Xmmm's Log ...

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Xmmm
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Re: Xmmm's Log

Postby Xmmm » Tue Feb 06, 2018 5:11 am

Turkish: Embarrassment of Riches

Diriliş: Ertuğrul is still pretty good and I'm continuing to watch that show, but I found an even better one. Behgat Ç. has a well-deserved 8+ rating on IMDB. It only has one season on Netflix, but that season has 96 episodes which are 90+ minutes each. There are literally a dozen other shows I need to explore as well. You could get 1000 hours of listening practice on Netflix alone

I'm getting disheartened about TurkishClass101. They made some weird creative choices. In one dialogue, a character has audible gastric distress. In another, a guy is way too into his food. These recordings are hard to listen to once, let alone repeatedly. And the dialogues all have 90% overlap with each other. I'm not sure 100 variations on thank you is what I need at the moment.

I've also taken a peek at FSI Turkish, and am not too enthused there either. There are only 17 hours of audio. That's equivalent to 4 lessons of Modern Russian. Once again, most of the drills are not recorded ... and what is FSI without drills?

So ... I'm going back to Duolingo. I got about 25% of the way down the tree the first time I tried Turkish. I'll freshen that up and continue. I figure doing the tree would give me low B1 vocab and grammar, and it nicely complements my current TV barrage.
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Ещё раз сунешь голову туда — окажешься внутри. Поняла, Фемида? -- аигел

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jeff_lindqvist
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Re: Xmmm's Log

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Tue Feb 06, 2018 11:39 am

Xmmm wrote:Turkish: Embarrassment of Riches

I'm getting disheartened about TurkishClass101. They made some weird creative choices. In one dialogue, a character has audible gastric distress. In another, a guy is way too into his food. These recordings are hard to listen to once, let alone repeatedly. And the dialogues all have 90% overlap with each other. I'm not sure 100 variations on thank you is what I need at the moment.


Yeah, some strange topics indeed, sometimes too much overlap, sometimes too little. I've lost count of the times I've copypasted stuff which Anki then rejected because the word or phrase was already in the deck.

I shared some of my thoughts in Expugnator's log, and in several posts in my own log (from August 2017 and onwards).

Sometimes you're lucky and find a series where the lessons introduce a concept with one question + four different answers, or indeed lessons with dialogues (yes, they exist!).
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Xmmm
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Re: Xmmm's Log

Postby Xmmm » Wed Feb 07, 2018 1:00 am

500 Hours


I've been watching La casa di carta and am on the last episode. I haven't used subtitles at all, nor have I replayed any scenes in English. Comprehension is about 70%. For the record I started learning Italian with less than 10% comprehension and have only put in 300 hours of listening. It occurs to me that this is a great result. I mean, really great. Another 500 hours of listening in Italian and I should have C1 listening skills.

Russian is a bit of a different story. I started at 0% comprehension and am now at 30%, and it took 500 hours of listening to get there. I've been beating myself up about it, but it occurs to me that maybe Russian is just hard, and maybe that's how long things take for people with no special aptitude. I have, after all, moved the needle. Another thousand hours and C1 listening should be in my grasp for this bear of a language also.

For Turkish, I want to do things right and follow more of an Italian path than a "lost in the taiga" Russian path. So I'm starting with some basic grammar and vocab (duolingo), but I'm also starting with my listening now. People say that listening to incomprehensible input is a waste of time, and maybe so, but don't forget that on Netflix I have the power to turn on Turkish subtitles as well. This allows me to receive incomprehensible input from two separate lines of attack! Having watched almost 10 hours of Turkish for the 6 week challenge so far, this means I've listened to (i.e., heard) roughly 40,000 words in Turkish and "read" (i.e. looked at, occasionally recognizing a word) more than 20,000 words of text.

Anyway, I would like to complete 500 hours in each TL by the end of 2019.


Edit to add my current listening ability for future reference. Listed as percentage comprehended of random TV dramas in the TL.

Italian: 60-70%
Russian: 30-35%
Turkish: 0%
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Ещё раз сунешь голову туда — окажешься внутри. Поняла, Фемида? -- аигел

Xmmm
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Re: Xmmm's Log

Postby Xmmm » Tue Feb 20, 2018 10:12 pm

Italian

I've been trying to watch Carbonio alterato in Italian, but I don't know if I can continue. It stinks! There's lots of things thrown in for shock value here and there. For example, I just watched an episode where half the time the character was being "virtually" tortured. It's all just a blatant attempt to cover up how boring the main story and characters are. The show is like a copy of a copy of a copy (times 5000) of Blade Runner. And I actually didn't care for Blade Runner (really poor adaptation of the book imo).

La casa di carta is way better than Carbonio alterato. I probably should just watch that again.

I'm also about halfway through reading Chimaira by Valerio Massimo Manfredi. It's not a great book (I'm not familiar with Dan Brown but I suspect it might be a Dan Brown clone) but it's easy to read. By far the easiest book I've tried to read in Italian. I have to find more supermarket bestsellers.

Russian

Locust on Netflix ended up being surprisingly good in a this-is-all-going-to-end-horribly way. I will probably re-watch it in March.

Season 2 of Нюхач is better than season 1. In season 1 it was a cop show with a ridiculous premise and slightly unhinged characters. In season 2 it's more of an urban fantasy with out-of-control characters that just pretends to be a cop show. Much better like that.

I'm trying to read HP #2 because I have a hard copy of it. Mark it up with the highlighter. Save it so I can be amazed with my progress sometime in the future. Slow going.

