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

[devilyoudont]

I did less than usual, but I also did a poor job logging what I did this week.

Japanese Log:

Reading:
NHK Easy
--滋賀県で毒を持つセアカゴケグモが３００匹見つかる

Watching:
Youtube (In English)
Japanese Phonetics episode 17

Listening:
Podcasts
--Forgot to log. Probably listened to around two to three hours of the usual suspects.
Music (1hr)

SRS:
Made 8 cards.
Reviewed 92 cards.

Struggles:
-Just have a lot going on right now that's preventing me from putting as much time into languages as I would like. Trying to do volunteering, a lot of stuff going on with family, and the everpresent danger of work taking over my entire life. Maybe not surprisingly, I'm also trying to deal with a lack of energy.

Successes:
-Still having a blast listening to the Matsumoto Ronica folklore podcast. I think this has probably added more to giongo and gitago vocabulary than anything else I've done lol. I've almost finished with the archive, and it doesn't seem like they are updating with new material any longer, so I'm kind of torn between wanting to relisten again, or move on to the podcast brilliantyears previously recommended. I think I might move on, but then return again in a year or a little more. Some of the episodes are duplicated in the archive I've been going thru, so I have already listened to some of them twice. It will probably be a couple weeks before I've listened to them all.

[devilyoudont]

Spanish Log:

Reading:
mundo primaria
--Started reading La leyenda del maíz

Listening:
Music (probably around 2 hours)
Podcasts (3hr 30min)
--Duolingo Spanish
--Cienciaes.com
--LingQ

SRS:
Made 12 cards.
Reviewed 156 cards.

Struggles:
--Again my evenings were pretty busy, so I mostly just was able to do the listening component while at work.

Successes:
--Understood a full phrase in Rioplatenese Spanish that was not ¿Cómo estás? (Ok it was the answer to Cómo estás lol). Paraphrasing, it was that when the speaker's friend feels bad, he also feels bad.
--Also started being able to pick out a discourse marker, understood the literal meaning of it, but still understood that it was being used as a discourse marker in Rioplatenese Spanish. The word in question was "entendés" which is the voseo 2nd person form of entender (to understand). Very glad I was able to pick this up because I have never looked at how voseo conjugations are formed! My educated guess is that this is equivalent to when we say "you know" all the time in English.
--I had a randomly high amount of comprehension for one of the Cienciaes.com episodes this week. In some ways, it's easier to understand things about science, because all the words come out of the same latin roots. It was a nice little confidence boost.
--Coming to the end of the LingQ podcast just as I start to make some breakthrus with Rioplatenese spanish, which is what the majority of the later episodes have been in lol. I'm wondering which podcast I will pick up next. Most likely go with one of Jaleel's suggestions from his log.

Esperanto:

Reading: (13 pages)
Ĉe l'akvo de forgeso (from Virino ĉe la landlimo)

Listening: (23min)
Podcasts:
--Pola Retradio en Esperanto

Struggles:
--I wasn't able to hang out and chat with any of my friends online this week due to being so busy

Successes:
--Finally getting back into doing some listening in Esperanto
--I am not a person who really understands poetry in my native language, but was able to understand this short play written in verse fairly well.

[Jaleel10]

--Understood a full phrase in Rioplatenese Spanish that was not ¿Cómo estás? (Ok it was the answer to Cómo estás lol). Paraphrasing, it was that when the speaker's friend feels bad, he also feels bad.
--Also started being able to pick out a discourse marker, understood the literal meaning of it, but still understood that it was being used as a discourse marker in Rioplatenese Spanish. The word in question was "entendés" which is the voseo 2nd person form of entender (to understand). Very glad I was able to pick this up because I have never looked at how voseo conjugations are formed! My educated guess is that this is equivalent to when we say "you know" all the time in English.
--I had a randomly high amount of comprehension for one of the Cienciaes.com episodes this week. In some ways, it's easier to understand things about science, because all the words come out of the same latin roots. It was a nice little confidence boost.

