Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

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Expugnator
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Re: Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

Postby Expugnator » Mon Feb 19, 2018 8:46 pm

What a terrific weekend! I'm finally making better use of my hidden moments. On Saturday, I went through the whole hole sentence-method pilgrimage on Clozemaster (including the text-input review for the stronger languages). Mond.ly (even re-added Norwegian) and Duolingo (including resuming the reverse tree for Russian/Spanish). Like I mentioned, Mond.ly seems to be the most reliable for Hebrew so far. I try not to bite more than I can review, so I'm doing 1-2 lessons on Duo followed by a couple more on Mond.ly.

Only one podcast for Italian on Saturday, but I also managed to prepare my snacks for the week in advance, to leave more time for the Sunday, that would involve more activities.

So on Sunday I had another Norwegian lesson, a new teacher. The lesson went great! This teacher speaks clearly, is patient and really knows how to encourage students. I could talk freely durimg the hour - I even think one hour is too much when you are already conversational in the language, as there is no time spent on explanations. Anyway, I'm glad there is noticeable progress happening in my Norwegian. I want to book more lessons further not only for Norwegian but also for other languages. Before someone vouches that I'm all-for tutor, I should say this is just my 3rd Norwegian lesson in 6 years (2nd this year) and only now I think I'm starting to make a good use of tutoring - I actually dropped my Russian sessions because at my current level they aren't worth it yet, I'm better off just working on output and writing at most, real-time conversation remaining a struggle.

On Sunday I continued the sentence pilgrimage but this time I didn't make it to the text-input review for German, Mandarin, Russian and Greek. I noticed that I work not differently on weekends than on weekdays: sessions longer than 20 min start to become tiresome and offer diminishing returns. So, it's better to alternate not only among the sentence apps, but also among those and other activites such as extensive reading and forum reading.

I was planning on finally starting a couple of new series on Netflix. The Brazilian Netflix now has the FIGS as default subtitles, but only these unfortunately. So that leaves only German for watching the series that are on the hype, because I don't see a point at watching dubbed series in French, Spanish or Italian. I can still watch native series on these languages, surem but the ones I'm looking forward to watching in French are not on Netflix, so it's probably dubbed German and La Casa de Papel, whenever I can finally start. I was tired from the long Clozemaster session - like I said, over 20 minutes already makes me tired - so I felt sleepy earlier, also because DST was just over and 10 pm felt like 11 pm. I'm still not abandoning my plan of having a mini-schedule lined up for making use of the hidden times on weekends, consisting on alternating through Clozemaster-Duolingo-Mond.ly, extensive reading in weaker languages, German and Spanish watching, forum reading. I'm almost catching up with forum reading which means I'll soon feel totally on the mood for bedside fiction reading.

I tried adding Hebrew to Clozemaster, and even though I was starting to make sense of some sentences, it's useless without vowels at such an early moment (and no, text-to-speech doesn't work as of yet for Hebrew on Clozemaster).

The way the weekend came along got me thinking I should find more audio for extensive listening, but what? The natural options would be Norwegian and German, as anything structured would be too easy for French, and I'm already doing Spanish and Italian.

============
Today I opened the Estonian soap opera's subtitle to check if it really belong to the series (some downloads got messed up). I skimmed through the text and I had to blink in order not to get any spoilers - that means my reading skills have improved well enough for allowing me to skim through Estonian subtitles! Way to go.

Thinking about booking a Mandarin teacher on italki. Any recommendations? There are so many of them.

I'm enjoying so much my Greek listening-reading. Those 4 pages take no longer than 12 minutes and allow me for so much learning. It's definitely beneficial to start listening-reading when your level has reached it even when you don't have much time for longer sessions.
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Expugnator
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Languages: Native Brazilian Portuguese#advanced fluency English, French, Papiamento#basic fluency Italian, Norwegian#intermediate Spanish, German, Georgian and Chinese (Mandarin)#basic Russian, Estonian, Greek (Modern)#just started Indonesian, Hebrew (Modern), Guarani
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9931
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Re: Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

Postby Expugnator » Tue Feb 20, 2018 4:56 pm

It seems I'm more adapted to Italian non-fiction as an audiobook now. I can pay attention to the audiobook without zooming out. I believe this can be attributed not only to an overall familiarity with the theme being discussed, as whatever book becomes repetitive after a while while fewer new words or concepts, but also to getting used to Italian non-fiction as a whole and the usual collocations it makes use of.

