it.

Inspired by the video in this thread on TL schoolbooks¸ I've searched out a primary school children's encyclopedia, and found this:
Leabhar Mór an Eolais, ISBN 9781857916348
It is an Irish translation of "The Ultimate Book of Knowledge" from Oxford University Press.
Here is a review (in Gaeilge):
http://www.inismagazine.ie/reviews/book/leabhar-mor-an-eolais
It's available via Litriocht:
http://www.litriocht.com/shop/product_info.php?products_id=4583

Along the way I also ran across Leabhar Mór an Cheoil (Big Book of Music), which looks like it might be of interest too, considering that reading related to ceol traidisiúnta is my primary motivations for learning Irish, though it's probably way over my head. And then there's Leabhar Mór na nAmhrán (Big Book of Song)...

[tangleweeds]

The problem of falling behind in my log is perpetuated by the self-imposed expectation that I account for time passed since the last entry. This becomes more unrealistic as the time since the last entry grows. Let's just skip it.

I've relocated these progress bars from my signature, as I've shifted emphasis in my studies a couple of times since making them.
Leabhair:
Ó Siadhail- Learning Irish: 3 / 36
Buntús Cainte- Vol 1: 10 / 60
Riomhaire:
Duolingo- Irish: 5 / 54
Memrise- Basic Irish II: 75 / 120

And for the benefit of my future self, here's a reminder of how to make progress bars:

Code: Select all

[progress=Ó Siadhail- Learning Irish]3/36[/progress]

But the progress bars are hibernating here for now, as I'm trying out the goal-less method, as enumerated here:
http://zenhabits.net/no-goal/
http://zenhabits.net/goal-less/
(thanks to iguanamon)

So rather than setting out a plan of what to do next, I'll be logging what actually happens, and observe what generates positive learning experiences (or not).

[Ogrim]

Good on you for going for the goal-less method. It is what I have been applying lately. It doesn't mean I don't have a long-term goal, which is to become proficient in Russian, but I aim at getting there without setting quantitative short-term goals, and I don't bother if it takes me one, two or five years to get there, as long as what I am doing with Russian is interesting and enjoyable.

I never bothered to learn how to make the progress bars for that reason, because I know I would then focus on increasing the green part rather than enjoying the activity in itself.

I enjoy reading your log. Although I have put of the idea of learning Irish (at least for the time being) I am very much interested in the language and its culture.

[tangleweeds]

Thanks, Ogrim, I thrive on positive feedback Russian has been wanderlust target for me for a few years now, but I'm resolutely sticking with Irish for now, so we're in mirror positions there.

I do agree that those progress bars can be problematic. I began suspecting mine of actively preventing progress on the courses they represented, as toxic "shoulds" that mess up my natural flow of motivation and curiosity. I've been enjoying the goal-less method, and have gotten various stuff done that had been procrastinated until now. It's been interesting how often I ned to let go of urges toward the meta-activity of planning, and remember to simply do whatever stands out as the optimal thing to do in that moment.

I'm accepting that I'm in a passive phase, where reading and listening are very rewarding activities, but I'm only moved to speak when I hear a recording of a native speaker speaking phonemes that are not part of my English skill set, so I practice those unaccustomed sounds a bit. But I find such speaking practice much more rewarding when I have software to record and play back my spoken attempts, and compare them to the target recordings. And the only software I've found that does that well is Anki.

Which means spending time using Audacity to feed Anki. What I am finding, though, is that I can make this valuable study time if I do it right. When using Audacity to segment an audio file into sentences, phrases, and/or vocabulary words, I loop the audio as I carefully type the Irish into the segment's label, and do that again (rather than simple copy/paste) when feeding that sentence/phrase/word into Anki. It's not something I can do when my roommate is home (it's a very small and open house), but the maddening repetition can turn words/phrases/etc. into earworms, which I think is a very useful stage of learning auditory material like spoken language or music, and typing out the Irish helps drill the spelling and permutations into my mind.

So the result is that I'm spending lots of time looping audio and carefully labeling it with Irish transcriptions, and building up a hoard of audio files to practice pronunciation with.

[tangleweeds]

Russian has been wanderlust target for me for a few years now, but I'm resolutely sticking with Irish for now

Famous last words! First the creation of the French Voyageurs group got some French books back onto the actively reading shelf , and now Russian books have joined them.

