zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

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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
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Duolingo German

Postby zenmonkey » Tue Jul 04, 2017 7:56 pm

And done! I've finished the German duolingo tree - however it took me so long (inconsistent, am I) that it is far from being all gold. I'll try to complete that over the next weeks.
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jeff_lindqvist
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Tue Jul 04, 2017 9:33 pm

I don't care (anymore) if all trees aren't golden - it's unpredictable which skills are the next to rust (hmm, gold doesn't rust, right?) and at what speed. But a few sessions of Strengthen skills each day are usually OK at a maintenance level.
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zenmonkey
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Languages: Spanish, English, French trilingual - German (B2/C1) on/off study: Persian, Hebrew, Tibetan, Setswana.
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Want to tackle Tzotzil, Nahuatl
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Wed Jul 05, 2017 9:25 pm

jeff_lindqvist wrote:I don't care (anymore) if all trees aren't golden - it's unpredictable which skills are the next to rust (hmm, gold doesn't rust, right?) and at what speed. But a few sessions of Strengthen skills each day are usually OK at a maintenance level.


At current rate it is going to take 3-5 Strengthen Skills per day to get to gold - i'm not sure it is a good use of my time. I think I will test how many of the weak skills I can bring back up in an hour and divide the number or remaining to see if I can complete this in a reasonable amount of time. If not, I'll move on as it.




In other news, we went to a Yann Tiersen concert this evening which was fantastic - a lot of old music of his that I have been listening to for the last 10 years and other newer stuff that I had not heard. In particular, worth mentioning in this community, was his first piece which included a Breton soundtrack - so, if you want to listen to a Breton poem read by a lovely French voice:



And just because he is so great...



And in other, other news, my first lesson of Tibetan was today, and that was fantastic!! I'm in the 'so excited' phase. Now to go slog through my other homework.
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zenmonkey
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Tibetan and stuff

Postby zenmonkey » Fri Jul 07, 2017 11:10 pm

For me, Tibetan coolness factor is way up there and after my first lesson this week, I've signed up for the next weeks and started practicing my calligraphy. Which is awful. I see months and months of work to create something that is perhaps readable (and probably never acceptable). I'm left handed and I write like chicken with a spilled inkwell attached to an electric toothbrush. But if I have the patience for this perhaps it will be gratifying in another way that languages usually aren't for me.

And along the path of learning the language there is also the modern culture - because my brief access to the region has been mostly through trekking and two resettlement areas I visited in Delhi. It's a quite limited taste of the current world.

My teacher, a bright young French woman (well, younger than me) gave me a few links to learn the alphabet - I think these are some kind of test!! The first was an awful tinny sounding and I cannot differentiate the sounds (I may also need new headphones) - the second underlines the fact that I will really have to work on tones. Oh, the frustration and excitement of a new language....

But what I really wanted to share about this cool new language is the following video: a rap song about the alphabet.



30 frickin tonal consonants.

Portuguese - I've finished the Daredevil series, that was fun, so now it is time to choose something else. Cruising along with Assimil and Duolingo. Maybe work on another 60 hrs of TV/podcasts and then start focusing on production.

Hebrew - Found a Memrise set for the book I'm working on so I've added that to my mix (thanks to the Tibetan studying, I looked to see what else was available there). I'm not behind yet, but I've got a few hours of homework this weekend if I want to feel caught up. Reading is still slow as Moses in the desert.

German - It's been low grade stuff, meetings in German, a podcast here and there, Anki, Assimil listening and duolingo. I honestly need to do some real studying - reading and output. But clearly I'm reading pages off the Internet without my eyes glazing over and the usual skipping that I do when I fall into the language. Since it is slower reading I tend to get frustrated and just want to skip forward, this is happening less and less. It would be nice to enter that magic zone. Because once reading comes to speed, watch out.

Enjoy your weekends, Leute!
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zenmonkey
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half-truths and hard-done

Postby zenmonkey » Sun Jul 16, 2017 10:53 pm

It's been a bit more than a week and I was writing my update a few days ago and didn't post - it seemed to be mostly a record of time spent on x or y and I can't say I found it terribly interesting.

