rpg learns Spanish, French, et cetera

[rpg]

More updates... maybe I should just take Italian out of this log title because I don't foresee myself spending much time on it for a while. Maybe I'll find time to return to it after I finish my summer of Mandarin.

Speaking of Mandarin, I finished my first semester last week! I still haven't learned a couple of the Lesson 10 vocabulary words from Integrated Chinese but I'll probably get through them tonight in Skritter. The second semester began today; onwards and upwards! I went through the character workbook for the second semester and was gratified to see that there's only around 250 new characters, compared to something like 375 in the first part. Learning characters was by far the most time consuming part the last six weeks (I've crossed 50 hours in Skritter already), so I'm looking forward to an easier workload this time around.

I also ordered the DeFrancis texts: the textbooks as well as the readers. The textbooks are written in Pinyin, based on the belief that the spoken language should be acquired before the written one. Apparently this means a lot of people don't like them, but I really believe in speech-first as well, and there seem to be extensive audio recordings available. Not sure how much I'll be working with them during the next few weeks, but I figure that this could be a nice way to work on my Mandarin after that.

The readers, meanwhile, seem to be widely popular. From descriptions they seem really excellent. My reading speed is horribly slow ("reading" isn't really a good word for what I'm doing), so I'm hoping these books can help me a lot. I imagine the large amount of input will be good for my general linguistic skills too. The only thing is that they're in traditional characters, but it seems that every serious Chinese student will learn both systems anyway so I don't think it's a big deal, though I probably won't try learning to write the traditional forms yet, just read them.

In French, I'm planning on returning to French in Action with some intensity after this Mandarin course finishes, but until then, it's on hold, unfortunately.

[an onyme]

Neat, we might be at similar levels of Mandarin! I would be interested to see how the material of the DeFrancis series compares with what you cover in your two semesters. There are only 400 characters between the 48 lessons of Beginning Chinese Reader, so you may not need to learn any new ones (I only had to add 縣 and 孫).

[rpg]

Neat, we might be at similar levels of Mandarin! I would be interested to see how the material of the DeFrancis series compares with what you cover in your two semesters. There are only 400 characters between the 48 lessons of Beginning Chinese Reader, so you may not need to learn any new ones (I only had to add 縣 and 孫).

Nice! I suspect it'll be more than just two for me; after the second semester we'll have learned a bit over 600 characters, but I'd be surprised if the two correspond that closely. The class uses simplified, so I'll be learning to read all the traditional ones anyway.

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My SO is on vacation for the next week, so I'm on my own. It's quiet around here...

I just broke my phone screen today. Really annoying. I depend on my phone for all kinds of stuff (Skritter, for one, as well as tons of two-factor auth) so I'm gonna need to figure out something here while I send it off for repair.

I ordered a fountain pen, to try to make the character writing I do more fun and less of a chore. It arrives tomorrow. Ho hum...

I was thinking today about my long-term language learning aspirations. I've got Spanish right now, with short-term plans for Mandarin and French. I want to learn the two other big romance languages (sorry Romanian!), Italian and Portuguese-- Italian because of Italian culture (opera, movies, books); Portuguese mostly just because it's gotta be one of the easiest languages for me to learn (due to Spanish similtarity) that also has over 100m speakers.

Moving to the Germanic family, I definitely want to learn German, which has some of my favorite literature for sure. I'm not sure I'll ever get around to the rest of the family, though, even though I know a lot of Germanic languages are popular with learners.

I do want to learn at least one Slavic language, which will probably mean Russian as it's the obvious choice. The other languages in this family hold some appeal to me but I'm not sure I'll ever get to them.

Then we have the East Asian languages... I already covered Mandarin, but I think Japanese and Korean are two obvious contenders. Japanese in particular has a lot of cultural appeal. The difficulty of the CJK languages has scared me off before from including them in my language-learning plans, but now that I'm learning Mandarin, I can see kanji being less intimidating. But Korean manages to make it to the hardest FSI category without a complicated script, so maybe learning hanzi wouldn't really shave off that much time for Japanese... regardless, I'm growing my comfortable with the idea of adding Japanese at some point, but the jury's still out on Korean.

That's already eight languages (!). There aren't a lot of people out there with a good command of eight foreign languages, so even this list, which feels minimal, is probably nigh unattainable. I'm still young, though, so maybe eventually... In the meantime, I better get back to my Chinese homework!

[an onyme]

Sorry to hear about your phone! Hope it gets back to you quick.

But Korean manages to make it to the hardest FSI category without a complicated script, so maybe learning hanzi wouldn't really shave off that much time for Japanese... regardless, I'm growing my comfortable with the idea of adding Japanese at some point, but the jury's still out on Korean.

