I fail words -- devilyoudont's Japanese & Esperanto log

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Re: I fail words -- devilyoudont's ja/es/eo log

Postby SGP » Sat Jan 05, 2019 10:17 am

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Re: I fail words -- devilyoudont's ja/es/eo log

Postby devilyoudont » Sun Jan 06, 2019 2:58 pm

Japanese:
Extensive Reading:
Books
--1 story from 宇宙人のしゅくだい

Listening:
Podcasts (1 hr 48 min)
--NHKラジオニュース
--メリケン!サックリドラマ!
--エッチな女子会

Gaming
Nintendo Switch:
--Let's Go Pikachu

Android mobile:
--Dragalia Lost

SRS:
--Made 50 kanji etymology cards
--Reviewed a total of 503 cards.

Esperanto:

Watching:
Youtube
--Evildea

Listening:
Podcasts (1hr 25 min)
--Kern Punkto
--Pola Retradio en Esperanto

Speaking:
Recorded for Common Voice

Writing:
Chatting

Spanish:
Extensive Reading:
Random pages of random webcomics looking for one I like at faneo.es

FSI Basic Spanish:
--Completed unit 1

Listening:
Podcasts (2hr 2min)
--Spanishpodcast.net
--Españolistos
--Duolingo Spanish Podcast
--Cuentos para irse a dormir

Gaming
Nintendo Switch:
Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Struggles:
--FSI drills are so far not as terrible as worried, but are still dreadfully boring. So far, trying to keep in mind their philosophy of over learning is keeping me engaged, but hopefully a force of habit will kick in soon.
--I finished FSI slightly faster than anticipated, and wound up not doing anything in Spanish on Saturday. I had some tentative plan of finishing the first season of La casa de las flores, but Julian is bumming me out man. Wound up doing nothing.
--I only made it thru about 2/3rds of my kanji in context cards. I'm hoping this will get better as time goes on. Part of the problem is that these kanji for first graders are used in SO MANY common words. But I know that it's going to thin dramatically. Kanji like 中 and 気 might be in a million common words, but I know that more or less the Japanese education system front loads more common kanji, and easier to draw kanji. So as I progress thru higher grades, there should gradually be less and less words for a given kanji (within the top 2k most common words).

Successes:
--I have now made kanji cards for all of the kanji for first graders, and all kanji that are used as a radical within those kanji.
--I learned a lot more from the first unit of the FSI course than expected. The first two units, of course, deal with pronunciation. For the past year, I have been listening to Spanish quite a lot, but there are still factors that I missed. On the other hand, without doing so much input, it's possible that some of the points made in this first unit of the course would not have felt salient to me. This, generally speaking, reinforces my own theory that learning from input, learning from SRS, learning from textbooks, learning linguistics information about a language, all form a virtuous cycle.
--I'm also feeling somewhat more hopeful that I can get thru this course. Unlike duolingo, even the most remedial level of FSI has useful information for me. With duolingo, I have a basic problem that the bottom of the tree is too easy, and I can't actually produce the stuff at the top of the tree, even if I can understand what it means. This makes trying to redo the course substantially more tedious than FSI (so far)
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Re: I fail words -- devilyoudont's ja/es/eo log

Postby SGP » Sun Jan 06, 2019 3:02 pm

There are hundreds (or thousands) of Spanish words that resemble their English counterparts very, very closely. Now I wonder to what extent you already took a look at this topic. Because it can be one of the most useful shortcuts. And yes, one couldn't over-simplify these matters either. Sometimes the Spanish counterpart would sound a bit unusual in some contexts, etc. But still... that whole matter is a very big advantage that natives of English have over natives of some other languages.
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Re: I fail words -- devilyoudont's ja/es/eo log

Postby devilyoudont » Sun Jan 06, 2019 3:46 pm

SGP wrote:There are hundreds (or thousands) of Spanish words that resemble their English counterparts very, very closely. Now I wonder to what extent you already took a look at this topic. Because it can be one of the most useful shortcuts. And yes, one couldn't over-simplify these matters either. Sometimes the Spanish counterpart would sound a bit unusual in some contexts, etc. But still... that whole matter is a very big advantage that natives of English have over natives of some other languages.


