tangleweeds garden path log

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tangleweeds
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Re: tangleweeds garden path log [100% NO for 6WC]

Postby tangleweeds » Sat Oct 31, 2020 9:53 pm

Norwegian resources and initial study plans for the 11/2020 6WC

After lots of reading on the forum, on reddit, & blogs (and special thanks PM & all who contributed in his logs), here's what I've chooses as primary resources for the November 2020 6WC:
  • a couple of textbooks since I thrive in academic situations
  • Pimsleur for taking walks ostensibly on the phone with my imaginary foreign friend
  • some electronic options because glowing screens make me happy.
  • (coming in the next post: my weird strategy for n+1 comprehensible input for ultra-beginners)

Norsk, Nordmenn, og Norge
A thick old-school textbook, lots of black & white pages full of text, a style I thrive on. It has an audiolingual feel, with tons of written exercises and audio drills. The textbook chapters are entirely in Norwegian, but there’s a compact grammar in the back plus a glossary to define all that mysterious vocab.

The workbook's early computer typesetting enhances the vintage feel; there are different kinds of exercises with grammar pages at strategic intervals. One wants to be sure to get the 2nd edition of the workbook as it includes an answer key and transcripts of the audio drills at the end.

There's also a second level textbook & workbook called Antologi, which I don't have, but the name suggests plenty of reading (& more exercises) in there, but there don't seem to be audio files for the second Antologi level. A functioning audio file purchase link for the first volume was difficult to find (the easy to find one is broken), so I'll append it here:
https://cdcshoppingcart.uchicago.edu/Cart2/Chicagobook?PRESS=wisconsin&ISBN=978-0-299-08805-7

The Secret of Nils
OK, I'm game to check out a story-based textbook theoretically more amusing than the standard language course. It's a modern style of textbook, antithesis of N, N, & N, with lots of colorful pictures and grammar diagrams. The grammar sections are short, clear, and often amusingly illustrated. One can listen to the audio online free, but you gotta pay to download or buy a CD. There's a second volume for this one too, which, guessing by its name, Mysteriet om Nils, appears to be entirely in Norwegian. Wheee!
https://soundcloud.com/skapago/sets/learn-norwegian-with-a
https://www.skapago.eu/nils/audio/

Pimsleur Norwegian
Our library doesn't have this one, but given my massive Pimsleur borrowing history, I guess it's time to share the wealth (extend my poverty?). I'll be getting this one from Audible once this month's credit arrives (on the 5th, I think? :( ). Pimsleur only has two levels in Norwegian, with 30 lessons each, and they cost :shock: 5 :shock: credits per level on Audible. :o Ouch! :o And I'm infuriatingly a single credit short :x And credits can only be purchased in threes :evil: So I've just got to wait for this month's to arrive, sigh :cry:

ETA: Cool news! The friend/ex-roomie I'm house&cat sitting for is sending me some nice Bluetooth earphones that will make this walk&talk plan much nicer! (they're really because he likes talking on the phone while taking walks, and wants me to be like him--I much prefer video chat, which he hates!)

Memrise
Duolingo's level of gamification drives me mad, but I work very well with Memrise. I'm going to start giving them money again as I enjoyed the Learn with Locals videos when I had them last, and appreciate having all the other study options available as well. They also have decks for books like Nils, Teach Yourself, and one of the NoW courses below.
https://app.memrise.com/courses/english/norwegian/
https://app.memrise.com/home/

Norwegian on the Web by NTNU
There are 3 versions of the basic course, plus one of level 2, and they're all free!. The third version of the basic course is the same as the 2nd one, only in a Northern dialect. With all they offer here, this will probably drift toward my looser n+1 category, but we'll see, since they do have interactive exercises which tend to amuse me well.
https://www.ntnu.edu/learnnow/info/toc
https://www.ntnu.edu/now/info/toc
https://www.ntnu.edu/nowin/info/toc
https://www.ntnu.edu/now2/info/innhold

ETA CALST
A pronunciation tutor, also free!: I'll just quote the website for this one: "The Computer-Assisted Listening and Speaking Tutor (CALST) is a pronunciation training platform which currently offers exercises for English and for Norwegian. CALST will help you to acquire a basic vocabulary of 1000 words and expressions."
https://calst.hf.ntnu.no

My sense is that right now I need to start with lots and lots of audio then connect it with text, to get a better feel for pronunciation. My brain sees how Norsk text looks so similar to English, so then that vexing inner voice pronounces it entirely wrong, like mutant German maybe??? No no no no no bad stop!

