zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

[zenmonkey]

And a picture of some of my finds and steals.

mmmm.... book porn.

Yep! By the way - the brown leather bound volumes in the middle were bound by my grandmother and the Ariele books (the boy with the cap) (ארעלע), a Yiddish primer were written by my aunt.

You have an interesting family background language-wise. Spanish, Yiddish, any other language in your family (apart from English of course)?

Yiddish on my father's side - he also speaks English, French, Spanish (N) and dabbled in Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese (they lived in Shanghai for 4 years). His mother spoke Polish but refused to allow it to be spoken in her house in Mexico, ironically her neighbourhood was called Polanco.

On my mother's side she spoke Spanish, English and French (usually in the same sentence...) French was my parents private language for a little while. Maybe a little Zapotec but that's lost to history.

[Brun Ugle]

My youngest daughter was singing in English today - she's in a chorus and these are songs they've memorised without really learning the meaning of a lot of words. This brute memorisation is interesting since it is only learning the sounds, which she has down perfect without meaning.

I will say for some people memorizing things like songs is just easy. I know it's significantly easier for me to memorize a sung piece of music than a piece for flute or guitar. I don't speak Latin at all but I still have much of one of the harder pieces my choir sung, which just so happens to be in Latin, memorized. Did I know the meaning, more or less, of what I was singing? Yes, but I couldn't string words in Latin together to form a sentence.

When I was in the marching band in high school, we had to memorize all our music. Now I see all these other bands that march with their music attached to their instruments, scuffling along, bells of their instruments down, staring at the sheetmusic, and it looks so sloppy. Our director was very strict, but we were good, and we looked much better and marched much better because we weren't looking at the sheetmusic. I'm sure all that effort was good for us too.

[zenmonkey]

My youngest daughter was singing in English today - she's in a chorus and these are songs they've memorised without really learning the meaning of a lot of words. This brute memorisation is interesting since it is only learning the sounds, which she has down perfect without meaning.

I will say for some people memorizing things like songs is just easy. I know it's significantly easier for me to memorize a sung piece of music than a piece for flute or guitar. I don't speak Latin at all but I still have much of one of the harder pieces my choir sung, which just so happens to be in Latin, memorized. Did I know the meaning, more or less, of what I was singing? Yes, but I couldn't string words in Latin together to form a sentence.

When I was in the marching band in high school, we had to memorize all our music. Now I see all these other bands that march with their music attached to their instruments, scuffling along, bells of their instruments down, staring at the sheetmusic, and it looks so sloppy. Our director was very strict, but we were good, and we looked much better and marched much better because we weren't looking at the sheetmusic. I'm sure all that effort was good for us too.

I like organised sloppy, like Stanford band, that looks like a zoo but is actually excellent musicians breaking the mold on purpose - you'll never see sheetmusic there.

[aokoye]

My youngest daughter was singing in English today - she's in a chorus and these are songs they've memorised without really learning the meaning of a lot of words. This brute memorisation is interesting since it is only learning the sounds, which she has down perfect without meaning.

I will say for some people memorizing things like songs is just easy. I know it's significantly easier for me to memorize a sung piece of music than a piece for flute or guitar. I don't speak Latin at all but I still have much of one of the harder pieces my choir sung, which just so happens to be in Latin, memorized. Did I know the meaning, more or less, of what I was singing? Yes, but I couldn't string words in Latin together to form a sentence.

When I was in the marching band in high school, we had to memorize all our music. Now I see all these other bands that march with their music attached to their instruments, scuffling along, bells of their instruments down, staring at the sheetmusic, and it looks so sloppy. Our director was very strict, but we were good, and we looked much better and marched much better because we weren't looking at the sheetmusic. I'm sure all that effort was good for us too.

I remember the same thing in middle and high school. For field show competitions everyone had their music memorized, but in parades there would be so many marching bands playing with music. Given my how much resentment I had for even being there (I hated marching and still don't like parades in general) I was less than pleased to see bands who hadn't memorized their music and/or who were essentially just walking.

[zenmonkey]

In France today, I've basically a day of language studying to myself. This morning I went 'chez le boulanger' and when he recognized me we ended up speaking in German. I asked him how many languages he spoke and he's a solid FR/DE/IT and Arabic speaker. So now my daughter has been instructed to speak Italian/German with him.
Off to study.

[zenmonkey]

Father's day is themed 'Romance languages' .... Luisa Maita new album (PT - thanks iguanamon for the intro), 1001 phrases pour bien parler portugais, and a few films with Italian and Catalan dubbing.

I'm spending a lazy Sunday studying just getting some sounds back into my brain. I do have some Hebrew and German I need to actually study later tonight.

[zenmonkey]

Based on the discussion on Anki & Assimil - I've build my own deck for Portuguese - I probably should post over in the original thread: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =19&t=5965

But I want to note some things here. I wasted hours, HOURS, yesterday trying to create the exact files names I wanted using the mac console... I got pretty close ... (skip down to the BOLD if technical stuff makes your eyes bleed).

---

Code: Select all

info = afinfo ASSIMIL_BPT_L001_S01* -i | grep title | cut -d '"' -f 2 |sed -e 's/.*-//‘;echo info; done > test1.txt

gives me the maps title which is the sentence in Portuguese for the file. Then than can be used with mv to create the correct file names and even extract the titles.

Code: Select all

for file in ASSIMIL_BPT_L*.mp3; info = afinfo ${file} -i | grep title | cut -d '"' -f 2 |sed -e 's/.*-//‘ ;do echo mv "$file" "ASSIMIL_BPT_${file#*/}${info}”; done >  test.txt

But I couldn't get it work - so at 3AM I gave up and used MP3TAG in in the Windows virtual machine to rename the files and then extract a CSV file. The resulting CSV file needed a little cleaning up.