I'm aware of a course called Language Transfer which is based around this fact, and is supposed to be pretty good. I haven't tried it myself tho (mainly due to having trouble getting it to work in my podcast player and giving up). This fact is actually probably the only reason why I'm able to do any listening, watching, and reading in Spanish.
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Re: I fail words -- devilyoudont's ja/es/eo log

Postby SGP » Sun Jan 06, 2019 4:28 pm

devilyoudont wrote:I'm aware of a course called Language Transfer which is based around this fact, and is supposed to be pretty good. I haven't tried it myself tho (mainly due to having trouble getting it to work in my podcast player and giving up). This fact is actually probably the only reason why I'm able to do any listening, watching, and reading in Spanish.

As for the Language Transfer Courses, I have been using them sometimes, but for a different purpose than the one intended by their makers. I was listening only, and sometimes pausing for the purpose of thinking how to answer, without saying anything.

And as for LT ES in particular, yes, Mihalis colega does focus on the similarities between English and Spanish. But as for actively looking at very long lists of similar words etc., that method could be yet another tool. His courses aren't meant to provide you with "as many words as possible", and I understand where he is coming from as well. They are about some other topics, including, but not limited to, putting a foot into the door, then moving some more.
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Re: I fail words -- devilyoudont's ja/es/eo log

Postby Serpent » Mon Jan 07, 2019 2:39 am

Another great resource is "Spanish vocabulary: an etymological approach".
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Re: I fail words -- devilyoudont's ja/es/eo log

Postby devilyoudont » Sun Jan 13, 2019 4:06 pm

Japanese:

Extensive Reading:
Books
--1 story from 宇宙人のしゅくだい

Listening:
Podcasts (1 hr 36 min)
--NHKラジオニュース
--メリケン!サックリドラマ!

Gaming
Nintendo Switch
--Let's Go Pikachu

SRS:
Made: 50 cards
Reviewed: 420 cards

Esperanto:

Listening:
Podcasts
--Kern Punkto
--Pola Retradio en Esperanto

Writing:
--Status Updates on Amikumu
--Chatrooms @ telegramo.org

Spanish:

FSI Basic Spanish:
Completed Unit: 2

Extensive Reading:
Webcomics
--Caught up on updates
--Started reading: El Gran Pandemónium

Watching:
Netflix (in ES with ES subs)
--La casa de las flores (Completed)

Listening:
Podcasts
--SpanishPodcast.net
--Españolistos
--Duolingo Spanish Podcast
--Cuentos para irse a dormir

Gaming
Nintendo Switch
--The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Struggles:
--Lost a few of my nights this week (Esperanto and Spanish nights) because I got a flat tire, and then had to wait for roadside, and then had to go to multiple tire stores because I apparently need uncommon tires for my car. Of course, I still did listening practice while working on those days.
--My phone bricked, so I can't total up how much time I spent listening to podcasts in Esperanto or Spanish. Also I didn't get a chance to re-sync anki, so I can only account for anki reviews done on Sunday and Monday. I don't even have a ballpark idea of what I reviewed on Tuesday.
--The descriptions of how to make consonant sounds based on position in the mouth are kind of lost on me in FSI. However, listening to the Lollygagging Podcast this week, I successfully (to my ear) produced a retroflex S ([ʂ]) so I don't think I am totally hopeless. I think that I will be attempting to find more resources about correct articulation of sounds for both Japanese and Spanish.

Successes:
--Finally completed La casa de las flores. It's a great show. It was hard to make myself go on because my favorite character at the start, Julian, just messes up his entire life and is in a completely pathetic place by the end. Hoping he can improve himself in the next season and crawl out of this dark place. On the other hand, I really enjoyed the comeuppance Elena received, and wish that they had waited for the next season for her to start to see a light at the end of the tunnel. By the end, my favorite of the siblings was Paulina, perhaps mainly for her incredibly exaggerated speaking, but also just because of the amount of strength and growth I feel like she showed over the season.
--This week's story in 宇宙人のしゅくだい was also my favorite one so far. I kind of enjoy the stories where Komatsu Sakyo presents a sci-fi premise, but it turns out that it's a completely ordinary event and one of the characters just is perceiving it as more than what it is. I also enjoy when Komatsu uses the story as a vehicle to make some observations on the relationships between parents and children. It is particularly funny to me to imagine a second grader reading this story where the point of the story is that children will never appreciate the painful toil of raising a child. When my level is high enough, this is an author I would like to revisit, as I know he is mainly famous for his novels for adults in Japan.
--Moved the template for my log (which I also use as a draft over the week) to google drive, so that it's not possible to lose it based on the failure of 1 device.
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Re: I fail words -- devilyoudont's ja/es/eo log

