Not all those who wander are lost

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sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
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Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Fri Oct 01, 2021 5:33 am

Reality has a way of making a mockery of petty concerns.
My wife has had stomach pains for the past two years. She had her gall bladder removed, and things improved some. But the pain continued and her doctors were at a loss.
A doctor finally suggested that she should have a cardiac stress test to rule out heart trouble...
Her EKG went haywire at a slow walk and they had to stop the test immediately with her in a lot of distress. It appears that my much younger than me, Filipina princess has pretty bad coronary artery disease. It was a complete and utter shock. I know that this is often quite treatable, but now we have a wait for the heart catheter lab, and hopefully a stent to fix this. Or a bypass to fix this. Or anything to fix this.

The doctor who suggested the stress test may have saved her life.

She has no family history. Her blood work has never been bad. She doesn't smoke or drink(much). She is a relatively young woman. She seems like the last person who would get coronary artery disease.
But she did.

I actually did a bunch of Irish anki cards today. There isn't much else to do sometimes in a hospital. Irish goes much faster when I'm not messing with Old English and Icelandic. Right now my Irish just needs hard work. I'm moving pretty fast.

We push on. We're home now with many medicines. Waiting is hard. I'm watching her sleep peacefully. I gotta sleep myself.
10 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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luke
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby luke » Fri Oct 01, 2021 12:58 pm

sfuqua wrote:It appears that my much younger than me, Filipina princess has pretty bad coronary artery disease.

She has no family history. Her blood work has never been bad.

I'm watching her sleep peacefully. I gotta sleep myself.

Sorry that your princess is not well.

My dad had heart disease. Sort of similar in that you wouldn't think so by looking at him.

My brother is very into https://nutritionfacts.org/ and Dr. Gregor as a science based approach to nutrition. His book How Not To Die, although big and thick, is a pretty easy read. Most of the chapters are independent. E.G., one can turn to a chapter on heart disease, organ diseases (heart's a organ, but since it's so common, it gets its own chapter), and other illnesses that are often greatly ameliorated and sometimes cured by a change in diet. It's one of the things I dipped into during my last visit. There are unifying threads to his approach. The story about his grandmother is poignant and determined the course of his profession and his life.

But changing diet is like learning a foreign language. Many people think it's pretty extreme.

Oh, and Dr. Gregor does this side stuff on nutrition like an avocation. He's not selling information. He's aggregating and distilling scientific studies into a format that laymen can understand with ease. He's not selling a private line of supplements or anything like that. Basically he says the grocery store has what you need, but you need to choose wisely.
1 x

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sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Tue Oct 05, 2021 3:04 am

After a very spooky weekend, my princess, in the original John Carter of Mars meaning of the phrase, has a stent in her heart, and things look good.

My Irish progress has been ponderous, because I am doing a bunch of cards that have many errors on them. I try to generate my cards automatically from books and sometimes the process is messy. Usually I just delete bad cards, but this stuff is important, so I have been fixing them as I go, which is slow.
My guess is that I have about 14 months of work before I would do test prep if I decide to do a cefr test.
I need to grind hard at Irish to get there. I think this is the most problematic part of the deck quality wise. Teach yourself Irish 1961 is great, even if it does contain rare Munster verb forms.
I'm learning lot..
15 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Mon Oct 11, 2021 6:29 pm

Well a post by Cavesa https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=17314 jarred me in another direction. I read it after I had just finished beating my head against Irish for two and a half hours, and I just wanted to read something. I started to think, "what am I learning Irish for?" :lol:
1. I'm not any more Irish than the average person from Britain; a few ancestors and that's it. My mostly British ancestors moved to Virginia and then Kentucky between 1670 and 1800 and without really mixing into the melting pot of America, so I am actually a nice British hybrid, Celtic, Saxon, Viking, and a dash French, just like many people in this corner of Europe. I don't have a big bunch of Irish ancestors :D
2 Not to sound like the delightful 15 year old Irish girl my daughter and I talked to a few years ago in Ireland, but where does Irish lead. If I reach a high enough level in Irish, I will have maybe 5-10 books to read total, and that's it.
3. I can already read Spanish pretty well, and although my French is slow, it just needs work. I took right off and read 20 pages of a French novel last night (in about 80 minutes :o ).
4. As far as escaping into daydreams in a foreign language, France and Spain have a ton of novels and movies. I could live mostly in Spanish, or French without moving anywhere.

I had my first dream in French in a couple of years. It was very realistic. I was in Paris, and I couldn't understand what anybody was saying. I was trying to read the newspaper and I didn't understand many of the words. Maybe it was a nightmare.

