zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

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zenmonkey
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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: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Wed Feb 02, 2022 6:12 am

Played with the Edge browser and the TTS and build out a very short, beginner island.
Text -> HTML -> Edge, Read Aloud -> Record -> Audacity to clean audio -> iMovie to bring it together. -> upload to YouTube
5 minutes tops.



These simple phrases are still beyond me. This week. ;)
5 x
I am a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar

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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: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Sun Feb 06, 2022 6:26 am

I’m excited! Today’s bookstore find is this little gem on the study of languages from 1885. C Marcel The Study of Languages or the Art of Thinking in a Foreign Language.

E8963E8D-6C1F-4695-9AFD-BEB5EEEC9107.jpeg


Less exciting is our house rule that every language book that comes in means three books need to go out. But it’s all I bought today. Not the Yiddish Phrasebook from 1903 nor any of the rare language manuals.

Now to dive in. More tomorrow on my current studies.
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby Le Baron » Sun Feb 06, 2022 1:51 pm

I just hide them, then sneak them onto the bookshelf a couple of weeks later.
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Sun Feb 06, 2022 3:39 pm

Three language books, or just three books? This is an important distinction!
6 x
Grammaire progressive du français -
niveau debutant
: 60 / 60

Grammaire progressive du francais -
intermédiaire
: 25 / 52

Pimsleur French 1-5
: 3 / 5

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zenmonkey
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Sun Feb 06, 2022 10:07 pm

Lawyer&Mom wrote:Three language books, or just three books? This is an important distinction!

Three books (of mine) of my choice. All I need to do is sneak in books I don’t want. :lol:
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zenmonkey
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Wed Feb 09, 2022 2:08 am

I’ve spent too much time doing non-language learning reading on this forum this last week. And too much language learning stuff and not getting enough work done. Not the best.

But my learning about learning continues. I enjoy this type of 'book-shelving'. And as I mentioned I recently bought the 'Study of Languages' - I’m taking notes, and will share them in a future post. I also found several other 19th Century authors on language learning and have briefly spent some time reading methods and reviews about methods. I think I bought a few books, I’m not even sure now, but it means I’ll have to wait a few days before I buy anything else. The great thing about reading 'ancient' learning texts is that they are generally available for free on openlibrary.org or one of the other text repositories.

I’m also reading How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately by Boris Shekhtman, definitely more relevant to activation and speaking. It’s a book recommended by Anthony Lauder in one of his videos. This is probably more applicable to my intermediate German versus the beginner efforts for Persian.

This brings me to these last few days. Other than just book-shelving, I’ve been helping both my partner and my daughter with their Spanish. My daughter is currently visiting family in Mexico and traveling in Oaxaca. She’s been messaging me with questions about travel in the region or strange expressions she’s heard. But this very present effort to improve their Spanish has me thinking about my German. It’s just going to rot if I don’t work on it. So along with Persian, I’m going to do a little maintenance/development reading.

German
I’ve been reading a few posts here in German and a few casual blogs. I caught half a dozen words that I know I know but couldn’t remember. So starting with those, I’m jotting them down, getting a definition and if I’m familiar with these as phrases (or collocations), I’ll end up adding them to an Anki deck - at this point, I think it makes more sense to work on chunks, collocations or partial phrases rather than single words or full sentences.

I’m also going to see if I can read a few books, I’ve dozens of unread bilingual texts, I’ll start there. My first victim is Hercule Poirot ermittelt.

Persian

The Modern Persian - Teach Yourself - The exercises and workload have certainly picked up. Doing the exercises now takes me about an hour of work and has me re-reading sections, looking up words, etc. This is not simply, 'oh I know this,' and voila, exercise done. At the same time, while my script knowledge is better, I still need to go back to doing a few basic writing exercises. Certain connected letters are just not there. I did look into LingQ for additional reading exercises and I love the fact that you can use different fonts or writing styles to work on understanding some of the different scripts. But for right now, LingQ is a distraction and I’ll look into it (or LWT) in a few months.

My core, despite all of the available resources, remains Anki, Assimil, and TYB. I’m focusing on vocabulary building, extensive listening, reading, and speaking via shadowing/repeating for now, principally as a tool for learning vocabulary, following the Assimil first wave.

I’ve also been using Forvo to add audio to my Anki cards but that is incredibly slow and with mediocre results. I decided to take a look at AwesomeTTS to see if I could get it working with the Azure server and while that was somewhat successful (the list of TTS languages is missing IR-fa even though it is right there in Azure.), I found out that a developer is rewriting AwesomeTTS to a new tool called HyperTTS (go see Reddit, if interested) - I was able to install the beta, launch it and now all my cards have pretty good sound from the Azure AI speech services. Overall it is pretty good, even if I did notice one or two strange productions. Better than the Forvo quality and easy to generate in batches.

