Philipp's Super Challenge Log [EN, ES, NO]

[Philipp]

Thank you for the explanation. I had a feeling that the word order is wrong. It’s good to know where the similarities between Norwegian and German end.

[Mista]

I had the opportunity to drop by a bookstore today. The books that seem to be closest to what you are looking for are these:

Liv Astrid Greffegreff: Enkel norsk grammatikk and Enkel norsk grammatikk. Arbeidsbok

The first one is the grammar and the second one is the workbook. An answer key is included in the back of the book.

I found one other set of books of the same kind, but that one seemed to be a level up compared to this one.

[Philipp]

First of all, thanks Mista for the recommendation. I‘m going to ask my local bookshop if they can get it. Unfortunately, on Amazon.de it‘s not available.

Last week I got less done than I wanted to because I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out Anki and creating decks. Especially making a Spanish deck for conjugations took me way too long. I don’t have the technical skills to automate these things completely and acquiring them would ultimately take longer than doing it by hand. That being said, I now understand why many language learners are partial to Anki.

I also signed up for LingQ because I have problems finding suitable reading material. There is a lot of content on the site, though I’m not always sure about the quality. The hardest part about language learning seems to be finding the right content. Something that is just at the right level of difficulty and ideally entertaining. A lot of what I’m watching and reading at the moment goes over my head and I worry that I’m wasting my time. On the other hand, I can’t just use material made for toddlers. After watching several episodes of Peppa Gris on Sunday I got a headache. The good news is my comprehension is pretty solid for the fact that I spend so little time on Norwegian and I learned the word for mud puddle (sølepytt).

For Spanish, I didn’t do much apart from Clozemaster and reviewing some vocab. My goal for this week is to review the FSI lessons I already did, so back to John and his trusty friend Molina and their exciting adventures at the embassy.

For English, I started to read „Finite and infinite games“. Ezra Klein, an American journalist, recommended it recently on his podcast and I thought to myself somehow you know the title.
Lo and behold, I found the book in my shelf. That makes it sound like I have a great number of books, which is not true. No idea why I bought it. My version is certainly second hand. Most likely it was cheap and I liked the cover. I‘m curious what it is about. I‘m 30 pages in and couldn‘t figure it out so far. I also finished watching The Terror, a fictionalized account of the Franklin‘s expedition. Some parts of the dialogue I had difficulties with. I‘m less used to British accents and the archaic language doesn‘t make it easier.

Regarding the Super Challenge bot, I decided to update it less frequently. Updating too often takes the fun out of it for me. I don‘ t want to put myself under pressure by monitoring too closely what I‘m doing. In the sense of, I should read 7,5 pages per day, but today I only read 5. I would rather finish with 80 books, films than dropping out prematurely because I‘m too stressed by the whole thing.

[Philipp]

Another week over, time flies.

I‘ve decided LingQ is not for me, I just don‘t like the design of the site and more importantly, I couldn‘t find content I like. Admittedly, I’m rather picky in that regard, but I can’t make myself pay attention if I'm not interested in the subject of a text. Canceling my subscription was an annoyance. I had to click through four or five pages of discount offers to do it. The last button actually said something like delete account instead of downgrade account. It turned out delete account, in this case, means downgrade account and I finally managed to cancel further payments. I still deleted my account, because I’m really annoyed by stuff like that. I thought about installing LWT or Readlang, but probably can do without it. I already have a browser add-on which translates phrases via Google Translate, that should be enough for now.

For Norwegian, I did a bit of Duolingo, Memrise, and Clozemaster every day. I also realized that I can’t distinguish certain sounds. Luckily, there is a great website called CALST where you can train your ear on certain minimal pairs. At first, I couldn't hear the difference between katt and kart at all. The retroflex t sounded like a normal t to me, but I’m getting better at it surprisingly fast, a couple of minutes a day seems to enough. My accuracy is still not 100% but much better than random like it was in the beginning.

In Spanish, I got a bit lazy. Instead of working on the FSI course I listened to some episodes of Language Transfer. I’m going to finish that first before I get back to the FSI course. What I did do consequently was working on my conjugation deck in Anki. It’s a 1500 cards deck, so this is rather tedious. But forcing this in my head now will ultimately be less painful than putting it off.

English: I started reading Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher. In the broadest terms, it’s about how language influences our thinking. The subject matter is interesting and I’m half-way through but, honestly, I wouldn’t recommend it. I just kept thinking the horse is already dead while the author keeps on beating for another 20 pages. What I actually learned about the current state of linguistics regarding the topic? Not that much, something akin to what is covered in a medium sized Wikipedia article. I hope the second part is more interesting.

[devilyoudont]

I personally did not like the Lingq website either. Some combo of the cost of the premium sub, and how much of a pain exporting to a proper SRS system appeared to be.