My plan had been to (re)start Russian either in Jan 2016 or when Duolingo Russian graduated it from beta, but an old friend's wife recently immigrated from Russia. I met her when they were vacationing here, and she's a very interesting person. She's agreed to help me learn Russian, and I'm going to help her learn to ride a bike. There are complications from living in different states, but Skype and frequent flyer miles will help.

So going goal-less has spawned a sprawl of wanderlust, but the feeling of moving between languages has been more comfortable and far less confusing than I'd anticipated. French, Irish, and Russian are pretty different, so when I run into the commonalities they usually reflect Indo-European roots, so they're cool and memorable rather than confusing.

One problem has been that pure goal-less-ness works less well when I'm going through the depressive (or at least apathetic) part of my natural cycle. When my energy is low, it helps to have an obvious do-this-next to plug into my pomodoro software and get started with, to prevent any kind of decision fatigue. So I feel like I need a strategy for times when conscious intervention is necessary to overcome my brain's reluctance to burn glucose on unnecessary concentration.

On the other hand, goal-less-ness uproots all varieties of guilt or drudgery. It's an interesting balance to explore.

More specifics to come.

[tangleweeds]

I met my friend's Russian wife a couple of months ago, when I was disappointed about an Irish workshop in November that I couldn't attend. I wondered whether it mightn't be a realistic language scenario to ask this new friend if she would like to help me with Russian, a language I'd wanted to learn before I ever considered Irish. But I decided I could only ask her if I learned the Cyrillic alphabet first, because I suffered brain melt on previous attempts to learn Cyrillic. That was a reasonable pre-condition to pestering someone for help with Russian.

In a recent discussion about Memrise, I learned that I wasn't the only one who found their planting algorithm strangely effective. I searched out alll the Memrise courses I could on Russian Cyrillic, from reading a normal typeface to accursed cursive (I suck at cursive in English too), plus typing (I had to re-verify my PayPal account after making repeated attempts to log in with the Russian Cyrillic keyboard still enabled) (and no, they never send you email about it ).

I'm still working on the longest, 120 item Cyrillic course, but was soon able sound out Russian words well enough to recognize cognates and loanwords. The first couple chapters of Get Started in Russian (from Teach Yourself, by Rachel Farmer) has a variety of small sets of words to decode practice reading, which use different fonts to help the reader adapt. Living Language's oxymoronically named Complete Russian: The Basics (2008) has long lists of cognates and recognizable geographical names for practice. The only downside is that book used a dense, boldface font for all the examples in Russian, so I find the unfamiliar letters surprisingly difficult decode without reading glasses and very good light.

I've only just begun learning actual Russian, beyond simply decoding Cyrillic text. I have a December birthday that gets intermingled with Christmas, so last week Santa delivered Assimil Russian, and I really like it. At this stage I super appreciate the slow, clear enunciation of Assimil's early lessons' speakers, and stuff has been sticking in my memory nicely. I already had Beginner's Russian (with the busy website), which has a nice, shallow learning curve too. One thing I noticed about both of these courses is that they both use large, clear Cyrillic fonts, and that's very helpful for me.

Another thing I noticed is that in this early beginner stage of Russian, just as I discovered (much later) in Irish, I feel the most comfortable and steady growth of understanding at this super-beginner level when I surf between resources seeking out comprehensible input. I resisted course surfing a long time because it was advised against, but a mental switch clicked for me when I got over this, and started getting much broader exposure to the language. I was able to go back to courses I'd found tedious studying intensively, and use them as sources of extensive TL audio/textual material which came with lots of "cheats", in whatever form the course author chose to divulge their clues.

It makes my brain light up when I see the same thing used and/or explained in similar but divergent ways, because it feels like I'm experiencing the true flexibility of language, rather than being locked into the particular usages each aothor chooses to dissect.

There are two things I have come to appreciate as I've resumed learning languages. One is comfort with uncertainty, noticing anomalies without stressing over them. Explore them if there's time, but if it's an important anomaly, it will will return soon enough. The other is providing enough receptive exposure time to allow a nice chunk of new material soak in on its own. There's no need to dive right in and start drilling; save that for the stuff that needs it.

