Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

[Expugnator]

Just for info, Барбоскины is subtitled in russian but more difficult than Luntik.
Luntik is subtitled from the episode 440 to 479, if you want to download to subs.

Thank you Arnaud, that's really invaluable! I'll keep with Luntik for a while and then proceed to this one or maybe mix them up. Since this one has subtitles, it might turn out more useful even if it's harder.

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On Tuesday evenings I'm alone with the babies at home and I put them to sleep. Yesterday, after they slept, I finally managed to do some app studying. I did miss doing some reading as well, but I didn't have anything specific lined up. Well, at least I did some Memrise rounds for Hebrew Duolingo (was starting to forget some words) and Speakly for Estonian. Speaking of which, is it only 400 words that the course has in total? It keeps telling me every 10 new words that now I'm already X% of the total 400 words that are required for getting around in real life. I'm just not sure if the course ends after that.

Speakly is working similarly to Clozemaster for me, except that it's by default text input. Since there are too few sentences on Clozemaster, Speakly has served as a sequel, a more comprehensive and well-graded one actually to the limited Estonian deck on CM. The first sentences were easy but now, although easy for comprehension, they're just at the appropriate level for production, for helping me finally activate the language. I'm somewhat impressed by how much I can answer right away.

I was here earlier from lunch so I decided I'd watch Side om side intensively, pausing for looking up unknown words. That was useful, as I had some 10 words in the 10 minutes I watched from it.

Лунтик is working, it's at my level. I am having trouble already at episode 4. I think I should pause and look up some words I know that are correctly displayed in the automatic subs.

Language Transfer Greek is working fine now. I'm reviewing and consolidating grammar. This method might work for activating, actually. The good news is the Swahili course already has 74 files, so it is almost a real thing.

My thirst for Hebrew persists (today's Indonesian lesson was more enlightening). I've checked 40 leçons pour parler hébreu, which was one of the first textbooks I used, just to have a glance at the language. Back then, it wasn't very productive because I don't have the audio and I wasn't familiar with the script yet. Since the exercises had no transcripts, I'd get lost in them. Now the game has changed. I believe I might soon start reviewing from it, preferably when I approach the end of Assimil or even as a bridge between Assimil's newer and older edition. It has the format I need now, short lessons with bits of both grammar and vocabulary (Assimil focuses on flow and less on structured learning). Another resource that looks promising is langenscheidt. Anyway, the better I am after Assimil, the better use I'll be able to make from the other resources which weren't so much suitable for beginners.

[Expugnator]

Yesterday I did some more vocabulary learning at Mond.ly, and I even did one more sublesson in Duolingo. I'm very reluctant to proceed with Duolingo as it's so vowelless. I prefer to just learn the vocabulary in its Memrise course where I can hear the words.

I don't recommend anyone to buy Routledge's Modern Russian Grammar Workbook as the kindle edition. The formatting and encoding are totally messed up, making it virtually impracticable to study. If they lacked a way to render both accented and italicized cyrillic characters, then why publish it in the first place?

Wanderlusting for Swedish again. I think I can hold on the rest of the year, but in 2019 I'll probably be enjoying Swedish native media.

So now Assimil tells me that the initial vowels in Hebrew's future are totally random. Josquin had warned me...Anyway, I can handle it, I'm learning Georgian and Modern Greek after all. Georgian paradigm of having the initial consonant define the person of the verb comes in handy. Greek also has some randomness involved.

Today I got more Hebrew done. A couple of Duolingo lessons. I'm impressed at how fast I managed to answer about the most common expressions. Even in typing Hebrew. It's definitely paying off to use my multi-app approach.

How do you use the demonstrative זו in Hebrew? I swear I was expecting זת.

[Expugnator]

Yesterday I studied a little more Hebrew: Mond.ly and Duolingo.

Today was a non-study day, as a had a course to attend here in the morning and in the afternoon I decided to work on the translations I owe a friend. I also took care of some other pending tasks.

I have one German and one Norwegian lessons booked for the weekend. Let's hope all goes well and both are productive.