I can say that as someone who started with Korean and then started Mandarin later, the Hanja I studied while doing Korean is really helping me hoover up these Mandarin words and characters into my brain. Unfortunately, Koreans don't write in Hanja much anymore, but nearly all the technical vocabulary is either transcribed English or two-Hanja words just like in Mandarin, often exactly the same. Even some of the less technical and more grammatical words are unexpectedly from Mandarin, like nearly all counting words such as 개|個 for thing, 명|名 for person, 장|張 for sheet, 번|番 for time something is done. The concept of counting words is the same, which made learning that in Mandarin easy for me. As for the grammar, if you are doing Japanese anyway then Korean grammar will seem like a copy-paste. The listening comprehension will be from scratch, though. Personally I never understood why it's such a challenge for English speakers. If you know what the particles and grammatical words are, carving up a stream of speech into nouns and verb/adjectives is super easy, barely an inconvenience.

It will still be a lot of work, but doing Korean after Japanese and Mandarin will be less work than Japanese after Mandarin which might be less work than doing Mandarin from scratch. Whether or not it's worth it is up to you.

That's already eight languages (!). There aren't a lot of people out there with a good command of eight foreign languages, so even this list, which feels minimal, is probably nigh unattainable. I'm still young, though, so maybe eventually... In the meantime, I better get back to my Chinese homework!

Your thought process is very similar to mine, the list in my head includes all of these except Italian. Then I think that hey, I should add Persian in there for the literature, culture, and mutual intelligibility with Dari and Tajik. Definitely at least one, why not two of Arabic/Hebrew/Amharic. Definitely ASL. That gets me to 11 languages and doesn't even leave room for any language from the Indo-Aryan branch, the perfect language of the original humans that has lasted unchanged forever (Tamil), Swahili, any one of Kikongo or Lingala, Wolof, any West Slavic language, SMBC, any one of the Scandinavian languages, Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Navajo, Guarani...

Good luck on that long journey though! At least you're knocking out one of the hardest ones now with Mandarin.

[rpg]

Your thought process is very similar to mine, the list in my head includes all of these except Italian. Then I think that hey, I should add Persian in there for the literature, culture, and mutual intelligibility with Dari and Tajik. Definitely at least one, why not two of Arabic/Hebrew/Amharic. Definitely ASL. That gets me to 11 languages and doesn't even leave room for any language from the Indo-Aryan branch, the perfect language of the original humans that has lasted unchanged forever (Tamil), Swahili, any one of Kikongo or Lingala, Wolof, any West Slavic language, SMBC, any one of the Scandinavian languages, Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Navajo, Guarani...

Good luck on that long journey though! At least you're knocking out one of the hardest ones now with Mandarin.

Well, I wouldn't say that I'm knocking it out--really it's knocking me out It's a tough world out there for us language lovers! A whole lifetime isn't enough to even scratch the surface of the world's languages. But I suppose the complexity and diversity is also part of what makes them so fascinating.

I do feel bad for not having any African languages on my "wish list". I think one problem is that I don't know of a large body of cultural output that is both in a native African language and also is appealing to me. I've actually got some interest in African lit and have read a few African novels this year, but the most well-known stuff is mostly written in colonial languages (particularly English and French).

Talking about my 8 language wishlist does feel a little fanciful--a bit of putting the cart before the horse. I'm hoping that it can provide me some motivation, though: if I want to learn a bunch of foreign languages, I really have to buckle down 加油, as they say.

And that motivation is something I really need right now as I'm beginning to burn out. If anyone is tempted to try something similar (intensive language course while also working full-time), all I can say is I hope you have a lot of energy.

[rpg]

Only one more week of Mandarin class! I don't have a ton to update here but it's been a few weeks so I feel like I should say something. As much as I love language learning I'm looking forward to the end; the workload continues being pretty intense on top of my job.

The main question now is: what next? I could try taking the fall semester class. There are a few caveats to that though: 1) it's 1h/day M-F at 9am at a 40m commute away (the classes I've been doing so far have been 9-12am M-Th), so I'd spend as much time commuting as I would actually in class (though I use the commute time for Skritter). I'm not a morning person so I'm reluctant to commit to this schedule every day and at only 1h/d of class it's munch worse being late than it is now (I'm frequently late at the moment). 2) There are no slots open in the course at the moment so I don't know if I can even take it; it will depend on if the department expands the course and on how students get shifted around between the levels (people who registered for the wrong class for their level). 3) It's expensive, as the summer ones were.

I'd like to ideally have the equivalent of two years of college Mandarin by next summer because I've been really thinking about trying to do a summer program for Chinese, like Princeton in Beijing, IUP, ACC, or whatever. Some of these like Princeton in Beijing you can still do with one year, but I presume I'd get more out of it coming in at a higher level. But I don't think there's necessarily anything stopping me from learning on my own over the next year either.