The last few days have been full of finds - today at a flea market I picked up Stieg Larsson's three The Girl .... books in audiobook format in German and a copy of Grammaire Progressive du Francais (Avance). I also bought Julian Barnes' Metroland, also in German. Yesterday in town, I found half a dozen bilingual readers, including some bilingual Sci-Fi. So I should be stoked but my first foray into the bilinguals led me into a series of questions.

Reading the first pages of Science Fiction Erzählungen left me looking for words in almost every sentence and little understanding. And I'm feeling that the amount of work I'm doing on other languages is making my focus on German ... unfocused. I was more confident a month ago and more focused on one core language plus one extra. Now, riding with four, German has taken a more equal footing and the lack of attention seems to be instantly felt. It might be the book, so I'm willing to ride it out some more, but I'm going to try to give German a little more focus this week.

It seems there are a few things pulling at my attention - I started a project to set up what may be an alternative to Lang-8 and I'm far from getting that to where I can focus part time - so it's taken hours of my week. I need to plan summer travel with my father and daughters and that is always complicated. And my new loves - Portuguese and Tibetan have grabbed my attention. Maybe I'll start tracking time again. Maybe I'll finish a book I've started.

Half-somethings

Books half-read
sit witness to something
half-way between plans
and desire, like the remains
of a meal, cooked and stuck
to the pan, among dirty dishes
almost empty wine glasses
that are witness themselves
to our messy whatevers.

Those pans that now
need to cleared out
or have crusty left-overs,
to be put away
are half-again reminders
of stories started
half-again guilt
of unfinished things.

Before I go to bed,
I'll finish this wine glass here,
leaning against the kitchen counter
and maybe read a few pages more.
The dishes will wait,
a good story is always
an escape, of all what's
been half-done.

Language learning always seems to be about half completed things for me, the unending thing that is language learning or projects put away and picked up later. And I guess right now I'm have this on my mind a lot - many project and languages started but not so much feels completed.

Well - I did finish another series in Portuguese - got through GLOW. Can't see it was fantastic. So my notes

Portuguese
At the end of DareDevil, I’m reading subtitles a little less, but still not really fluid.
I watched one episode of Designated Survivor in Portuguese and was completely surprised in how easy it was to understand everything - probably due to the high and even register.
And I randomly selected Okja as the next thing to watch. What a strange choice. First the cast is very eclectic with Tilda Swinton, Paul Daro, Giancarlo Esposito, Jake Gyllenhaal, just an odd film but enjoyable … any prior idea that I could move away from subtitles was somewhat squashed by parts of the movie. Well, particularly the entire third of the movie that is in … Korean. In any case, I’ll stick to subtitles (in Portuguese) for at least another 20-30 hours. I was thinking my next series would be House of Cards or Glow…
And Glow won. It was not a terribly good choice for the language as the register is mixed and not that interesting. Less understanding than DD or Designated Survivor but still enough to be a good challenge.

News podcasts are now relatively fully understood but something like Vida99 podcast drops to about 10-20%. Slang, really fast, 'hip' register is lost to me, for now.

Hebrew
Assimil lessons 17 / 18 - but I feel I need to spend more time per lesson. Hebrew from Scratch is going nicely with the addition of Memrise cards. But I completely understand why this is a hated book — the modules are a big waste of paper and this could be done more cleanly and compactly. And it all does seem a bit random. More practice reading and writing would be a big help. And the method used for teaching cursive seems disordered.
I'm thoroughly enjoying classes with my iTalki teacher - we are moving along and working on conversation a bit. I have lots of homework to do this week and will continue to look at Memrise. With the other informal tutor we came to the conclusion that it wasn't working that well (he focuses almost purely on drills) I'm going to try to scan some material and see if we can focus on that.

Tibetan
Did some review work and other than the class - mostly focusing on Memrise right now. The prefix and post-fix modifiers for pronunciation of syllables are .. wow. Complex. Tone, vowel shifts, etc. depend on modifiers.
I ordered Colloquial Tibetan, so that will be my learning material outside of the classes. Together, maybe that will get me to A2/B1 in a year. Looks like a plan. I have a book on my desk called “Himalaya by Bike” maybe that will be a target for next end of summer? (Don’t tell the gf!)
I also found a copy of Ladakhi Grammar in an on-line bookstore in India and ordered that.

