Languid Language Learning

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Elenia
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Re: Languid Language Learning

Postby Elenia » Tue Aug 25, 2015 3:04 pm

@emk - thanks for commenting :) I get that feeling really often, and it's a good way to buoy myself whenever I'm feeling down. Probably the most amazing thing I have ever done with any of my languages is cancel my insurance in French. I'm still proud of myself for that, although it was over a year ago. After all, I don't even know if I can do it in English! So even if I was awkward and non-native at all at that time, at least I did it.

(I'm also lucky enough to have an ego of epic proportions... so every time I get down about how bad I am at x thing, there is that part of me going: but hey, you're fantastic at this!)

---

Here is the (second) promised post on using Bakunin's recordings. The first post I made gives an overview of the benefits of the method, and the different stages of understanding. This skips out, almost entirely, how I use the recordings, the little experiments I made, and other small details which I talked about while messaging Bakunin privately. I'm not sure quite how to write these things up clearly and concisely, but I'll give it a good try.

The story used was 'Bow Wow's Nightmare Neighbours'. Details for this picture story, and others, can be found on Bakunin's blog. I have six pictures, with six accompanying recording.

I listened to the very first recording quickly, once, to check the pace of the recording and my level of comprehension, to report back to Bakunin. I felt that both were good. This will evidently mean different things to different people. The kinds of recordings that Bakunin made for me tell the story of what is happening in the picture, focusing mainly on the prominent elements elements: Bow Wow is yellow, Bow Wow has a red nose, he is sleeping... so on, so forth. I found that I was able to follow the direction of the description, as well as most of the words used. I think that being able to follow the description is important in its own right, although it is intrinsically linked to understanding the words.

Bakunin and I also discussed the amount of details included. Bakunin made the choice to keep extra details down to a minimum, which I believe was right for this kind of level as it would have made the process of following the description and learning the new words a little bit more difficult. As Bakunin said:

Adding such information usually makes the recordings more difficult but also more interesting.


I also thing that adding smaller or more complex details into a later recording would give me more mileage on each picture. This gives me the opportunity to build on what I know without getting bored, and would also (hopefully) make the process more interesting for the person doing the recordings.

We also talked about how word choices are made. This could be seen from the same angle as the extra details. Bakunin gave the example of the appropriate terms for animals mouths, and found that it was harder than would first appear due to the nature of the story. We both thought that perhaps coming up with a list of vocabulary to be included first might be helpful for both the tutor and the tutee. So, for my part, I would specify to my next tutor that I would like a few extra details to be mentioned, for example the phases of the moon. And for the tutor, they would go over what vocabulary they want to use in each recording and provide a word list for me. This last is fine, as I am not going for an 'audio only' or 'audio first' method. I believe such a list would be a reference, only. I would not want to sit down and made sure I understood every word on the list, or to memorise them. That kind of learning is exactly what I would want to get away from. But having this list will focus the recordings more, and help anchor the word in my memory more.

A word list would also come in handy with the other activities we talked about: shadowing, chorusing, transcription and discussion of new vocabulary - the last which I would prefer to make use of in a 'tell and tell back'* way, by trying to retell or describe the pictures for myself. Personally, I like the idea of shadowing and transcription in particular - at my lowly level, any kind of spontaneous production is more a test to see if I can (spoiler: I can't). Transcription in different forms has worked very well for me in the past, and I would like to experiment with transcribing everything and transcribing only one particular element - more like a 'note taking' exercise. All shadowing will be more a spontaneous thing than anything else. Bakunin has also suggested writing descriptions, which I imagine will be a great help to me, and which will (hopefully) force me to pay more attention to the structures than I usually do.

I haven't managed to get any more work done on the recordings, although I have listened to them more since my last post. This means that I haven't yet worked out all the little details of a routine, or when and how I might need to change tactics. Hopefully I'll get that worked out soon.

*more information on this can be found on Bakunin's log.

---

In other news, I have read more of the adventures of Arsène Lupin. I have just over hundred pages left (but the font is large, so it probably works out to be less). It's been a really compelling read, and I'm always excited to get further into it, but I have to restrict myself to a chapter per sitting to prevent burnout - reading for an hour or more straight on a screen really isn't kind on the eyes.
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Re: Languid Language Learning

Postby Bakunin » Tue Aug 25, 2015 6:49 pm

Thanks for the write-up :) I think it's a good reflection of our private conversation.