[Expugnator]

The weekend was not spectacular, but it had some important developments language-wise. I did very little for each of my apps (especially on Clozemaster, which I'm using only for Chinese apart from 4 Indonesian rounds I did yesterday), but i'm happy I managed to use each of the apps for a while and, most important, keep my Hebrew progressing and review consistently. I also activated some Estonian on Speakly.me . Plus one episode from the Italian podcast.

The highlight were once again the classes. I had one German and one Norwegian classes. Both tutors had similar profiles which were exactly what I was searching for. They would let the conversation flow and then would give extensive feedback. The German one did so more rigidly for the first then second parts of the lesson. His feedback was based on sentences I had said wrongly or not so idiomatically. The Norwegian one would interrupt me to correct but that wasn't annoying because I make much fewer mistakes.

I learned important lessons from those two italki sessions:

1) My spoken German is not so bad as I thought; it's not much so A2ish than it is in the B1 range.
2) My German comprehension, on the contrary, is much behind my Norwegian one, and that probably explains why the gap has become so wide between these two languages in the past couple of years. I need my German passive skills to reach those of Norwegian before I can dream of any more fluency in it.
3) At my current stage, I'm much better off improving my active skills through writing, because I still have too many gaps to be filled regarding language islands. So, just keeping chatting regularly is paying for something I can get on my own, by having my language islands proofread (I have good friends who are native speakers). It's better to have occasional classes, not regular ones at this stage.

As for Norwegian, I'm happy I found a good, accessible tutor after the previous one has stopped teaching. I plan to have classes once or twice a month according to time and budget. The language starts to flow naturally, and at this point it really pays to have strict tutor. That guy even complimented me on my accent, so I might be doing something right. In fact, my awareness of intonation and emotion in the language has definitely improved and I can, even if at baby steps, carry on that knowledge in the form of more expressiveness and less robotic, read-from-textbook speech. The tutor was also strict about bokmål and didn't let me skip the g in morgen and the d in hvordan which is at least the perception I have of how those common words sound, but currently it's better to overcorrect and I'm sure I can adjust my style later by focusing on whatever TV series character that speaks in a more relaxed Osloan way.

As I hadn't studied on Friday, I was really looking forward to the next day. Today I managed to finish my tasks, in spite of being too busy for a Monday.

[Expugnator]

I had one class cancelled and so I started my studies earlier. This time I did manage to have a headstart, already preparing for a busy afternoon. As I was less tired, I manage to concentrate on the Estonian soap opera more than usual, which was very productive. Fourteen minutes of comprehensive input everyday, it's almost like going through some 8 Assimil lessons in a row. The dialogues in a soap opera are much more relevant than in a fantasy or sci-fi series, for example, at least in terms of vocabulary. It's not being so well with the reading part, because Agatha Christie's novel is too much abridged in its Estonian edition. I'm looking forward to finishing this one and starting contemporary fiction.

Just figured out my next listening-reading experience for Greek is ensured! I have Inferno both as text and audiobook, which I'm going to do after The Lost Symbol.

Just because I did the rant on Estonian above, I managed to read Agatha Christie's book quite well today, paying attention to the new words and to how the sentences are built.

Just because I said I was happy about having Dan Brown's Inferno to listen-read in Modern Greek, I'm starting to feel The Lost Symbol might not be my ideal resource. It looks rather verbose in Greek translation, with many long words and their Portuguese equivalents. Maybe it's just the beginning of this book. I remember much more action going on in Dan Brown's books before this one, which I listened-read in Mandarin.

Assimil Hébreu is going over my head. I should pause and proceed to a more graded, slow-paced resource, but I'm probably going to review this edition anyway (besides working on the older one). So, let's keep on moving. I'm lost due to the lack of grammar explanations, so maybe I should find yet another resource for basic grammar.

And now I'm introduced to the classifiers in Indonesian. After going through them in Mandarin and Indonesian, I might even go wild and learn Swahili next year.

[Expugnator]

Finished the good film Le Convoyeur. Now I'm re(starting) the trilogy L'Auberge Espagnol.