Turkish

I've completed 4 out of 7 checkpoints on Duolingo. I've also watched the first 13 episodes of Diriliş: Ertuğrul. It's a nice, slow moving, repetitive historical drama. Nobody is using any slang or neologisms. I will probably watch a few more episodes, then recycle all of them in March.

hours: ru 1411 it 550 tr 44
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Ещё раз сунешь голову туда — окажешься внутри. Поняла, Фемида? -- аигел

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reineke
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Re: Xmmm's Log

Postby reineke » Tue Feb 20, 2018 11:40 pm

Altered Carbon is at most a 5x copy of Blade Runner. The flashbacks are annoying. I liked Blade Runner.
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Xmmm
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Re: Xmmm's Log

Postby Xmmm » Tue Feb 20, 2018 11:49 pm

reineke wrote:Altered Carbon is at most a 5x copy of Blade Runner. The flashbacks are annoying. I liked Blade Runner.


A lot of people liked Blade Runner, which is fine. A lot of those people didn't know that it was based on a book, and that the director cut out about 90% of the questions the book asked (what does it mean to be human?, how do you actually know that you are a human and not an imitation?, etc.) so he could focus on the questions that were important to the director (what if it rained in Los Angeles all the time instead of never?, what if everyone in Los Angeles was Japanese instead of hardly anyone?).

If you treat Blade Runner like it was an original story and not an adaptation, then fine it's better than most science fiction films. As an adaptation, though, it's as good as Demi Moore's version of The Scarlet Letter.
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Ещё раз сунешь голову туда — окажешься внутри. Поняла, Фемида? -- аигел

Xmmm
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Re: Xmmm's Log

Postby Xmmm » Thu Mar 01, 2018 6:15 am

I completely gave up on Altered Carbon after the Cylons destroyed the rebel base and blew Obi Wan Kenobi up in the Millenial Falcon.
The first thing I did to recover from that awful show was to go and watch Season 2 of Marseille. Not as good as Season 1 unfortunately ...

Then I watched one episode of Le cronache di Frankenstein and was pretty stoked for the first ten minutes or so until I realized it's just another cop show.

However, tonight I spotted La cerchia del male di Hitler. That's got to be worth a try.

I'm also thinking about springing for a Clozemaster Pro account. Because of this:


cloze-ru-grammar.png


I can't get through Russian grammar if it's pencil and paper and a dusty book, but gamified stuff I can do (I finished my Russian Duolingo after all, even with 5000 keyboard switches).
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Ещё раз сунешь голову туда — окажешься внутри. Поняла, Фемида? -- аигел

Xmmm
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Re: Xmmm's Log

Postby Xmmm » Mon Mar 12, 2018 3:50 am

Well, I could not last 800 listening hours without speaking Italian. I'm at roughly 400 hours now and have just scheduled an Italki lesson for later this week. I found myself getting really anxious and neurotic about it ... almost a B2 reading level, understand lots of TV, but don't know how to put two spoken words together. Eventually, I snapped.

I will sign up for Russian also, after a couple weeks of Italian lessons.

I also timed myself on Clozemaster. For Italian, I can play 200 sentences an hour. For Russian, 120. The reason: harder to type in Russian, more typos, less possibility to guess correctly, and so on. Based on that, playing the whole 'fluency fast track' would take 100 hours for Italian and almost 400 for Russian (course is twice as bit, speed is half).

I also looked at my hours for February (45 Italian, 40 Russian, 45 Turkish) and realized I've started using languages to avoid unpleasant responsibilities in the real world. So I'm going to limit Russian and Italian to 7 hours a week each, and Turkish will have to go back to 20 minutes a day of Duolingo for a while.

I've started watching По ту сторону смерти. It doesn't look like it's going to be great, but I'll give it a chance for a few episodes.
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Ещё раз сунешь голову туда — окажешься внутри. Поняла, Фемида? -- аигел

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Re: Xmmm's Log

Postby Xmmm » Thu Mar 15, 2018 4:26 pm

I had my first Italki session in Italian. It went incredibly well. I was amazed.

It was 60 minutes 100% in Italian. I understood about 80% of what the tutor said. When I spoke, I made a fair number of mistakes. However, I didn't hesitate much. Awkward pauses were few and for the most part I could come up with the vocabulary I needed.

The tutor was pretty horrified when I said that my self-study method was Duolingo plus hundreds of hours of TV, but said that my accent was actually pretty good and that even though I needed practice, I spoke well relative to her other students.

I feel like if I were going to learn another closely related language, this is the exact road I'd take again. I've done less than 200 hours of 'work' in the language and 400 hours of kicking back and watching TV. And here I am speaking Italian and I don't even have much of a headache. :)

It's such a contrast to my Russian odyssey of pain ... there must be a lesson to learn there ...
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Ещё раз сунешь голову туда — окажешься внутри. Поняла, Фемида? -- аигел

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Re: Xmmm's Log

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Thu Mar 15, 2018 5:11 pm

I’m a huge convert to the hundreds of hours of TV method. I mean I have a degree in German, I’ve done all the book work imaginable, and frankly TV almost as effective and a lot more fun. I have to remind myself sometimes that massive input just wasn’t possible back in the day. (Even if you lived in an immersion environment, you couldn’t just stream hour after hour of compelling content. Like after Fresh Prince of Bel-Air came Alf. You were at the mercy of the broadcaster...)

The biggest difference between the old school approach and now is that I had a better balance between my four skills, because I would be tested on all of them. But honestly, given the content available I’d much rather have amazing listening skills and like no writing skills. I’ve written academic papers in my target language. It built character and I’m over it.
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