kanewai's book shelf (current: italian)

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kanewai
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Re: kanewai's book shelf

Postby kanewai » Tue Mar 09, 2021 1:27 am

It's not all Greek these days. I finished my first Italian book of the year a few weeks back.

L'isola di Arturo, Elsa Morante (1957).

This is the story of Arturo, a child who grows up semi-feral in a crumbling palazzo on Procida, off the coast of Naples, in the 1930s. His mother has passed, his father is away for months at a time; he spends his youth alone with his dog, exploring the island by day, and reading classic adventure stories by night. For him it's a paradise, but it ends when his father returns - bringing a semi-literate 15-year old bride with him.

From here the novel slowly turns as dark as a Greek tragedy.

It reads like a fairy tale, and I was surprised how matter-of-factly Morante dealt with sexual topics, gay and straight, that I thought would have been taboo in 1950s Italy.

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To say anymore would ruin the plot, so let me share a note about the author I read from a profile in the New York Times:

"Morante didn’t attend college. She lived in poverty, sometimes resorting to prostitution, while struggling to become a journalist then a novelist. In 1938, she prepared a pot of boiling oil, intending to pour it on the heads of Hitler and Mussolini, who were passing in a convertible limousine under her apartment windows. Her future husband, the novelist Alberto Moravia, talked her out of this suicide mission."

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Re: kanewai's book shelf

Postby dklinker » Tue Mar 09, 2021 1:44 pm

Thanks. I enjoy the short novel reviews. I hope you keep them coming.
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Re: kanewai's book shelf

Postby kanewai » Wed Mar 10, 2021 8:56 pm

Update: screw DuoLingo. That was a waste of five evenings. I give it a shot about once a year, and each year it seems like they've made it even more simple than the year before. There's progressively less useful content, easier exercises, and more bells and whistles. I spent fifty percent of my time watching animations telling me what I good job I'm doing. It's almost aggressively bad. I looked at future lessons, and it appears that in about three weeks I'll finally get around to I am / you are / he is. It's ridiculous.

On the opposite end of the scale, Language Transfer eases up in intensity around Lesson 80. I can now work through a lesson while out and about walking or biking. The previous ten or so have required my full and undivided attention.
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Re: kanewai's book shelf

Postby kanewai » Tue Mar 16, 2021 11:58 pm

2021 Book 4:

Total Khéops, Jean-Claude Izzo (1999)

"In the beginning is the Book. And that moment in which Cain kills his brother Abel. In the blood of this fratricide, the Mediterranean gives us the first noir novel" (from an essay by Jean-Claude Izzo)

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Total Khéops is a "Mediterranean noir" set in the immigrant neighborhoods of Marseille. It has some standard crime novel tropes - there's a back story involving three friends, one who became a cop and two who turned to crime, and the beautiful woman they all loved. Now two are dead, the woman has disappeared, and the flic has returned to his childhood streets to investigate what happened. There's a convoluted story about fascists and a war between French and Arab drug runners and the Italian mafia and ... by the end there were far too many characters to keep track of. It felt like new, major bad-guys kept being introduced right up until the final chapters. It would have helped if I kept a list of characters; as it was I was totally lost by the novel's resolution.

But the mood of the story, starring the streets of Marseille, and its music and poetry and food, its sensual young people and petty criminals and existentialist cops, was totally cool.

Plot: ** 1/2

Style: *****

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Marseille n'est pas une ville pour touristes. Il n'y a rien à voir. Sa beauté ne se photographie pas. Elle se partage. Ici, faut prendre partie. Se passionner. Être pour, être contre. Être violemment. Alors seulement ce qui est à voir se donne à voir. Et là trop tard, on est en plein drame. Un drame antique où le héros c'est la mort. À Marseille, même pour perdre il faut savoir se battre.

Marseilles isn't a city for tourists. There's nothing to see. Its beauty can't be photographed. It can only be shared. It's a place where you have to take sides, be passionately for or against. Only then can you see what there is to see. And you realize, too late, that you're in the middle of a tragedy. An ancient tragedy in which the hero is death. In Marseilles, even to lose you have to know how to fight.

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Re: kanewai's book shelf

Postby kanewai » Fri Mar 19, 2021 8:54 pm

Hey, did you all know that modern Greek is hard? Surprised me too.

(I'm joking - I knew full well that this was going to be a challenge)

I'm still trying to put in an hour of study each day, but I've had to slow down my pace. I finished Lesson 5 of FSI, Lesson 50 of Assimil, and Lesson 85 of Language Transfer this week. Originally I thought I would have finished LT last month, and be well into the active phase of Assimil by now.

I'm still adjusting to Greek spelling, especially with the vowels. Upsilon in particular is tricky - it acts so differently depending on where it is in a word. Thankfully all the vowel combinations follow regular patterns - I just have to consciously think about them when I encounter a new word. It's not automatic.

