Stelle’s 2018 log

[Stelle]

I just had my first Tagalog Skype lesson in a very long time. It was challenging! My brain hurts! But it was actually better than I expected.

I have enough vocabulary to speak broken caveman Tagalog, but I don’t have the verbs. So I know what I need to work on next.

My main goal right now is to start thinking in Tagalog. When struggling through a conversation in Italian, I can rely on both my Spanish and French. But when speaking in Tagalog, Spanish becomes a huge interference. So, for my next Skype session, which will take place two weeks from now:

- review a variety of verbs so that I can actually turn my thoughts into reasonable sentences
- review lesson two of Elementary Tagalog
- STOP THINKING EN ESPAÑOL!

[rdearman]

I assume when you say computer that you actually mean laptop, since if it was a desktop computer you'd just throw the USB keyboard away and get another one for a few dollars (~$15). If it is a laptop there is a good chance that the only thing wrong is that the ribbon which passes the keystrokes is loose and only needs to be reset into the holder. If however the keyboard is broken, replacement ones are cheap (~$30), and you can often find a youtube video which will show you how to dismantle and reassemble with a new keyboard. Failing all of that you can still just purchase a new USB keyboard and plug it in, then use if for your passwords, etc.

If by computer you mean something made by Apple, then you should probably just throw it away and buy a computer.

[Stelle]

If by computer you mean something made by Apple, then you should probably just throw it away and buy a computer.

I won’t tell you that it’s a MacBook Air.

[rdearman]

If by computer you mean something made by Apple, then you should probably just throw it away and buy a computer.

I won’t tell you that it’s a MacBook Air.

Yeah, I sort of figured, otherwise you'd have just bought a keyboard and moved on with your life. The only genius who works at Apple is in the Marketing department.

[Stelle]

I FINALLY finished L’Uomo in Fuga, the Stephen King book translated by Delio Zinoni. What a great book. King was ahead of his time when imagining reality TV, although there were lots of unintentionally funny bits that missed the mark (as is true for most novels written in the past and set close to our current era).

Overall, a highly recommended book! I don’t know why it took me so long to finish.

Actually, I do know why. I got into a reading binge of several mediocre thrillers written in English, all with the tired trope of “unreliable female narrator”, a trend that’s existed for a while but that really exploded after the book Gone Girl became so popular. While the books are page-turners and hard to put down, they also feel formulaic and manipulative, and the endings leave me with a slightly unsatisfied and overly-full-but-still-hungry feeling, kind of like bingeing on gummy bears.

I also read a literary horror, Bird Box, which was very, very good. Highly recommended if you’re an English learner and you like creepy end-of-the-world stories. It reminded me of a much-better cross between the movies The Happening (STUPID movie, but interesting concept) and The Crazies (even STUPIDER movie, but anyway, I digress...). I realize after typing that out that it doesn’t seem like much of an endorsement, but I really did like the book.

Anyway, no regrets. I’ve read four English books in the past two weeks, and now I’m ready to go back to some of my unfinished books from before.

For various reasons, both my Tagalog and Spanish lessons have been cancelled both this week and last, and I’ve started listening to health podcasts in the car, so my language study has been very stagnant. I’m going to try to shake things up this week.

[Stelle]

I’ve been in Mexico since Sunday morning, in the Riviera Maya. We’ll be heading back to Toronto tomorrow night. Over the past few days, we’ve done a ton of swimming and walking, visited the archaeological Mayan sites of Tulum and Coba, and eaten obscene amounts of delicious food.

I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to focus on Spanish over the past few days. We’re interacting in Spanish every chance we get. I’ve spent hours reading and am well into book six of Harry Potter. I watched the first three episodes of Casa de Papel on the plane and will continue tomorrow on the way home.

I haven’t felt much motivation for languages lately, but I realize now that my attention has just been too fragmented. I never planned on studying multiple languages. It kind of just happened after I started participating on HTLAL. After reading hundreds of threads from aspiring and successful polyglots, it just seemed natural to want to learn many languages. But now I realize that that isn’t really me. If I ask myself what I want to accomplish in languages over my lifetime, I realize that my goals are very simple: I want to reach a very high level of Spanish, and I want to learn enough Tagalog to get by. Other languages that I’ve flirted with over the past few years have just been a distraction from my real goals.

And so, I’m formally giving myself permission to abandon Italian. In the future, if I plan to travel to a country where they speak a language other than French, English, Spanish or Tagalog, I can just dabble and pick up some basic greetings and basic conversation as part of my travel preparation. I may very well change my mind and commit to another language in the future, but for now I’m refocusing on Spanish as my primary foreign language, with a bit of daily Tagalog desk study to keep progressing ever so slowly in my secondary foreign language.

Arrivederci italiano! It’s nothing personal!

[Stelle]

Home again! I miss the warmth of Mexico, but at least it´s sunny here in Toronto.

On the plane last night, I continued with Casa de Papel. I should have been sleeping, but I´m physically incapable of falling asleep on a plane. Buses are another story. I´m passed out within minutes. But I´ve yet to fall asleep on a plane, even when my flight leaves after 1 in the morning, as it did last night.

Anyway, I´ve watched the first six episodes of Casa de Papel, and I´m well and truly hooked. I´ve been watching in Spanish with Spanish subtitles. Part of me feels that the subtitles are a crutch, but I turn on the subtitles when I watch movies in English, so I guess there isn´t much difference. Anyway, the show is exciting and intriguing, even if some of the characters get on my nerves and there are two characters in particular that I keep mixing up.

I´ve read the first 100 pages or so of Harry Potter 6. I´ve been reading this series FOREVER, and I just want to finish it now. So I think that I´ll finish book six and then move directly into book seven...and then be done with it. I like the Harry Potter books, but I´m not a huge fan in the way that so many others are.