I filled out the lang eval survey for the Native Material study. Either Portuguese or Slovak will be my study language for that.

Portuguese
● Assimil
● 1001 phrases
● Daredevil
: 10 / 100
: 1 / 1001
: 26 / 26
● Writing
● tandem sessions
● duolingo
: 0 / 100
: 0 / 50
: 3 / 15
Hebrew
● from Scratch
● Assimil
● Living Language
: 55 / 480
: 18 / 85
: 2 / 8
● Podcast 101
● FSI
● duolingo
: 8 / 200
: 4 / 530
: 2 / 15
German
● Lingvist
● Podcast hours
● Books
: 755 / 3000
: 3 / 100
: 2 / 50
● Writing
● tandem sessions
● duolingo
: 5 / 100
: 1 / 50
: 15 / 15
Tibetan
● Alphabet
● iTalki Lessons
●Colloquial Tibetan
: 13 / 35
: 2 / 30
: 0 / 50
● Memrise
● ...
● ...
: 5 / 100
: 0 / 50
: 0 / 50


[tags: #tagLangHE]
Last edited by zenmonkey on Fri Jan 11, 2019 4:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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PeterMollenburg
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Re: Where the monkey scrapes by the skin of his teeth

Postby PeterMollenburg » Mon Jul 17, 2017 1:27 pm

zenmonkey wrote:I've been waiting for the results of my B2 test for a few weeks - and was dreading the response - so I didn't call the center to ask them about the delay and the results. But they called and asked me to come and pick up my 'Zertifikat B2'.

Well, that sounds like good news, right?

I dropped by after work and received the news. I PASSED THE B2. I scraped by with a 'pass' score and certainly nothing that allows me to say I have a strong basis for the C1 but I got it. Woo!

And now with that period of limbo over, I have to start towards my new goals - taking the C1 by July 2018. (I gave myself 12 months.) Clearly my weakest point continues to be writing. Not surprising when 95% of my learning fun and energy is around listening and speaking. Time to focus!


Sorry about the late recognition Mr Zen... I thought I must've missed it (the posting of results), and I was nearly going to PM you. Congratulations !!! Welcome fellow B2 personium-dude-overlord, to the C1 path, albeit in another language ;) Awesome work!
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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: Where the monkey scrapes by the skin of his teeth

Postby zenmonkey » Mon Jul 17, 2017 2:04 pm

PeterMollenburg wrote:Sorry about the late recognition Mr Zen... I thought I must've missed it (the posting of results), and I was nearly going to PM you. Congratulations !!! Welcome fellow B2 personium-dude-overlord, to the C1 path, albeit in another language ;) Awesome work!


Many thanks, PM! May we both succeed (on a not too long path) of C1ness!
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zenmonkey
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Tibetan : slowness of opacity

Postby zenmonkey » Sun Jul 23, 2017 9:54 pm

Ah, the slowness of an opaque language - I am just still learning the alphabet after several lessons. Add tone and aspiration to each letter and it is like trying to juggle a ball on your nose on a unicycle.

My first sentence:
འདི༌ག་རེ་རེད།
I think it means "what is that?" And, of course, to write it you can use a transcription method (which is pretty neat) - you just need to write using the Wylie keyboard:

Code: Select all

a'di ga re re/*
*and my keyboard is German so I have to use my American overlay...

But of course it is not pronounced anything like that. That would be too easy.
First letter here is silent. Then that ད (da) is a [tha] (an aspirated / low tone) but the diacritic དེ makes it a thi istead of tha ... anyway... after a struggle what should come out of your mouth is

/thi kha re re'/

or maybe

/thi ga re re'/

And it takes forever to get there but it is still pretty magical.
This post is a marker so that months from now I can look back and see how far I've gotten ... or not :lol:.
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zenmonkey
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Paying the price of ignoring a wise man

Postby zenmonkey » Tue Jul 25, 2017 7:37 pm

From our discussion on the native material study, smallwhite smartly wrote:
smallwhite wrote:Iguanamon has always warned us to keep the number of languages simultaneously learned down to a minimum. There's a price to pay for ignoring advice from a wise man.


