zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

[zenmonkey]

Sunday - 2 am so a short post.
I spent several hours getting my development deck back up to speed to update the site. I hope it is useful.

German
I also got LWT back up and running with my machine and uploaded an Asimov novel.
I've picked up "Der Araber von morgen" vol 2 and 3 so that will be some of my future German reading.
Anki, Skype with Brun Ugle and stuff...

Tibetan
Regular iTalki lesson and ankified the recording of the sentences this last week. So nice content to work with. A bit of memrise.

Hebrew
Completed maybe 2 lessons in Assimil? but had my iTalki lesson and did some memrise. More than last week, less than next?

Setswana
Still doing the Memrise course every day. We had a study group session planned on Monday with a native speaker and I have high hopes. Homework complete and been also converting unisa recordings into an anki deck. This is my 6WC language and it has been going well so far.

[Brun Ugle]

How are you finding LWT for German? I haven’t actually used it for any language in a while, but I’d been thinking I probably wouldn’t use it for German in any case because I figured it would be too much hassle with all the separable verbs. Do you find that a problem?

[zenmonkey]

How are you finding LWT for German? I haven’t actually used it for any language in a while, but I’d been thinking I probably wouldn’t use it for German in any case because I figured it would be too much hassle with all the separable verbs. Do you find that a problem?

The problems I see are manageable. I tell it to either ignore or set to "well known" those terms. It's possible to select whole phrases or compounds but it isn't that practical to do so.

"Du solltest dich schämen." Here you'd want to have "dich schämen" as a single 'be ashamed' rather than 'shame' for "schämen" (although that works too, there are other worse examples). But if you unlearn the "dich" then that is going to pop up everywhere. I don't worry too much about these as there is enough material to work with.

The thing that does take huge amounts of time is eliminating all the words that you DO know, to make the tool effective.

[zenmonkey]

Stumbled across the vocabulary of certain books from someone who did a lexical analysis from project Gutenberg. http://www.mine-control.com/zack/guttenberg/

So basically, if you read a single Dickens novel or "Gargantua and Pantagruel" intensively, translated in your L2, and learn the vocabulary, you know the language.

[zenmonkey]

So this is a "nuts and bolts" post - see that thread too.

Memrise

Memrise courses vary in quality significantly - some courses include sound, some are well structured... and the courses that I find to be really good may or may not include sound. It's usually a good idea to register for one - take a look inside and see. Also take a look at the number of user, the course duration and how much time people have dedicated to it - the leaderboard numbers give you an idea.

To find courses it is necessary to use the website, the app does not have all the material that is available - so you select a course on the website and afterwards you can use it on both (more on that later).

Currently I'm registered in courses in Tibetan, German, Portuguese, Setswana and Hebrew.

Of these, one of my favourites courses at the moment is Setswana. It is based on an old public domain printed course and follows the chapters. Unfortunately it does not have sound (that would have made it truly exceptional). Why do I like this course? That's simple - I feel I'm learning, it isn't frustrating and I'm moving along. I'm about 1/5th through the course and I hope to finish it. The course author did not complete the paper material (claiming it has too many errors), so we will see how it ends.

This is a points based system and I've set myself to complete 6K points per day which is supposed to correspond to about 15 min. Why is this important?

app vs website

In short, the app is easy, the website is hard. The web version just requires that more responses be typed in, whereas the app has more multiple choice or build from blocks answers. I complete 6K points in about 10 min on the app. On the web site this usually takes me half an hour. But who cares about points? What matters is that I'm actually learning! Umm, well, the difficulty of the interface does matter - since it is an SRS like interface, getting through the material with as little as possible negative feedback influences how long I'll stick to something. Schedule and time available matter. It isn't an easy equation.

What I try to do is to mix it up. I am probably running at about 40%/60% app/web with this Setswana course. This means that I spend hours more than my study group colleagues over the same material. Am I learning 'better'? Probably not in that I end up repeating material just because I made a small typo in the web version where on the app I would have selected the right multiple choice.

If I get frustrated with the web, I either move on to the app for a little while or slow down my learning. When I find that I am just not getting a term, I start writing down on paper the material I'm not learning. This physical act helps and I should be able to review my notebook off-line, although in reality, I rarely do that. By writing and spending more time with difficult phrases or words I tend to learn them. It took me a while to figure out that just trying to use Memrise alone and fail/repeat/try/fail/repeat/learn wasn't working and I needed to work with the material otherwise. It's built to move words missed to a difficult list so that you review those more often but that can just be a recipe to miss the word over and over and over without learning it (what I call the Anki trap - I should write about that, too). Since this course is based on a printed material, it is also very effective to review and read the relevant sections before and during my Memrise time.

It works well. Well, except in certain courses. In certain courses, I feel I'm just churning and repeating the material. More on that later, I guess this is part 1...