So I should probably postpone all those lovely tempting written exercises in the Norsk, Nordmenn og Norge books (yeah I like weird fun), until I stop hearing written Norwegian entirely wrongly when I see it on the page. Fortunately N, N & N has plenty of audio drills as well, which are great for my purposes, and NoW also has audio drills available for download too. It's a little frustrating that I won't I'll have enough credits for Pimsleur for a week, though.

And I've collected a bunch of supplementary material for my ultrabeginner n+1 but that will be in my next post.

ETA: I've also set up my time tracking spreadsheet, so I'm ready to go!
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tangleweeds
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Re: tangleweeds garden path log [100% NO for 6WC]

Postby tangleweeds » Sun Dec 06, 2020 12:07 am

And how very dull, I've had another neurological relapse. It was probably partially caused by US election stress--ever notice how one always gets sick only (immediately) after the crisis ends?--but mostly because the single generic from the one manufacturer of the only antidepressant I can tolerate disappeared due to merger/acquisition. Other (cheaper) generics have caused neuro issues all the way from twitches to seizures, and my stockpile of the good kind is running out. So I've been tried a different generic that I had found only mediocre in the past, and thus reignited the neurological issued caused by the super bad generic.*

The one cool thing is that I scored a lifetime membership to Memrise for a very good Cyber Week price, and wanted to post about it here--who else in my life would rejoice with me? So I'm ready for whenever my brain settles down enough to study, yay! And Memrise is really one of my highest-value services, and I have liked being able to support them when I could.But I truly love lifetime memberships when I can swing them--staunching that slow but steady bank account bleed.

Think on it a bit, language llcs, isn't it worse for all the everyone's' budget projections when I keep needing to switch around between different subscription services, depending which language I'm prioritizing at which level? Wouldn't it be best to all know where we stand on a steady basis?

Only I'm poor, so it's gotta be a pretty good deal to make me pull the trigger, and I'm super happy about this one.

---------------------------

* If you were about to reply "all generics are the same" check out the book Bottle of Lies, very badly named by its publicist but written by the premier US pharmaceutical journalist. It was recommended to me by one of my pharmacist friends, and describes the problems FDA inspectors have in overseas plants--in the US, they have law enforcement powers and can show up a la "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!", but since all manufacture went offshore to the cheapest possible location, and depending law/custom of the country, FDA inspectors could be required to get permission to enter the country and inspect far ahead of time. So they keep finding QA record deletion and other evidence destruction when they get there.

It's really bad because the truly bad batches of drugs end up in 3rd world countries and people die because low quality makes standard dosage ineffective at best. Anyway, if you take prescription drug that are off patent, or care about health conditions around the world, ignore the awful name and read the book! When I went to copy the link to share, I discovered it's even on limited time sale for only $3 on Kindle (and probably other ebook platforms). I thought it was worth paying full price for after reading the library copy a couple of years ago.

[Edited to fix absurd spelling errors]
Last edited by tangleweeds on Tue Dec 08, 2020 6:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: tangleweeds garden path log [100% NO for 6WC]

Postby Cèid Donn » Sun Dec 06, 2020 3:46 am

Sympathies for your health issues.

I have been debating whether to grab a Pro sub for Memrise while they have it on sale--but the yearly one, not the lifetime one. I already have gotten burned by 50Languages--I had a lifetime membership from like 2005 or so, but when they revamped the whole site for mobile a couple years back and changed how they do their paid access, I lost it. Granted, it was super cheap--like 8 bucks or something, but it was lesson in how these tech companies aren't beholden to their users, even paying ones.

