zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

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Brun Ugle
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby Brun Ugle » Mon Jan 28, 2019 8:25 pm

zenmonkey wrote:
Brun Ugle wrote:Actually, my point was more that you should read Star Trek. Star Trek is fun! Back in high school, I used to always read Star Trek in class, with the book hidden below my desk or behind my textbook, fooling nobody. :)


I'm a huge fan of sci-fi but I've always been a bit doubtful of Trek or Star Wars books. Are they canon?

The authors generally try to write them so that they can fit into the Trek universe, but since many were written before the shows ended, sometimes something happened later in the show that maybe made the book not quite fit. I wouldn’t call the books canon, no. They are basically fan fiction, I suppose. But they are frequently written by known science fiction writers, so it can be pretty good fan fiction. Anyway, I think they are fun and they are apparently very popular among German speakers because tons of them have been translated to German.
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Mon Jan 28, 2019 9:53 pm

Shtisel Is such a wonderful show. I only had access to the first season on my streaming platform, but it was just so good. I watched Srugim first, which is also quite good, but not as dreamy as Shtisel.
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Tue Jan 29, 2019 11:44 am

Lawyer&Mom wrote:Shtisel Is such a wonderful show. I only had access to the first season on my streaming platform, but it was just so good. I watched Srugim first, which is also quite good, but not as dreamy as Shtisel.


I think "dreamy" is a pretty good description of the show. There is definitely that quality about it.
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Sun Feb 03, 2019 11:10 pm

I signed up for the 6WC for Hebrew so I'm only going to log my time here until the end of January, from then on, I'll post my tracking to the twitter bot. I really need to finish my tracking app to have a single place to track, while reporting in multiple places.

This week i've finished watching Shtisel and enjoyed it so much, I might restart it completely. I'm watching When Heroes Fly for the moment but the thematics is a lot less "dreamy". I'm understanding 10-15% of the dialog directly which is great at this point. I think that when I started the show, I was really understanding nothing. I'm not yet taking notes or looking anything up, maybe at the third pass... This week I also had my first Hebrew Skype lesson for the year. I'm going to switch to two a week for the next 6 weeks and see if that helps. We've also agreed to start working again with Hebrew from Scratch. In the Hebrew Anki thread, we were discussing a deck sourced from these material, so I decided to add that to my material. It's the most advanced deck of cards I've ever seen. It has links to on line dictionaries, rollover fonts, clickable tables, etc... It's quite the nice deck but I had to spend some time looking into the code and then prioritising the cards to focus on the first chapters of HfS. I've also started the Memrise HfS deck.
I've blown out of the water my time goals with Hebrew but I'm not convinced that this tv watching is really that effective (at this time), but I'm enjoying it.

I've been keeping up with Setswana quite nicely and expect to finish the Memrise deck in the next weeks. I'll work with it as review for a while and start working with the Anki decks with recording I created.

Tibetan & Portuguese took a nap this week.



Time log

Hebrew - Task goal (2 hrs / week)

- 28.1 Shtisel 150 min
- 29.1 Shtisel 50 min
- 30.1 Shtisel 50 min
- 30.1 Anki 20 min
- 31.1 Shtisel 50 min
- 31.1 Anki 30 min

Anki: Hebrew from Scratch, Hebrew Alphabet, Hello Hello Father 

Hebrew Total 350 min

German - Task goal (2 hrs / week)
- 28.1 Anki 30 min
- 29.1 Anki 20 min
- 29.1 Exchange 30 min
- 30.1 Anki 20 min
- 31.1 Dogs of Berlin 50 min
Anki : New Words, Movie, Song, Minimal Pairs
German Total 150 min

Tibetan Task (2 hrs / week)
None
Anki : MTL deck
Tibetan Total 0 min

Setswana - Task (1 hrs / week)
- 28.1 Memrise 40 min
- 29.1 Memrise 50 min Lesson 53
- 30.1 Memrise 20 min
- 31.1 Memrise 30 min

Setswana Total 110 min

Portuguese - Task (?? hrs / week)
None
Anki : Assimil
Portuguese Total 0 min

Prep Time
Prep Time - Total time 0 min



My Current Daily Pick List
Hebrew - Shtisel/When Heroes Fly > Anki > Clozemaster > FSI > Assimil > Other
German - Anki > B Grammatik > DW.de > Elemantarfragen
Tibetan - Anki > MTL > Memrise
Setswana - Memrise > Anki > A Course in Tswana
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zenmonkey
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Mon Feb 04, 2019 5:04 pm

Today's Hebrew Lesson ended with this little gem from the Kotzke Rebbe

הרבי מקוצק:
אם אני אני כי אתה אתה, ואתה אתה כי אני אני, אז אני לא אני ואתה לא אתה. אבל אם אני אני כי אני אני, ואתה אתה כי אתה אתה, אז אני אני ואתה אתה.