For me, doing the recordings was an interesting experience. I'm excellent at giving my tutors instructions ;) but it's a different thing to be on the other side for once. It took me quite some time to do the first recording, to get over the first hump, but the other ones were quicker. I also realized that there are many possible ways to describe the same picture - every single instance will have holes.

I also found some of the more specific feedback interesting, for instance when you noticed that my pronunciation of "draussen" sounds more like "traussen" with a "t"-sound somewhere between a proper t and a d. I wasn't aware of that. Apparently partial devoicing of initial stops isn't uncommon in many languages including German, and my colleagues at work also confirmed that it doesn't sound wrong. I don't think those little details need to be analyzed to death, but as a learner it's good to model one's pronunciation on native speaker pronunciation and not rely too much on spelling, at least until one has internalized the most important phonotactic rules*.

*EDIT: I don't mean to imply that initial devoicing of stops is important or even standard. A better example for an important phonotactic rule in German would be the mandatory devoicing of final stops: "Hund" is pronounced "Hunt". It's easy to pick this up from listening but more difficult from books.
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Re: Languid Language Learning

Postby daegga » Tue Aug 25, 2015 7:10 pm

Bakunin wrote:*EDIT: I don't mean to imply that initial devoicing of stops is important or even standard. A better example for an important phonotactic rule in German would be the mandatory devoicing of final stops: "Hund" is pronounced "Hunt". It's easy to pick this up from listening but more difficult from books.


It actually is standard when the stop (actually also some fricatives like 's') isn't preceded by a voiced sound. Thanks to final devoicing, most of the time it isn't preceded by a voiced sound, exceptions are of course vowels and approximants. When spoken in isolation, it works like when the word is not preceded by a voiced sound. So most of the time, you devoice. So it's not only you or some random phenomenon ;)
I don't know about Swiss-German, but in Austria we devoice irrespective of the context. But this is regional of course.
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Re: Languid Language Learning

Postby Bakunin » Tue Aug 25, 2015 7:29 pm

daegga wrote:
Bakunin wrote:*EDIT: I don't mean to imply that initial devoicing of stops is important or even standard. A better example for an important phonotactic rule in German would be the mandatory devoicing of final stops: "Hund" is pronounced "Hunt". It's easy to pick this up from listening but more difficult from books.


It actually is standard when the stop (actually also some fricatives like 's') isn't preceded by a voiced sound. Thanks to final devoicing, most of the time it isn't preceded by a voiced sound, exceptions are of course vowels and approximants. When spoken in isolation, it works like when the word is not preceded by a voiced sound. So most of the time, you devoice. So it's not only you or some random phenomenon ;)
I don't know about Swiss-German, but in Austria we devoice irrespective of the context. But this is regional of course.


Cool! I added the disclaimer because I couldn't find a paper explicitly confirming the initial devoicing but I may well have used the wrong search terms; I only found some general papers on initial devoicing in several languages including German. Everything you write makes total sense. My Swiss-German is not good enough to make reliable statements about such details without consulting native speakers. One thing which totally stands out is that voiceless aspirated initial stops in German are usually unaspirated in Swiss-German, so those words sound anyway quite different. My gut feeling is that devoicing occurs nonetheless but I would have to check.
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Re: Languid Language Learning

Postby Soffía » Sat Aug 29, 2015 6:53 pm

Elenia wrote:There are still a lot of details that I miss extensively, but I still wonder over the fact that I can actually read in Swedish.


I just had to quote this for truth, because I feel like this all the time. Perhaps it's because I came late to language learning. For the longest time it felt like I wasn't reading so much as deciphering. But this morning I was sitting outside one of my local coffeeshops, drinking a cup of tea and chuckling to myself as I read Jon Gnarr's autobiography (without a dictionary. I thought to myself, I may not be getting it all, but by God, I'm actually reading it. Amazing feeling. Congratulations to you!

(Also I think "languid language learning" is a great title for a log. That might just be my philosophy as well.)
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Re: Languid Language Learning

Postby Elenia » Sun Aug 30, 2015 12:29 am

While I can't add to Bakunin and daegga's discussion in any academic capacity, as I know next to nothing about linguistics, I can add a personal detail. When talking about words which I first came across in a recording, and then read in a book, I happened to remark that I had heard 'draussen' as 'traussen'. I found this interesting mostly because a detail like that would take me a lot longer to work out if I had encountered the word first in a text, and then heard it. After both hearing, reading and discussing the sound, I hear it as something not quite a t, but certainly not a 'd'. I am confident that I would be able to produce a sound close enough to correct for this to go unnoticed by others, but I also know that the sound I made would have tipped further on the 'd' side of the scale, and I simply would not have been able to hear the difference.