I´m also hoping that Ficciones will arrive soon at the library, so that I can join Spoonary´s readalong.

After reading about Kwiziq on FrannieB and Cavesa´s log, I signed up for a free account and have been playing with the Spanish grammar tests. I have a free premium account for a week, and I´m really loving it so far! It´s quite addictive and very helpful with reviewing small grammar points that I´d forgotten that I forgot. I´m not sure how I´ll use it when I move to the free account, with only ten quizzes per month, but for the past few days I´ve really enjoyed doing 10 or 15 quizzes at a time.

I´m so happy that I recommitted to Spanish! All of a sudden it´s easy to find time to learn again, whereas for the longest time I just felt that I should be working on my languages, with very little motivation to actually do it.

[Stelle]

...and the love affair with Spanish continues.

All week I’ve been listening to Futuro Abierto in the car, to the tune of about forty minutes per day. No TV this week, because weekday evenings just fly by too quickly. I’ll finish the last two episodes of Casa de Papel on Friday, and then J and I have a date on saturday: we’re going to start binge-watching El Ministerio del Tiempo.

I’ve also read almost every day. I forgot my Harry Potter book at work, so I picked up a bunch of non-fiction books from the library. Nothing really groundbreaking, since the selection was sparse, but I got a few self-help books, a memoir and a dog training book. I find that I read much more slowly when I’m reading non-fiction, because I get less caught up in the story and reread whenever anything strikes me as odd or interesting. I haven’t read a lot of long-form non-fiction in Spanish, so I’m looking forward to seeing how it will help me keep progressing.

I’m actually surprised at how much i’m LOVING Kwiziq. I’ve been doing it every day with a timer for a half an hour. I’ve currently got 100% in A0 and A1, 29% in A2, 54% in B1 and 4% in B2. Going through the beginner grammar has been hugely helpful, since I haven’t done much formal grammar study in a while. My free trial runs out tomorrow, and I’m a bit sad. The monthly payment is quite high, and I really don’t see myself paying for a resource just for review. But I’ve really enjoyed using it, and I think that the ten free monthly quizzes are far too few to be of much use at all.

[Stelle]

So I accidentally started dabbling in Russian.

I may have mentioned this before, but I work in a public school where a full half of my students speak Russian at home as their first language. They’re always chattering away with each other in Russian (despite their teacher’s constant reminders of “en francais, s’il te plait”). And the other day two of the children were writing Russian words on a whiteboard during indoor recess (thank you, mid-April ice storm!).

I’ve been home sick since Friday with a horrible case of strep throat that won’t let go, and in between naps, I decided to learn some of the cyrillic alphabet to surprise my students.

Surprise, surprise: I’m in LOVE!

I haven’t felt this way about a language since I started studying Spanish. I loved Spanish right from the very first minute, and I continue to love every minute that I spend in that beautiful language.

I started (and abandoned, and started, and abandoned, and started) Tagalog because I enjoyed the process of learning a language, and I just felt like I should, seeing as how it’s my husband’s first language. And I do love what I can now do with it, but I see myself as a perpetual A1-A2 learner, because I’m just not passionate enough about it to really commit. It always feels like a chore to sit down and study Tagalog.

Italian, I decided to pick up in preparation for a family trip that never materialized. I enjoyed learning Italian, mainly because it felt so easy after Spanish. I loved that I was able to read children’s novels almost immediately, and that I could understand slow speech without much effort. But then we didn’t travel to Italy, and Italian is just kind of....there. Italian is a beautiful language, but I don’t really see myself putting in a ton of effort to perfect it. It just doesn’t really capture me.

The way that I feel learning cyrillic letters and puzzling out words is nothing like how I felt starting Tagalog and Italian. It feels more like how I felt the very first time I was able to put together a sentence in Spanish. I know it’s only been three days, but I wonder if I’ve accidentally discovered another language love...

Oh, and I also bought a ukelele last week, so there’s that. If only there were more hours in a day!

[Stelle]

Over the past week, I’ve:
- watched the videos “Read Russian in Three Hours”
- played with Russian courses on Memrise and Duolingo
- printed out lists of countries and actors in Russian to practise reading
- listened three times to Pimsleur unit one
- done half of the 7-lesson reading course on learnrussianforfree.com

Overall, I’d say that I’ve been spending about half an hour daily in the car (Pimsleur), and 30-60 mins doing online study at home.

Russian is definitely harder than any language I’ve tried to learn before. And by harder, I mean that it’s taking me a lot more time to learn my very first words. The first time I listened to Pimsleur unit one, I felt like a deer caught in a headlight. I couldn’t remember a word three seconds after repeating it. The second run-through was better, although I was still incredibly slow. By the third time, I finally felt like something was sinking in.

Vocabulary on Duolingo and Memrise is very difficult for me. Even very basic vocabulary - man, woman, boy, girl - slips out of my mind the second the screen changes.

But I’m having a lot of fun with Russian. I’m not ready to say “I’m learning Russian”, but I intend to keep playing for now!

In Spanish, I’ve been doing lots of extensive activities. I picked up Harry Potter 6 again, and I’m about three-quarters through. I finished watching Casa de Papel. SO GOOD! I’m not sure how I feel about the recently announced season 7, since I thought that the show had a good sense of closure.

I accidentally listened to an Italian podcast while folding clothes. I left it on and quite enjoyed it. I may consider adding just a bit of passive Italian into my routine, if only to not lose what I’ve learned.

Oh, and I’ve also learned four chords on the ukelele. This has absolutely nothing to do with language learning, but I honestly don’t feel like joining a ukelele forum.