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Elenia
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Re: Morgana's log

Postby Elenia » Tue Aug 14, 2018 12:01 pm

Ani wrote:
Morgana wrote: :shock: Do I need to know about Chinese history to read this book? :oops: My knowledge is non-existent in that department. How would the reading buddy thing work? I think once I commit to it I'll definitely fail to read it, but I'm already not reading it, so things cannot get any worse :lol: (Btw I do also have Bröderna Lejonhjärta, but I think I'm saving it for a few books down the line... I have so many already! I've turned into an ebook hoarder!)


Pardon my butting in.. I did struggle with the Chinese history aspect (lack of knowledge on my part) but in the English & French at least there are some foot notes to help.

You two better get going before we all start reading the second book :)


Is this a forum wide read along? Who else is reading? @Morgana, you don't need to know all that much, just roughly what the Cultural Revolution was and why. I had to read Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (also available in French, Ani, in case you're interested!) for a class, and that gave me the background I needed. A quick wikipedia look-up would also help :)

Morgana wrote:How would the reading buddy thing work? I think once I commit to it I'll definitely fail to read it, but I'm already not reading it, so things cannot get any worse :lol: (Btw I do also have Bröderna Lejonhjärta, but I think I'm saving it for a few books down the line... I have so many already! I've turned into an ebook hoarder!)


I have no clue :D Maybe we can talk about it with each other in our logs or PMs? What we've enjoyed, what we didn't like? We can do it without goals, instead just updating each other on where we are so we don't actually spoil something. Or maybe we can both try to read it and then talk to each other about it when we're done? My husband has a reading buddy in the US, and they write letters to eachother about the book, sometimes while they're reading, sometimes when they've finished. We can do something like that, except more digitally. It can be a low pressure kind of thing :D

Morgana wrote:I was going to ask you how your Finnish was these days! It has been a long, slow process to change my attitude about language learning, and that process is still ongoing. I have a tendency to turn everything into work even when there's no need to do so, and it sucks the fun out of everything. So, I am working on just having fun, not having goals, not worrying about how I'm doing or when I'll get to some specific destination, and rather try to enjoy each day's contact with the languages, whatever form that contact takes. It's very much not my personality type, so it's intentional practice for now, but hopefully overtime I will "chill out" and convert the "chilling out" into the default approach. And so it is with wanderlust: it used to be a source of stress (distraction! extra work! more inevitably failed attempts and disappointment!), but if I'm interested in having fun and being curious and not worried about goals/timelines/perfection, then it sort of opens up that avenue and frees it from being this potential detriment to everything else. And it frees me from having to think of anything I start as yet another long-term commitment. You said something important: "At the end of the day, I know what I want," and that's the key. Knowing what one wants to get out of something, and also knowing why (ie. that the "want" has solid foundation and isn't an externally-inspired "want" and thus a bit fragile). When you sort that out, it's a lot harder to get side-tracked.

Thanks for this comment Elenia, I quite appreciated it.


I'm glad I could be of help :) it is liberating when you remember that you can pick up and drop languages as you please/need. I enjoy being able to have fun with my languages, and while I would definitely welcome stronger skills and I would ideally have more discipline, I'm glad that I do not have the opposite feeling of stress. A language will always be there for you to get to in future, or to come back to. German isn't going to up and walk away. Finnish isn't going to disappear off the face of the earth. Of course, this is only true for the bigger languages, but those are the languages we are both talking about. The only endangered language I currently have any interest in learning is Northern Saami, and there are efforts being made to keep it going, so I don't mind holding off on that for however long it takes. Your idea of having notes to yourself where you will see them is a good idea. My sister always writes her goals on her mirror (right now, it says '2018 is the year of EASE'. It's not always easy to stick to such things, but it's good to remind yourself, and be reminded, that your languages are for your own enjoyment, and that the moment they stop being enjoyable and start being a source of stress is the moment you should scale back or take a break. Well, anyway. Now that I've waxed poetic, I should really go and get some studying enjoying done :D
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Re: Morgana's log

Postby rdearman » Tue Aug 14, 2018 1:37 pm

Elenia wrote:Is this a forum wide read along?

Yes, part of the book club in the multilingual area. https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... &start=100
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Elenia
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Re: Morgana's log

Postby Elenia » Tue Aug 14, 2018 2:41 pm

rdearman wrote:
Elenia wrote:Is this a forum wide read along?

