Not all those who wander are lost

Continue or start your personal language log here, including logs for challenge participants
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 » Mon May 23, 2022 4:15 am

:D
I got my copy of Les Passagers Du Vent from France, and it looks cool. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Passagers_du_vent
It looks very cool. I think I may try using scriptorium, after I get so I can read it. :D

I can read much of it already, but I need to look up some words to get 100%. :D
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...

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 » Sat May 28, 2022 5:10 am

Glorious weather these days. Not enough rain this year, so the fire season may be bad, but it hasn't really started yet. The mockingbirds are crazy here. We have three in trees around our apartment, so at least one is singing all the time, night or day...

OK, I'm a few thousand cards into anki decks for Spanish and French with cards from Pimsleur and Michel Thomas courses for each language. The cards are all L1->L2 cards. I have been surprised at how hard some of these cards are and how useful they have been.

Right now I am even more convinced that the whole Input only approach is misguided for people learning their language as a foreign context. It is fairly straightforward to use input to develop comprehension on your own in a foreign setting, but you have to speak a language to learn how to speak it. Maybe some people can just get input and start talking, but I bet that they all have chances to use the language. If you don't have a chance to use your language in your environment, L1->L2 cards can give you a chance to practice producing the language. :o

My cards have been cards translating from English to the L2; they are different actual free conversation of course, but they do offer an overview of survival language and basic grammar. After a few thousand cards now, I can feel the cards start to snowball, and I am confident that completing the deck will produce A2/B1 level production, along with a lot of vocabulary from input.

The main difficulty of this type of card is trying to remember the way that the courses choose to translate certain things in the context of the course. I'm having a lot more trouble with French than with Spanish, since I have much less background in it.

My goals for my production in French and Spanish are pretty humble. I would like to be a tourist that is easy for locals to deal with. Beyond that my goals are all comprehension based. I would like to be able to read aloud in my languages, and be able to read novels and watch movies in these languages.
My wife continues on through the Spanish deck, and I keep trying to fix the many messed up cards in it. I keep her in her own profile, and whenever she syncs my fixes move onto her phone. She is having a lot of trouble with all of the agreements that Spanish has, gender and number, but she keeps pounding through cards until she gets them right.

We've started having conversations in "Pimsleur Spanish" from time to time, which annoys my daughter, the German student. When she doesn't understand something, she just takes off in German to show us that she can be incomprehensible too.

I've been reading El País and Le Monde every day and have made some progress here also. They keep me away from the maddening US news industry.
As a teacher and parent, the recent school shooting in Texas has been difficult to bear. We practiced active shooter drills at my school once or twice a year, so I have thought a lot about how I would handle such a situation. I had to talk to kids about this every year. Madness...

I can't imagine what happens to someone to make them a shooter. I don't understand some of my fellow citizens and their values that make them think that weapons with large capacity magazines are a good thing to have spread through our society. What are they thinking? Who do they plan to shoot?

Sorry; I'm off topic for language learning, and if anybody is offended, I will delete these sentences, but trying to get my head around being a part of a culture where school shootings are so common that we had to practice for them... this is the main mental challenge I have been having the last few days.
Last edited by sfuqua on Sun May 29, 2022 3:35 am, edited 1 time in total.
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
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sat May 28, 2022 1:53 pm

I haven't discussed in detail my newspaper reading. I am reading El País and Le Monde every day, and I am thinking about getting more systematic with it. By choosing the international or European versions of each paper I can see a lot of stories which are mssing from US media, and I can learn about far away places. I mentioned before reading Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't be Wrong, and I was shocked at how much actually learning something about the political structure and economy of France helps me to appreciate the country. I am smart enough not to hold the miserable trip my family took to Paris a few years ago against a thousands of years old culture :shock: , but now I do understand a lot more about what we experienced there. I suppose most people from the EU would have sufficient background information on France to judge it on its own merits, but despite being better informed than I imagine most tourists are, we fell into about every stupid mistake a tourist could fall into. We rushed through everything too fast. We chose the wrong hotel in the wrong neighborhood. While most people were nice enough in Paris, a few people were jerks, and we should have just laughed at them and moved on instead of being annoyed. :lol:

Anyway, I think that staying up to date with the news from a country might be a good way to stay motivated while continuing to practice reading. :D :D
I'm pretty happy about how my language learning is going right now. I hope I can lock in "good tourist" language levels with my decks and just keep building.

Life is good. :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...