To quote myself (because past me was a lot more clear):
[quote=Past Elenia]I think this kind of subtle difference is something I wouldn't necessarily pick up on if I hadn't heard the word first. I might notice something about the way the pronunciation differed from my own realisation of the word, but I don't think I would be easily able to pick up on how what the difference was.[/quote]

I addition, I had never really thought about the way German sounds work. I am quite fortunate in that I am able to produce an approximation of German that sounds (and I quote) 'as if I actually understand what I'm saying'*. This is no doubt thanks to the fact that my mothers family pride themselves on being able to 'do' accents. We are no means perfect, and I doubt I could fool a native, but I've got a good base and a lot of previous practice making my voice do things that it wouldn't usually do. However, I have never really thought about the fact that the 'd' in Hund is devoiced, even though I pronounce it as such. Likewise, I have never really thought of what the difference would be in voicing the initial 'd' in draussen. The only thing I might have remarked on is that it would sound like someone speaking German with a really awful accent. I would match it up with the model, Plato-perfect German** I hear in my head, and find it wanting.

*This comment is warranted and definitely a compliment, as it was in reference to the time when I performed a scene from a play in German for a class. While I understood my speeches well enough, my level in German is way lower than the level at which Bertolt Brecht was writing, and I certainly didn't understand everything on the first read through.

**This Plato-perfect, ideal German is, I must add, probably spoken by no one ever, but it's good to have a vague idea of things.

---

@Soffía - I started fairly early, but I still have that feeling every now and again, even with French. I've mostly learnt how to let my analytical mind take a back seat, but every now and again I come across a difficult sentence and I have to go back over it, and then I start second guessing myself. I start to question whether or not I am actually understanding what I'm reading. When this starts to happen, it turns into a chore, and I start treating the text like a code to be cracked once again. I think that being able to find something funny is a good indicator that you're no longer deciphering. And, once you get past the initial hurdle, it's just a matter of reveling in the feeling of what you can do. So, congratulations to both of us!

---

I have been feeling lazy and yet restless recently, and I'm not sure how to combat it. I've been doing a lot of reading, but mostly in English. However, I am continuing on through the advetures of my good friend Arsène Lupin. My copy of Nagasaki has also resurfaced, somehow having managed to float to the surface of the litter of books, notebooks and papers that occupy my bed at all times. So, I have read some more of that, too. I think that I'll be able to finish it in a few days, as long as it doesn't get itself lost once again.

Apart from that, I've sat myself down and done some dedicated book study with Rivstart, and am intending to go back to FSI to see if I can find a way to work with it that will help me push up my grammar. (I know that that's what the drills are for, but I feel like I need something more than that). I found a grammar book in Foyles the other day, but it cost £25! That's the price of two normal books, or three if I'm lucky and have someone eligible for a student discount hanging around! So, I'll continue on in my search for pages and pages and pages of exercises. Wish me luck!

Finally, I have sort of returned to Anki. I have been taking a really long break from Anki because... well, I wanted to! But I've caught up on my reviews now, and I have also deleted my German deck for what has to be the third time now. I immediately started it anew, with a few sentence cards. These are just cards highlighting the way 'nehmen' has been used in sentences from Tintenherz - it came up a lot, and I first thought it meant 'supposed'. But, after creating hyperliteral translations with google, I see in means 'take'. I can quite easily see the relation between these two: in English, you can say 'I suppose [that]...' or 'I take it [that]...' pretty much interchangeably, so the thought of these two being connected isn't completely alien to me. Where my translation offers 'suppose', the original construction is always some form of 'nehmen an'. I have only the very vaguest idea of how grammar works, but I remember a duolingo comment (on the Swedish course, of all places) which talked about the use of 'an' with other verbs. Google translate throws up the same translation for 'nehmen an' and 'annehmen'. This is something I should look up and do more work on, but I think I would like to amass more examples of this and similar concepts before I check up on the grammar behind it. It is good to have the map, but for me it is better to have the map when I already know the streets.
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Re: Languid Language Learning

Postby WalkingAlone13 » Sun Aug 30, 2015 12:47 am

Hallo :) I have always found your log interesting and therefore check by when I'm able, it's always fascinating to see how you're doing, especially as German is my current focus and Swedish has always been a "I will finally start properly one day" type language for me.

