zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

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zenmonkey
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Location: California, Germany and France
Languages: Spanish, English, French trilingual - German (B2/C1) on/off study: Persian, Hebrew, Tibetan, Setswana.
Some knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Ladino, Yiddish ...
Want to tackle Tzotzil, Nahuatl
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Re: languages, alphabet and ...

Postby zenmonkey » Thu Dec 13, 2018 7:47 am

eido wrote:
zenmonkey wrote:So, I've been studying Korean Hagul along the way. Fascinating!

What's your favorite part of the alphabet so far? I love the way Hangul looks, and I love Korean's sound, so I'm curious.

EDIT: have you thought about looking on Reddit to see if there's any native Cherokee speakers lurking there, or contacting tribal colleges in the States?


I really like the logic of it and how quickly one can pick up the basics of deciphering. I also like the sound of it. I found a few native speakers to record words / sounds and there is definitely something enjoyable in listening to them.

Cherokee is a bit more difficult because not only is it difficult to find someone willing to participate but the language fluidity varies greatly. I'm on contact with two groups in the US for some other linguistic projects and it is just a question of time and energy -- it will get done in 2019. I'll be in the US for the next 4 weeks, I hope to reach out then.
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Re: languages, alphabet and ...

Postby SGP » Thu Dec 13, 2018 8:34 am

zenmonkey wrote:
eido wrote:
zenmonkey wrote:So, I've been studying Korean Hagul along the way. Fascinating!

What's your favorite part of the alphabet so far? I love the way Hangul looks, and I love Korean's sound, so I'm curious.

EDIT: have you thought about looking on Reddit to see if there's any native Cherokee speakers lurking there, or contacting tribal colleges in the States?


I really like the logic of it and how quickly one can pick up the basics of deciphering. I also like the sound of it.

Logic and deciphering - Korean or Hangul?
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zenmonkey
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Posts: 2528
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Location: California, Germany and France
Languages: Spanish, English, French trilingual - German (B2/C1) on/off study: Persian, Hebrew, Tibetan, Setswana.
Some knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Ladino, Yiddish ...
Want to tackle Tzotzil, Nahuatl
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=859
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Re: languages, alphabet and ...

Postby zenmonkey » Thu Dec 13, 2018 2:44 pm

SGP wrote:
zenmonkey wrote:
eido wrote:
zenmonkey wrote:So, I've been studying Korean Hagul along the way. Fascinating!

What's your favorite part of the alphabet so far? I love the way Hangul looks, and I love Korean's sound, so I'm curious.

EDIT: have you thought about looking on Reddit to see if there's any native Cherokee speakers lurking there, or contacting tribal colleges in the States?


I really like the logic of it and how quickly one can pick up the basics of deciphering. I also like the sound of it.

Logic and deciphering - Korean or Hangul?


The Hangul writing system.
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Re: languages, alphabet and ...

Postby SGP » Thu Dec 13, 2018 3:19 pm

SGP wrote:Logic and deciphering - Korean or Hangul?
zenmonkey wrote:The Hangul writing system.

Understanding the basic of deciphering it: already got your point, I guess.
But what about its very logic?
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zenmonkey
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Some knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Ladino, Yiddish ...
Want to tackle Tzotzil, Nahuatl
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Re: languages, alphabet and ...

Postby zenmonkey » Thu Dec 13, 2018 3:32 pm

SGP wrote:
SGP wrote:Logic and deciphering - Korean or Hangul?
zenmonkey wrote:The Hangul writing system.

Understanding the basic of deciphering it: already got your point, I guess.
But what about its very logic?


The Hangul include information about tongue placement during pronunciation. Therefore there is some visual representation on how a word-morphene will be produced. It is this logic which I was referring to.
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zenmonkey
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Some knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Ladino, Yiddish ...
Want to tackle Tzotzil, Nahuatl
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Hebrew - FSI - Lesson 1

Postby zenmonkey » Fri Jan 11, 2019 4:27 pm

Had to clean up some of the links to the front of this log which pointed to the old domain and are now hijacked - yikes!

Coming back from the US, I've brought back some nice books and language related gifts.

I have a hardcopy of the Hebrew FSI Basic Course and I've finally started that. Completed lesson 1 today. It took me 3 times the recorded time, because as practice, I'm also printing out the dialogues. Over the winter vacation I've forgotten my Hebrew script!! I'm currently not signed up for italki classes and I'd like to spend at least 45 minutes a day for 10 days before I do so. I'm rusty.

And I don't know if part of the problem is that I'm just getting over the flu but this lesson seemed harder than it should have been (brain fog?)

Looking back over my log, I feel it is sort of a mess but I don't think I'll start a new one with the new year. I like the continuity of the long logs for some reason.