Yes, part of the book club in the multilingual area. https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... &start=100


Thanks for the info. I see I'm about a month out, so I'll just give this one (and the next) a miss :D but nice to see the Spanish Book Club has spread!
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Elenia
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Re: Morgana's log

Postby Elenia » Wed Aug 15, 2018 8:41 am

Morgana wrote:Since it seems you are also passing on the forum book club this time around, I say why not try the reading buddy thing. This is just a suggestion for our first check-in, but why don't we check in with each other in one week (August 21) and just update each other on where we are at. That way you'll see if I've even started and if it is worthwhile to continue to keep checking in ;) What do you think?


Seems good to me! I'm on chapter two currently (a few pages in), and haven't read anything since about last week. I won't read anything this week, either :)
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Chung
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Re: Morgana's log

Postby Chung » Wed Aug 15, 2018 7:11 pm

Xenops wrote:
Morgana wrote:[ Well, returning to the north... why not Finnish? Don't get excited. I haven't even started yet. I might not, for a little while. I'm going to get organized with what I've got going already and see what room is left.


Last month, as I was being tempted by Finnish, I lamented that the current forum has so few Finnish learners, and thus resources. I had to look on the old forum for ideas.

I do not know how I would fit it in, but I would really like to take a vowel harmony language to A2 or so: my linguistic curiosity is itching to better understand it. I researched Manchu, but there is just...Nothing. I have never seen a language with so few learning materials. I don't know if even iguanaman could learn it. The only commercial materials teach it like a dead language ("let's translate this passage!") It's an interesting contrast in attitudes between the UK reviving their Celtic languages and the Chinese not interested in preserving their history (Manchu used to be the prestigious, court language in China).

Turkish is the other vowel harmony language I have considered: I love the orthography, but I don't love how it sounds: Finnish orthography just looks really odd, but I like how it sounds. I love how Hungarian sounds, but I don't like the orthography. These might be superficial preferences, but if I have to look or listen to the language constantly, I should like it at the basic level, yes?


Hmmm, that gets rid of the easy choices then. Yet if all you're after is learning any language with vowel harmony up to A2, I can think of a few alternatives to the obvious choices (my favourite is Hungarian). Assuming that you'll end up liking both the orthography and phonology, why not...

- Azeri, Kazakh, Turkmen: Of these three, Azeri sounds a lot like Turkish which may be enough to turn you off ultimately. Kazakh looks and sounds the most distinct from Turkish since it uses the Cyrillic alphabet and is sometimes pronounced nowadays with a slight Russian accent because of how many Kazakhs are native speakers of Russian (in effect they end up learning their ancestral language as a foreign one). Turkmen is usually written in Latinic rather than Cyrillic, and can sound a little like Azeri or Turkish with a lisp. There are some suggestions for learning resources (free and at a cost) here if you scroll down that post.

- Meadow Mari: Your only real choice to get started is the thick but excellent Оҥай марий йылме: A Comprehensive Introduction to the Mari Language. Vowel harmony isn't as wide-ranging as in its Finnish or Hungarian relations, and you choose the suffix variant whose vowel quality conforms best to the vowel of the stem's stressed syllable.

- Mongolian: You could start with the Peace Corps' free primer and the older competencies course (text here, audio here - look for the files under the sub heading "B07 Mongol Language Competencies -- Peace Corps". If you want to start learning it with the traditional script instead, you could try this set of lessons. There are a couple of textbooks that you can buy readily: Modern Mongolian and Colloquial Mongolian).

N.B. Estonian, Northern Saami (Uralic), and (modern standard) Uzbek (Turkic) don't follow vowel harmony.

Morgana wrote:
tiia wrote:Honestly, I find the amount of (free!) online resources for beginners of Finnish already pretty good, the problem is more often, that they might be hard to find, if you don't know how to find them. You should take a look at the Finnish language profile on the main site. There's a section called "Online courses or downloadable material".
There's also the list from infopankki on online learning material.