I found the following quite interesting as I had noticed something similar.
"While I can't add to Bakunin and daegga's discussion in any academic capacity, as I know next to nothing about linguistics, I can add a personal detail. When talking about words which I first came across in a recording, and then read in a book, I happened to remark that I had heard 'draussen' as 'traussen'. I found this interesting mostly because a detail like that would take me a lot longer to work out if I had encountered the word first in a text, and then heard it. After both hearing, reading and discussing the sound, I hear it as something not quite a t, but certainly not a 'd'. I am confident that I would be able to produce a sound close enough to correct for this to go unnoticed by others, but I also know that the sound I made would have tipped further on the 'd' side of the scale, and I simply would not have been able to hear the difference."

I'm not sure if this is what you're talking about, exactly, but do you notice the same thing with "dort drüben"? When I heard this initially I had to listen to it a few times to make sure I knew whether it was a t or a d sound. I haven't come across your example just yet but now that you've mentioned it I'm going to look it up so that I can get a feel for saying it.
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Re: Languid Language Learning

Postby astromule » Sun Aug 30, 2015 3:47 am

Pimsleur?
WalkingAlone13 wrote: but do you notice the same thing with "dort drüben"?
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Re: Languid Language Learning

Postby WalkingAlone13 » Tue Sep 01, 2015 4:00 pm

astromule wrote:Pimsleur?
WalkingAlone13 wrote: but do you notice the same thing with "dort drüben"?


Genau :)
Also, I actually found the aforementioned example "'draussen' as 'traussen'" on Pimsleur, and weirdly, the initial pronunciation (male) actually sounded more like a "k" sound which completely threw me, it was only when I heard it again (Female this time)that I realised it was actually "draussen". So it looks like some words might prove very difficult if this happens with other words.
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Elenia
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Re: Languid Language Learning

Postby Elenia » Sat Sep 12, 2015 2:33 pm

@WalkingAlone13 - I haven't used Pimsleur, and have never come across 'dort drüben', but according to my internal model, a similar thing might happen here. I imagine that the effect might actually minimised by the 't'+'d' combination, but I say this with absolutely no proof... what did you find? As to your worry about it becoming a problem, I think that being aware of it and making the effort to keep it in mind while your listening will stop that from happening. And, after a while I think you'll probably not notice it at all!

---

I haven't done much since the last time I posted (over a week ago :O ). I managed to meet with garyb when he was in London, and go a few books, including La Disparition by Georges Perec, which I am really happy about.

My boyfriend came to visit, and so I have been super busy socialising and travelling, leaving little time or brain-space for anything else. We talked a teeny, tiny bit of Swedish, but not enough for me to think it counts for anything. However, today I am back in earnest. I have worked through the first chapter of the Rivstart Textbook and Workbook, and managed to add a few more words to my Output challenge, which is seriously lagging behind. It's the A1/2 textbook, and so the first chapter is really simple stuff. I've come across only one unknown word (and an unknown place name, which is probably less important). However, I feel like I'm solidifying what I know and putting it into practice, and working up through the grammar exercises from the beginning really won't hurt, considering all my grammatical pitfalls.

Aside from this, I finally got back to my dear, neglected Arsène. I now have only one more story to read, of about 53 pages. It shouldn't take to long to read, as the text to page ratio is low, but I probably won't have time/energy to read it today.

I have had a sense of aimlessness recently, with regards to work, languages and the future, and so I'm hoping to slowly regain the feeling of working towards something. I have a couple of concrete goals in mind, but they do not necessarily equal a feeling of purpose. I am also (possibly as a result of this aimlessness) really feeling the burn of wanderlust. Surprisingly this wanderlust is not directed at any of the usual suspects (Dutch, Portuguese, Catalan), but at Welsh, Twi*, Japanese and Korean**. At any rate, I don't intend to entertain any of these fancies at the moment. But they are tempting me, somehow...

*Although I haven't really thought deeply about this, so I don't know which variant. I also don't know why Twi.
**Mainly because of food. I like manga and manhwa, dramas and anime, but these things on their own are not compelling reasons. Food definitely is.
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