Today I could listen longer than usual and I may have the chance to keep doing later in the afternoon. That reinforces my need to have more listening material off-hand. I should find a Norwegian podcast on familiar, simpler topics. So far I have only found psychology and technology, both rather dense themes.

Things are getting better with German. I still can't enjoy dubbed series or audiobooks extensively without text, though, but that is my main goal towards becoming an active learner (moreover, I have to activate my current skills, for which I need to book a couple of lessons. Pity that German is generally mor expensive than Norwegian, and being better and enjoying Norwegian more makes it my natural choice for whatever class).

A shorter day of studies. More to come tomorrow, I hope.
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Expugnator
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Re: Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

Postby Expugnator » Wed Feb 21, 2018 9:36 pm

The reason I left earlier today was that I underwent a refractive surgery in both eyes. The sight is far from ideal yet but it's expected to get better in the following weeks. I'm thrilled. The doctor said I could take the week off but I preferred not to, as I have other things to do besides work and I'll have to keep using my sight anyway. Discipline matters for a good recover: I was told to keep my eyes shut for 8 hours and so I managed to. I think I'm even listening better now after that evening with eyes shut.

I'm chatting regularly to a Greek on Speaky, but so far only English. I'm also chatting regularly at a Whatsapp group with other learners. A new member joined and has been very active, we have many conversations along the day but not so much to lose track of them.

Police dog in Mandarin is 警犬, with the less used character for dog, 犬.

So Norwegian actually has a word for lager beer, and it's pils.

The day was busy with a visit to the doctor in the middle of the afternoon to check if it's alright - apparently it is - so I couldn't even finish the long review lesson on Assimil L'hébreu, and Indonesian was a miss.
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kujichagulia
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Re: Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

Postby kujichagulia » Thu Feb 22, 2018 4:29 am

I'm also checking in to say that I love your log as well.

Is Becoming Fluent written in academic language or is it pretty straightforward and easy to understand?
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Expugnator
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Languages: Native Brazilian Portuguese#advanced fluency English, French, Papiamento#basic fluency Italian, Norwegian#intermediate Spanish, German, Georgian and Chinese (Mandarin)#basic Russian, Estonian, Greek (Modern)#just started Indonesian, Hebrew (Modern), Guarani
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Re: Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

Postby Expugnator » Thu Feb 22, 2018 8:40 pm

kujichagulia wrote:I'm also checking in to say that I love your log as well.

Is Becoming Fluent written in academic language or is it pretty straightforward and easy to understand?


It's really nice to see you around, kuji! Thank you for your kind words!

Becoming Fluent is totally meant to a general audience, I'm sure you'd make a good use of it.


===================
It's usually hard to give consistent rules about prepositons, but I like it how Modern Russian Grammar cleared up many issues about using v and na which I was starting to get the hang of.

Now that I've dropped textbooks/structured study for Modern Greek other than Language Transfer, I'm paying more attention to the LT lessons. So far I saw it as only a complement to my old-school textbook study, but now I'm making a better use of Michalis' insights on grammar and, particularly, not so obvious etimology.

Hebrew today was just finishding the review lesson which I had started yesterday but ran out of time. This lesson has no transliteration, only niqudot and translation. That forced me to pay even closer attention to the audio. All in all, I'm starting to get a good hang of the language. This newest Assimil edition is indeed learner-friendly, as even I, who never overlearns, retain a good deal of vocabulary from the earlier lessons.

The day was much calmer today. I didn't get much done other than the usual schedule, though.
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Expugnator
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Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9931
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Re: Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

Postby Expugnator » Fri Feb 23, 2018 8:35 pm

Today I had a lecture to attend , so I went for an inverted schedule: I tried to do most of the reading in the morning when I wouldn't have access to a computer and left the watching for the afternoon.

It went okay, though I mightn't have made the headstart I was planning. I decided to also just read in parallel the books I usually listen-reading, when possible. That allowed for some new impressions.