I have had Memrise Pro before and really liked it, but between me getting really burnt out on Memrise and getting frustrated with a number of changes they implement earlier in 2019, like the whole Decks debacle, I didn't renew at the end of 2019. I instead got a year sub to Drops, also at a holiday sale rate, but I'm not going to renew when it expires at the end of this month. I like Drops for what it is--a nice, albeit slow-ish vocabulary trainer--but I can live with the more limited free version at this point. Right now I'm getting a lot more out of Memrise, now that's I've recovered from my previous burnt-out and they gave up on trying to make Decks work, so I may sub again.
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Re: tangleweeds garden path log [100% NO for 6WC]

Postby tangleweeds » Mon Dec 07, 2020 6:27 pm

Cèid Donn wrote:Sympathies for your health issues.
Thank you so much. They are tedious at best, but pretty stressful at worst.

Cèid Donn wrote:I have had Memrise Pro before and really liked it, but between me getting really burnt out on Memrise and getting frustrated with a number of changes they implement earlier in 2019, like the whole Decks debacle, I didn't renew
Yeah, I had a super sweet yearly membership price from way back, but I also quit in a fit of pique after the Decks debacle. Since they rescinded that, I'd been watching for a good deal, but the ones offered on-site were never good enough to make me pull the trigger. But then I remembered to check Ondesoft Deals (kinda the Mac version of StackSocial) during Cyber Week and scored--Yay!
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Re: tangleweeds garden path log

Postby tangleweeds » Tue Nov 28, 2023 6:38 pm

Well, it’s been so long I barely know where to begin, but to make a long, complicated, and tedious-to-live story short, further neurological testing I was only able to get (US insurance woes) via a long covid clinic led to my third diagnosis of ADHD. The third time really was the charm, because that was enough to caused an entirely different medical entity to cough up some treatment for the ADHD, which has really turned my life around, at least as far as my studies and general outlook on life go. There’s still plenty of chaos, but changes in strategy based on the neurobiology of ADHD have helped me manage it.

Currently I’m working in Japanese, and have been able to focus entirely on Japanese (i.e. constrain wanderlust) by giving myself permission to freely jump around between resources in whatever way stimulates my brain to produce enough dopamine to maintain focus. Oddly, giving that permission has made it easier to feel when I am dissipating energy by chasing too many shiny new things (or even favorite old things), and I’ve found myself naturally working within a reasonable set of resources that are varied enough to maintain interest, but not so numerous as to stun me with decision fatigue.

I do shift around within that set with things falling in and out of favor, but now I understand that when my brain loses its ability to focus on one thing, I have an arsenal of equally relevant other things to dangle in front of it. It’s actually very much like managing cat toys—often you need to take away some and re-release others to keep a jaded, middle-aged catso moving. Come to whatever conclusions you will :roll: :mrgreen: :lol:

Really it’s all somewhat oriented towards passing JLPT levels, but with enough variation that when a familiar word, kanji, or grammatical chunklet from one resource shows up in a couple of others, I can feel my feel my whirling mind stop in its tracks and note, “Hey, this thing is appearing all over the place, it must be important!” and bang! it makes a memory impression that really sticks.

It’s a kind of chaotic spaced repetition, except it’s more effective than seeing the same thing repeating in the same place, as with, say, Anki. And I say that as someone who enjoys both making and doing flash cards. I’ve made more progress in Japanese than I have since I did an intensive summer program back in the ‘90s, and I feel a lot more solid about what I’ve learned than I did back then.

You might note that this is kind of what my brain was trying to make me do all along, only my efforts to constrain it led to chronic wanderlust. It feels kind of nice and solid to only be doing one language at a time (said by someone trained since middle school to juggle two closely related foreign languages at once) (Korean! Korean! Korean! whispers a voice at the back of my head. But I am successfully ignoring it!!).
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Re: tangleweeds garden path log

Postby tangleweeds » Fri Dec 01, 2023 8:01 pm

There actually is a backbone of consistency in what I’ve been doing, which is falling asleep to Japanesepod101. I’ve had chronic insomnia since I was very young, and have learned to manage it by dimming the lights a couple hours before I need to sleep, and convincing myself that I’m just listening to very dusty history audiobooks or “The Great Courses” until I finally drift off (I think I’m tapping into some primal memory of falling asleep during college lectures here). Sub in JapanesePod101 and we’re good to go (also, thank you Black Friday sales!).