Otherwise, I actually use my advanced Finnish (nearly) daily. Ok, right now I'm in Finland, which makes it much easier, but even in Germany I had put quite some effort in making it part of my everyday life. It's wonderful I can now use Finnish sometimes at work, but not everyone there speaks Finnish, so...
Even English is a foreign language for me, but it doesn't really feel like it. I know it's definitely not perfect in terms of vocabulary, but it's sufficient for everything I need it for. Usually I even try to avoid it, because I use it anyway more often than I'd like to. (Only reading fiction is something I should do more in English.)
I think it might depend also on the amount of languages you learnt to an advanced level. Integrating one or two or three languages into your daily life might still work out quite well, but after a certain point there is just the time going to be a limiting factor, especially when you still learn new languages.
Thanks, tiia! That Finnish language profile is fantastic. Very comprehensive. I used some info from there (and from the mit extra mühe thread) to rule out resources like Colloquial, Hippocrene, TY... since they didn't sound like I'd enjoy them. There is so much information within the profile however that I think I'll have to return to it a few more times as I make progress. I hadn't noticed/seen the infopankki link before, thank you for pointing me in its direction.

Thanks for sharing about your Finnish use. That's inspiring that you were (and are) able to make it a regular feature in your life. I see that it can be a conscious effort at first to include one's languages in daily life but I suppose after a while it is just habit. (Too bad about English being so ubiquitous!) Your point about time being the limiting factor is the thing for me, really. If I'm spending X time on the languages I learned first, then it gets hard to tack on more languages later, so I see why people who become advanced but still want more decide to set aside those advanced languages. Maybe it's the reasons each person learns languages, obviously for others it makes sense to do things that way. For me, it makes sense to limit the number so I can keep them in my life regularly.

rdearman wrote:Did you check the study group for links? I'm sure we put a lot of links in there, (before I bailed out cause it was too hard).


https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =26&t=3287

And the links in the language profile Chung did for the static site?

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 487#p30163
Yes, I did! Reading a significant chunk of the Finnisch mit extra Mühe thread was one of the more enjoyable parts of this preparatory phase :) And yes again for Chung's profile, what a comprehensive reference indeed. Thank you, rdearman.

aaleks wrote:I guess I'm one of the "few people" who has reached intermediate level but can't just move on :) . I think, in my case it's so because I get emotionally invested in a language I'm learning so I choose my languages accordingly (now it's only English and Italian, and who knows probably it would stay that way). That also means that I would never become a polyglot but I'm ok with that :)
I feel similarly, aaleks. I will never go on to learn 10 languages, but I certainly respect those who do! But it's like you said, I get emotionally invested when I can bring a language out of beginner and at that point if it's a task I've chosen for myself (and not had forced on me), then it's got its hooks in and I won't be letting go.

------

Now for a general point about resources, because I think I was misleading in earlier statements. I'm picky/lazy/however you want to call it. I overwhelm easily. My eyes start to glaze over and information stops going into my brain and I can get intimidated and pack it in before I've even started. I am also a poor excuse for a millennial: I don't like web resources. I like downloadable audio, that's great. But I don't want to stare at a screen, don't want to have to click things a lot. For one thing, I never liked doing this :lol: For another, I get headaches and vertigo from screens and it's just nice if I can find a way to study without the laptop/tablet being the centrepiece of that studying. Finally, this is a dabbling/extra/fun language, so I don't want to invest too much effort upfront until I know it will be sticking around. But, given my preference for not-on-the-web resources, if Assimil had Finnish for English speakers, I'd splurge. So, there you have it. All my "excuses" and thus the reason I may have inaccurately stated there was a lack of resources for Finnish. There is a lack of resources for what I want resources to be :P


I'm glad that you got some use out of the Finnish profile. It's definitely one of the longer profiles out there (maybe too long). I'm like you in that I don't like web resources (or more specifically online courses with streamable audio/video). I'd much rather download that stuff in .pdf and .mp3 and work with it with pencil and lined paper. Unfortunately a lot of the good stuff in hard copy for Finnish is expensive. The audio might be streamable or downloadable, but the books can cost a small fortune (especially true when you have to buy it from a Finnish store and so pay charges for shipping and customs outside the EU).