I gotta work on my French.

As far as CEFR tests go, I don't really need to do any. I could do Dialang at some point, although I know that is not the same thing. Are there any other cheap/free language tests out there that I am not thinking of. It is good to have a goal. Back a few years ago I did a silly little vocabulary tests where I took the first 20000 lemmas in Spanish, scrambled them, and then put them in anki and tested how many I knew of the first 100 that came up to guess what my vocabulary was. I got right around 10000 words in Spanish as my "passive vocabulary" . Maybe I could do something like that to get some sort of sense of accomplishment.

I think I'm going to just read in French and Spanish, and do Assimil just enough to review the grammar. I feel like my French is at that point where it is ready to start snowballing and improving quickly. Writing... Maybe I can keep a journal. I really don't like doing handwriting. I ruined my right had with overuse while I worked at NASA, and even though I ruined it keyboarding, it hurts more writing than it does keyboarding.
5 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Mon Oct 11, 2021 8:17 pm

I think that I am just going to read and watch shows whenever I can. I will listen to tts audiobooks of what I'm reading whenever I walk and I will watch as many shows as I can, but I don't think I am going to do that for anything other than fun. It seems to me that I learn more vocabulary quicker when I read, and I need a lot of vocabulary in French especially.
I remember listening to a French couple on the bus in Las Vegas a couple years ago, and the fascinating conversation they had. We were riding by the place where that madman killed 60 people and wounded 411 shooting from a high rise hotel in 2017. Las Vegas history! I'm glad I had enough vocabulary understand it. I wondered what they would say.

English version
Man: It is very hot.
Woman: Yes, very hot.
Woman. I think everyone on this bus is a tourist.
Man: Yes.
Woman: It is very, very hot.

I was proud of myself for understanding, but the vocabulary was not too challenging.
I agreed completely with everything they said.
12 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Fri Oct 15, 2021 3:42 am

I've been fooling around with fantasy lately, in French and Spanish.
Weirdly enough, I have rediscovered what I have noticed before, fantasy is a hard genre for me. Historical fiction, my favorite. History and general fiction, pretty easy usually, but the translation of _The Eye of the World_ in Spanish is pretty hard, although readable. _Game of Thrones_ is very, very hard for me in French. I suppose the smart thing to do is to try some historical fiction in French and Spanish so that I can keep my speed up, but then I'm not smart sometimes. I'm going to try doing some concentrated reading of _Game of Thrones_ in French for a week or two and see if it doesn't lighten up. :D
I may try a parallel translation to speed things up. I always love the way that that can get one to comprehend a sentence even with a lot of shaky vocabulary. :D

I'm gettting good comprehension with Francoise Sagan's books. It is a blast to understand a book which is aimed at native speakers. Sometimes when reading in French I have that cool experience where I get a sentences with a bunch of half learned words. I sometimes find I can read the entire sentence with good comprehension, even though I am not completely certain of the meaning of most of the words.

This whole thing of learning words is pretty far from a binary, "I know it, or I don't know it" proposition. :roll:

Anyway, I'm happily pounding away at French and Spanish. I alternate days, Spanish day and then French day. I read each day and I listen to tts audiobook while walking. My comprehension of Spanish listening is almost as good as my English comprehension. My French comprehension sucks. :lol: I'm trying to listen to stuff I've already read. I don't keep stuff exactly aligned however

My wife went back to work today, and was fine. It took her a longer time than usual to recover from her stent because she had been sick for so long, but she's back...
Now I'm in big trouble :lol:
8 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Fri Oct 15, 2021 1:25 pm

Wow, parallel texts were a good idea. After only 15 pages, the whole thing started to seem clearer. I think that the whole idea of idiolects is very true. I hit the combination of George RR Martin and Jean Sola (the translator) and it threw me for a loop for a few pages, plus the fact that the first few pages of many books contain some of the hardest stuff in the book, as the author sets the scene for the action.
Anyway, French is moving back into focus. I'll be listening to _Le Trône de Fer_ while walking today, and I'll be reading _El Ojo del Mundo_ later and doing anki Assimil anki French and Spanish. I'm thinking about dumping Assimil (again!) and just doing a bunch of drills on verbs for both languages. It seems to me that verbs are one of the big challenges of Romance languages, that and gender and number agreement...
3 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sat Oct 16, 2021 3:18 pm

But really, why read something a little too hard when there are books that are just right???

