Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

[Expugnator]

Trying to give a boost on the Argentinian podcast, which is getting better in terms of content as well. Yesterday I listened to it in the evening as well, when coming back from a Portuguese class where I managed to make an Australian understand both usage and formation of the Present Subjunctive in Portuguese, and even grasp some irregular forms.

Yesterday I did no Duolingo, but got nearly all Clozemaster (missing three rounds on German text input) plus Speakly.me done.

This morning I also listened to more than usual from the Argentinian podcast, as I went to the grocery's and drugstore after dropping the girls at the kindergarten. The episodes are almost 2 hours long, so reaching number 200 will be a marathon comparable to binge watching series.

Today I watched a dubbed video for the first time in the TeleCuraçao youtube channel. Not bad! I think the guy is Brazilian, it's about a jiu-jitsu academy. He talks really fast for Brazilian standards, from the lipreading, so it was funny to hear Curaçaoan Papiamento spoken at machine-gun speed.

Finished book 5 of A series of Unfortunate Events, what a relief. I'm seriously considering reading them all in a rush in a strong L2, even though I have the audiobooks in German and will be able to read 2-3 per month up to 13.

As for what comes now for Russian, I'll remain on translated novels, but something with a more down-to-earth vocabulary and a less annoying plot. I'll have to get some more suggestions of translated novels. I'll have to resort to romance and the likes because I'm a bit fed up with YA, fantasy and sci-fi for Russian. I had a much better learning when I listened-read Guillaume Musso in Russian, so that's probably a path to follow again.

I got an insight from Dan Brown's audiobook. Several numbers are read out of the usual order, and with that I noticed it might be much more efficient to learn them this way. I get some units reviewed as well as tenths. It's much less boring as well.

Arriving is magic in Hebrew (מגיע).

The day ended with breaking news that distracted me. I just did some random app-learning and realized I had forgotten to read Spanish yesterday, and so I did.

That's it for the week, as tomorrow is a holiday and I'm preparing to lose my 150-day streak on Clozemaster. To conclude, more pics from what I'm reading.

Spanish


Estonian

[Lawyer&Mom]

Do you actually highlight known words as you read, or are these just examples? I love them either way.

[Expugnator]

Do you actually highlight known words as you read, or are these just examples? I love them either way.

I'd never mark a physical book, and these are actually ebooks. I just did it as an exercise. I might repeat it in a couple of years for the hardest languages.

[Expugnator]

I managed to keep my streak on both Clozemaster and Speakly.me thanks to pure chance: even while being on the countryside, I visited one of my wife's uncles who lives uphill and there they have a reasonable mobile internet coverage. I could use the shared connection from his wife's phone through wifi. Other than that, I read but not much. It was mostly about shopping on Friday then resting and socializing at the weekend.

When I got home I gathered some translated audiobooks for Russian. I need to find a real page-turner, and a soft story that won't cause me any aprehension about its end. I have some options lined up but I will decide later today.

Today was an inverted schedule. I had to take my wife to the doctor and so I read in parallel most of what I usually listen-read, including German and Norwegian. Still lagging behind as I had to follow her back home so she could rest, and then walk back here. I had the unfortunate idea of taking Uber to the doctor's office because I was afraid of spending too much time and money on parking near there. Turned out it was much cheaper on a private parking terrain and there were still spots along the street.

All that took me more time. I also dropped by the computer shop to buy a new portable HDD as the one I use everyday is nearly dying, but they're out of stock due to the dollar crisis here. I hope it won't die completely before at least next week.

I went for a Marc Lévy to be listened-read in Russian-French. Not regretting it so far. It has plenty of dialogues and so it will be a similar experience as the one by Musso I L-Read some months ago.

I'm done with Colloquial Hebrew; from unit 9 on I'm supposed to translate the dialogues on my own. That puts me back at the same situation as with the Routledge course: taking screenshots and OCRing. Now I'm going to ease my way into grammar by reading Parlons Hébreu, in the hope that it helps me deal with actual grammarbooks later. I still haven't forgotten about going back to Assimil new edition and doing the old edition as well, but I have enough of the short-dialog format with pod101. I might actually replace pod101 temporarily with Assimil when it becomes too hard, as it happened with Modern Greek.

Papiamento



Modern Greek

[Expugnator]

Yesterday I had to stay here longer and I didn't give any classes in the evening either, so I had enough time for the whole Clozemaster plus Duolingo Indonesian and Hebrew. I still get annoyed by the vocabulary introduced, but overall I'm following an adequate rhythm with Hebrew. With Indonesian it's still a matter of too many new words and too little new grammar, but I'll get used to it.

I'm 42% through the Georgian novel and it's finally starting to feel easy again. It took longer than in my previous novels, but it's due to the unique vocabulary which I'm finally getting the hang of.

Managed to buy the new HDD. Can't afford an SSD as of yet, with the dollar skyrocketing. Anyway, the former standard one lasted for over four years so I hope this one will last as well.

Finished "Di Leonardo Sciascia - A ciascuno il suo". Not a book I particularly liked, but it was a change. Now I'm back into routine and Gianrico Carofiglio's fourth book, still hoping I can find always the best resources audiobooks in Italian.

I found a candidate for when I'm done with Parlons Hébreu: The Berlitz Self-Teacher. It has transcription and translation all the way. An issue with learning so many languages is that I keep forgetting what I'm doing next for a given language. Like my next Spanish book: it's going to be the one by Joan Melé, Dinero y Conciencia. Anyway, just refraining from spending 40 extra minutes on Hebrew is a relief.

French



Mandarin

[Xmmm]

Finished "Di Leonardo Sciascia - A ciascuno il suo". Not a book I particularly liked, but it was a change.