[zenmonkey]

Memrise - Part 2

Except in certain courses. In certain courses, I feel I'm just churning and repeating the material. More on that later ...

So what's going on there and can I fix it?

The course where I am having issues are in Tibetan and Hebrew - my two "opaque" languages. Both courses have sound, are considered well built but I'm just not succeeding. The issues are different.

Hebrew - I am having difficulty remember the material. I get unhappy about that and push it off and, of course, that's just a vicious circle of not learning. I honestly think that what is going here is related to what I'm going to call "visual/sound hooks". In languages written with the Roman alphabet, visually figuring out pronunciation is relatively easy. See it, sound it out, minor corrections sometimes and, then, boom - sight and sound integrate well help with the meaning. With Hebrew, I don't have visual history of 40+ years. I'm building those hooks, but they take time. And of course, the absence of vowel markers, the ת/ט confusion (both have a 't' sound, and while one is more used in foreign words the rules are really that constant). And, to complicate things, along the way I'm also working on the cursive writing. It's a small complication but it makes the visual/sound hooks slightly more ambiguous.

Back to Memrise, to seat vocabulary better, I'm cheating. Memrise has an SRS calculation that will set-up all material to review. But cards can be set to 'bad' for minor typos or one can get lost in a cycle of just reviewing over and over 'difficult' words. So, like I said, I cheat.

I write down words I miss - I write them much like Iversen's Wordlists - 5 missed words, then meaning then I write them in cursive twice. And the next time they come up in the 'difficult words' list I pop them in either form memory or from my notebook. The idea is to clear the 'difficult list' knowing that I will see them soon in the review phase. Keeps me happy, keeps me going. Seems to be working better.

Tibetan - This is a complete different kettle of fish. As opaque as Hebrew seems to me, Tibetan just gets harder - ambiguous pronouns, honorific, tones, silent letters, etc. It's great! But learning it? Well, Memrise is comes off as an exercise in futility. And the same thing goes - the "visual/sound hooks" not only don't exist for me, the Wylie method of entering words via the keyboard is counter productive - typing on Memrise (web) is timed and the slightest typo requires that I go back two or three keystrokes as it takes sometimes several keys to form a letter. Also, I'm using a German keyboard but Wylie depends on an an US layout so typing something like བཁྱོ which only sounds like /kyo/ requires that I type 'bakhzo' - doing that with a timer is ... a waste of learning time.

Here, with Memrise, not only do I 'cheat' as with Hebrew but if I still see a word or tone review too often I also mark it as 'deleted' over reviewing to failure isn't effective and once I complete this material I'll move on to the next. I'm holding loosely to requirements of the method to go a little faster, learn some and move on. Better than banging my head into the this wall.

It took me a while to find these compromises. It's okay to delete cards and to stop repeating something that doesn't work as intended. Hope this helps others.

[tags: #tagLangHE]
[tags: #tagLangTI]

[Lawyer&Mom]

I really like Clozemaster for non-Roman alphabets. *Lots* and *lots* of repetition, no typing. I tried doing Russian on Memrise and Duolingo, but I just could not remember how to spell the words and got way too frustrated. (A different alphabet makes the words so much more slippery!)

Hebrew is on Clozemaster. I’ve got nothing for Tibetan.

[zenmonkey]

I really like Clozemaster for non-Roman alphabets. *Lots* and *lots* of repetition, no typing. I tried doing Russian on Memrise and Duolingo, but I just could not remember how to spell the words and got way too frustrated. (A different alphabet makes the words so much more slippery!)

Hebrew is on Clozemaster. I’ve got nothing for Tibetan.

Thanks!! I'll take a look once I'm throughly current cycle.

[zenmonkey]

This last week I’ve done zero study. Between helping my father with house stuff, his health appointments and having my two youngest and needing to feed and entertain them in America, I have not had much motivation or time.

It’s 3AM, Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof, I’m still not home but this weekend I should be back on things.

I did get to speak a lot of French and Spanish in the US as we do “language dropping” - I’ll briefly say something in Spanish to my father (“what do you want?”) in front of strangers and some directly address us in Spanish. Or someone overheard us speaking French. Language dropping is pretty effective.

Today, on the trip back I even got to place a sentence in Icelandic and three (3!) in Setswana with a woman on the train that was speaking Afrikaans to her son. Ended translating for the little boy between his German and the French of the father of a little girl that wanted to play with his stuffed animal. Toss in the controller and we had a brief three way, three language conversation on the bar car and the number 14. Reminds me of the standard phrase “the sky is blue”. I almost said “the cat is under the chair”. But I’m glad I got to throw out my Setswana phrases. Not really communicating but it’s the first time I’ve “used” it in public.

[rdearman]

I almost said “the cat is under the chair”. But I’m glad I got to throw out my Setswana phrases. Not really communicating but it’s the first time I’ve “used” it in public.

Braggart. Still, good job! I found some people speaking Afrikaans but they didn't know any Setswana.