Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

[Expugnator]

Yesterday I forgot to mention that I finished reading 'Becoming Fluent'. Unexpected, because I was on page 184 out of 247 and it turned out the final 60 pages were references and notes. 'Becoming Fluent' is as serious as language-learning advice can get, it doesn't really sound like the authors are trying to sell you anything but rather write an actual language-learning guide.

Now I'm finally reading 'Fluent Forever', which even got recommended at 'Becoming Fluent', so it might have its merits as well. I'm planning on taking care of all my language-learning self-help books that had been standing on my 'to-read' shelves for too long.

Yesterday I has to update a podcast app and so I decided to test again for listening to a Norwegian podcast. I'm much better now than last time I tried! I'm really in need of extensive listening for Norwegian, I just don't know if I can understand it enough for it to be productive. For example, I can't follow Elena Ferrante's novel in nynorsk yet, but maybe I could if it were in bokmål, Anyway, it's encouraging to notice that my Norwegian listening has improved considerably. This also corroborates my experience with the lesson I took a couple of weeks ago.

Today I could spend more time listening to the Argentinian podcast, despite that being a Tuesday. I had more time of waiting and preparing my desktop for working.

The Mandarin listening-reading is as productive as ever, just when I was about to drop Mandarin altogether. I don't know if it's the slower reading at the audiobook that gives me extra time for looking words up with Pera-pera; I suspect even if I were just listening I could understand quite a lot at this point. the same if I were just reading.The novel is perfect for that, many dialogues but even the descriptions are digestable at this point.

Started a new audiobook in Italian, non-fiction this time. Going smoothly.

German listening-reading was also quite productive. I coud ignore the translation for some full paragraphs. Pity that it's yet another language I'm considering dropping. The languages seem to be fighting for their permanence in my schedule by presenting themselves more transparent at this critical moment.

Another good day for Estonian, yet another language I'm planning to drop. Life is playing tricks. I'm finding it easier to read the novel, and some expressions start to become automatic thanks to finding them both at the novel - that has plenty of dialogues - and at the soap opera.

A technique I have been using for improving momentum and avoiding distraction is to always leave the next task prepared before I interrupt. Right now I'm standing from the computer for eating a sandwich and i'm leaving the next activity prepared, which is Assimil Greek open as well as the corresponding soundfile to today's lesson.

I was concerned that I couldn't study Assimil Greek yesterday, as I was intending to finish the book this week. Nevermind my plans, the book has 101 lessons, not 100, so I'm only finishing it after Carnival anyway. Still clueless as to what to pick next.

At Language Transfer Greek, I learned a new contraction, στα as σου τα. it's optional, but I should keep an ear on that, especially on colloquial language.

Hebrew's review lesson was productive. Enough to encourage to keep with Assimil for a while, instead of slowing down and starting over from another resource, at least for the time being. I still have the feeling my Hebrew is being held up, just like my Greek. I could be learning more from either language each day because my tolerance for their newer vocabulary is higher than average. I don't have that high tolerance for Indonesian, for instance, even if the other aspects of Indonesian seem easy. When I learn a new Hebrew or Greek word, it always feels like I'm unveiling a mistery from past history.

I seem to have enough Hebrew resources for the A2ish stage. Whatever resource lacks transliteration, vowels and translations is not suitable for a true beginner, at least not for me. That leaves out only Assimil and pod101. That's why I'm better off with the apps. The old TY fits the chriteria but it's a grammar-translation method which I should save for later. This is note for self so that I stop wasting time trying to find new resources for Hebrew on my files.

Still not the most productive of the days, given that I didn't have any serious interruptions, but I finally managed to read in Spanish again, after the Indonesian lesson.

[Elsa Maria]

Thanks for the recommendation for Becoming Fluent. I just added it to my Goodreads "Want to Read" pile. Also, I have been meaning to comment on your log and let you know that I find your posts inspiring! It's always so interesting to read the details of your schedule.