Yeah ... I should have warned you at the time. My bad. I used to enthusiastically recommend my preferred books and films, but found out after many similar reactions that I'm the only person in the world that likes them.

When I promote a book or film, this should be taken as an anti-recommendation, or something to avoid.

I love salted licorice. I hate everything by Steven Spielberg. I can barely stand Stephen King (only way I'd read another book is if I were trapped in a mountain cabin with a maniac outside). I tossed Hunger Games after 1.5 pages. I tossed The Martian after three sentences. Two of my favorite TV shows of all time were cancelled halfway through their first season (Quark, Key West). Etc.

This is everyone's last warning ...

[Expugnator]

This is everyone's last warning ...

Don't worry about that! I've had some good suggestions from your log, and I might even get back for Turkish later.

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Yesterday only Greek text input on Clozemaster and Duolingo Hebrew and Indonesian were left undone. Today started much busier as I had to get the girls ready for the kindergarten and so I went to the gym after that, which means coming to the office later and having less study time. Not so much problem I hope since I'm saving time on Hebrew now.

Kampen for tilværelsen has been moving away from the Pole drama, which I appreciate. I still have to pay more attention to the audio, though. I've been relying too much on the subtitles and even then I've been mostly skimming through them.

At a Guarani Whatsapp group, people are posting cartoons and memes and native speakers are translating them. It's amazing to see memes being born in real time! A real proof of a language's liveliness.

Finished copying all stuff into the new mobile HDD. The old one will remain as backup. I can breath now.

As I head towards the end of Assimil Indonésien, I can make some remarks: first, I'm far from mastering even 10% of the vocabulary; second, I managed to get a good grasp of syntax so far; third, I need to find a way to apply it to the lower levels of Clozemaster, while syntax is simpler than what I find on Assimil - but still challenging enough - and vocabulary is still too vast for me to start turning the sentences into transparency. Whatever resource I'm choosing next needs help me cope with those issues. I'm definitely going to back to reviewing Assimil in the future, though.

Not a bad day, in the end. I expect to do the rest of Clozemaster in the evening.

This is the last on my series of posts about reading coverage. None of these - Norwegian, German and Russian - is technically a transparent language, and I think the former two are benefiting from the ease of the resources chosen. My actual average vocabulary might be much lower.

Norwegian



German



Russian

[MattNeilsen]

I'm mentioning Deinonysus because I know he's working on Indonesian right now and he recently had some good suggestions in his log - maybe he can provide you with some ideas for what's working for him.

[Deinonysus]

I'm mentioning Deinonysus because I know he's working on Indonesian right now and he recently had some good suggestions in his log - maybe he can provide you with some ideas for what's working for him.

Well, if Expugnator is almost done with Assimil Indonésien with 10% of the vocabulary mastered, he's probably more advanced than I am at this point.

I've been mostly focused on learning beginner vocabulary. I have a spreadsheet of mnemonics for Duolingo vocabulary with just over 250 entries so far. I'm also a bit over the top 250 words or so in Clozemaster, but I'm not really tracking mnemonics for those, I'm just brute forcing it.

I'm not doing much extensive reading yet, just browsing r/indonesia and kompas.id and seeing which words I can pick out.

[Expugnator]

Thank you guys. I'm reading Deinonysus' and others' logs, I just have to catch up with reading. I'm having trouble finding a way to learn the basic, grammatical Indonesian vocabulary (adverbs, modal particles) and start building up on concrete vocabulary, but the resources I have don't do that in a friendly way. I should be focusing more on Clozemaster for Indonesian, making it a main resource instead of just accessory, the way MattNeilsen is doing with Hebrew, because the other resources present vocabulary in a much more chaotic way. I'll see about next week, right now Indonesian is the last language I do Clozemaster for on a given day, and even there I still find the 101-500 words level a bit hard.

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I totally missed out on You are wanted's second season. The problem now is the same as with the French series: I don't have time to watch this premium content in my TLs. Anyway, there subtitles in both German and Portuguese.

I'm feeling a bit tired and a little bit more bored with the activities. I have more time for studying now, but I'm procrastinating towards the end of the day. Even if I can read faster in most of my TLS now and thus save time at the reading activities, the large amount of information absorbed remains. So it happens that I feel I need a pause before starting my so-called post-schedule activities, which is anything I added before Russian L-R and series. When I started studying full-time, this period accounted for only a remaining hour with a couple of activities, but as I started to optimize my time usage I could add more and more activities before what I consider my main ones. Needless to say, more time doesn't necessarily equal more mental readiness.

Most of the year has passed and I'm afraid I have little to show for my older languages. I probably know how to bring a language up to a lower B1, but then I get stuck at a plateau and I can't convert my appreciation of nearly all of my languages into consistent and progressive output skills. I'm stuck at "almost" good enough and I don't think more input would be an answer, though just building on islands seems mentally exhaustive at this point.

Today I heard the Happy Birthday song in Georgian for the first time. The Georgian lyrics are beautiful.

FInished my first book from Proyecto Nocilla (they're all in a single kindle volume). I'm still trying to make any sense out of it, but I like the style. Maybe something Xmmm would like if he ever did massive input Spanish. I have to be even more strict with what I read in Spanish than with what I listen to with Italian, because overall these materials are transparent (even if the Spanish vocabulary seems much broader and I'm not working intensively as it would be recommended if I wanted to expand mine).

Hebrew circumfixes remind me strongly of Georgian. Even the prefix me- seems to be common to both languages, though in Georgian is more related to people - action performers - than to objects.

Another similarity: the 3rd person pronoun is also the demonstrative pronoun for farther things.

One hour and a half to go, I've read my quota of Parlons Hébreu for the day and enjoyed the insights. I'm mentally exhausted to do my apps for the day (I lost my streak for Speakly.me yesterday), even though technically there's plenty of time.