They have a ton of content at the lower levels to which I’ve regressed over these years of neglecting my studies, and they throw a bunch of oddball vocabulary in with the usual suspects, which is great because vocabulary is what I need. Grammar has always been my strong suit and a language’s sentence structure is what I remember when everything else goes rusty, so I’m not even worrying about that, just picking it back up it along the way as I jump around between textbooks ingesting vocabulary and practicing reading.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, reading was neglected in the program I studied way back when. Fortunately all the kana app drilling I did several year back made pretty lasting impressions, so this time around I’ve mostly been playing with kanji apps.

First there’s the popular iOS app from Luli Languages that used to just be called Kanji! but now it’s Learn Japanese! - Kanji, which is, as many have noted, strangely effective (there’s another app from the same developer that does kana and some basic grammar). It both makes you learn to write the kanji, and learn some potentially confusing vocabulary variants that use the new kanji (i.e. different readings, transitive/intransitive pairs, etc).

I also really like the popular Android app called Kanji Study (its iOS version sucks), so I sideloaded the Google Play store onto my Kindle Fire and use it on that. In the basic version you also learn to write the kanji, and there are various ways of quizzing that you can set the parameters for quite flexibly. But I really like how it incorporates the Kodansha Kanji Learners’ Course, including the many levels of reading practice. They licenses it all from Kodansha and you have to pay for the higher levels, plus there are other cool add-on packages you can purchase.

I’m all in favor of paying developers but burnt out on subscriptions, and these are one-time paid apps. The add-ons to Kanji Study are a little costly, but over the years I think I’ve bought them all, because they’re really really impressive content-wise. OTOH the Luli Languages apps are a bargain for all you get.
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Re: tangleweeds garden path log

Postby tangleweeds » Wed Dec 13, 2023 7:47 pm

Well, it was my birthday last week, and I got a couple of items relevant here:

Image

The grammar dictionary immediately proved itself useful by clearing up some confusion between ごろ and ぐらい, and now I find myself wanting to look up every function word that seems likely to be included. Meanwhile, I was going through the yellow N5 book in the "Tango"/単語 series and realizing that I knew the majority of the vocabulary, and most of it was from my not-quite-so-passive-as-one-might-expect listening to JapanesePod101 while waiting to fall asleep. This makes me feel that the (well discounted) subscription fees to Innovative Languages are a good investment.

Meanwhile, I am studying みんなの日本語 with the help of the Renshuu app, and following Genki in Bunpro (as well as using Genki's weird little vocab apps). I've noticed that I do very well with apps, partially because I have age-related vision issues and text on devices is easily enlarged, and partially, I think, because I've always preferred "edutainment" apps for fun over gaming.

I have the same propensity to want to play with glowing, responsive screens as any monkey, toddler, child, or adult on the planet. I just happen to enjoy simple, clean, ungamified learning apps. And it's clear to me from the first moment I interacted with a computer that they (+ phones, tablets, etc.) are by the nature of their implacable limitations highly effective conditioning devices. So if I'm going to let a machine train me to do things, it might as well be a skills that carry over into the real world, right?
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Re: tangleweeds garden path log

Postby tangleweeds » Tue Dec 19, 2023 5:22 am

Image

I needed to show off another new book on Japanese, this time an early Christmas present, which I couldn’t resist showing with the other newbies, this time from a bit of a side view so y’all can a sense of how much content one gets per book. We’re seeing about 190 pages in Tango/単語, which does have smaller print, 310 pages in Sentence Patterns, & 630 in the Grammar Dictionary, respectively in the order pictured.

The sentence patterns book looks about perfect for my level, which I estimate to be N5 gnawing at N4. It’s basically what the title promises, collections of pretty straightforward sentence patterns that demonstrate how Japanese structures the basic kinds of ideas you might want to express, such as comparisons, causality, giving & receiving, conjecture & hearsay, etc.

In the first section of the book, which is both an index and a set of references, each set of ideas has a number of major exemplar sentences, in English on one page and Japanese on the facing page. The Japanese is in regular kanji&kana, then in Romaji (in case that scares you off).

In the main section, each of these exemplars gets explained, and is followed by a bunch more example sentences using the same structure. There’s one basic grammar point per sub-section, and they build on one another textbook-style. At the end of each exemplar sentence’s sub-section, there are a few translation exercises, where you’re given some vocabulary and similarly structured English sentences to put into Japanese (answers provided).