Well done. Understanding something while listening is very rewarding. It kinda feels like you are developing a superpower, right? You can see glimpses of your strength but you know you need to put in a lot of work to be able to get to a high level.... yeah, I am a nerd, leave me be haha.

Have you noticed they say "viste" a lot? It's kinda like "you understand?", "you see?" kinda like entendés. My Argentinian friend said that it is very common.

Buen día, Mariano.

¿Cómo estás? Yo bien, ¿vos?

Mira, estoy un poco resfriado.

La verdad que… los cambios climáticos de los últimos días me tienen… me tienen bastante mal, ¿viste? Hace una semana estábamos con… cinco grados, ocho grados, y hoy estamos teniendo veintiocho, veintinueve grados, o sea, y estamos a veinte de Mayo, ¿viste? No me tienen bien estos cambios, me…me traen alergia y bueno, estuve en cama unos días, con un poco de fiebre.

El voseo (from Argentina and Uruguay) conjugation is super easy.... if you are familiar with vosotros conjugation lol. For the present tense you simply remove the i from the ar and er verbs, ir verbs remain the same.

Habláis - Hablás
Coméis - Comés
Vivís - Vivís
Sois - Sos
Estáis - estás

Haber stays has though, in tú and voseo. It's the only exception.

For the Command tense. Take the infinitive, remove the r and stress the final syllable.

Vivir - Viví
Andar - Andá
Comer - Comé

No exceptions!

That's pretty much it. Argentinian el voseo only has two forms - in the present and the command. The rest of the tenses follow the tú form.

--Coming to the end of the LingQ podcast just as I start to make some breakthrus with Rioplatenese spanish, which is what the majority of the later episodes have been in lol. I'm wondering which podcast I will pick up next. Most likely go with one of Jaleel's suggestions from his log.

Most of the podcasts I recommended are not as conversational as the Lingq podcasts but I definitely recommend SpanishPodcast. net. A nice mix of Spanish culture and history, conversation and storytelling.


Good luck with your studies!

[devilyoudont]

Jaleel, thanks for the advice I will probably look into that podcast tomorrow <3

Japanese Log:

Watching:
Netflix (In Japanese)
-伊藤君AtoE episode 7
Youtube (In English)
Japanese Phonetics episode 18 + 20

Listening:
Podcasts
--News in Slow Japanese
--十分で聞けるオリジナル物語
--エッチな女子会
--朗読と歌
Music (2ish hrs)

SRS:
Reviewed 117 cards.

Struggles:
--I just wasn't feeling well on Sunday, and so did not do much of anything.
--Last week of the month, so overtime is taking over any and all of my free time in the evenings again. The struggle is real.

Successes:
--I'm finally hitting the section on japanese verb conjugations and pitch accent in the Japanese Phonetics series. In terms of words that do not conjugate, I feel things are largely a case of needing to memorize the pitch accent, and learning to hear certain pitch patterns. But words that conjugate are a particular struggle, as clearly they don't always follow the same pitch accent pattern of the dictionary form of the word (even my totally useless ears can hear that)
--Recognized a word 針仕事 in my extensive listening that I learned from intensive reading!
--エッチな女子会 covers topics that I do not really have any vocabulary of in Japanese (or Spanish and Esperanto for that matter) and this week was probably the first time I followed the majority of the discussion

[devilyoudont]

I started looking at some stuff by Paul Nation and Alexander Arguelles based on some posts made by reineke. So, what they said has made me want to give extensive reading a shot, particularly for Japanese, and especially because the words I generate flashcards from while doing intensive reading largely have not been super useful to me. In a video for a polyglot conference, Arguelles explained that the goal should be picking a text where 1 in 50 words is unknown. I realized that these texts do exist for me in Japanese, but I tend to avoid them, having previously believed they would not be helpful for me. So, for example, many articles posted on NHK News Easy are 98% comprehensible to me, but I previously avoided those articles, in order to select articles that would yield previously unknown words, even if those words were things like "探査機" (space probe).