If I am I because you are you and you are you because I am I, then I am not me and you are not you. However, if I am I because I am I and you are you because you are you, then I am I and you are you.

I like it, definitely describes my thinking about language challenges.


Which makes me think of the poem Als das Kind Kind war

I found a really nice version in Spanish.


Maybe I'll translate it to Hebrew.
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zenmonkey
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Setswana! and beyond!

Postby zenmonkey » Thu Feb 21, 2019 10:29 am

First things first. I finished the Introduction to Setswana course on Memrise! I finally ploughed through this morning through the last module. That's 30 days of continued Memrise study, which is a first for me. The interesting thing has been my ability to create a few sentences spontaneously - I think last night I told my daughter to "tell your teacher you want to learn to speak Setswana". She promptly rolled her eyes. Which was exactly what I was expecting.

There are some mistakes in it, but apparently the author is also very critical of the original Peace Corp material. And this brings me to an aside.

The price of negativity...
I noticed a few errors early on the Setswana course - I had two choices, go through them and ignore them, perhaps using them as reminders of possible mistakes (and possibly I learned a few things incorrectly) or dropping the course. If this was a language that had huge amounts of perfect learning material I could have taken the time to switch to better material. But perfection being the enemy of good enough ... I'm glad this material had its faults. It made me reflect on something I see here quite a lot. We spend a lot of time writing about how Pimsleur, Rosetta, Michel Thomas, Language Transfer, Benny Lewis, ASSIMIL, FSI, (insert your object of hate), etc. are all not good enough, old, use the worst methods for reason x, y, or z. The price of that negativity is that we stop using material that is, often enough in its imperfection, adequate.

Early on, I used Michel Thomas to start my German journey and found it useful. It fit my study style at the time (no book, in transport, rapid hooks into the language) and I quickly moved on. I had no expectations, no focus on efficiency, I hadn't read how terrible it was and I had it for free (aren't libraries wonderful?). I knew I'd use it for a few weeks and move on. I still recommend it as a good intro that one should move through quickly.

But if I had read all the reviews on it, I would have probably approached it skeptically, mistrusting the method, content and worst of all, my use of the time. I suspect that these pernicious little doubts would have quickly left me doubting my study with the additional emotional cost. I might have dropped that start, I might have stopped using MT and searched out "better" material. And probably I would have wasted a lot of time looking for the "most efficient" or "ideal beginner" material.

I'm going to try to stop listening to the nay sayers, internal and external, and focus on using material that is useful and adequate. If I were to score the Setswana course I just completed, I'd probably give it a 3 stars out of 5 - it has errors, no sound, yada, yada, yada. Who wants to spend time on a 3 when you can hunt out the mythical 5 star language learning material? Well, in Setswana, as far as I can tell there is no 5 star material. This is as good as it get, so getting it done and moving on is one effective strategy.

But the same seems to hold for some of the languages I study were the material is much more abundant. I haven't seen the perfect 5 start course for German (I've seen better that this Setswana course, for sure!). Each time, something is off, the level, the material, the boredom factor ... whatever it is, I can always find why some adequate material is just missing something and should only get a 4 out of 5 in my scorecard. But really 4 out of 5 is adequate. It's good enough. It's let do this and go beyond!

Is it Adequate?
So what really makes material adequate? I think I have two simple questions in my mind:

- If I focus and complete this material will it improve my knowledge in a way that is evident to me?
- Can I complete this quickly and move on or should I invest time identifying material that is more adequate for me right now?

It is really about being comfortable in the ambiguous quality of material and the language learning process.

So, for Setswana, I'm moving on, mostly. As part of my learning process, I still plan to do reviews of this material for the next 30 days and go back to the book and do some focused study (now that I have a large part of the vocabulary in my head).

The next 30 days of Setswana are going to be focused on ... ? Well, I need to figure that out but I think I have a lot of cards with sound, recordings, a few books... And I need to spending time talking, of course. I think 30 days of consolidating (after I get my material back in place) and I might be ready to start a conversation class on line. I've got a few leads...

I need to write about Bruno Ganz, Hebrew, Memrise to Anki experience, my week with my daughters, Georgian, WordNet ... later.
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My two youngest are here in Germany this week. We've visited Darmstadt and Frankfurt and had dinner with some multilingual friends. My girls speak French/German/English/Spanish (order of strengths) and my friends' girls speak (English father, Spanish mother) - German/English/Spanish. I've always thought my friends kids spoke better Spanish and English than my daughters but I think that is an extended version of self-doubt and self-criticism - listening carefully I can see where they have imperfections or missing vocabulary. I tend to be more critical of my own and it is objectively ok to see that my girls are weaker in their L4 compared to what is consecutive L2s in the other girls. Different learning strategies!