Another alternative to Lingq is FLTR: https://sourceforge.net/projects/fltr/

Like LWT it is free, but it has a much easier install. Just if you are still vaguely interested, but don't want to pay (Readlang) and don't want to deal with a headache to install (LWT)

Anyway, I hope this is helps.

[Philipp]

Thanks for the tip. I will check it out. Easier installation sounds good, that was the thing that kept me from trying LWT.

[Philipp]

I finished Trough The Language Glass. As I wrote in my last post, I was disappointed at times even annoyed with the first half of the book. The second part is better, though. All in all the books was OK. It’s a collection of mostly interesting anecdotes and some studies about the topic of linguist relativity. For my taste, though, it’s too light on substance and I remain unconvinced by the author's conclusion. He describes the findings of these studies as profound and claims that the language we speak shapes our thoughts. In my, admittedly amateurish, opinion it really does not matter that much. Yes, Russians are a bit faster at distinguishing shades of blue because they have two distinct words for light blue and dark blue. But does this have any real-life consequences? Anyway, I already spent way too much time thinking and reading about this. Onward to the next book: A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. I wanted to read this for a long time.

In Spanish, my choice of reading material is much more humble. Recently, I finished two graded readers for level A2 and B1. I can’t say that it’s fun to read in Spanish. In part because my Spanish sucks and in part because graded readers suck. I hope I can graduate to native material soon. Several Harry Potter books are available on Kindle Unlimited, they might be an option, though, I’ve never had much interest in the books.

On the weekend I watched the second season of Glow, which was great. I highly recommend it for binge watching. There’s really nothing not to like about the show. It’s set in the 80s, about a team of female wrestlers (the fake kind). There is some social commentary in the storytelling, which keeps the show from feeling exploitative. But mostly its light-hearted and fun: 80s music, 80s fashion, big hair, a group of misfits bonding, scantily clad women wrestling, etc. Did I mention the music? This is my new favorite song:



I've always had a weakness for 80s music, especially Italio Disco, which I unironically love, but somehow this song went under my radar. There is something to be said for fun-loving music when the political landscape looks bleak. On that note, I have to find my 80s mixtapes.

[Philipp]

NO: Jeg har begynt å se på et nytt show. Faktisk har jeg allerede slutta først del. Showet heter Trolljegerne og er et animasjon-show(?) produsert fra Guillermo del Toro. Jeg liker filmene hans, fordi jeg valgte ut showet. Dessuten, tror jeg, passer troller og norsk bra sammen . Showet er om en teenager som finner en magisk amulett og blir en trolljeger. Av og til snakker hovedpersonen spansk. Det er rar for meg. Da må jeg tenker for en øyeblikk å forstå at det er spansk og ikker norsk. Det er også en tysk på showet, (selvfølgelig er han den dårlig fyren). Hans aksent er veldig sterk, så han er et bra dårlig eksempel.

I hope, that wasn’t too bad. I thought it’s about time that I also produce some output. The summary in English is that I started to watch a new series called Trollhunters. I’m experimenting with the subtitles, sometimes I watch with German ones sometimes with Norwegian ones and sometimes without. Sadly the Norwegian subs are not an exact transcript, though at times I can catch the difference in dubbing and subtitle.

I also finished the fourth part of the Memrise course. There are another three parts with 1500 words, but I decided to quit the course, though I’m going to do the reviews. After finishing, I skimmed through the rest of the course. There are too many cognates that it would make sense for me to continue, though I feel a bit guilty about dropping Memrise. I also like the approach of Clozemaster better; the only downside is the audio.

The next weeks I’m going to focus on the NoW course, plus some Clozemaster. Once I’ve finished it, I’m going to re-evaluate on how to continue.

[Philipp]

Another Norwegian update, because I neglected Spanish over the last couple of weeks. Dividing my attention between two languages gets harder. I wrote something in Spanish about a series I started to watch but I’m not happy with it. Maybe I’ll post it eventually, but I’m rather ambivalent about the show (Diablo Guardian) so expressing my thoughts is not easy.

In Norwegian, I finished the NoW course. To be honest, I skipped some of the grammar exercises, but I wanted to be done with it. I also still have two-thirds of the Duolingo course ahead of me. That’s enough grammar for me for the next months. In the next weeks I want to focus more on Spanish, so Norwegian has to take the back seat. My plan is to keep watching TV and do some Duolingo and Clozemaster. I finished Trollhunters and started with Side om Side, which is available on NRK for foreigners. It’s a sitcom, not something I would usually watch but it has a lot of dialog and subtitles. There is actually a lot available on NRK, but it’s a nightmare to browse through the alphabetically ordered list: https://tv.nrk.no/programmer/utland if anyone is interested.

