Not all those who wander are lost

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Teango
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby Teango » Sat Oct 23, 2021 7:44 am

sfuqua wrote:Dialang helped me focus on how I suck...

And this is the problem with standardized testing! Especially online testing with no individuality or human batteries included!!

Take heart, sfuqua, Dialang told me pretty much the same thing about my German back in Darmstadt (and Rick sums up the absurdity of it all too well). I've seen so many good people tilted to the ground by this dastardly piece of coding. Ignore it. Kick its outdated interface and boring cryptic questions to the curb. You're doing brilliantly. Instead, seek out and move toward whatever helps you fall deeper in love with the language and fosters respect for the people who use it, and realize you're awesome and making great progress in your own good time and interests. Your interlanguage is constantly evolving, and with a bit of water, sunlight, and care, it will blossom into something amazing with time. You'll see.

All right, enough words in English...it's time to score another minute of Spanish before the sun sets today. ¡Ándale!
12 x

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sfuqua
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Languages: Bad English: native
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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 12:35 pm

Wow,. I somehow missed Rick's post. It might have saved me from wasting an hour on the thing.. I know better than to take the results too seriously.
I think that they may have produced a uniquely fouled up test with dialang. It is pretty easy to do this unless you are very careful.

My advice to learners would be to avoid dialang.

I'm still gonna do some basic stuff, my Spanish could use it.
1 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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sfuqua
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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 3:34 pm

I'm gonna quit talking about dialang pretty soon. :D
I looked again the archives, and I saw that some people do think they got fair scores on dialang. I think that most of these people live in Europe. Maybe their is something about European education that helps them on the test. It is a European test. :lol:

I wonder if there isn't a need for a more general language comprehensions test. Of course everybody would have their own idea of how to do it. I would probably pick something like a bunch of different cloze passages with audio.

Learner is given a passage with blanks in it. They hear the passage read aloud. Then they get to select the words that fit into the passage. By picking passages at many different levels and changing the speed of the narration, one could produce tests at many different levels. I guess you would have to trial it a bunch to make it meaningful. There could be copyright issues.

Anyway, I think something like this might be a better general test of listening and reading than dialang.

There are many other ways to do it.
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...

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sfuqua
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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 5:26 pm

More importantly than my speculations about Internet testing, it is raining in San Jose! It started a couple of days ago, and the whole world suddenly started to smell sweet. When the rain started at night a bunch of my neighbors and me went outside to stand in the rain. We all laughed at each other, but the rain was sooo sweet. The dust is out of the air, and for a while here it looks like the California of old. The rain is supposed to continue through tomorrow, and the accumulation hasn't been great, but maybe this is the start of something good. Anyway, at least for here, the fire season is over. :D

My daughter is in a play and has been running on 4 hours sleep a night for the past few nights, finishing the show and then doing her homework. She has done dance since she was 12, but this is the first time she has acted. She has a tiny role, but she does dance a bunch. Right in the middle of all this the final acceptance on her trip to Germany next summer came through. She's going, and she is psyched. She is thinking of doing Pimsleur before she goes, but perhaps her teacher will give them enough courtesy phrases and the like to get her going there. There's time.

OK, me and language, I'm gonna concentrate on Spanish for a bit.
I've been thinking of finishing FSI. I did the first 45 lessons, pretty thoroughly many years ago. I stopped before I got to the part of the course that deals with the subjunctive and other advanced topics. I've always meant to finish it, but several years have gone by. I've restarted FSi many time, but I never get through more than the first few lessons, because they are too easy.

I need to review the whole thing; I need to avoid just starting at the beginning, and I need to spend enough time on each lesson to reach some sort of mastery. In the introduction of FSI Basic Spanish, it suggests that the course could be done one unit a week, and that it should take about 600 hours to complete. At FSI, this course was used as support for a full time course at a rate of about 2 units a week. One problem with doing FSI slowly is that you forget the first part before you get to the last. I've got the think of a review plan other than just repeating the same lesson for a week.
I need to think how to to do this
4 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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IronMike
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby IronMike » Sun Oct 24, 2021 12:46 pm

sfuqua wrote: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.