But that isn't why I'm mentioning this. What I loved from our dinner was how quickly and spontaneously the four settled into speaking German with each other. Part of it must be habit, they are each used to speaking with unknown children in German here. Part of it is negotiated ease - none of the adults speak German as well as the kids and despite our attempts at influence language choice, German was really it... when they wanted to include us, English or Spanish would crop in. Among the adults, we spoke mostly English and Spanish.

Having my two youngest daughters here also helped me look at some language material I would never consider. L, the older of the two is actively trying to improve her Spanish so we listened to Slow News in Spanish podcasts in the car going to and from Frankfurt. I paused it quite a bit and we worked on vocabulary and meaning along the way. I have to say, it is an excellent podcast. Part of it is behind a pay wall and if I was learning Spanish I'd really think about paying for this. The content just seems really worth it. Anyway, if you're looking into Spanish - take a look at the free part of the Slow News in Spanish.

We also watched a few movies on Netflix - they had no cultural reference to the 80's brat pack classics. A lot of that was in English with German or English subtitles. And I watched Moonlight with the older of the two (the younger one just wasn't interested.) purely in English - a lot of the accent and register was very foreign and difficult for her. But it was engaging enough that she struggled through it with enjoyment. There is a lesson there. I think I like watching movies as passive listening quite a bit and I need to seek it out more. I've often been critical that this isn't real studying but there is a place for it.

So we've been trying to stick to English and Spanish most days - with about 50% of our conversations are not in French. This is a success I think. Heading back to France later today.


I'm going to subject them to hours of talk podcasts...

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Brief update to My Current Resources:

Setswana
Memrise: Intro to Spoken Setswana (completed)
There are 2-3 other courses but I'm not yet actively working with them
Anki: Peacecorp (rdearman's) and Unisa (mine) decks with sound
Books:
A Course in Tswana
Peace Corps: Intro to Spoken Setswana
Peace Corp : There is no word for grammar in Setswana
Kauderwelsch Setswana
Apps
uTalk modules
and the setswana oxford dictionary https://tn.oxforddictionaries.com/
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zenmonkey
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Fri Feb 22, 2019 11:24 pm

I mentioned in my last post a few subjects I wanted to cover (Bruno Ganz, Hebrew, Memrise to Anki experience, Georgian, WordNet ...) and I'm not sure I'll get to them all any time soon.

Bruno Ganz has passed away. His roles in several movies have been excellent company on my German journey. I had cards from Wings of Desire in Anki that I don't study (because I made them rather poorly). And I've recently tried reading parts of the text to my daughters. I loved his accent, I loved his mother's Swiss accent. So I think I'm going to binge on his movies in the next weeks, I have several, others are available here and there.

Hebrew today was as bad as it gets. My review was supposed to cover a dozen action verbs I'm supposed to know and I could remember about 10%. My class was bad. My Memrise review worse than burnt carrots. Well, I looked back over last few days and I've been doing the time but not really focusing on learning. I'm pausing for tonight and going to work on Hebrew tomorrow. Bad days are disappointing but somehow they are also a motivation to work better (not more).

Ok, maybe one last Anki review....

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zenmonkey
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Hebrew and German

Postby zenmonkey » Sat Mar 02, 2019 6:40 pm

Hebrew

    I’ve had good weeks since the 10th of January - I have been studying every single day usually Hebrew, Setswana and some German. It’s been intense and the working with Hebrew has going to sleep with phrases running through head, falling asleep with that, thinking in Hebrew and waking up with Hebrew words … Great! Well, it might be a bit too much. Falling asleep is a bit difficult and I may need to cut back. It’s not that positive when my limited vocabulary makes me swirl about with very limited mental vocabulary. There are some negative emotional results I experienced when I focus too much.

    On the positive side, I’m learning! This weeks have been a serious step up over the last 6 months. I’m watching the series Shtisel for the second time and going from understanding one or two words here and there to getting full sentences! I’m still well below 20% comprehension but I love that this is visibly improving. My “study stack” is now italki lesson once/twice a week (and the homework from Hebrew from Scratch), short Memrise sessions, short Anki sessions, Shtisel videos, 30 minutes of Pimsleur a day, occasional hebrewpod101 sessions, a rare Assimil and paper flashcards from Pimsleur and/or homework.