Coming up: more about French

[iguanamon]

... the progress bars are hibernating here for now, as I'm trying out the goal-less method ...

Wow, , it's good to see another person trying out "no goals". It is a very liberating feeling. I actually accomplish more and feel better doing it because I do what I love... and the rest follows.

It makes my brain light up when I see the same thing used and/or explained in similar but divergent ways, because it feels like I'm experiencing the true flexibility of language, rather than being locked into the particular usages each author chooses to dissect.

There are two things I have come to appreciate as I've resumed learning languages. One is comfort with uncertainty, noticing anomalies without stressing over them. Explore them if there's time, but if it's an important anomaly, it will will return soon enough. The other is providing enough receptive exposure time to allow a nice chunk of new material soak in on its own. There's no need to dive right in and start drilling; save that for the stuff that needs it. ...

Letting the language come to you, nice! Keep up the good work, tangleweeds!

[tangleweeds]

Thanks, iguanamon!

I went through a brief French phase earlier this year (documented somewhere in my old HTLAL log), but before that I hadn't touched French since leaving secondary school many decades ago, I studied it for five years before graduation, starting when I was eleven or so, and core elements of its grammar feel permanently engraved. More advanced vocabulary and verb forms, less so.

From the beginning I've used Linvist.io to help bring back my French. I enjoy it, in the same way I enjoy a well-crafted Memrise or Anki deck. But I hadn't used it in some months, and had re-forgotten some verb forms and more modern vocab items. I had to laugh when the algorithm abruptly lost faith in me and downgraded to much simpler questions ("what do you remember, fallible fleshling?"). But it had been interesting to notice how most of my mistaken answers were misspellings of what had been the right phonetic idea.

I've also started reading an A1 level, "two volume" (slender little things) condensation of Les Trois Mousquetaires from Hachette. The vast majority of the vocabulary swims up from the basement of my memory, albeit much aided by context, but a few words hover tantalizingly out of reach -- until I look them up then think, "Wait! I knew that!" A couple of those per page, plus the occasional word I truly don't know, makes this is pretty straightforward reading, not much of a stretch, but I am very slow. And it reminds me of being a kid, and reading books that were a few years ahead of "age appropriate." There isn't much I don't actually understand, but there's a murky, uphill sensation to the act of reading... which I remember from reading a translation of the Three Musketeers when I too young to grok it fully!

[tangleweeds]

We're just about at the solstice, and the urge to hibernate is strong. I have not been feeling attracted to electronic self-quizzing like Memrise or Lingvist. There are times when I truly enjoy staring into a glowing screen and playing an invigorating game of whack-a-mole with learning/memory challenges. As I've said before, it's my personal form of electronic gaming; decades ago I was the the dork who frequented on the "edutainment" section of software outlets. Mavis Beacon taught me typing. Letter invaders...

But I haven't been feeling that way lately. I haven't wanted to read grammar either. I'm just reading two different Hachette A1s. Mystère sur le Vieux-Port came with a CD, as do the modern edition of the mousquetaires faciles; I found my older editions des mousquetaires at Powell's, before I learned how to locate the CD editions at the Book Depository. After crashing and burning out of my previously attained level at Lingvist, the experiment is now to see how reading français facile revives forgotten French.

I've actually enjoyed things more after taking the challenge of highlighting all the words on which I'm blurry or guessing in any way, generally by context or cognate. I've been looking them up, not while reading, but when I'm in a more analytic mood. No wonder my reading had been feeling out of focus!

[tangleweeds]

Here's the website of the branch of Hachette that publishes these graded novelettes with CDs:
http://www.lire-en-francais-facile.com/
I see that Les Trois Mousquetaires condensations are now classed as A2, while Mystère sur le Vieux-Port is A1. My mousquetaires are the lowest level of a previous grading system, with "Facile" indicating 500-900 word vocabulary. Vieux-Port uses < 500 words, but oddly, I'm finding more shaky words to highlight in Vieux-Port than in Mousquetaires.

And here are more links for myself to use later, via tomgosse's log
http://www.podcastfrancaisfacile.com/
http://www.newsinslowfrench.com/

Youtube on Pronunciation
French Pronunciation by U of M's LRC
French Sounds