[Expugnator]

Thank you Elsa Maria, I read about it at this forum myself. Thank you for the positive feedback as well. I've been reading your log and wish you all the best with Russian.

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The chapter on Russian diminutives and augmentatives is one where grammars for English speakers make me facepalm. All this speech on instranslatable and subtle...while those Russian suffixes work much likely the Portuguese ones. It's just a matter of learning new endings for a well-known phenomenon.

Is it only me or the Hebrew נו might compare to the Russian ну ?

It's too early to say something I might regret later, but I think I can do without niqqudot in Hebrew when the time comes.

I'm gifted with my Indonesian resources as they are all registerscient, both pod101 which I used as a headstart and now Indonesian Way. I'm much less likely to speak bookish Indonesian and more likely to understand TV series once my vocabulary evolves.

Once again some issues on the way, traffic jam and so I only made it till Indonesian and nothig extra (despite having 1 extra hour available in the morning).

[vonPeterhof]

Is it only me or the Hebrew נו might compare to the Russian ну ?

Yeah, it's one of the many marks of Slavic influence on modern Hebrew (via Yiddish). The footnote on this page describes its range of meanings in a pretty humorous way, and much of that also applies to the Russian ну.

A bit of a tangent, but I'm reminded of how much of a culture shock it was for me when I first heard someone use ну to mean "yes". I was six and had had a pretty sheltered childhood up to that, going to a small private kindergarten in St. Petersburg, so usage this colloquial was completely alien to me. I think it was in one of my first conversations with a child my age in Almaty, after we moved there.

-Ты знаешь про черепашек-ниндзя?
-Ну.
-...так знаешь или нет?
-Я же говорю, "ну".
-...?

[Expugnator]

Pas de nouvelles, bonnes nouvelles. Je n'ai rien de spécial à dire au sujet de mes études de langues étrangères aujourd'hui. Tout marche comme prévu. Ah, oui, j'ai failli oublier : j'ai un nouveau cahier. Pas exactement nouveau, c'est tout à fait un agenda de 2013 (celui que j'utilisais jusqu'à aujourd'hui était de 2014, mais comme je n'écris qu'une page par jour et que je n'étudie pas tous les jours de l'année, les agendas durent plus d'une année comme habitude).

Hier j'ai oublié de lire toutes les 20 pages prévues du livre Fluent Forever, ainsi que les trois pages du roman italien. Je n'ai pas lu en espagnol non plus, ce qui veut dire que j'ai eu moins de temps disponible que je n'avais pensé auparavant. Peut-être que si j'avais lu ces deux livres je n'aurais pas eu le temps d'étudier la leçon d'indonésien. Pourquoi je dis tout ça ? C'est une note mentale du fait qu'il faut être plus attentif.

Enfin il se passe quelque chose d'intéressant dans le livre "Les Enfants d’Icare". Je compte bientôt finir ce livre, mais au moins j'ai pu profiter de quelques passages vraiment inspirateurs sur la nature du temps et la condition humaine.

Une mauvaise nouvelle : les leçons 43 à 60 du cours de grec moderne de Language Transfer n'ont pas été transcrites en caractères grecs, mais entièrement en caractères latins. J'espère ne pas avoir de problèmes, mon grec marche vers un niveau intermédiaire solide, mais c'est quand même désagréable.

Voilà que j'ai fini une leçon de L'hébreu sans peine de plus. Très utile, très pratique. Je commence à comprendre la logique derrière les mots hébreux. D'ailleurs, même si je n'ai pas le temps, j'ai décidé de réviser les leçons vidéo sur l'alphabet hébreu. Cette fois-ci, je ne vais pas regarder toute la vidéo ; je vais me concentrer sur les extraits qui montrent comme s'écrivent les lettres et les mots d'exemple. Ça va aller, cette fois-ci!

La leçon d'indonésien d'aujourd'hui n'as pas été particulièrement difficile. Je n'arrive pas à mémoriser tous les mots nouveaux, c'est bien sûr, mais je comprends de plus en plus la langue. J'ai l'impression que déjà dans la neuvième leçon les auteurs du cours ont décidé d'utiliser la vitesse normale dans les dialogues enregistrés. C'est difficile au début, mais c'est plutôt encourageant. L'indonésien a une correspondence phonétique entre son et écriture pas négligeable.