I realized that, at this point. reading in parallel in full atention, i.e. not being distracted by the computer, may be more efficient than normal listening-reading, where I tend to get distracted by both the computer and the audiobook itself (the narrator's voice making me wander from the written text).

With Russian, I had to look at the Russian text more focusedly since there was no audio to push me forward. I managed to read some paragraphs in Russian paying much more attention than usual.

As for Norwegian, I noticed I have a much better understanding of the Nynorsk text when just reading it than when flipping into the Italian for the odd unknown word (Italian isn't a language I read skimmingly as I do in English, French, Papiamento and Native Portuguese) and then struggling to get on track again on the Nynorsk text at a badly formatted epub.

I didn't notice any big differences for German (comparing listening-reading and just parallel). I'm still at the lower 90% of comprehension where the remaining words still make me stuck, and I have to flip through texts in order to clear the meaning out.

I believe that, as in other cases, the answer lies in between. It's not that parallel reading is more efficient than listening-reading the lose way (the way I do). It's just that sometimes a break in the method might account for unforeseen approaches and for a renewal of overall immersion in the activity. I'm almost sure I'd start to get distracted soon if I dropped all the audio and went only for parallel reading.

One final note on this topic: I read Estonian just with texts, no sentence-by-sentence Google Translate add-on (which feels like the Pera-pera add-on for Chinese). I noticed this helped immensely get the bigger picture and process longer sentences, as I was using the GT pop-up translation as a crutch even on shorter nominal phases I could already understand. Again, alternating between both methods might be the best way, and the fact plain parallel reading starts to become optimal now can be credited to an overall improvement of my Estonian knowledge. Until then I wouldn't be able to link which word translates into what, weren't for the hyperliteral translation provided by the GT add-pn. This is definitely a point worth observing.

More on Russian: its grammar is rich and complex at such a level that even the practical, B-side (that's its name) of the Modern Russian Grammar: a practical guide tends to be contamined and become no more than a lesson on verbal and nominal regency. In the other languages, this section is mostly register, tone, sociolinguistics, idiomatic usage, while in Russian there's so grammar to be taught that it invades even that field where one's supposed to read more about practical usage and less on morphology. Morphology is everywhere in Rusian! There's no way out!

I am seldom so excited about starting a resource like I was today with Jo Nesbø's novel in Mandarin, given how much I benefit from it. It's my 4th resource every day and it was postponed till after lunch, so I even got anxious about starting it.

So, Skam is over and I feel orphan. Looks like there won't be a fifth season after all. It's a great series that can do great about teaching and inspiring people to learn Norwegian. Now I'll stick to Side om Side for the time being and then narrow my options to what NRK can offer.

So, the time has come. Assimil has switched all the exercises to cursives. A crash-course, I'd say, and the timing was ok because I have more or less mastered the print alphabet and was (still am) reviewing the cursive through the pod101 alphabet lessons. One concern I have about Assimil is that it's not always so marked that a sentence in the 3rd person refers to a feminine speaker, for example when it's a nominal phrase or participle construction that is rendered rather by single verb in the French translation. That might lead to gender embarassement.Anyway, it seems there is never a distinction on the verb in the first person, not even in the past tense?

By the way, the scarcity of learner-friendly resources for Hebrew and the lack of any vowel indication on most Duolingo words made me resort to the politically incorrect Memrise. I'll be working on the Duolingo course there and a few more. Luckily there are also courses on Syriac/Aramaic over there, which will be useful when the time comes.

The lessons at The Indonesian Way are bringing less and less information in the core text and turning into long drills. Let's see what module II reserves.

My strategy of inverting schedules went alright and I finished much earlier. Only that I couldn't open the TV series in Georgian so I had to resort to watching it in another language. So I watched it in the original audio with Greek subtitles, checking the Portuguese subtitles once in a while. The good news is that my Greek is already good enough to profit from this modality (which I also used for Estonian when I didn't have native series with subtitles).