Postby devilyoudont » Sun Jan 20, 2019 5:03 pm

Japanese:

Extensive Reading:
Books
--1 story from 宇宙人のしゅくだい

Listening:
Podcasts (1hr 19min)
--NHKラジオニュース
--メリケン!サックリドラマ!
--エッチな女子会
--News in Slow Japanese
--朗読男女~5分で聞けるオリジナル物語
--恋愛心理学♡知りたい!相手の気持ち

Gaming
Nintendo Switch
--Let's Go Pikachu

SRS:
Made: 50 cards
Reviewed: 528 cards

Esperanto:

Extensive Reading:
Read the preface of Beletra Almanako from IronMike!

Listening:
Podcasts(50 min)
--Pola Retradio en Esperanto

Writing:
Made a new Esperanto Twitter account

Spanish:

FSI Basic Spanish:
Completed Unit: 3

Listening:
Podcasts (1 hr 27 min)
--SpanishPodcast.net
--Españolistos
--Cuentos para irse a dormir

Gaming
Nintendo Switch
--The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Struggles:
--Missed nighttime Spanish study on Thursday due to life getting in the way. Still did listening during the day.
--FSI Unit 3 might need to be repeated. I don't have any kind of automaticness in producing correct gendered adjectives and articles in Spanish.

Successes:
--Four weeks in, I finally hit a kanji which I totally did not recognize. 麦. It turned out that I did know how to say this word (it's barley). But, this is the first kanji where I will actually be learning the form based on etymology. And so soon, I will be actually finding out if this is a viable way to learn how to write the kanji.
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Re: I fail words -- devilyoudont's ja/es/eo log

Postby devilyoudont » Sun Jan 27, 2019 4:16 pm

Japanese:

Listening:
Podcasts
--NHKラジオニュース
--メリケン!サックリドラマ!
--News in Slow Japanese
--恋愛心理学♡知りたい!相手の気持ち

Gaming
--Let's Go Pikachu

SRS:
Made: 50 cards
Reviewed: 252 cards

Esperanto:

Listening:
Podcasts
--Pola Retradio en Esperanto

Spanish:
Podcasts
--SpanishPodcast.net
--Españolistos
--Cuentos para irse a dormir

Struggles:
--I'm struggling with depression fairly severely again. I feel like every week this month, some bombshell has dropped on me. At some point, my body's automatic response to any stress kicks in and I just become severely depressed. By like day 2 of this week I was already operating on a "just do the minimum and maintain the habit" mindset. On the one hand, this mindset ensured that I did some quantity of studying 6 out of 7 days this week. On Saturday, I had run out of easy material and so wasn't able to really do anything. I opened up FSI, but got nowhere with it. Clearly, Krashen's filter was in place and I was just not in a mindset to learn anything.

A potential solution to this is picking out a new Spanish TV series to get into. I hope to have one picked out before Thursday (my Spanish days are Thurs, Fri, and Sat).

--Previously the tech's at my phone company attempted to repair my phone. This repair didn't hold out, so the phone had to be replaced. I can at least say exactly what I listened to, but I did not get around to totaling up times before the old phone died.

Successes:
--I haven't given up.
--Last time I felt this severely depressed I did not have any pets. Having pets forces you to have some semblance of structure in your life for their sake. And once you are already up and walking the dog, why not study some Japanese and do some laundry. They have been a huge help.
--Really enjoying the current quiz-show topic on Españolistos: How stupid are you about Latin America? (I'm pretty dumb apparently :lol: )
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Re: I fail words -- devilyoudont's ja/es/eo log

Postby Cèid Donn » Sun Jan 27, 2019 10:02 pm

Kudos to you for hanging in there. I'm no stranger to depression either. Even if you don't feel like what you're doing study-wise is productive, just making that effort to maintain the habit of studying and exposing yourself to your TL regularly helps you, your brain's health and your overall mental state and mood. Don't worry too much about progressing forward--if all you can manage on a particular day is some no-pressure general exposure and reiteration/repetition of material you already know pretty well, it's still constructive learning because in the very least, you're not letting your knowledge of your TL completely atrophy. From the perspective of brain health alone, not letting more recently acquired knowledge and skills atrophy during a depressive period might even been more important than learning new things, given what we understand so far about depression's impact on memory and intellectual performance. Treading water is always better than sinking, right? ;)

And I agree, pets definitely help. I don't know what I'd do without mine. I only wish they knew how much I depend on them. :)
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