An opera fan's log - French, German, Italian, etc

[Deinonysus]

Well, I don't know how I lasted this long without a Twitter account, and I even deleted my Facebook account recently, but I thought that since I'm picking up Danish and I have a long French reading and watch list to get to, I'd might as well sign up for a couple of challenges and make use of the Twitter bots, so I made myself a shiny new Twitter account. I signed up for a Full Super Challenge in French (might switch to German half-way through and make it two half challenges) and a 6 Week Challenge in Danish. I've never done a challenge on this site before, so I'll see how it goes!

... I began to notice that Danish did a lot of weird things with vowels that I thought only English did. ... Also, the syntax is shockingly close to English ...

I might be wrong, but I don’t think I’ve ever come across anyone else saying these things. I’ve not studied Danish in any depth, but cursory overviews of the pronunciation do indeed make it seem similar to English in its ability to frustrate learners! It’s certainly daunting, but for some reason relating it to English just lets one drop the mental blocks and approach it without bias. (Or maybe that’s just my experience!)

I’ll be following your log with interest!

Haha, there's no doubt that Danish pronunciation is a challenge, but I'm definitely feeling some kinship with it. It is already starting to feel more natural in my mouth than French, even though I've been working on French for much longer. Then again, maybe I'm just a hopeless optimist.

I would say that I found German and Icelandic pronunciation easier but paradoxically less English-like than Danish, if that makes sense.

Thanks, and I'll be following your log as well. Good luck with the Super Challenge! Held og lykke!

[Deinonysus]

Well, it's my first day of the Super Challenge for French and the 6 Week Challenge for Danish. I've been trying to time and update everything I do with the Twitter bots. It's pretty different for me to track things so discretely. Usually I just have set activities throughout the day like Assimil before bed or Memrise whenever I'm in line for something, and reading whenever I feel like it, and I never really track my time or progress too carefully.

The Super Challenge runs from today through the end of 2019 (inclusive), which is 610 days. Since I'm doing a full challenge (100 50-page "books" and 100 90-minute "films"), I should shoot for 8.20 pages read per day and 14.75 minutes of video watched a day. Here is a table with the full target times if you start today.

Challenge	Book Pages/day	Film Min:sec/day
Half	4.10	7:23
Full	8.20	14:45
Double	16.40	29:30

So far I read a 2-page article on Le Monde, and I'm planning on reading a bit of Le petit prince this evening. I didn't watch my usual 10 minutes or so of French news on france24.fr, so I'll have to make up some viewing this evening too.

I know that I'm going to slump and miss days or weeks at some point, so I should try to overshoot when I can. But I get decreased performance when I'm stressed about a deadline, so maybe the best strategy is to just chill and see what happens.

[Neurotip]

My trip was last week now and I'm back! I can't decide whether to write details about it or keep it private, but it was incredible!

Fantastic! Great to hear that, glad you had a good time.

I realized that in the time it would take me to learn Icelandic, I could probably learn Danish twice (at least).

Já. Takk. ... Mér líður svolítið illur.

[Deinonysus]

My trip was last week now and I'm back! I can't decide whether to write details about it or keep it private, but it was incredible!

Fantastic! Great to hear that, glad you had a good time.

I realized that in the time it would take me to learn Icelandic, I could probably learn Danish twice (at least).

Já. Takk. ... Mér líður svolítið illur.

Courage, mon ami! Icelandic is a very cool language, and there's nothing better than the shocked and confused look on an Icelander's face when they hear that a foreigner has learned their language (even if, like me, it's only at a very basic level). I'm definitely going to revisit Icelandic someday, and hopefully with a big North Germanic vocabulary discount from Danish.

[Deinonysus]

Eyyy, it's my 100th post! I'm an orange belt now! Ha-ya!

French
This will probably only make sense to people who have read The Little Prince. Yesterday I read the passage where the prince meets the fox, and the fox wants the prince to "apprivoise" him. I knew I had heard the word before, but I couldn't remember what it meant. The prince didn't know the word either. I didn't have access to my phone to look it up, so I just assumed from context that it meant "to make friends", and I thought it was a lovely little passage about friendship.

And then this morning, I looked up the word and it means "to tame". And that hit me like a ton of bricks. The whole passage took on a completely new meaning.

I instantly remembered where I had heard the word before. It's in the first sentence in the habanera from Carmen:

L'amour est un oiseau rebelle		Love is a rebellious bird
Que nul ne peut apprivoiser.		That none can tame.

The Challenges
I think I'm starting to get used to timing all of my work in Danish and all of my viewing in French. It's honestly a bit weird and I'm not sure if I like it, but I think the challenges will be good motivation for me not to slump so maybe it's worth it.

I do sometimes find myself avoiding doing very quick activities in a target language like skimming the headlines of Le Monde (because it doesn't really "count") or just doing a quick Danish Duolingo lesson during some downtime (because it isn't worth the hassle of timing just one 2-minute lesson). But on the other hand, it did encourage me to finish a news article I started, while I would have normally just skimmed the first paragraph and skipped the rest. So there's a positive right there.

[Neurotip]

Courage, mon ami! Icelandic is a very cool language, and there's nothing better than the shocked and confused look on an Icelander's face when they hear that a foreigner has learned their language (even if, like me, it's only at a very basic level). I'm definitely going to revisit Icelandic someday, and hopefully with a big North Germanic vocabulary discount from Danish.

Tee hee. Maybe it will happen one day. One of my patients is Danish and I asked her last time how to pronounce her name properly - she was a bit defensive, I think she thought I was taking the mickey. When I asked her again in Swedish she was a lot more forthcoming. Then I mentioned Icelandic and we were back to the 'what sort of weirdo are you' look again...