So, I ordered a book from aoitori bunko (kodansha's imprint for children). I don't have a strong idea of if this book will be much below or much above my level, but it's intended for Japanese 2nd graders (小学校2年生). It's called 宇宙人のしゅくだい. Being a little below my level is probably not a bad thing, as there's a high probability of an unknown word actually being known, and I just haven't successfully learned to read it's kanji yet. The book with have furigana of course. And if it's above my level, I can always get a graded reader after this. I just want to try to avoid that if possible, as Japanese graded readers are really expensive, and importing from Japan already made this seven hundred yen book cost close to thirty dollars. Maybe at some point I need to take a trip to NYC and load up on books at Kinokuniya.

In the meantime, I decided not to do my Japanese flashcards that I had been generating from intensive reading for the time being. I didn't delete the deck or anything, but I am just gonna take a break from it for right now. I also got a frequency list anki deck that notes pitch accent. Obviously, I'm not gonna learn pitch accent from extensive reading, and I'm still not very good at hearing certain patterns. I plan to just do 10 new cards for the three days a week I do Japanese so that it doesn't get out of control, even tho I'm obviously gonna know tons of the early words in the deck.

Spanish Log:

Listening:
Podcasts (5hr 41min)
--Spanishpodcast.net
--Cienciaes.com
--LingQ

Struggles:
--I basically lived at my job, so I didn't do anything but listening.

Successes:
--Holy crap I listened to a lot
--Finished the LingQ Spanish Podcast!!
--Spanishpodcast.net is incredibly wonderful. The guy talks really clearly and slowly, but it's also 100% in Spanish. A lot of episodes are about explaining idioms, which is really great because he explains the literal meaning word by word and then explains the idiomatic meaning and then gives usage examples.

Esperanto:

Reading: (16 pages)
Vaka seĝo (from Virino ĉe la landlimo)

Listening: (39min)
Podcasts:
--Aminda Radio Esperanto
--Kern Punkto

Struggles:
--I didn't chat with any friends again. I feel guilty about it, so I somewhat started avoiding people because I feel bad that I'm never around. Gotta get over it and just start talking to people again
-There was one word in Vaka seĝo which I was not able to deduce from context. Kajero... all I was able to understand was that it was an object that you can hold in your hand that everyone in schools seems to have in large quantity. I couldn't resist, and looked it up. Turns out it's a notebook or a workbook.

Successes:
--So, based on it's first page, I had a comprehension rate of 97.3% for Vaka seĝo. Not bad. Indeed, I did not have to use a dictionary to understand the main points of the story, and there were words I didn't know which I was able to deduce from context.

[devilyoudont]

Japanese Log:

Reading:
NHK NEWS WEB EASY
--スポーツのアジア大会が終わる　日本は７５個の金メダル
--千葉県の棚田で東京などから来た人たちが稲を刈る
--日本が研究と開発に使ったお金が２年続けて少なくなる
-- ブラジル　火事で国の博物館が焼ける
--文部科学省「教科書を学校に置いて帰ってもいい」

Watching:
Netflix (In Japanese):
--詩季織々(around 1 hour and ten minutes)
Youtube (In English)
--Japanese Phonetics episode 21

Listening:
Music (about two hours)
Podcasts (1 hr 45 min)
--News in Slow Japanese
--エッチな女子会
--朗読と歌

Writing:
Posted a 9 sentence essay on a few sites where you can get your writing corrected.

SRS:
Reviewed 96 cards.

Struggles:
--There was a Japanese speaking family at the dog park this week, but I was too nervous to introduce myself.
--The book I ordered for extensive reading did not arrive until Wednesday morning, by which time I already started my Spanish study. It turns out I accidentally ordered 2 copies. I know exactly how I did this because I've done it before I was on the website to order, I put the item in my cart, I was prompted to make an account, I made the account, I returned to the item page, put the item in my cart, and then checked out. So now I have an extra copy of this that I don't know what to do with On the bright side, it's not so desperately important to go to Kinokuniya New York if importing a book is gonna be roughly half of what this cost me.

Successes:
--Everything I read this week I read extensively, and I don't feel like I missed out.