The thing is that for dabbling in Finnish, I think that the best and cheapest way is indeed to use online material of which there're plenty of high-quality and free links for beginners as seen in infopankki's list. If you want to dabble otherwise (and skipping the usual suspects from TY, Colloquial or Hippocrene), then the only hard-copy course that I think is most suitable is From Start to Finnish which as I type this goes for at least $32.48 (second-hand) on Amazon Marketplace and comes with free streamable audio if buying the CDs becomes too expensive (there's one seller offering a used set now for $9.99 and that's far below the usual going price of a new set for about €50). FSI Conversational Finnish is a little tough to use and needs a fair bit of motivation (which you might not actually have when you're just dabbling) to be effective.
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tiia
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Re: Morgana's log

Postby tiia » Wed Aug 15, 2018 7:56 pm

[quote="Chung"][/quote]
On the German market there is a bit more choice, I think. I'm not sure how much Finnish for Swedish natives is out there. Such material should exist at least. - But again stuff from Nordic countries is expensive... German books are usually cheaper.

But maybe have a look at you library? They might also get it from another library for you.
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Elenia
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Re: Morgana's log

Postby Elenia » Thu Aug 16, 2018 2:42 pm

Morgana wrote:One of my next tasks is to get a book+audiobook pair lined up shortly so that once I've got some footing from the TY Finnish course, I can start doing the listening and reading. Any Finnish learners or speakers who feel like chiming in with book suggestions, I'm happy to receive them :) (Not kids' books but not really stuffy, flowery, pretentious adult literature either please!)


I know of a few books which have been translated into English, which may fit your specification: The Rabbit Back Literature Society, which I believe is speculative fiction; It Came From the North, which is an anthology, and which I know is speculative fiction and finally Memory of Water, which is young adult and (you guessed it!) speculative fiction. I haven't read the first two, or even peaked inside of them. I received an advanced proof copy of the third ahead of its widespread English publication and wasn't a huge fan, but everyone else ever loved it, and I think it even got a film made of it. The first two books are a big part of why I wanted to learn Finnish, which I forgot until you asked for book recommendations :) I know you're not a fan of screens, and I am usually the same. However, Mina Sundberg is a webcomic artist with a gorgeous comic that she has published for free in Finnish and English. There is also a very cute artistic rendering of the Kalevala, available in Swedish and Finnish. And Estonian, in case Expugnator is looking and interested. I must confess, I haven't made it very far into any of these things, but if we find buddying up on The Three Body Problem continues well, maybe we can find some way to share the joys of Finnish, too :D
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reineke
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Re: Morgana's End of 2018 Make It As Hard As Possible to Learn a Language Experiment

Postby reineke » Wed Aug 22, 2018 10:56 pm

Morgana wrote:Kató Lomb surely learned the majority (all?) of her languages pre-internet, pre-SRS apps, pre- all the convenient technology we are spoiled with today...


You write it like it's a bad thing.
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Re: Morgana's End of 2018 Make It As Hard As Possible to Learn a Language Experiment

Postby malach » Wed Aug 22, 2018 11:53 pm

Morgana wrote:In the end I wanted to convey that a language could be learned without the digital dependence, more for my own reassurance than anyone else's.


Yay!

Ultimately, it's all about getting information past our eyes or ears and into our brains. We don't want to use our target languages with a book in hand or even digital enhancements. Wittgenstein famously said something about discarding the ladder after we have climbed it - so long as the ladders go to the same rooftop, does it matter which we take?
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Elenia
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Re: Morgana's log

Postby Elenia » Thu Aug 23, 2018 8:06 pm

Well, I'm sure you've heard my story about how I started off in Swedish- a paper book in hand, looking up every word and writing the translations onto the book itself. I didn't mind doing it, and it worked, to a point. So I think letting go of what doesn't work for you will go just fine.

I do use Clozemaster, but I haven't used ANKI in a very long time. I have no dreams of Clozemaster teaching me words- I view it as just a bit more exposure, and I like using it. ANKI is good at what it does, in a limited way, but even with ANKI, you won't catch all the unknown words, and you don't need to. You don't need to learn the words backwards and forwards, inside out and upside down. Especially as your goal is passive/receptive use. Read lots, listen lots and you'll get there. You have a solid base and you are good at noticing the little details. If you're worried about missing words, you can still write them down with pen and paper, which is probably a good exercise in and of itself. Keep your word lists, and go through them when you feel you want a refresher, maybe even use an address book to create your own lexicon? Try Scriptorium (the full method, where you make sure you understand the grammar and the words in the sentence before copying it out). See what sticks. You'll really be fine!

And just drop ANKI. Don't worry about phasing it out, just let it go. It's amazingly liberating! You'll come across the words you need again, and you can find a new, more enjoyable way to work with them when that happens :)
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