Have you tried DLI's online diagnostic assessment?
2 x
You're not a C1 (or B1 or whatever) if you haven't tested.
CEFR --> ILR/DLPT equivalencies
My swimming life.
My reading life.

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sfuqua
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Languages: Bad English: native
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Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
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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 » Sun Oct 24, 2021 4:39 pm

Not yet.
It actually looks much better and less arbitrary.
If nothing else it is actually an adaptive test, and it is much longer. I'll get to it at some point here.
Because of the nature of the people who made the test, and the use of the test, I bet it is a better general language ability test. :D

Wow, I gotta say things just got loud in my apartment! :o An F-18 just went over, low enough to shake things up a bit. This is pretty rare; I hope this doesn't mean we're going to war with someone. Unlike many people, I absolutely love the sound of jets. I'm still the little kid that talked his parents into going to every airshow within driving distance. I still remember the thrill I got at one show where I got to touch the wing of an F-104. By puberty I figured out that I did not have the nervous system to be a pilot (EEK, I'M UPSIDE DOWN!), but I still love jets and rockets. Late at night, when people are supposed to be asleep or watching porn, I watch videos of high performance aircraft showing off. And rockets taking off. I'm so old I still get a little tear in my eye when one of the things works... :lol:

So I am a total space nut. I think my favorite mission of all, weirdly enough, was the Cassini mission to Saturnhttps://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/cassini/overview/. I was excited about the mission before it launched, and I got my family and my family's signatures on the CD on the side of the spacecraft. Us and a few hundred thousand other people. :D It launched in 1997 and it was a glorious mission. When it ended in 2017, I remember that I set my alarm to be awake as the brave little robot burned up in the upper atmosphere of Saturn. I lay in the dark in my bed and thought about all of the good people who had made this wonderful mission possible. I thought of the many things that had happened in my family during the mission, my chance to actually work at NASA for a few years, the arrival of my daughter, our move to San Jose... I thought about what was happening to the spacecraft at that moment... I didn't wake anybody else up. When I knew that Cassini was gone, I started my dayhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrGAQCq9BMU.
Somewhere in the atmosphere of Saturn, I guess, there are a few atoms that were once an image of my and my family's names. :D
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...

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sfuqua
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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 » Thu Oct 28, 2021 4:48 am

Well, I'm having trouble figuring out a way to do FSI that doesn't take hours and hours of my time. How did I ever get through it the first time? :o
It is a wonderful resource. My wife has given us a couple of scares, but appears to be OK. Her boss is picking on her; he is annoyed how she is sick so much. Sorry, fella, but we she has had stomach cancer, coronary artery disease, gallbladder surgery, months of unexplained nausea and a lot of other fun things. I guess some people lack the sympathy gene. :evil:

I've been reading and doing Assimil, and forgetting to log my reading and listening time these days. I need to get my act together. A thorough run through Assimil may do all I want fot my Spanish. I've also discovered that I miss studying something new. That was the fun of Irish, Icelandic, and Old English. There was always something strange right around the corner. :D

Even and ancient language without a huge following like Old English offers a lot to study and daydream over.

I've found myself daydreaming about focusing on Old English full time. It doesn't really lead anywhere, but then where does any of this lead?

I want to learn Old English because I don't want to talk to anybody? :lol:
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 » Sun Oct 31, 2021 6:09 pm

It was a wonderful week for Spanish and I didn't study very much. :D
I did anki Spanish, or course, two courses at the "with ease" level, and two courses at the "using" level, and I'm getting far enough along that it is not completely trivial.