Assimil - Lesson 20
TYB - Lesson 14
Basic Persian pg 16
Anki - 440 active reviews, about 30 min a day, adding 10-20 cards to my activities a day.
Fun factor: 8/10
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zenmonkey
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Sat Feb 12, 2022 10:10 pm

Today’s find!!

3B07038F-A758-4DE0-8AAB-DD2FFB583EE5.jpeg
D9C26EB5-7E89-4696-BB08-209661BB75E4.jpeg


Local library had a book sales. These were just sitting there.
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby rdearman » Sat Feb 12, 2022 11:09 pm


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zenmonkey
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Mon Feb 14, 2022 7:05 am

Persian

I found a Persian podcast that does lessons from early on. And while the first episodes are really beginner level and there is too much English in them, I think they might be useful for me when I walk or drive. Assimil is just too lacking in meaning to listen to without the book.

And this is a good resource for language resources :D https://www.alllanguageresources.com/persian-podcasts/

So I most certainly have more material than I can digest in the next months.

One of the challenges I’m addressing is vocabulary learning. But I may be over-focusing here and not really balancing my learning. The issue I see is that while I now can somewhat read words, I certainly have no mastery. So using tools like wordlists, the Persian word just doesn’t visually scan and represent a group of phonemes as easily as romanized alphabet words do. I recognize that this is slowing me down in vocabulary acquisition - there is no way in hell that I can do 50 words a day, never mind doing a focused 100.

My typing in Persian still sucks and is very slow. So for now, I'm only adding 10-20 words a day. This means I'm about 2 weeks behind on the worlds I'm seeing in my lessons.

So if I want to balance my learning between 1) vocab, 2) listening and reading, 3) speaking and writing, and 4) fluency development, and, at the same time, develop some mastery of the script, I’m going to need to be comfortable with the additional complexity.

This week has been mediocre, while I studied every day, on at least 2 days, I only did Anki. That's not going to be very effective. I want to watch that over the next weeks and make sure I'm focusing on non-vocab activity. I watched several of the Jeff Brown (Poly-glot-a-lot) videos this week because of the Natural Language Acquisition and ALG discussion threads. I'm a fan of heavy input, verbal games and exchanges, but not blindly so. I've been planning to add a tutor/conversation partner but these threads have me thinking that earlier may be better than later. I still think I want to finish Assimil before I do so, but I'm wavering. My wife asked me why I wasn't signed up yet for exchanges and was surprised when I mentioned I'd only been working on the language for 6 weeks. Which seems both like a short learning time and a long period without a tutor. Such is the world of only learning with short daily periods.

Instead, we spent breakfast yesterday doing a short 'Jeff Brown like' session on her Spanish. I wanted a hands-on session to see how a learner might react, how stuck she might feel, how easy or hard it was for her to keep it interactive. It was fun, but tiring for her. I think we'll try to do those once a week or so.

This week, I also tried to do some Iversen style word lists - I wanted to see if that worked better for acquisition for me. That was a mess. Trying to keep the orthography of 5 words in my head before writing them down, just underlined my lack of automatic grasp of grapheme mapping/representation. But maybe, just because of that, wordlists might be a great way for me to push myself to get there! I'm not giving up on them. Not yet. But really, that's a very slow exercise at this point. Actually, anything that requires writing is very slow.

A friend of mine posted a Persian poem on her Facebook feed by Attar.

ره میخانه و مسجد کدام است
‎که هر دو بر من مسکین حرام است
‎نه در مسجد گذارندم که رند است
‎نه در میخانه کین خمار خام است
‎ورای مسجد و میخانه راهی است
‎بجوئید ای عزیزان کین کدام است
‎به میخانه امامی مست خفته است
‎نمی‌دانم که آن بت را چه نام است
‎مرا کعبه خرابات است امروز
‎حریفم قاضی و ساقی امام است
‎برو عطار کو خود می‌شناسد
‎که سرور کیست سرگردان کدام است

Which is the path to the winehouse, which is the way to the mosque
For both are forbidden to the unfortunate.
I am prohibited from the mosque because I am sly.
And I am banned from the wine house because I am inexperienced.
Yet there is another road,
Beyond the mosque and past the wine house
Speak oh dear ones, where is it?
The sleeping priest drunk at the wine house is a nameless idol
Today I will choose a pilgrimage to the winehouse.
My opponent will be the judge and my deity will be the wine bearer.
Go, Attar, because you can recognize for yourself
Who is the master and who is the wanderer.



So now I have a first text to study.

Podcast Chai - Episode 4
Assimil - Lesson 23
TYB - Lesson 15
Anki - 490 active reviews, adding 10 a day.
Fun - 7/10, -1 this week.
7 x
I am a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar

Lycopersicon
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby Lycopersicon » Mon Feb 14, 2022 12:23 pm

Perhaps a Persian typing course could be helpful?

https://typeo.top/
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