Listening comprehension is also surprisingly hard. I can read a dialogue in Assimil, and understand it ... and then not be able to follow along at all the first couple times I listen to it. Interestingly, my pronunciation seems to be on track. Once in awhile I'll read a word or phrase into Google Translate, and google will understand me. I can't even do that with French half the time.

The final thing I'm working on is trying to internalize how the aorist tense works. I understand it intellectually, but I haven't internalized the aorist forms of many verbs yet.

In theory a flashcard program like Memrise or Duolingo would be perfect for this. And yet they just don't live up to their potential. The user-made Beginner Greek (with full audio) on Memrise is better than most, but I still encounter the same types of issues I encounter with all of them - the translations that they ask us to do are dependent on context, and aren't actual translations.

For instance, take the sentence: θέλω να φύγω

The literal translation would be I want (θέλω) that I go (να φύγω). A more natural translation would be I want to go.

However, the flashcard programs will present να φύγω as to go, although it only means that in that particular context. If you didn't use outside resources you would have no idea.

It's frustrating, because this type of issue seems to occur regularly with Memrise and Duolingo. It's one of the reasons I'm very skeptical of people who claim to reach any kind of practicable level with these programs.

-----------------------------

I look back at my work on Turkish years ago, which is supposed to be equally difficult for English speakers. Turkish had a much steeper learning curve in the beginning. However, after three months I was able to start applying what I had learned. It was basic, for sure, but I was able to get by in Turkey for a month without using much English. The initial learning curve with Greek hasn't been as steep, but it has been steady - I'm still not at the point where I could go to Greece and get by. Maybe in another month or two. I hope!

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I'm glad I have studied other languages; it helps me evaluate and adjust the approach I'm taking with Greek at any given moment. Currently I am moving very slowly through each lesson, and doing everything five times correctly before I move on. That means I need to read through each vocabulary list in FSI five times, and I'll start over if I get a word wrong. Same with each sentence in LT, and the exercises in Assimil. It's time consuming, but it will help me internalize some of what I'm learning.

It's also tedious, and I won't keep this up for longer than a week or two. I roll my eyes when I read about language hackers insisting that they know the "best way" to do anything. The "best way" for me this week is going to be different from the "best way" next week. I like my little 'do everything five times' technique, and it's worked for me in the past ... but it's only the best way for me at this particular point in my studies.
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Re: kanewai's book shelf

Postby kanewai » Mon Mar 22, 2021 11:04 pm

My books and podcasts have been taking me back in time recently ...

Y Julia retó a los dioses (Santiago Posteguillo): It's the second century a.d., and Julia Domna is on her way to establishing a new imperial dynasty to rule over Rome - though many of the old gods are opposed to the idea of a Syrian Empress.

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La Historia de España: Flash forward a few centuries, and the Empire in the west is on the verge of collapse. Visigoths and Swabians have taken control of Hispania, and it's ¡Adiós, Imperio romano!

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Storia d'Italia: Less than a century later, and the Gothic King Totila is battling Roman troops sent by Justinian. to retake the Italian Peninsula. And now we witness La morte di Roma (544-546).

roma.jpg


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I have to check the notes to the podcasts these days to remind myself where I am in history at any given moment.
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Re: kanewai's book shelf

Postby kanewai » Mon Apr 05, 2021 6:40 am

Greek, Month Three

It's only been three months. In my rational mind I know that I am making excellent progress. But in my irrational monkey-mind I think that I am failing completely. I know that all those ridiculous "influencers" who claim that they learned a language in just three months (or is it one month now? or even seven days???) are full of it. And yet ... they do make us doubt ourselves.

So. Here's where I'm at:

Language Transfer: Lesson 105 /120. The sheer amount of information Mihalis provides is almost overwhelming. And yet he has provided me a structure that I can hang on to while I work through more traditional courses. If he's reading this: Μπράβο.

Assimil: Lesson 60 (passive) and 12 (active). One of the difficulties with Assimil is that the dialogues by lesson 60 have reached the B1 (or even B2) level, while I ... a mere mortal ... am not at that level after three months. It's really hard, and really time consuming, to work through each lesson. But also: the active wave is now surprisingly easy. Just like they promised me it would be.

Greek Pod 101: Beginner Lesson 5. I am cautiously optimistic about this course. I had hoped to jump in at the Beginner 2 Level ... but it took me less than a minute to give up on that. There's a lot of noise on the site and app to work through to find the actual lessons, and they're not as structured as LT or Assimil, but there are other things that impress me. A thirty-second dialogue will have a ten minute walk through, but you can also choose to just listen to the dialogue, or read and play it line by line, or just review the vocabulary. This helps immensely.

FSI: Paused on Lesson 5. The quality of the pdf is distracting, but even worse: I'm not always sure what the exercises are asking us to do. It's not as clear as the Spanish or French courses are. I'm keeping the download ready, in case I go back to it, but for now FSI is not a priority.