I've just bought good earphones, and now I'm hoping to follow the audiobooks even more clearly. It was good to try with some not-so-good ones for a while, as it forced me to understand Italian even at a lower volume (no problem with Fench anymore).

Having a good time watching Luntik. It's just the appropriate level. I don't even need subtitles most of the time. There is enough variation from one episode to the other for allowing me to consolidate frequent vocabulary in Russian. Any help now is welcome for leaving the A-range.

The Indonesian Way lost me. At lesson 29, I was supposed to go through two full-fledged narrative texts, with dialogues introduced by quoting verbs. The texts are rather long and a huge jump from the previous lesson. I decided I'm not making the same mistakes again, by sticking to a resource I'm not learning optimally from just for the sake of completion. So I wrote down where I dropped it, in case I want to resume from that.

I've also decided I'm going to review the first level of Hebrewpod101 whenever I decide to work on this resource again (which is not sooner than when I realize I have enough time for working on two Hebrew resources daily), because there is important grammar information scattered through these lessons even if vocabulary-wise it might be easy when I get back. That's an issue with pod101 lessons: 15 min of a lesson when all there is to mine are a dozen of sentences and a few grammar rules. I could just use the pdf, and that's what I'm probably going to do for this level.

Now for Indonesian again: today I"m starting Assimil. I'm using the resource I'm most familiar with at an earlier stage, and I know Assimil Indonesien is not very weel-reputed, but I need structured learning which I couldn't find either in pod101 or in The Indonesian Way. It's strange to say that about Assimil, but it feels more structured than those pdf courses, and yet I'm having the same problem with Assimil Hebrew being too little structured! What I really feel now is that I lack grammar. I need to read enough about the grammar. I feel that both for Hebrew and for Indonesian I'm not letting vocabulary fall behind as I tend to do, and at this point I miss the guiding of a solid basic grammar knowledge. After all, both languages are non-IE, and getting my grammar down at this moment would certainly help me keep my active and passive skills almost synchronized.

What I'd really need now for Indonesian would be an essential grammar like those by Routledge, but it turns out only the Comprehensive Grammar is available. Therefore, I'm sticking to Assimil because I don't want to ead everything about every grammatical feature at this moment.

All in all, I can attribute this feeling to a sort of an impatience. Having been through languages harder than both Indonesian and Hebrew, I feel I'm holding myself back inadvertedly. I can't wait to master some basic grammar rules and start playing with sentences so I can enrich my vocabulary.

As for Hebrew, perhaps I'm better off using material published in Portuguese. I have at least two accessible grammars which I could use without running the risk of wasting resources at a lower level, as there is still enough in English or German.

Today is the last one of studies this week, and I'm hopefully back after Easter.

[Lawyer&Mom]

Wow, I had no idea L'Auberge Espagnol was a trilogy! The first is near and dear to my heart as it came out not long after my own study abroad experiences, and really captured that time in my life. Are the next two films worth checking out?

[Expugnator]

Wow, I had no idea L'Auberge Espagnol was a trilogy! The first is near and dear to my heart as it came out not long after my own study abroad experiences, and really captured that time in my life. Are the next two films worth checking out?

Actually I haven't watched the other two yet, and I watched the first one long ago, so I'm going to start it over. I'll be posting here the upcoming weeks (I only watch 10 minutes from a French film each day, so it takes me around two weeks to finish each film).

[Mista]

The tutor was also strict about bokmål and didn't let me skip the g in morgen and the d in hvordan which is at least the perception I have of how those common words sound, but currently it's better to overcorrect and I'm sure I can adjust my style later by focusing on whatever TV series character that speaks in a more relaxed Osloan way.

Pronouncing the d in hvordan is essential, but pronouncing the g in morgen is unusual unless you speak a western dialect

[garyb]

Wow, I had no idea L'Auberge Espagnol was a trilogy! The first is near and dear to my heart as it came out not long after my own study abroad experiences, and really captured that time in my life. Are the next two films worth checking out?

In my opinion they're nowhere near as good as the first, but still worth a watch! I like most of Klapisch's films, and they're full of colloquial everyday French.