The resulting fields where:

Code: Select all

Portuguese | English | Lesson | [sound:filename.mp3]
Bom dia. | Good Morning. | ASSIMIL Brazilian Portuguese - L001 | [sound:ASSIMIL Brazilian Portuguese - L001-S01-Bom dia..mp3]


And yes, I used google docs to translate each text (with something like =GoogleTranslate(A1;"pt";"en")).

---

Easy.

Well, the real reason I am writing this here is that not only did I waste a huge amount of learning time creating a deck (and only the size of the deck makes this effort worthwhile - all the sentences to 100 lessons) but I also learned something about the quality of my prior decks and efforts with sound files.

I need to make sure I have three cards:
Passive wave: where I need to show I know the meaning:

• a "L2" card which has the target text and the voice
• a "sound" only card where I only listen to the sentence (no text)

Active wave: where I need to produce the target language

• a "L1" card which has the target text and the voice as the answer

Before I did not use a "sound" card and probably that is a big weakness in my decks.
So, as I run the passive wave I will suspend all "L1" cards until I've done 30 lessons.

At the current rate I expect I'll hit the first active part in about a week.

[zenmonkey]

i took a great picture of some material for rare languages available at the local bookstore! …. and I’ll post a picture of the rare languages material because someone might find a need to get the Peul dictionary...

I bought nothing because I’m full up. No I lie, I bought some father's day material but no rare language stuff, I promise.
What am I working on?

Portuguese

So it looks like wanderlust is in my veins after the polyglot conference. I am falling back in love with Portuguese. Such a lovely language. Eu amo os tons doces desta linguagem. My problem has always been that it is too close to Spanish and that I get massive bleed over. So I’m going to try to focus on a short period of input (films & TV mostly), run through ASSIMIL and move to an active wave of shadowing and sentence drills and probably an exchange. After an initial burst, I’m probably going to end up slowing down a bit. But I hope momentum gets me back to B1 level. This might be a language for the 6WC or the Native Material test.

Basically I’m watch a lot of TV dubbed in Portuguese. Wooh!

Ladahki / Tibetan

Nothing much done this weekend as I’m in France and don’t have my material with me. Could/should do Tibetan video on youtube … Mostly just vowel work. Could be a 6WC language but I need more material.

Hebrew

Continues, despite the heavy travel last week, I got my class in and have homework. Keeping busy with Anki, Assimil and Hebrew from Scratch. Another candidate for 6WC. Am I spreading myself too thin?

German
Mostly massively listening to podcasts this week. Which is of course the issue. Hmm, need to produce more.

And after 2 weeks of travel I am behind on Anki by about 600 cards. I’ll complete that catch up by the weekend.

Portuguese

● Assimil ● 1001 phrases ● Daredevil

: 6 / 100 : 1 / 1001 : 4 / 26

● Writing ● tandem sessions ● duolingo

: 0 / 100 : 0 / 50 : 2 / 15

Hebrew

● from Scratch ● Assimil ● Living Language

: 55 / 480 : 17 / 85 : 2 / 8

● Podcast 101 ● FSI ● ---

: 8 / 200 : 4 / 530 : 0 / 100

German

● Lingvist ● Podcast hours ● Books

: 755 / 3000 : 3 / 100 : 2 / 50

● Writing ● tandem sessions ● duolingo

: 5 / 100 : 1 / 50 : 14 / 15

[jeff_lindqvist]

Portuguese

So it looks like wanderlust is in my veins after the polyglot conference. I am falling back in love with Portuguese. Such a lovely language. Eu amo os tons doces desta linguagem.

Yeah, the wanderlust bug.... I just got hold of ten childrens books in Portuguese. That'll be my reading material for the next few days.

[zenmonkey]

Yesterday, spent the day at an international community picnic and heard the woes and joys of a variety of expats living and learning in Germany. People too busy to actively study or others hammering away at a language school, still others regretting language interference and how difficult it seems to switch to English when work is fully German and your native tongue is something else. Bratwurst, Sangria, Brazilian desserts and music.

Personally, I had the opportunity to speak in various languages while translating or code-switching for whomever stumbled onto our table. We had a Portuguese woman sitting with us and I should have tried to grind out a few minute but aside from a phrase or two we stayed away from it. Perhaps the next time, but I still feel this is such a passive language - which I guess is ok still, I’m mostly only working on aural reception right now.

I did get a few questions on “how to study by yourself” and “resources for language xxx” which will likely result in my making a series of slides for colleagues. How deep or what to include and still remain synthetic is always the challenge.

I’m currently reading an excellent book called Becoming Fluent - How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language. I’ll definitely be citing it here - it has a lot of material that would be interesting to the community or spark discussion. I’m reading it in English as it was a find during my trip to the US last week and even though I wanted to only read in target languages I feel this exception makes a lot of sense.

Portuguese
Been consistently getting input this week. I’ve watched 13 episodes of Daredevil in Portuguese with Portuguese subtitles. Overall understanding is very good and I’ll continue for the next season. Every once in a while I’ll track back and change subtitles to English for deeper understanding. But I only watch a few minutes the way. I don’t think subtitle-free would be particularly useful right now.

Which brings me to an idea that I think is worth sharing. When we listen to someone, we also watch what they are saying and part of the hearing of words actually involves reading the mouth and face. The book Becoming Fluent talks about the McGurk effect — interesting enough that I’ll start a thread on it — where the effect of the visual face reading can be so large as to fully change what you hear. Well, specifically for watching dubbed material, this observation suggests that one should pay attention to not watching the face of the actor - because the visual clues will go against the voice being heard. Trying to consciously not watch a speaker in video is hard! Focusing on the subtitles might make that easier, too, along with providing additional visual input to what is being said.

more on my week later…