In the end, I am in a good space for three months / less than 100 hours of studying. I have five months to go before I land in Thessaloniki. I'll still be a beginner at that point, but I hope to be a "fluent beginner."

-----------------------------------

I miss actively studying other languages. Maybe in another month I can work them back into the rotation.
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Re: kanewai's book shelf

Postby kanewai » Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:48 pm

I'm slowly passing an early threshold with Greek - the basics are feeling more natural, and it takes less mental energy to work through the lessons. It's still hard! But in the beginning I would be exhausted after thirty minutes of new material. Now it feels like I've covered a broad overview of the language, and can go back and work on internalizing it.

Part of the challenge is the number of tenses you need just to construct basic sentences. In a Romance language, or in English, you can get by with just the present tense in the early stages. It won't be pretty, but it's possible. In Greek it feels like you need a grasp of the present, the subjunctive, the aorist, and the medio-passive just for entry-level communication.

The LanguagePod course is useful, but also frustrating. A typical ten-minute audio lesson will be:

  • Setting the scene, in English. This will take a full minute or more, even though the scene could be summarized in a few words, e.g. two friends are in a bar.
  • A four sentence dialogue in Greek, first at natural speed, then slower. This is good.
  • The dialogue, with English translations. Also good.
  • A review of the new vocabulary. Still good.
  • A discussion of the grammar points. This is not done anywhere near as well as in other courses. The ... instructor ... speaks ... very ... very ... slowly. And I often forget what the subject is by the time she gets to the end of the sentence.
  • A discussion of Greek culture, in English, where we learn silly things like: Greeks like beer. All kinds of beer. German beer. Irish beer. But mostly Greek beer.
  • A one-minute of discussion / advertisement about all the other things available on LanguagePod. This is a waste of time. I already pay for the damn course.
  • The dialogue is repeated. Finally.

There are useful things scattered around the website and the app, but you have to hunt for them. I do like the line-by-line audio clips; this helps immensely, and I wish Assimil had this option.

Overall, though, Greekpod is primarily a passive experience. I can drift off ad still finish a lesson. I need something more active and engaging, and started working Pimsleur into the rotation. As soon as I finish Language Transfer I anticipate using Pimsleur daily. I wish there were more than two levels.

I still play with Memrise off and on, but it is definitely a low-tier low-effort method. At this point I'd rank the courses as such:

Top Tier - Great at what they do
Assimil Le Grec
Language Transfer
Pimsleur

Middle Tier - Useful, but not as efficient as the top tier
GreekPod

Lower Tier - Still useful, but not efficient
Memrise

No Tier - Not worth the time
DuoLingo
Communicate in Greek

I'm not sure where FSI would fall, or if I will ever return to it. I'm still missing a solid grammar-translation or a pattern-drill course.

----------------------------

When not thinking about Greece, I have become fully immersed in Amin Maalouf's historical novel about the life of Omar Khayyam. The book is as dreamy as the Rubáiyát itself.

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From Goodreads: Samarcande, c'est la Perse d'Omar Khayyam, poète du vin, libre-penseur, astronome de génie, mais aussi celle de Hassan Sabbah, fondateur de l'ordre des Assassins, la secte la plus redoutable de l'Histoire. Samarcande, c'est l'Orient du XIXe siècle et du début du XXe, le voyage dans un univers où les rêves de liberté ont toujours su défier les fanatismes. Samarcande, c'est l'aventure d'un manuscrit qui, né au XIe siècle, égaré lors des invasions mongoles, est retrouvé des siècles plus tard. Amin Maalouf, l'auteur de Léon l'Africain, nous conduit sur la route de la soie à travers les plus envoûtantes cités d'Asie et nous ravit par son extraordinaire talent de conteur.
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Re: kanewai's book shelf

Postby kanewai » Wed Apr 14, 2021 7:35 am

I’m deleting Innovative Language / GreekPod101 from all my devices & requesting a refund of the surprise “yearly premium membership” I was charged for - when trying switch to a “basic account.”

The lessons have no structure and lack any kind of linear progression. The audio is 80% English. This is a program designed to lure you in with a few days of good material & trap you into yearly memberships.

Avoid them.
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Re: kanewai's book shelf

Postby kanewai » Sat Apr 17, 2021 1:54 am

This was the dialogue that finally made me snap in Language Pod:

1. Did anyone call during lunch?
2. They called from this morning's client's office. It's about some detail from our offer.
3. Did they leave a number?
4. No, they said you should use the company's telephone center.

It is only the eighth lesson of the absolute beginner track, and it's supposed to demonstrate the genitive case. It is, I would note, not an "absolute beginner" sentence, not good English (sentence two in particular), and not a very good use of the genitive. And I looked back, and realized that the dialogues were all like this. It's like they weren't even trying to craft a good lesson or a linear progression; it's all just lots of random stuff.

So it looks like I'm back to my two old friends, Assimil and Pimsleur. They're a pretty solid combination, though I'm still keeping an eye out for a good, general grammar book.
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