tangleweeds garden path log
Posted: Sun Jul 19, 2015 3:32 am
This garden path log so named because I'm keep being surprised by what's around the next bend. I haven't done well at Total Annihilation or time tracking, but I've been pretty consistent about enjoying myself with interesting foreign language materials. Mostly these were in Irish, which I began studying in February 2015.
My Irish adventure began when Duolingo Irish came out of beta early this year, and I gave it a try. But there wasn't enough grammar to keep me happy, so I soon augmented with Amazon's suggestions of Teach Yourself:Complete Irish, and Spoken World: Irish from Living Language, which turned out to be good choices for grammatical explanations. I also fired up old friends Audacity and Anki, and started making sentence cards with audio. In this initial phase, I focused hard on my ability to speak and recognize unfamiliar phonemes, and catch the rhythm of the language. Learning how to speak my new vocabulary in the context of sentences and phrases lets me practice patterns of intonation, inflection, etc. at the same time. And since I'm the kind of person who will look up and puzzle out the form, function, and meaning of every individual word in any sentence I learn, I made no cards for individual words, which is now a decision I'm reconsidering.
A couple of chapters in to these courses, I felt like I don't have much personal use for how modern courses adhere to the (very sensible) CEFR A1 curriculum. Unfortunately I have no realistic plan to get to Ireland any time soon (but if anyone offers to take me there, I'll get right back on that curriculum ). On the other hand, I have first-hand memories of stone walls and luminous green fields from a childhood visit to the village my great-grandmother emigrated from, so the old-fashioned content of Learning Irish triggers vivid memories. Another big plus for Learning Irish was that I enjoy the grammar exercises in Nancy Stenson's freeware workbook to go with LI; the main minus was that I never felt like LI had enough full-sentence audio,. The final downside was that a few months in, my life unexpectedly became way more complicated and stressful, and I had a hard time sticking to this more rigorous program, particularly entering data into Anki. My final progress in LI was getting chapters 1 & 2 down cold, ch. 3 pretty well covered, and ch. 4 familiar but with gaps.
What I enjoyed enough to stick with when life got rough was Buntús Cainte. The way it demonstrates several variations on the new material works very well for me. I'm solid on chapter 8 and everything before, and currently working on chapters 9 - 14, with the predictable spectrum of ch. 9 being pretty steady and ch. 14 being pretty shaky. Because listening is my worst skill, I call a chapter "cooked" when I hear its audio and automatically visualize the situation it refers to in real time; the funny little drawings help with this. I'm pretty skilled at going directly from TL to mental image without passing through English on the way, having discovered the magic of thinking in my TL during secondary school.
Buntús Cainte also has a great Memrise course, and that's where my SRS habit migrated when life started getting stressful, and I didn't have energy to keep up with all the audio editing and input that Anki needed. Aside from Buntús Cainte, I also completed the Basic Irish course and got halfway through Basic Irish 2 before life got even more complicated. Basic Irish 2 was fiendishly hard to find; Memrise's weighted search wouldn't spit it out. I had to locate it via Basic Irish's creator Baas' personal pages.
Then life got way too complex, and I wasn't able to get much done at all, though I rarely went more than a couple of days without casually browsing through some kind of Irish language materials when I had time and energy to spare. Though I was frustrated at the time about not having energy to get much Irish study done, in retrospect I'm pretty happy about how I kept the flame burning through that difficult period.
Things have started to come together again in my life, making room for more Irish, and I've been browsing around trying to put together my plan for renewed effort that direction. I definitely learned more when I was using SRS regularly, so I want to get Anki fired up again, but perhaps with a different configuration of cards. One thing I noticed during Memrise courses was that I had more stamina when it was asking me a variety of different types of questions, and I want to harness that.
My Irish adventure began when Duolingo Irish came out of beta early this year, and I gave it a try. But there wasn't enough grammar to keep me happy, so I soon augmented with Amazon's suggestions of Teach Yourself:Complete Irish, and Spoken World: Irish from Living Language, which turned out to be good choices for grammatical explanations. I also fired up old friends Audacity and Anki, and started making sentence cards with audio. In this initial phase, I focused hard on my ability to speak and recognize unfamiliar phonemes, and catch the rhythm of the language. Learning how to speak my new vocabulary in the context of sentences and phrases lets me practice patterns of intonation, inflection, etc. at the same time. And since I'm the kind of person who will look up and puzzle out the form, function, and meaning of every individual word in any sentence I learn, I made no cards for individual words, which is now a decision I'm reconsidering.
A couple of chapters in to these courses, I felt like I don't have much personal use for how modern courses adhere to the (very sensible) CEFR A1 curriculum. Unfortunately I have no realistic plan to get to Ireland any time soon (but if anyone offers to take me there, I'll get right back on that curriculum ). On the other hand, I have first-hand memories of stone walls and luminous green fields from a childhood visit to the village my great-grandmother emigrated from, so the old-fashioned content of Learning Irish triggers vivid memories. Another big plus for Learning Irish was that I enjoy the grammar exercises in Nancy Stenson's freeware workbook to go with LI; the main minus was that I never felt like LI had enough full-sentence audio,. The final downside was that a few months in, my life unexpectedly became way more complicated and stressful, and I had a hard time sticking to this more rigorous program, particularly entering data into Anki. My final progress in LI was getting chapters 1 & 2 down cold, ch. 3 pretty well covered, and ch. 4 familiar but with gaps.
What I enjoyed enough to stick with when life got rough was Buntús Cainte. The way it demonstrates several variations on the new material works very well for me. I'm solid on chapter 8 and everything before, and currently working on chapters 9 - 14, with the predictable spectrum of ch. 9 being pretty steady and ch. 14 being pretty shaky. Because listening is my worst skill, I call a chapter "cooked" when I hear its audio and automatically visualize the situation it refers to in real time; the funny little drawings help with this. I'm pretty skilled at going directly from TL to mental image without passing through English on the way, having discovered the magic of thinking in my TL during secondary school.
Buntús Cainte also has a great Memrise course, and that's where my SRS habit migrated when life started getting stressful, and I didn't have energy to keep up with all the audio editing and input that Anki needed. Aside from Buntús Cainte, I also completed the Basic Irish course and got halfway through Basic Irish 2 before life got even more complicated. Basic Irish 2 was fiendishly hard to find; Memrise's weighted search wouldn't spit it out. I had to locate it via Basic Irish's creator Baas' personal pages.
Then life got way too complex, and I wasn't able to get much done at all, though I rarely went more than a couple of days without casually browsing through some kind of Irish language materials when I had time and energy to spare. Though I was frustrated at the time about not having energy to get much Irish study done, in retrospect I'm pretty happy about how I kept the flame burning through that difficult period.
Things have started to come together again in my life, making room for more Irish, and I've been browsing around trying to put together my plan for renewed effort that direction. I definitely learned more when I was using SRS regularly, so I want to get Anki fired up again, but perhaps with a different configuration of cards. One thing I noticed during Memrise courses was that I had more stamina when it was asking me a variety of different types of questions, and I want to harness that.