So I decided to use the little time left on Memrise's Duolingo course. Apparently it has what I need. In fact, I just need to go through the words once in a while, so I can listen to them. I'm worried that Memrise will start pushing me notifications that say I have to go through the word for 'he comes' 10x more before it's 'learned'. It really gets on my nerves. That's one bad aspect about those apps, the amount of time you waste just navigating their interfaces. You waste a good deal of time. And I'm not even taking ads into account. Clozemaster is a bliss at this respect.
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Expugnator
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Languages: Native Brazilian Portuguese#advanced fluency English, French, Papiamento#basic fluency Italian, Norwegian#intermediate Spanish, German, Georgian and Chinese (Mandarin)#basic Russian, Estonian, Greek (Modern)#just started Indonesian, Hebrew (Modern), Guarani
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9931
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Re: Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

Postby Expugnator » Mon Feb 26, 2018 8:55 pm

It was a nice weekend for language learning again. At the app front, I left Clozemaster and Mond.ly behind, but I had good practice for Hebrew by using the Duolingo+Memrise combo. I have yet to catch up with Duolingo on Memrise, but I'm sure that's the way to go about learning Hebrew the multimedia way.

I also did a lot of forum reading, I'm almost catching up. I didn't make it to the Polyglot Meetup. Saturday afternoon the power went off from 4pm to 10 pm. When I finally got at least the global wifi working, I started watching La Casa de Papel. I couldn't watch much because power returned and I had to turn off the lights again and prepare for sleep, but 7 minutes were enough to win me. It's great to watch such a cool series that is not originally in English. It's like watching 3% (the feeling, the series themselves have nothing alike).

Then on Sunday I worked on gathering material. I still couldn't renew my treadmill playlist, but I could find sources for the next seasons at the Arrowverse, dubbed in Georgian.

In the afternoon I proceeded to the booked classes. First, Mandarin. I found a nice tutor who is quite to-the-point when both doing corrections and completing what I still can't fully say in mandarin. I noticed that nearly 100% of the time she translated something from English or French I'd already know that word, was just lacking it in my active vocabulary. Only few words were entirely new. That means there's a long road to follow in order to activate my Mandarin, but I'm on the right track and looking forward to booking more lessons.

Then I had just half an hour of Norwegian with the newly-found tutor. I'm basically fluent in Norwegian, few gaps in conversation. I'm starting to pay attention to details such as intonation as the vocabulary is coming up more easily.

I'm happy with those classes and I should expand them to other languages I need to level up; next is German.

I felt tempted about iguanamon's challenge, but it really isn't the time for a new language now, especially one I wouldn't be able to study with all my resources. Possible candidates would be Yoruba, Welsh, Turkish or Persian, but they aren't even next on my hitlist (those would be Swahili, Czech, Catalan, Romanian, Hindi, though not at this order).

===================
Back to normal routine with classes in Savassi in the morning. That means I will leave work later even in the calmer days. Supposedly more time for study. Just today I spent more time than before listening to the Argentinian podcast, accounting for the average 30min that was the situation last year. I also managed a headstart on reading non-fiction.

It's easier to just talk randomly at Speaky, I don't have to struggle to write a couple of sentences now and then in Russian, Georgian or Norwegian (which are the ones I receive most messages for). Today, though, I got particulary held up. Some people don't believe my skills and so I have to keep proving myself.

It's a week of completions, fortunately. It's always motivating to finish a resource and start something new. Today I finished watching "9 mois ferme". Not a bad movie with some superficial stereotyped French legalese. Now I'm going to watch "Polisse". I was supposed to go for "Casse-tête chinois", but it's been ages since I watched "L'auberge espagnole" and I haven't watched "Les poupées russes" yet, so that will have to wait.

I'm trying to pay more attention to In the Name of the People, which I watch with double subtitles. I actually understand more than I thought I did.

A very busy Monday, and a a result I couldn't work up to Indonesian. I had to spend almost an hour filing a formal complain on the telecom.
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Expugnator
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Languages: Native Brazilian Portuguese#advanced fluency English, French, Papiamento#basic fluency Italian, Norwegian#intermediate Spanish, German, Georgian and Chinese (Mandarin)#basic Russian, Estonian, Greek (Modern)#just started Indonesian, Hebrew (Modern), Guarani
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9931
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Re: Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

Postby Expugnator » Tue Feb 27, 2018 7:49 pm

Korean is a low-priority language in my list (despite loving hangeul), but I found a native teacher who lives in SP and speaks Portuguese. That makes it much easier and got me wanderlusting, even more so that he seems to charge cheap, if I haven't mistaken the monthly fee for the individual class fee.