Why do I say it was a great week for Spanish? Well I've always been suspicious of people who claim that they learned a lot from reading or listening to things they don't understand. "It just comes to you." "One day you wake up and it is easy." Well, I've never really had that experience. For me it seems that listening or reading things that I don't understand leads me nowhere. I keep trying to do it, because it would be nice if it was true that I am going to just discover how much I have learned automatically, but for me, I need comprehensible input, and I need it at i+1 (Krashen) to learn. Hu and Nation (2000)https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234651421_Unknown_Vocabulary_Density_and_Reading_Comprehension operationalized what i+1 is, one of the few times that Krashen's brilliant but vague suggestions have had some concrete suggestions connected to them. ;)

My problem is that I keep trying to listen to and read stuff that is too hard for me. I want to be one of the "cool kids" when I'm not even cool yet. 8-) Oh, I can L-R García-Márquez and know what is going on, or I can watch La Reina del Sur, and understand much of it, but neither is a completely comfortable. :o

Then, I sort of randomly turned on Telemundo. And I realized that I can understand virtually everything. That is until they get to a telenovela, where my comprehension drops off to half baked again. But I spent hours a day listening and watching comprehensible input. My Spanish seems to be waking up and dancing with joy. I'm thinking of subscribing to the Latin channels from my cable company so I can get some channels from down in Central and South America. :D

In a similar vein, I'm reading El Pais as my main reading source these days. I need a good Latin American newspaper that is online. Any suggestions?

Oh why did I ever think I needed to go to Old English and Norse to find something strange. Latin America and Spain are at least as weird as Iceland (I mean weird in a good way. :D )

OK, so now I am just going to get more comprehensible input and start chattering in Spanish? I don't think so. Reading the thread about people learning languages fast in the US military https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?p=197433#p197433 reminded me that hard work is needed to really move one's language. I'm going to thoroughly do FSI Spanish and Platiquemos. :shock:

The suggestions on the courses suggest that these courses are supposed to take between 10 hours (FSI) to 6-8 hours (Platiquemos) per unit. I did the first 45 lessons of FSI before, but that was almost 10 years ago. I need to do the whole thing. FSI specifically talks about "overlearning" or continuing to practice even after one has reached "mastery". Overlearning has been shown to greatly improve performance in the short term (the first few days), but it has much less positive effect after that. I think that FSI finds it useful because of the fast pace at which they move through the courses, the learner never has time to forget anything. :shock:

One effect of overlearning is that, once the material is familiar, the rest of the practice becomes very easy. Some people may find this stage boring. :lol:

With the slower pace I will use to get through FSI/Platiquemos I will need to do some explicit review, so here is my plan.

Go through Platiquemos, doing each drill five times. After considering many, many review schedules, I decided to do a second wave through the material using FSI doing each file five times, after I get about half thru with Platiquemos... This means that I will be repeating each unit ten times. I may change the review schedule if I think of something better. I'm going to get my news from El Pais, and any other good Spanish newspaper I can find online.

I would swear that mostly just watching television that I can (mostly) understand has had a bigger immediate impact on my Spanish than anything I have done for a while. :D
6 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 Nov 01, 2021 1:20 am

OK, I'm down to 3 repetitions per drill or three times through each unit.
Long ago, when I recieved my brief training in teaching with the audio-lingual method, the teacher said that one should never repeat the same drill more than three times. I don't know if that was based on any research or anything but it makes sense. I'm still going to do a second wave with FSI, so I will hit everything six times total before I'm done. :D

One change in my approach from 10 years ago when I did most of FSI, is that I am not even paying attention if I get something wrong. A wrong answer doesn't mean that you are bad or something; it does mean that you haven't learned something yet.
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
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Tue Nov 02, 2021 2:49 am

FSI/Platiquemos seems very easy, but I'm still near the beginning. I'm thinking of parking Assimil and replacing it with reading El Pais. I'm going to try the https://www.dliflc.edu/online-diagnostic-assessment-oda/ test in a few weeks, but I'd like to tune up a bit first with something other than a novel... Besides, I'm surprised at how much I'm enjoying El Pais. :D
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...


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