And this has been on my mind a bit. I think she struck a cord. She's right of course. And I have to look at my language learning method and consider that it may impact me negatively to hold onto too many languages at times. Of course, I know that when I do that I often end up dropping one for a while. And that's fine because often I am not 'serenading the lady to take her home' but just 'dancing a waltz to pass the evening together'.
So it was with Mandarin, Arabic or even Italian. We've met become slightly familiar but remain friendly enough that we might visit in the future but for now, not many a dance in the near future. That's fine.

Other languages, I really want to achieve something and the stacking of study is hampering depth. My German drive to C1 is basically not going places if I'm not spending the time and giving in to my three other active languages. I can get by with slow advances from everyday exposure, if I don't have a goal but I really do need to get that going.

But the cross-over that I am seeing is that it takes me a few minutes now to activate and be sure that I am in Tibetan or Hebrew mode. Something that wasn't there a few weeks back - one opaque language meant I was all in the pit instantly - now it's two pits and it takes a minute to see which one I'm in.

Speaking of pits - I am finding learning the Tibetan alphabet to be a completely different set of challenges than Hebrew and in interesting ways. In Tibetan the vowels are marked ས་སོ་སི་སེ་ is sa, so, si, se, and quite easy to identify as all you need to do is write "sa, so, si, se" with the Wylie converter on. Well, sa may become sé depending on the suffix, etc. but the vowels are relatively easier than Hebrew where ס סו סא סי סע have a series of rules that you need to experience to figure out the unmarked vowels and the sounds that may or may not be produced. On the other hand, the consonants tend to be a bit easier to hear in Hebrew and to produce - no need to worry about tone, aspiration and vowel length. Two writing systems that I'm attacking at the same time in one and no way am I going to approach Tibetan handwriting for a long time ...

As Tasha Mannox writes...

There are several different forms of the Umeh class of scripts, when learning Umeh there is a specific chronological order, from the more uniformed constructive forms called Tsugring ཚུགས་རིང། meaning long form and Tsugtung ཚུགས་ཐུང་། meaning short form, to the more cursive styles གཤར་མ། of which there is the every-day writing styles of Khyug dri འཁྱུག་བྲིས། meaning nimble writing and Kyug dri རྒྱུགས་བྲིས། meaning quick writing.
There are other intermediate script styles བར་བྲིས། such as Tsugmakhyug ཚུག་མ་འཁྱུག། a sub style between Tsugtung and Khyug yig. Petsug དཔེ་ཚུགས། often used for hand-written texts and books, of which is traditionally associated with different regions of Tibet, such as the Khamyig ཁམས་ཡིག། a script style referring to the Eastern Provence called Kham.
For the more artistic form of calligraphy Drutsa འབྲུ་ཚ། is used, this script style is particularly flamboyant and cursive in style, traditionally used for official documents and titles.


Enough complexity that I'll stick to Uchen even if Umeh is what what is used in handwriting more often. Gotta pick my battles.

Which brings be back - too little diversity and I get bored, too much and I'm sure to suffer from it. so in the end it is a question of awareness and focus. Actively knowing I could be more focused but willing to pay the price of a little (or a lot, in the eyes of some) of diversity versus the depth of focus.

Back to my studies! (And Hebrew, Portuguese and Tibetan are going nicely, only German is sort of standing still.)
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Jar-Ptitsa
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I can speak: Dutch, German, English, Spanish and understand Italian, Portuguese, Wallonian, Afrikaans, but not always correctly.
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby Jar-Ptitsa » Wed Aug 02, 2017 4:20 pm

zenmonkey wrote:
vogeltje wrote:Hola eugenio : ¿qué tal?

hace muy buen tiempo aquí - estoy sentada en el jardín. quizás haga el mismo en Francia. el agosto o setiembre que viene vamos a Belgica una semana. viajamos siempre con el coche y son unos quinientos kilómetros.


HOLA!! El tiempo estuvo casi perfecto este fin de semana - bueno menos los momentos de lluvia :lol: Disfruta de tu semana de vacaciones!






jaja. :) a las flores las gusta la lluvia.

Gracias. tengo ganas de volver - una semana no es mucho pero mejor que nada.
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-w- I am Jar-ptitsa and my Hawaiian name is ʻā ʻaia. Please correct my mistakes in all the languages. Thank you very much.
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