The grammar dictionary handles things somewhat similarly, with main exemplar sentences for each term covered, then a bunch more example sentences. But in the grammar dictionary there’s more explicit, equation-style breakdown of the exemplars, a set of related example sentences, then a long string of grammatical points (in case *that* scares you off).

[editing in place because I’m having a nightmare trying to post this evening, lost it once, later got a duplicate]
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Re: tangleweeds garden path log

Postby golyplot » Tue Dec 19, 2023 6:35 am

tangleweeds wrote:[editing in place because I’m having a nightmare trying to post this evening, lost it once, later got a duplicate]


Yeah, LLORG has been really slow and flaky lately for some reason. It took me forever to post and edit the post to my own log this morning.
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Re: tangleweeds garden path log

Postby tangleweeds » Tue Dec 19, 2023 8:58 pm

File under: My poor brain just can’t catch a break!

Image

That’s an early picture of the black eye I got last week after tripping & face-planting onto concrete, ironically on my way to (what turned out not to be) a routine checkup with my doctor. She forwarded me to the ER, where CT and x-ray determined I’d broken neither my head nor my wrist, but I’ve definitely enjoyed a host of concussion symptoms: sleepy, weepy, headache, ringing ears, disinclination to eat (or digest once I have), and that annoying inability to concentrate that makes neurological injuries so very, very dull.

But that was now a week ago, and as my plump, purple eye fades to an unlovely mix of aubergine, amber, and bile, I’m gradually regaining my ability to focus (and digest). I’ve been making fewer harebrained mistakes in my kanji apps, and remembering what I was supposed to be learning from listening to various episodes of JapanesePod101 (though perhaps not quite always all the details I might otherwise have have learnt).

I’m trying to view it as an opportunity to make some kind of fresh start. It’s not as though a knock on the head gave me amnesia on Japanese (or anything else, beyond those first few fuzzily remembered hours after my fall*; I resumed normal consciousness sometime during the many hours in the ER waiting room). It’s just that any kind of hiatus provides an opportunity to reflect on what has and hasn’t been working during previous endeavors.

JapanesePod101: a total winner for someone at my level. I’m not really studying from it in any focused way, just listening by candlelight in the bathtub, or in my sleep-mask-headphones** whenever I rest, nap, or attempt to sleep. I consult the written lesson notes when it seems necessary, but their kludgey formatting makes them less useful for me than they might otherwise have been.

I generally listen to a few episodes in a row but repeat often, graduating older episodes of any given season as they get solid (or tiresome) and newer episodes enter the mix. When I get bored of one series, I jump sideways into another at about the same level or better.

I do feel they’ve now gone a bit overboard in terms of hiding content in response to complaints that redundancy made the site confusing to navigate; I’ve had to dig through massive searches on terms like “beginner” to locate all the different seasons at the lowest levels. Because I listen to it in most of my downtime, any given season will old after a while; other seasons at a similar level will re-enforce some of the same vocab and grammar while also introducing new variations.

This moving around also helps to quell my ADHD restless hunt for novelty=dopamine—understanding the problem really does help solve it. Also, it helps trigger the brain’s natural inclination to (pretty effortlessly) remember things that keep reappearing in different environments—different seasons with different hosts and different plotlines (or lack thereof) are different enough to my brain to trigger this effect, though of course the effect is greater when vocabulary, kanji, grammatical structures, etc surface in entirety different media.

Another big winner is YouTube textbook/grammar videos. I will talk about some of those in my next post—the forum has been slow and requests timing out on me, so I’ve been losing drafts, etc. so I will post this while it still exists.



* Bright Sides in US Insurance Woes: Ooh, the bad stats on greying ladies who fall down plus the expense of an ER visit will probably induce my insurance to re-authorize physical therapy! Yippie!!

** Sleep-mask-headphones are a brilliant invention for anyone who needs to sleep or rest in a busy or bright environment. The main drawback is that they suffer from Cheap Chinese Junk disease, malfunctioning or dying within a couple of years—I think I’m on my third set. I wish I could just buy their eminently replaceable electronic innards!
.
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