Another update, and wrinkle, is that my SO and I have made plans to go to Paris next year that are now pretty definite. We'll be going in late January until the summer, and during that time I'm planning on studying French. The thing, then, is that I need to spend the rest of the year focusing on French in preparation for this, in addition to the time I spend maintaining/improving Mandarin. I think I want my French to be at least A2, ideally closer to B1, before we go. At let's say 20-25 weeks of study while there, maybe 20-25 hours/week of instruction, that gives me 400-625 hours of instruction. That's looks like around the time to go from B1 to C1, or from like A1-ish to B2. Looking at how much time I have before we go I'll need to spend maybe 1+ hours a day to hit A2 and maybe 2+ for B1. So I don't know...

One final aspect is that when we go I'll need to quit my job. I could consider quitting earlier so I could spend some time focusing on the language before the trip; this is a little more appealing to me since I think my SO will also be depending on my language skills a bit (though it's Paris so I don't think English will cause a lot of problems). I'm not super attached to my job right now anyway, but on the flipside it's paying well and I think staying there is good for my resume.

[rpg]

Well, I finished my Mandarin summer courses! I got an A for both semesters, so that's nice. I've been putting my life back together the last ~week and a half now that I no longer have 40h/week of Mandarin on top of my job... my Skritter queue has already grown to over 1200 reviews due (!), so my immediate goal is to get that back down to 0 over the next couple weeks, and to learn the lesson 20 vocab from Integrated Chinese (pretty minimal).

What's next? I think I've ruled out taking the next semester pretty definitively, so I'll be continuing on my own. I haven't fixed a single study plan... I have the DeFrancis books (textbooks and the readers), and I just ordered David and Helen in China. I've been poking around a little bit with different apps for input now that I'm past the total beginner stage. Du Chinese seems pretty nice, so I'm thinking about subscribing. ChinesePod has way too much English, at least at the low levels, so I don't think it's what I want at all.

I did my first Spanish activity in months last night, watching S2E11 of El Ministerio del Tiempo. Relieved to discover I still understand Spanish... I wrote down a ton of vocab that I didn't know, though. Some highlights include:

• agobiar(se) (be) overwhelmed,
• las patillas sideburns,
• jiñar (ES) to shit (coarse but seems like the most accurate translation),
• liarla parda (ES) which seems to be either to screw things up or to get screwed up (in the partying sense),
• tarado crazy,
• el garabato scrawl,
• el atajo shortcut,
• el paripé a show or farce,
• cutre stingy (tacaño),
• pitorrearse (ES) tease or make fun of

and a bunch more more. It's actually a little depressing thinking about how much Spanish vocab I don't know, and I don't have a good method for really learning this more "advanced" stuff that doesn't get naturally reinforced as much. Se puede decir que me estoy agobiando por todo el vocabulario!

I'll be restarting French in Action in the coming weeks! And I've removed Italian from the log title since I don't anticipate doing any work there any time soon.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Well, I finished my Mandarin summer courses! I got an A for both semesters, so that's nice. I've been putting my life back together the last ~week and a half now that I no longer have 40h/week of Mandarin on top of my job...

My hat is off to you. 40 hours of Mandarin on top of a job is something I could never do.

[Querneus]

tarado crazy

Is that what that word really meant in context? I only know this word with the meaning "fool" (noun) or "stupid" (adjective), but I see the DRAE says it also means "someone with a physical of mental defect, typically of a hereditary kind", which doesn't tell me much anyway.

[rpg]

tarado crazy

Is that what that word really meant in context? I only know this word with the meaning "fool" (noun) or "stupid" (adjective), but I see the DRAE says it also means "someone with a physical of mental defect, typically of a hereditary kind", which doesn't tell me much anyway.

You may be right! I'm not really sure, I would definitely trust a native speaker much more . I got the "crazy" meaning from wordreference. The DRAE includes "alocado" as one definition which seem to mean crazy. In context I think something like "stupid" could also work, the gist of the sentence was something like "My family will think I'm tarado" where the speaker is a conspiracy-theorist person. It's within the first couple minutes of the episode (S2E12) if you're curious.

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I'm slowly starting back up with French. I've rewatched the FiA videos for lessons 2 - 6 and am starting up lesson 6. Still find it remarkable every time I revisit FiA how comprehensive it is. Really not much else like it.

As for Mandarin, I'm a little worried about not backsliding after my intensive summer. I need to spend some time studying hanzi, for example, but I've not been prioritizing it so far at all. I'm hoping that after David and Helen arrives I'll be motivated to get back into it...

On Spanish, I haven't done much the last week, but I'm planning on starting doing some reading again soon. I need to finally get through Corazón tan blanco...