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 » Wed Jun 08, 2022 5:53 am

Well, I've been moving steadily along the past few days. :D I am pounding my way through some beginner level courses in French and Spanish, languages where I am already advanced or at least intermediate. There is absolutely nothing in these courses which I couldn't read easily, but when I do it as L1_>L2 cards, my weaknesses and vague understandings become clear. Especially in French, I am learning just how much I don't know about the language. Ça and ce, for instance, have been recent annoyances. L2->L1 is easy. L1->L2, I keep saying "why" a lot in my head. Looking up explanations for some of these things only shows me that the online experts don't agree. ça n'est suffit pas ce n'est suffit pas. I'm pretty sure I don't get it. I need to look at what Michel Thomas says about this...if he says anything. Michel Thomas often has a clear "rule of thumb" for the subset of grammar for his languages that he covers. Assimil may have a clear explanation in there somewhere also. :D
Basic problems like this reveal the problems with approaches that don't explain the grammar as one goes along. With French, I basically did half of French with Ease and then started reading, since I guess I thought I believed the whole Krashen Input Hypothesis approach. Well, it's years later, and my spoken French is still at the "quoting phrasebook" level. My French reading comprehension is still shaky too. While I don't think that pounding through almost 10000 L1->L2 cards will teach me all the French grammar I missed with my haphazard approach, it may force me to find resources to figure out what I don't know.
With Spanish I don't have much trouble, but I do think about grammar while I do the cards and try to figure out what will be hard for my wife when she gets to that part of the course herself ( she is doing the same deck herself). It is interesting to see what bugs a Fluent speaker of Cebuano, Tagalog, and English when approaching Spanish. Interestingly enough, agreement of gender between adjectives and nouns is one thing that she regularly messes up. Of course Tagalog (and I assume Cebuano) don't have grammatical gender. Many Spanish words were borrowed into Tagalog, usually in their masculine forms, so this forces her to analyse these borrowed words in a new way when she hits them in Spanish. She is a machine on these cards. I keep offering to cut down her number of new cards, and she keeps refusing. "Just keep them coming!" I've always known that she was smarter than me in a lot of ways, and I think language learning may be one of her strengths. I've seen her trying to communicate in a language where she knows just a few words. Big smiles, no embarrassment, and just use the living daylights out of what she knows. People look forward to talking to her again. She says that she learned beginning spoken English on the job as a maid and waitress at the hotel in Manila where she worked before I met her. She says that German men were particularly nice and helpful, and would sometimes hang around in the restaurant to work with her on her English. I'm glad to hear that German guys will go out of their way to help a cute teenager learning English. :lol: Seriously. She found native English speakers, of all flavours, to be less nice and helpful on average. :o
L1->L2 cards can be a pain to learn because of the ambiguity of the translation in this direction. The nature of anki makes this even worse than it would be in an actual Pimsleur course. Is it est-ce que vous voulez coucher avec moi? or is it Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ? or should I know someone well enough to use tu before I ask if they want to sleep with me. Well, both est-ce que vous voulez and voulez-vous are in my sentence deck, but in the actual course they are introduced separately and are contrasted with each other. However when the sentences appear in an anki deck, one can wind up reviewing one structure and have the other structure show up in a review card right in the middle. The way I have reduced this problem is by having multiple translations of the French sentence on the front of the card-- a google translate translation, a yandex translation, and word by word translation. This helps keep things sane.

Anyway, I am working hard, and I think what I am doing will push my French along. I fully expect my wife to pass me by in Spanish in a few months :D
11 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
luke
Brown Belt
Posts: 1243
Joined: Fri Aug 07, 2015 9:09 pm
Languages: English (N). Spanish (intermediate), Esperanto (B1), French (intermediate but rusting)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=16948
x 3631

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby luke » Wed Jun 08, 2022 11:52 am

sfuqua wrote:Is it est-ce que vous voulez coucher avec moi? or is it Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ? :D

According to Patti LaBelle, it's Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir? :lol:
1 x
: 124 / 124 Cien años de soledad 20x
: 5479 / 5500 5500 pages - Reading
: 51 / 55 FSI Basic Spanish 3x
: 309 / 506 Camino a Macondo

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 » Wed Jun 08, 2022 12:56 pm

Ce vs ça.
This Vs that?
Demonstrative adjective vs demonstrative pronoun?
Directly before etre vs everywhere else?
All of the above at the same time?

So ce soir not ça soir?

I gotta figure this out...

I guess EE Cummings used the phrase first in the context of speaking to a prostitute, so maybe it does scan ok in the Patti LaBelle version.
Last edited by sfuqua on Wed Jun 08, 2022 2:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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...

DaveAgain
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1968
Joined: Mon Aug 27, 2018 11:26 am
Languages: English (native), French & German (learning).
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... &start=200
x 4050

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby DaveAgain » Wed Jun 08, 2022 1:33 pm

sfuqua wrote:Ce vs ça.
This Vs that?
Demonstrative adjective vs demonstrative pronoun?
Directly before etre ve everywhere else?
All of the above at the same time?

So ce soir not ça soir?