[devilyoudont]

Spanish Log:

Intensive Reading:
mundo primaria
--Finished reading La leyenda del maíz

Listening:
Podcasts (3hr 36min)
--SpanishPodcast.net
--Cienciaes.com

SRS:
Made 32 cards.
Reviewed 144 cards.

Struggles:
--I just ran out of steam on Friday night.

Successes:
--I really can't believe how great SpanishPodcast.net is. I also can't believe how much I am able to understand even at my low level. I might actually shell out for some his audiobooks at some point.

Esperanto:

I didn't do any concentrated study for Esperanto this week. Just some chatting with some friends, and not even very much of that.

I've decided to change things around somewhat. This week, and possibly going forward, I'm gonna switch the order that I study languages. I'll still do Japanese Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. But I'll do Esperanto on Wednesday, and Spanish on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I'm often able to do more "fun stuff" with Japanese, since Japanese has a weekend day, and I'd like to give Spanish some of that benefit as well. This will also create some more time for me to listen to Esperanto. I do practically all my listening practice at work. On the weekends I rather listen to music!! And there's only so many times a person can go thru the Esperanto Spotify Playlist.

[devilyoudont]

Japanese Log:

Extensive Reading:
--宇宙人のしゅくだい (to page 18)

Watching:
Netflix (In Japanese with Japanese Subs)
--伊藤君AtoE Episode 7 (around 23 min)
Youtube (In English)
--Dougen's Japanese Phonetics course, episode 22 + 23

Listening:
Music
Podcasts (3hr 6 min)
--朗読男女
--エッチな女子会
--朗読と歌
--マイドリーム大作戦

Gaming
--Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp

SRS:
Reviewed 164 cards.

Struggles:
--Based on page 1 my comprehension of 宇宙人のしゅくだい is only 93%
-- The book is actually a collection of Sci-fi short stories all by the same author. I had been hoping for a continuous text, but I bought based on title and suggested age group only. Beggers can't be choosers.
--For the second story in the book, I had to look up 1 word こいのぼり. This means a koi-windsock. The second story entirely hinged on this word, but I wasn't able to guess what it was.

Successes:
--There were several words I did successfully learn from context. This is one of those children books that intends to introduce new vocabulary to the reader, and defines the word a sentence or two after the word is introduced. This is something that always used to annoy me when reading books in English as a child, but wow is it invaluable for me right now!
--Finally finished the Matsumoto Ronika podcast. It will be fun to revisit it in maybe a year!
--I found an android game that I'm actually having fun with in Japanese. I'm not very familiar with the Animal crossing games, and the characters unfortunately speak in kind of an affected way. But this is definitely a fun way to learn words for a lot of random every day items, from fruit to fish to furniture to insects.
--Finally started the podcast which @brilliantyears recommended!

Esperanto:

Reading: (9 pages)
2060 from Virino ĉe la landlimo

Listening: (1 hr)
Podcasts:
Pola Retradio en Esperanto

Struggles:
--Still struggling to make time for friends in Esperanto. There's a lot going on at my job, which is interfering with my free time.
--These plays seem to be getting shorter and shorter. I might have to reevaluate reading just 1 play a week.

Successes:
--I really haven't enjoyed the last couple of plays. This is a success for me because it means I'm understanding enough that just understanding it isn't enough to entertain me. I often find myself annoyed by the author's word choice, or thinking the basic premise was dumb.

[devilyoudont]

Spanish Log:

Intensive Reading:
@guia infantil
--El murciélago

Listening:
Podcasts (2hr 34min)
--SpanishPodcast.net
--SER Historia
--Cienciaes.com

Gaming:
--Animal Crossing Pocket Camp

SRS:
--Reviewed 69 cards.

Struggles:
--So I fell into a bit of a depression. This happens to me, sometimes for unexplained reasons. This made Spanish study pretty difficult this week. But I am hoping I am on the other side now.
--I never got around to making flashcards for the story I read. Oops. Hopefully I won't forget during my next Spanish period.

Successes:
--I at least did something every day. And I think I kept my listening at a good level, despite moving stuff around and feeling depressed.

[sillygoose1]

I hope you feel better. The same thing happens to me frequently and it makes things difficult but it's good you still got some study time in!