Apprivoiser! You have removed a small thorn from my side - I always wondered what the second line of that song was. Thank you!

[Deinonysus]

It's been a while since I updated this log. My Danish stint ended abruptly when I got back into League of Legends, because it unfortunately saps my energy for other hobbies such as language learning. I was working on Korean for a while in another thread; it was a short-lived attempt to channel my video game obsession into progress in something. I'm fairly pleased with that short side quest; I did make very good progress in reading and writing, and got a sense of the language's feel and pronunciation.

About a month ago, a brief Wikipedia binge on Maya numerals led me into a full-blown Spanish bender. I'm very happy that my language learning motivation is back. I've been making swift progress on Duolingo, averaging a bit over 10 crown levels a week. I'm currently at crown 58 out of 565 (based on 113 Spanish skills and a maximum of crown level 5 in each skill), so I'm around 10% of the way to maxing out the tree.

I have also been rewatching Destinos, which I first watched in Middle and High School Spanish class. I never got to the end, so I'm excited to finally see what Raquel can find out about Rosario. Is she still alive, and will Don Fernando ever see her again? I'm still on Episode 5 out of 52 so I still have a ways to go. It's available for free on https://learner.org/series/destinos/ with some exercises to go along with them.

I'm also going through Pimsleur Spanish in the car. My local library has Pimsleur Spanish 1, and I'm sure I can get the rest of the series through my state library system.

I'm also on a Sci-Fi kick in English. I'm rereading Dune at the moment, and I also picked up a copy of the first 5 books of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series. I also have Frankenstein, 1984 and Asimov's Foundation trilogy waiting in my queue.

Once I'm done with my English language reading list, the next logical step will be to go back to Jules Verne. I really do need to get back to my Assimil lessons so that I can get through Verne a bit more easily. I don't think my French has rusted too badly, but it has been a while since I worked on it. I also need to get back to watching the news in French every morning, and I still several Tintin books and the last 30 pages of Le petit prince waiting for me.

[Deinonysus]

Unfortunately Destinos has dropped out of my evening routine, and I haven't been able to work in Assimil French yet either. But I have been making steady progress with Pimsleur and Duolingo, and I started watching the French news in the morning again.

Spanish is much easier than French!

This may just be my skill difference talking, but I really underestimated how much easier Spanish spelling is than French (or even German which is still pretty good). The writing system is an absolute gem and it really helps to make the language accessible. It's really only a couple of inconsistencies away from perfection.

The main imperfection I find with Spanish that there should be an acute accent to mark the stress if it isn't on the penultimate syllable, but in reality this is only done around 80% of the time. Also, I've heard that the only common spelling mistake among Spanish speakers is confusing "b de burro" with "v de vaca" since the pronunciations have merged, and if your dialect doesn't have the ceceo (pronouncing z and the soft c as the English "th", as in standard European Spanish), you could also confuse those letters with s. But if your biggest problems are occasional accent marks and a couple of redundant letters, you know you're in good shape.

I haven't really done extensive listening yet in Spanish, but so far I can parse everything I hear in Pimsleur and Duolingo, and I'm expecting that to be much easier than French as well.

Reading list
I've been enjoying reading more anglophone fiction. I finished my reread of Dune, and I also reread The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. But I think I want to start alternating between French books and English books. So I think I'll try to finish the last 30 pages of Le petit prince before moving on to 1984, and then read a Tintin album between each subsequent anglophone novel.

I'm hoping that I'm able to make a lot of progress with the advanced Assimil French course before I run out of Tintin books. I can get through Verne and get the gist of what's going on, but it's slow and I'm sure I miss a lot.

[Deinonysus]

I went through the first lesson of Assimil Using French and watched the next episode of Destinos, so hopefully I'm back on track! Now I just need to do it again tonight, and then the night after that…

Because I'm anal, I didn't pick the second wave of Assimil French With Ease exactly where I left off, which would be lesson 65. Instead, I repeated lesson 64 so that the weekly review lessons match up. Every lesson that is a multiple of 7 is a review lesson, so for them to match up, the mod 7 (ie, the remainder when you divide by 7) needs to be the same. Lesson 1 in the new book has a remainder of 1, so I had to start off at lesson 64 because that is also 1 more than a multiple of 7. And now they match! :eye twitch:

I'm also back to working on my French vocabulary Anki deck daily, and I even added a few words while I was reading Le petit prince. One word that I'm surprised I hadn't run into before was « trier », to sort. I know it as a familiar English loanword, but only in the noun form: "triage".

[Deinonysus]

Well, I changed tracks again. I work at a local university and I was hoping to audit some intermediate Spanish classes this year, but it looks like they all filled up. That brings me back to an earlier plan I had to audit intermediate German classes. So now it's time to brush the cobwebs off of my German!

It's been a while since I worked on German, so I just reset the Duolingo tree and tested out of what I could. Unfortunately, when you test out of a skill it only gives you a crown level of 1, so I have a lot of grinding to do. Fortunately, the easy lessons go very quickly.

Although I'm adding German, I do still want to some work in Spanish. I'm past the point where Pimsleur will help me in German or French, so I'd might as well continue doing Pimsleur Spanish lessons in the car. And one half-hour of Destinos a night can't hurt, right?

So at least for now, I'm planning on working on three languages at once. I've only done that once before. It was a couple of years ago when I was an intermediate German learner and was just beginning French, and I was also working on Heisig's Remembering the Kanji for future use with Japanese. I maintained that for around a month before I dropped the Kanji, but I made at least some progress in all three languages, although of course not nearly as much progress as if I were putting all of my effort into one language.

So we'll see what happens. If the class falls through, I'll probably drop German. Otherwise, I'll probably start winding down on Spanish and pick it back up another time. Or who knows, I might just give into wanderlust and study ancient Babylonian.