Je passe alors à l'espagnol. Pour la deuxième fois cette semaine, je suis arrivé à lire une dizaine de plus de pages du roman La sombra del viento. Je n'ai pas cherché des mots dans le dictionnaire. J'ai décidé de m'habituer d'abord à l'écriture. Il y a pas mal de mots rares qui peuvent être régionales ou bien empruntés au catalan, et je ne veux pas remplir ma mémoire avec des mots pas standards dans ce premier contact plus long avec la langue espagnole. Je le ferais plutôt s'il s'agissait d'un romain argentin ou colombien ou d'un autre pays latino-américain dont j'aurais plus d'intérêt à apprendre les couleurs du dialecte local.

Après avoir fini cette lecture rapide, j'ai été pris de panique. Je ne savais pas quoi faire. Il n'y restait pas longtemps et j'étais censé décider vite pour ne pas gaspiller ce temps additionnel. J'ai opté pour continuer un travail qui n'est pas urgent, mais qui reste toujours inachevé. J'ai travaillé sur ça pendant une demi-heure et je me suis mis alors à faire quelques leçons d'hébreu sur Duolingo. Quelle belle journée d'études! À ma grande surprise, je n'ai pas pris longtemps à écrire chaque paragraphe de ma notation d'aujourd'hui dans ce journal, même si j'ai dû consulter un dictionnaire, Google ou même quelques amis francophones de temps en temps.

[Expugnator]

Some interesting insights while listening to the Argentinian podcast: one was when the author pronounced 'feng shui' with the actual Chinese vowels and I found it absolutely natural, i.e. it was the pronunciation I was expecting even though I was listening to a podcast in Spanish. Then he repeated with vowels as they are written and read in Spanish (same as Portuguese, so it is the pronunciation I was used to hearing) and it was that one that I found more strange. Then at another moment he mentioned how he went out with friends in Barcelona and they felt so much at ease around him that they start chatting out loud in Catalan, even if his wife would just smile as she didn't understand a word. It is nice to know how essential Catalan is to the local identity even in a major city such as Barcelona, to the point that the native speakers ended up speaking it after a while even when surrounded by (or maybe because of that) friends from another Spanish-speaking (and Spanish-only speaking) country in South America.

I got lost at the Italian non-fiction audiobook. Not because of the Italian, but because the theme adressed is rather complex and some chapters had long discussions on methodology. I replayed a long chapter (19 minutes) and so I didn't read Fluent Forever on the bus on my way back to home after lunch, leaving it for later.

Checked again today: still no 4th volume of A series of unfortunate events. So far, the 4th volume remains scheduled for Russian listening-reading.

Hebrew going on as planned: I'm enjoying the new Assimil lesson and I'm not spending much time reviewing the alphabet videos from pod101, less than a couple of minutes.

I'm impressed. The vocabulary review at the start of each The Indonesian Way lesson must follow some SRS vocabulary. They manage to alternate the presented words from the previous lessons in a frequency that makes them stick when I'm about to forget them.

Today I decided to use the remaining time for doing some Clozemaster. I finally went as far as the Romance languages. Now comes Carnival, and I'll be off until next Thursday.

[Josquin]

It's too early to say something I might regret later, but I think I can do without niqqudot in Hebrew when the time comes.

Wait until the verbal system smacks you in the face...

[Expugnator]

It's too early to say something I might regret later, but I think I can do without niqqudot in Hebrew when the time comes.

Wait until the verbal system smacks you in the face...