As I wrote I want to do more in Spanish. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I believe a breakthrough is in reach. I’m tempted to sign up for the 6WC challenge, maybe six weeks of focused studying can push my level to something worthwhile. Tracking closely what I do is not really my thing, but I like the idea of a challenge. Which, to be fair, is a bit of a contradiction. I also have some free time in August, so it would be a good opportunity. I’m going to make up my mind till Thursday.

[Philipp]

It’s been over three weeks since my last update and half-time in the 6WC, so I think it’s a good time for an update. I’ve been relatively consistent with my efforts but the kind of breakthrough I've been hoping for hasn’t happened yet and probably never will. One can dream though. Stil, I’m making progress, so I’m not going to complain (or only a little).

In alphabetical order:

English: After figuring out how Anki works and full with hope and avidity* I downloaded several shared decks. Now I’m stuck with 10k cards. Seriously, I’m working on a large grammar deck to clarify some points and find areas I have problems with. Hitherto*, most of the cards are easy and I’m deleting many, though I have only seen about 10%. I’m also trying to improve my vocabulary, hence the asterisks, with an SAT 1500 words list. To be honest, I arrogantly assumed that I would know the majority of words from the list. Well, I don’t. Even in the first Harry Potter, which I’m reading at the moment, are words that I don’t know and it irks me. For example, gingerly, I couldn’t remember ever coming across that word and it’s kind of a distinct word. I know the root means redhead and – well – a root, but gently that’s far from obvious. The worrisome thing is that shortly after looking it up I encountered it again in a podcast. Either that is a crazy coincidence or lots of things are going over my head while I’m convinced that my listening comprehension is super-duper.

Norwegian: I finished Side om side which I really liked in the end. After the first season my favorite character quit the show and now after the last one, my second favorite character seems to go as well. Nonetheless, I’m looking forward to the next session which seems to start in fall. One of the fun parts of language learning is to watch trashy TV without a guilty conscience. Since I finished the show I did very little apart from SRS and I can already tell that my Norwegian is getting worse, though there’s not that much to lose. I’m more and more realizing that vocabulary learning really works best for me when I have context. Seeing a world in the wild, so to speak, helps me remember it. Without that reinforcement of listening or reading my retention becomes worse.

Tangentially related, I found an interesting podcast after searching for NRK on my podcast app. It’s called Death in Ice Valley and a co-production from the BBC and NRK. The English podcast is about the mysterious death of a woman in 1970 near Bergen. I already finished it and once I have a little more time I’m going to look for some information in Norwegian about the case.

Spanish: I’m participating in the 6WC with Spanish and so far I’m doing fine. Finishing among the top 5 is my goal now and should be possible. The first couple of weeks I spend mainly on reviewing material. Some time ago I decided to stop doing reviews in Memrise and quit a Langescheidt course after doing about half of it. Then I changed my mind. The one constant in my approach to language learning is to constantly change it. Therefore I spend a lot of time on reviewing the 2000 or so pending words and on recapping the chapters in my Langenscheidt course. Sadly, I still haven’t finished it because there are only so many hours in the day and I’m hooked on Harry Potter now. About a week ago I started to read Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal. I’m reading the English and Spanish version concurrently. One chapter in English to understand what’s happening and then one in Spanish. The first chapters were hard but now halfway through I’m getting into the rhythm. Before starting with Harry Potter. I also reread an A2 graded reader. I think sometimes going back to easier material is good for the sake of morale. I am nowhere close to being good at Spanish, but at least I can read a graded reader for beginner fluently. That’s unironically worth something.

To come back to Harry Potter, I think that I found an error in the translation. But I might be wrong because I’m never really sure who is doing what to whom in Spanish. The original says: ”Binns droned on and on while they scribbled down names and dates and got Emeric the Evil and Uric the Oddball mixed up.” For context, Binns is a professor who gives a lecture to Harry’s class. The translation is: “Binns hablaba monótonamente, mientras escribía nombres y fechas, y confundía Emerico el Malvado con Ulrico el Chiflado.” Shouldn’t it be escribían and confundían? It’s the class (they) who confuse the dates and names, isn’t it? Maybe someone with a better command of the languages can help me out here.

In any case, reading Harry Potter is fun, even though I was skeptical at first. I’ve read it before, at least parts of it, in English class about 60 years ago. I didn’t like it at the time, because I thought a fantasy novel should be more serious. At the time I had just read Lord of the Rings (in German) for the first time and that was my benchmark. In hindsight, I feel kind of bad for the young trainee teacher who introduced us to the book. I vaguely remember that she was really enthusiastic about it, but everyone just wanted to watch the movie instead. Since then I changed my mind. Harry Potter is not that bad. Though, I’m still convinced that Aragorn would win in a fight mano-a-mano against Harry (all grown-up, to make it somewhat fair).