I can read most everything that Françoise Sagan wrote with just a little use of the popup dictionary. So far, it seems like she creates very high class soap operas that take place in France, and therefore give a nice sense of "not in California", which I enjoy.

Not that California is bad; we're getting more and more into Fall these days. It is cool and crisp in the mornings. The last few days something that is in bloom is really bringing in the hummingbirds. They are buzzing around and chattering to each other right outside the window as I write this.

I may keep going in Wheel of Time in Spanish. Maybe I could do Wheel of Time in Spanish and Tolkein in French, if I want to go back to all fantasy. Or maybe I'll just drift between books as I have been doing.

After fiddling around with cards to drill grammar in anki, I think I'm just going to keep plugging away at Assimil French and Spanish, reading the books in parallel as I go along, but using anki to learn the material.

I'm happy, I get a booster covid vaccine Monday, so I will have an excuse for being lazy for a day or two...
5 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

DaveAgain
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1961
Joined: Mon Aug 27, 2018 11:26 am
Languages: English (native), French & German (learning).
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... &start=200
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby DaveAgain » Sat Oct 16, 2021 3:53 pm

sfuqua wrote:Wow, parallel texts were a good idea. After only 15 pages, the whole thing started to seem clearer. I think that the whole idea of idiolects is very true. I hit the combination of George RR Martin and Jean Sola (the translator) and it threw me for a loop for a few pages, plus the fact that the first few pages of many books contain some of the hardest stuff in the book, as the author sets the scene for the action.
Anyway, French is moving back into focus. I'll be listening to _Le Trône de Fer_ while walking today, and I'll be reading _El Ojo del Mundo_ later and doing anki Assimil anki French and Spanish. I'm thinking about dumping Assimil (again!) and just doing a bunch of drills on verbs for both languages. It seems to me that verbs are one of the big challenges of Romance languages, that and gender and number agreement...
I vaguely remember a reddit thread on the Game of Thrones French translations, complaining that the earlier books' translated text was difficult to read, the later books being translated by someone else.

This was a comfort to me at the time as a peek at Arya's Fleabottom scene was a wall of unknown words. :-)
2 x

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sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sat Oct 23, 2021 3:31 am

Well, I've lurched again.

I'm all Spanish all the time right now.

I think it is good to be honest about things; it might save somebody else some trouble

I took the Dialang test https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=17331 and I was sort of shocked at the results. I got a B1 in reading. That stings. :( The placement part of the test said that I had strong vocabulary knowledge, but that I might have trouble speaking, which I thought was probably true, but my results were low intermediate on the actual reading test. I'm not sure how well dialang matches the other parts of the CEFR system, but I did notice that dialang at least does not match anything I have been doing in Spanish for the last eight years. I didn't read a single passage of any length or complexity, and I still got many answers wrong.

Of course what kind of test did I think I was getting? :o A test on reading novels and listening to audiobooks? :lol: The test is specific and it figured out that I am very weak on some basic survival skills that pretty much everyone would know who has ever been to Spain or used test prep materials. I've never been to Spain. I did no preparation. I bet I could level up quickly in dialang by studying specifically for the test. Right now, I actually would do better with a page of García-Márquez than I would do with a Spanish menu.

I'm gonna go back to basics and finish what I was working on with Spanish before I drifted off into French, and Irish, and Icelandic, and Old English, and... FSI here I come...

I do have some big reservations about dialang, however. Even with no evil intent it is possible to produce a bad test if you just follow the descriptive statistics about test items. I know, I did some test development in the US refugee program in the 1980s. One sign of bad item selection are tricky or ambiguous questions. Is it a test of solving puzzles, or is it a language test? We fell into that one. You've got to read items again before you let them go live or you can produce a test full of confusing puzzles. Even after looking at the answers I still don't know why my answer was wrong in some cases. I understood every word. Maybe I'm weird; are you testing for weirdness, or is it a language test.

The open ended questions on dialang are nonsense. There was no human reading the answers. Intellegent test takers are always going to find new ways to answer your dumb question. The test also shows that it supports all of the current fads in test development. Open ended questions. Adaptive (I don't think it adapts during the test, only with the placement part). "Real" activities. Confounding writing skills with reading? I'm just not impressed.

Even though I don't believe that dialang is an appropriate test for someone who isn't looking to get certified, it did make me shift gears. Thanks, Dialang :lol: I have a new respect for anybody who goes through the whole CEFR process for real.
Dialang helped me focus on how I suck, and this is the stated goal of the test, so I guess it was successful. However, people who aren't looking to do a full CEFR test at some point may not find the results useful.
5 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...


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