I posted this already expecting a more experienced learner to come and say that Either you Josquin, Systematiker or vonPeterhof. I try not to worry by now. After all, I have Georgian, Russian and Estonian to give me enough nightmares on verbs, and I'm motivated by Hebrew because everything is so new and unique, even if it might complicate that much. I'm really looking forward to studying other afro-asiatic languages later!
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I'm back after 5 days. Four days travelling, and then yesterday I was a full-time dad. The girls loved it. Wife had to work and I still had the day off on Ashes Wednesday. I didn't do much these 5 days. I was at the countryside, no internet. I read a bit from Fluent Forever, but not enough to catch up if I were studying regularly. Also a couple of pages from Modern Russian Grammar and from the Italian novel. Then I spent yesterday mostly reading the forum. I believe I'll be only back at the app game (Duolingo, Clozemaster, Mond.ly - got the app now) when I've caught up with reading the forum. Anyway, I also chatted in Georgian, two long conversations where I could notice how I am comfortable with my personal 'islands'. I only had to translate from English twice, two unknown words.
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At the Estonian soap opera, at two different scenes involving different characters, the visitor asked the host about someone who lives there, which happened not to be home. At both scenes, the visitor asked when that person is coming back, and the host's answer was "she doesn't know it either". I don't know if this is culturally typical of Estonia, because answering like this in Brazil would either sound witty or impolite:

- Ega sa tea, millal ta tagasi peaks tulema?
- Seda ei tea tema ise ka.

(-Don't you know when she might come back?
- She doesn't even know that herself.)

Finished watching L'écume des jours. A cool, nonsensical film. It's the French film number 118 that I've watched so far. Now I'm going to watch 9 mois ferme.

I got caught up on how to say that I spent the day yesterday with the kids, in Norwegian. I had written that "Jeg ble hjemme og passet på barna". Then I asked at the Norwegian chatroom about how to translate "take care of the kids", and a guy said "ta seg av barna" or "ta hand om barna". He said that "passe på barna" would translate "look after", and "ta seg av/ta hand" would be "take care of". The difference is subtle, but it seems "take care of" means a more significant, close relationship between the caretaker and the kids, while "passe på" would be more neutral and could be applied to professional babysitting as well.

Accomplished Language Textbook: Assimil Le Grec sans peine (old edition)



I'm finally done with my second edition of Assimil Greek (I started from the newer one). It is always good to have one more Assimil edition to help consolidate. I didn't overlearn the lessons, as I never do, but this time I can't find any more excuses not to tackle native materials in a productive way. Actually, what hindered my progress in Greek were those successive recommencements which I did both for Assimil and for Language Transfer - meaning that I was (am) exposed to a very high number of short lessons aimed at beginners for a very long time, over a year. It is not wise to do only Assimil and Language Transfer for such a long time, especially after going through yet another similar-format resource such as the Kypros course abd the Cortina method. I had better start native materials sooner - there's plenty of translated audiobooks in Greek even if the text is harder to find as an ebook - instead of languishing with both of my two Greek resources a day at a lower level. Anyway, it's not Assimil's fault. I wholeheartedly recommend doing both editions of Assimil if you have them at your disposal, maybe just not right away, as there are so many similar alternatives for Modern Greek, even totally free. The old spelling/katharevousa won't do much harm at this stage.

Now comes the time I waste a good half hour deciding what to do next. I have too little output practice or even exposure to native materials to make any good use of a grammar at this moment. At my current stage I'm aware of the rules and I still haven't memorized the forms themselves, so I need more exposure to consolidate the rules while actually learning their most common applications in high-frequency words and collocations.

Having checked my resources, I noticed I have some readers, some monolingual textbooks for immigrants - which I tend to use as my final textbooks - others that are more grammar-based. But then why insist on resources that may lack audio or translation or be limited when I have an endless source of audiobooks? So that's what I'm doing: I'll be enjoying the guilty pleasure of listening-reading an audiobook by Dan Brown in Greek, this time 3-4 pages a day like I do with Georgian, Russian and other languages that started opaque. There's more to come, and there might be even more once I find a reliable source for Greek ebooks. I'll keep working on Language Transfer as well, and those will be my two resources. After LT I'll probably be able to find the grammar-based textbooks more digestible. After a couple more audiobooks, I might have the necessary vocabulary for going smoothly through readers and textbooks for immigrants, until I become totally independent as a learner.