[tags: #tagLangHE]
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zenmonkey
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Some knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Ladino, Yiddish ...
Want to tackle Tzotzil, Nahuatl
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Mid-week notes - 2019 "goals"

Postby zenmonkey » Wed Jan 16, 2019 3:12 pm

I was going to wait until the weekend but this is getting long, has a lot of different ideas going, so I'm going to post and entry now.

I wrote out some goals / resolutions in the resolution thread (https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 9f#p129535). Here is the essential extract:

zenmonkey wrote:
My real aspirations for the year, in terms of language learning are:
German
  • Prepare for the C1 test. This means being fairly fluent and will require work in grammar, vocabulary and even pronunciation. Read and listen a lot. Watch a bit of German shows - I've got a great list. I'd hope to continue our exchange sessions with Brun Ugle.
  • Focus my activity much more on native material.
  • Spend at least 2 hrs a week.
Hebrew
  • Complete Assimil & FSI. Really I'd like to move this to a solid A2 level. I've been futzing around this last year and need more consistently, if I want to get anywhere with this.
  • Take a pause from italki lessons until February.
  • Spend at least 2 hrs a week.
Tibetan
  • Complete Colloquial Tibetan and Modern Tibetan Language Volume 1. I really like what I've achieved in the last year and think that continued work here will be truly enjoyable.
  • Take a pause from italki lessons until February.
  • Spend at least 2 hrs a week.
Setswana
  • I'm going to complete that damn Memrise course. I've fallen behind! I may not go beyond the Polyglot conference (if I attend) but I would like to continue studying Setswana at least up to that date.
  • Spend at least 1 hrs a week.
Other Languages
  • Activate my Portuguese - over the winter vacations I had two opportunities to speak it and mostly waffled. I was nicely reminded that my father and brother are pretty fluent, if hesitant. So I have family resources to practice.
  • Tzotzil and Nahuatl - do a bit of exploratory study to figure out which of the two I want to tackle next. No real solid goals there but mostly feed the dragon. And have fun with it.


Tibetan Romanisation issues
Over the vacations I finalised converting some tapes to .MP3 so now I can start using the Modern Tibetan Language book. However, I cam across a bit of romanisation that left me confused.

The problems with romanisation or transcription to the latin alphabet for pronunciation are that methods are very inconsistent across different authors. We are then left guessing about representation and how to read a particular text. It clashes with whatever mental model we’ve made for a sound. Writing out in IPA would probably be better, but it isn’t always present.

It’s taken me a while to figure out that some books work off of pronunciation, while others are using a transliteration…

Modern Tibet Language
‘ = aspirated (k’a = ཁ or kha)
Pronunciation: k’a (low tone aspirated) -> transliteration: ག་ or ga

Losang Thoden book Modern Tibet Language does a good job of clarifying pronunciation vs transliteration. I'm looking forward to using this material. He passed away recently, so in using his material there is also a thought of thankfulness to his attentiveness in sharing the language.

Hebrew FSI
I also brought back from my trip the Hebrew FSI Basic Course book, as I mentioned last week, I've started working with this. But the audio hiss is bad enough that it gets on my nerves very quickly. So I've decided to clean up the audio as I go along with each unit. It might be more efficient to do it in one go, but for now I'm downloading only some of units and trying to spend less prep time (failing at that!!) with each learning session and more time on learning.

My thoughts on the FSI material through the first 3 units is that I'm going to have to spend more time per unit then I originally thought or I can consider this to be a skimming exercise. But given that my level isn't really intermediate enough just skim through this material, I think I'll slow my roll and spend some in depth, Ankified time with this material.

I went back to read how others use of the Hebrew FSI material.

Expugnator mentions “merely skimming” them and notes the poor quality and needed effort to improve sound. Mostly positive about the material but considers it not a beginner material and notes.

Expugnator wrote:As much as I am enjoying FSI Hebrew, it definitely wouldn't suit my learning style as a beginner. I'm glad I've learned to use it my way and broke the resistance for using the audiolingual method, as it's going to be useful for other languages”
and
Expugnator wrote:“I don't overlearn anything, like other learners do with FSI. So I imagine it might be even more suffering (to my eyes) for someone who overlearns it to start from scratch. I've been through several textbooks and I'm still meeting many new words in each lesson, but in a quantity that I can handle, while reinforcing structures and enhancing conversation patterns. FSI is indeed richer, it has more content, more substance. For opaque languages, it might be the safer route from an A2 to a middle-B1 stage.

cjareck and MattNeilsen both use the FSI material more intensively and I am currently leaning towards this.

cjareck notes some of the difficulty of using FSI:
cjareck wrote:I listened to all the lessons at least several times, but I realised that this wasn't helping me. So I changed tactics - I put all the drills into Anki. It takes a lot of time and goes slowly, but seems to improve my speaking skills.