As a matter of fact, I don't think a Brazilian without a good command of English could have productive classes with a Norwegian as for learning the language from scratch. A native who speaks well the student's L1 is always an asset. Moreover, at earlier levels a good fellow countryman who went through the same path might be pretty effective too.

Today was a non-study day. I had to make several phone calls, decide on two upcoming trips and on the renovation at home as well as work on the monthly 2-page x2-language translations for some friends. Tomorrow I'll see the eye doctor in the evening to make sure things are going as planned, so less study time is expected as well. Hopefully I'm back on track on Thursday.
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Re: Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

Postby kujichagulia » Wed Feb 28, 2018 1:14 am

Expugnator wrote:Korean is a low-priority language in my list (despite loving hangeul), but I found a native teacher who lives in SP and speaks Portuguese. That makes it much easier and got me wanderlusting, even more so that he seems to charge cheap, if I haven't mistaken the monthly fee for the individual class fee.

Hangeul is so beautiful, isn't it? I'm tempted to learn Korean some day, simply because it is near here and I've always been interested in the culture, music and food. The grammar is the same as Japanese, so if I can master Japanese, that will be an advantage in learning Korean.
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Expugnator
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Languages: Native Brazilian Portuguese#advanced fluency English, French, Papiamento#basic fluency Italian, Norwegian#intermediate Spanish, German, Georgian and Chinese (Mandarin)#basic Russian, Estonian, Greek (Modern)#just started Indonesian, Hebrew (Modern), Guarani
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9931
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Re: Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

Postby Expugnator » Wed Feb 28, 2018 9:36 pm

@kuji , if I were to learn Korean I'd have to first learn Japanese to take advantage of my knowledge of the Chinese hanzi, and only then proceed to Korean so I could employ my general knowledge of the Japanese grammar 8-) That's why I say that Korean is low priority, but indeed hangeul is pretty neat.

===========================

Yesterday I managed to watch one episode of La casa de papel. Great start. Hope I can watch at least one per week. Spanish is no problem at all, but I keep the subtitles to make things more practical.

The day didn't start superb, and I wonder how far I'll make into my studies. I still see blurred especially at the left eye which was starting to get better, and so I'll see the doctor again. The gym opened some minutes later, so I had to rush home, shower and leave for dropping the girls as I had class at 8:00. I went there and the student didn't show up nor call to inform me.

Now I'm going to study verbs of motion on Modern Russian Grammar. I have the feeling it's my final attempt to read on it thoroughfully. Whatever else needs consolidation will come through usage. Meanwhile, I might have been enjoying my second Slavic language, which will probably be Czech, at the second semester.

As I said on Monday, this was supposed to be a week of completions, and I hope it still is, despite yesterday. I finished reading a spin-off of a chick-lit novel in Italian, which proved quite shallow, superficial and short. I don't recommend using such spin-offs, as that one from Scusa ma ti chiamo amore was also terrible. Now I'm going for a fantasy novel. I had had a glance at it several months ago, and it seemed harder than average, but now it seems easy. It's from Lucia Troisi, a recommendation I read at the forum.

I'm enjoying Side om side. It's definitely harder than Skam in terms of vocabulary, and so I'm pausing and looking words up sometimes, but I'm definitely much better than when I wqtched the first season, over 2 years ago. I should remember that Nesten Voksen is lined-up. Better stick to what is 'tilgjengelig i hele verden' whenever possible.

Today I finished Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's end, which I was listening-reading in Russian. A relief. Just like most of my Russian materials, the timing for using it was pretty much wrong. Long narrative and descriptive periods, speculations about the nature of human kind and technology. Less action than in the previous book I read from him. I needed something more contemporary and with more dialogues. Therefore I'm going to listen-read Guillaume Musso in Russian. This time I can't go wrong, I'll be as close as possible to n+1 input while learning optimal vocabulary.

I tried to catch up while waiting at the doctor's, but I had so much to do today that a lot of activities came undone. Third in a row. I have two translations to provide so either tomorrow or the day after might remain incomplete as well.
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