    It seems like a lot but I’ve stopped FSI. Living Language and Clozemaster at this time. They did not bring joy. If I had to stick to only one main resource right now, I’d probably say that I’d keep Pimsleur, run through it and add back other stuff. I’m surprised because in the past I hated Pimsleur, but right now it the right program for my stage in learning.

    I started back with Pimsleur because I stumbled across Ellen Jovin’s old blog on her Pimsleur Hebrew experience and thought, “Hey, I really should give this another shot,” especially since I had received a set a few years back as a gift. I’ve completed 8 lessons so far, and I wonder if my love will stick with me through the full course material. It is getting harder. But I’m alternating with Assimil and I plan to make that my daily workout for the next months. (And yes, it is kind of creepy material but one can ignore that.)

German and churn and churn

    Reineke posted Steve’s video on moving on to native material and how important it is to start using native material where a majority of people never move away from beginner material. This has me thinking about how I use German and how late I moved into native material. Steve talks about moving into the real language in a month or two or three. Yikes!

Reineke wrote:


    I don’t know when I moved into German native material but it’s been a while and yet, when I want to “study”, I do go back a lot to learning material. I’m currently going to go back to Perfectionnement Allemand material because I never really finished. I’m not going back to FSI… But at the same time I’m sort of floundering with native material. Here is one reason why I churn with this language. When I read news, tweets, facebook posts in German I’ll stumble across one or two words that I don’t know or it is just a little harder to read and my brain is lazy. My brain says, “oh, German, skip that stuff” and off I go to read something in English. It’s a terrible but quite present habit. So I add more material that I avoid. Churn.

    I need to work on this.

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zenmonkey
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Mon Mar 11, 2019 11:27 pm

(taking this over to my log to stop polluting nooj's lovely log with this stuff.)

Saim wrote:
eido wrote:
Saim wrote:I'm honestly confused. Why would they be less convinced you're a local if you spoke more Catalan?

The way I'm reading it is they got mad because he only addressed them with a Catalan greeting, and proceeded to speak to them in Spanish. The host didn't like that, so they treated him badly. He was convinced @zenmonkey was a monolingual Spaniard and not a Mexican despite the obvious accent difference, so he changed his attitude toward him. That's what I understand.


Sure. I don't believe that's why that happened.


:D Well, I think that's fair. I mean, I probably would not have believed it either, if I hadn't experienced it. The swearing, the terms used and the resolution and the explanations by the owner the next day all made it very clear that it was all cultural and all language related. Sure, it could have been that the guy's underwear was too tight or the I looked too much like his mom or that there was a candid camera somewhere. But it seemed to us to be as described.

Now, In over the last 25 years, I've been back in Spain 25-30 times (had two bosses that were based in Madrid) of which maybe 6-7 times were in Barcelona. A few times in Mallorca. I've driven from Bordeaux to San Sebastian to Taragona to Girona and back. I have never, ever, not once had a negative cultural experience in Spain, expect for that one time. I've had my car broken into (we left/forgot an empty bag in plain view...), I've had emergency care (bike crash), I've slept on the floor of an airport, I've photographed a strike... but no other altercation. Not only that, I don't know anyone that's gone through that. In fact, language wise the bilingualism that I've seen and experienced is exceptional - sure, some people clearly function better in Catalan but, as a tourist, I'm not sure I've ever met a local in Barcelona that doesn't also speak Spanish.

It's ok, if you don't believe it.
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby Saim » Tue Mar 12, 2019 7:09 am

zenmonkey wrote::D Well, I think that's fair. I mean, I probably would not have believed it either, if I hadn't experienced it. The swearing, the terms used and the resolution and the explanations by the owner the next day all made it very clear that it was all cultural and all language related.


I don't doubt it could have been culture and language related. What I find it hard to believe is that he was upset that you spoke Spanish (and not Catalan), in that case he probably gets angry on a daily basis.

In fact, language wise the bilingualism that I've seen and experienced is exceptional - sure, some people clearly function better in Catalan but, as a tourist, I'm not sure I've ever met a local in Barcelona that doesn't also speak Spanish.


More people in Barcelona (especially when including the metropolitan area) are Spanish-dominant and many don't speak Catalan at all so it's not really an issue of them "also" speaking Spanish.

If you ever do the opposite experiment (i.e. speak to everyone in Catalan), you'll probably find this bilingualism doesn't exist, and you'll likely get far more "negative language-related experiences".

I certainly don't want to deny or minimise your experience, all I'm saying is that Catalan is a minority language in Catalonia, and the level of negative attitudes towards Catalan among Spaniards and among foreigners in Barcelona is generally not reflected in the attitudes of Catalan speakers towards Spanish.
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