MattNeilsen reports using Anki with
MattNeilsen wrote:Audacity .. so I could play around with some FSI/Pimsleur sentences. I think I'm going to try to pull one or two phrases from each FSI unit that strike me as generally useful conversational phrases and practice Kjellin's chorusing method with them.


So, I'm definitely creating Anki cards. As a start (with Unit 3) I'm chunking the parts of the dialogue sentences and creating cards from those. Depending on the length, one sentence might have 3-4 notes (x2 cards).

I've still need to decide how I want to do the drills but I think I'll probably manage substitution, completion and response drills slightly different. I need to think about this.

Cleaning up audio for Hebrew FSI.

As I found the audio recordings to be of really bad quality, I’ve decided to clean them up as I go. Here are my filter settings for reference in Audacity.

1. Run Reduction (db:5 , Sensitivity:6, 0) 2-3x
2. Normalize
3. Equaliser (low rolloff for speech or a drawn ramp to 100Hz)

I like doing the playback in Audacity as it allows me to slow down the playback for certain pauses or to add/delete silences where needed.

Daily material selection for all languages

One of the issues I have with focusing my study time is that I find myself in “analysis paralysis” of language material - I get stuck with the idea of “what should I do today?” which creates some sort of inertia and then I don’t start. I go off and do some other task before coming back to actual learning. To try to break through the overchoice effect, I’m going to use my log to list current material (in a working order), so that I can just choose from it.



Time log
I'm tracking time spent on different activities here for now. As part of the tracking for one of the challenges but also as what I'd like to see as output from the tracking app I'm developing (more on that at another point).

Hebrew - Task goal (2 hrs / week)
- 11.1 FSI Lesson 1 45 min R/W/L
- 13.1 FSI Lesson 2 39 min R/W/L
- 13.1 Hebrew Anki 7 min
- 13.1 Shtisel 10 min
- 14.1 Anki 14 min
- 13.1 Shtisel 31 min
- 15.1 Anki 5 min
- 15.1 Shtisel 30 min
- 16.1 Anki 15 min
- 16.1 FSI Lesson 3 55 min R/W/L
- 16.1 Clozemaster 10 min

Hebrew Total 261 min

German - Task goal (2 hrs / week)
- 12.1 TITANS TV 240 min L
- 15.1 Anki 21 min
German Total 261 min (Dubious quality)

Tibetan Task (2 hrs / week)
- 14.1 Anki 15 min
- 14.1 Review spelling / pronunciation / transliteration 30 min
- 16.1 Anki 15 min
Tibetan Total 60 min

Setswana - Task (1 hrs / week)
- 16.1 Memrise 15 min
Setswana Total 15 min

Prep Time
- 13.1 iTunes set-up FSI 10 min.
- 13.1 Anki on new device 20 min
- 14.1 Anki added new Tibetan Spelling card format and populated 30 cards with sound 60 min
- 16.1 Audacity tagging and thinking about Anki for FSI Hebrew 80 min
Prep Time - Total time 170 min



My Current Daily Pick List
Hebrew - Anki > Clozemaster > FSI > Assimil > Shtisel > Other
German - Anki > DW.de > ??
Tibetan - Anki > MTL > ??
Setswana - Memrise > Anki > ??

[tags: #tagLangHE #tagLangTSN #tagLangDE #tagLangTIB #tagMethodAnki #tagMethodAudacity]
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby rdearman » Wed Jan 16, 2019 4:45 pm

In audacity if you select a "white space" area with hiss then you can just do Effect->Noise Reduction->Get noise profile (your selction) then Select entire track and remove the noise. It should get rid of all the tape hiss in one swoop. I don't know if your method is the same but I've used the above to get rid of pops and cracks as well as tape hiss.
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zenmonkey
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2528
Joined: Sun Jul 26, 2015 7:21 pm
Location: California, Germany and France
Languages: Spanish, English, French trilingual - German (B2/C1) on/off study: Persian, Hebrew, Tibetan, Setswana.
Some knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Ladino, Yiddish ...
Want to tackle Tzotzil, Nahuatl
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=859
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Contact:

Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Wed Jan 16, 2019 5:21 pm

rdearman wrote:In audacity if you select a "white space" area with hiss then you can just do Effect->Noise Reduction->Get noise profile (your selction) then Select entire track and remove the noise. It should get rid of all the tape hiss in one swoop. I don't know if your method is the same but I've used the above to get rid of pops and cracks as well as tape hiss.


Yeah, that's my step 1. Which I misnamed Reduction and not Noise Reduction... The settings I use are such that I prefer to run it two-three times with different noise profiles, because even the silent sections have some echo going on. That plus thresholding does a pretty good job.
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby Deinonysus » Wed Jan 16, 2019 6:55 pm

Could I ask what drew you to Tzotzil rather than one of the larger Maya languages such as Yucatec or K'iche'?
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