Today I could make a good use of the extra time. I read in Spanish, watched Mr. Robot dubbed in Russian then worked on Clozemaster up to Spanish, which I hadn't done for a long time (still Indonesian-Turkish-Czech-Romanian-Estonian-Georgian-Finnish left on Clozemaster, plus Hebrew on Duolingo and Hebrew, but there is hope now).

[Ogrim]

I got caught up on how to say that I spent the day yesterday with the kids, in Norwegian. I had written that "Jeg ble hjemme og passet på barna". Then I asked at the Norwegian chatroom about how to translate "take care of the kids", and a guy said "ta seg av barna" or "ta hand om barna". He said that "passe på barna" would translate "look after", and "ta seg av/ta hand" would be "take care of". The difference is subtle, but it seems "take care of" means a more significant, close relationship between the caretaker and the kids, while "passe på" would be more neutral and could be applied to professional babysitting as well.

You are right. The difference is subtle, but "ta seg av" indicates that there is more involvement. "Passe på barna" could mean that you are just watching over them (e.g. while they are playing or eating) to make sure that nothing happens to them. "Ta seg av" would mean that you also play with them, feed them etc.

[Expugnator]

I'm so happy that yesterday I managed to do Clozemaster at least for the language I'm studying actively. The dabbling/Clozemaster-only languages Romanian, Catalan, Turkish and Finnish were left, as well as Georgian and Estonian with 100% mastered decks and the text input part of German, Mandarin, Russian and Greek, but at least I managed to resume using the app. Insisting on a method or a resource that doesn't work is silly, and I'm often guilty of that, but dropping a method that has been proved to work is equally silly. I hope I can continue working with sentences on a daily basis, because for some languages they're my only non-extensive activity.

Speaking of Finnish: at today's Õnne 13 episode, a guest enters the hotel hall and asks for a beer in Finnish. The concierge replies in Finnish and nothing gets subtitled into Estonian. I knew it was Finnish because I have the Estonian subtitles turned on, but for people who are watching it without subtitles the Finnish just gets thrown away quickly with no subtitling or dubbing at all. I wonder if a basic understanding of Finnish is more or less taken for granted at the Estonian society, or if the brevity and lack of relevance of the dialogue makes it unnecessary to provide translations.

No matter how interested I am in language learning, I can't stand reading the description of a serial killer chasing a victim through a forest and not feel disgusted about it. Just a reminder of why I dislike reading those krimis.

I finally see some progress in Russian. I need to look less often at the subtitles, at least at the English ones (as translated by GT). I even liked somewhat the song that ended the episode:



Getting hooked into Russian pop music wouldn't be a bad idea for learning. I'm collecting Norwegian pop songs from Skam and that allows for extra listening practice, of the repeated type, which I tend to avoid. This one I found through related videos is elligible for the treadmill:



First day of listening-reading Modern Greek regularly was a sound success! I did 4 pages, as planned, and it didn't feel tiresome at all. The language has already started to "slow down", which is the feeling we get when the audio becomes more comprehensible and you start to treat the speech in the foreign language like a normal speech. At this rhythm and with so many books available, (passive) fluency is unavoidable.

At The Indonesian Way, I'm starting to have instruction on how to use the relative pronoun yang. I had seen it briefly at pod101 and learned a bit more through context, but now I'm getting explicit grammar instruction. Understanding it represents a paved way to racing through the Indonesian complex sentence and its meaning.

Somebody tells Duolingo that teaching a Hebrew word without no vowels and NO sound file leaves the learner totally clueless about the word's pronunciation. To make matters worse, we get drilled on such words before they are introduced. Mond.ly is much better at assisting the learner, even though there seems to be less language teaching and more memorization so far.

Today I simply forgot to read in Spanish, and when I noticed it was too late. I replaced Clozemaster with Duolingo and Mond.ly, so no need to feel guilty for that.