I guess EE Cummings used the phrase first in the context of speaking to a prostitute, so maybe it does scan ok in the Patti LaBelle version.
Perhaps Ms LaBelle was using Vous in its plural-you sense? :-)
2 x

User avatar
luke
Brown Belt
Posts: 1243
Joined: Fri Aug 07, 2015 9:09 pm
Languages: English (N). Spanish (intermediate), Esperanto (B1), French (intermediate but rusting)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=16948
x 3631

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby luke » Wed Jun 08, 2022 1:43 pm

DaveAgain wrote:
sfuqua wrote:So ce soir not ça soir?

I guess EE Cummings used the phrase first in the context of speaking to a prostitute, so maybe it does scan ok in the Patti LaBelle version.
Perhaps Ms LaBelle was using Vous in its plural-you sense? :-)

And she wants to get it on tonight. :)

Apparently e.e. cummings was more patient, or maybe he didn't want to wait until night. I can't tell.
2 x
: 124 / 124 Cien años de soledad 20x
: 5479 / 5500 5500 pages - Reading
: 51 / 55 FSI Basic Spanish 3x
: 309 / 506 Camino a Macondo

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 » Fri Jun 10, 2022 5:27 am

A minor family crisis stopped me from completing my cards yesterday, so I had a bunch today. I beat my head against them for two hours and considered every excuse on earth to quit the whole project and take a nap. but I got caught up... :o I saw Top Gun yesterday. It was a great movie if you like aeroplane porn, which I love. I think there were some actors in the film, but I really only noticed planes. The main characters were all F-18s, which reminded me of the first time I ever met an F-18, back when I worked at the refugee camp in the Philippines. :D

Our camp was located quite close to the old US naval base (as the plane flies. Since the back fence of the base faced us, it was an hour and a half drive away, so I only got over to Olongapo, the town near the base every few weeks. I like to hang out in a bar a little out of town, which was a favourite of the Navy seals. The presence of Seals kept the drunken idiots out, so it was a pretty peaceful place to talk and solve all the world's problems. Anyway, I became friends with a lot of Navy guys. Pilots didn't hang out there, but I got to know many guys who worked on the planes on the aircraft carriers. The carrier battle groups would come and go and were pretty spectacular. Many ships, planes, and thousands of sailors. The whole town ol Olongapo would go crazy when carrier battle groups would come into town and we got to know the patterns. We had a lot of F-4s back in those days and some F-14, and we heard that F-18s would be hitting the fleet soon, and everybody, sailors and civilians alike, was excited to see them. The movements of the carrier are top secret, which meant that every bargirl and taxi driver in the city knew what date they would be arriving.

There was a rhythm to the way they arrived. As the ships approached land, the carrier would launch its planes offshore and the pilots would fly them in, so they could be serviced while the group was in town. It was traditional for the pilots to play around a bit before they landed. So the way that you knew that the ships were almost in was when the ground began to shake. Sometimes the jets would fool around near our camp, often a lot lower than I think they ever fly in the US. They would mess up occasionally and come off the sea supersonic, so every couple of years we would get hit with a tooth rattling sonic boom. Great fun! :D

I had a motorcycle in those days, and I would go home for lunch every day, about four miles from the camp to the village where I lived. My trip home for lunch would often coincide with the arrival of the planes from the carrier. I would drive along a ridge from the camp down to the valley and watch the planes fool around, Anyway, one day when I was home for lunch, the ground began to shake, so I quickly hopped back on my motorcycle to head back to work, so that I could be on on the ridge with a view of a lot of the sky to watch what the planes did as they came in. That was the day I saw my first F-18s. The were practicing bombing runs or something down in the valley next to the ridge where I was riding. I knew what they were, and I was excited to get back to Olongapo so I could hear what the maintenance guys would say about them. :lol:

Then an F-18 came over and introduced itself. :shock:

I was blasting along the road at about 100 kph on my bike, when an F18 popped out of the valley next to me. He was coming straight at me, so I didn't hear him coming. He was lower than me as he went across rice fields below, I guess and popped up over the ridge directly over my head, so low and so loud that I thought I would be blown off of my bike by the blast. I was so startled that I almost had to readjust myself on the bike to stay on. As he flew away, he rocked his wings, which makes me think he might have buzzed me on purpose. :o

I'm proud to say that I didn't wet my pants. :D

My God, what a thrill! I've always loved jets (and rockets), but after that experience, I've always had a special feeling for F-18s. I know that their ultimate purpose is death and destruction, but they are beautiful. :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...

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 » Sun Jun 19, 2022 5:08 am

Still slogging through these cards. I made a deck for Italian too, and then suspended it until I pounded through these French and Spanish cards. As I have said before, translating L1->L2 is a good way to practise sentence production, but it can be harder than just speaking. Some aspects of my Spanish seem to be coming into focus better, and I find the French deck pretty hard sometimes. I find this kind of work to be painful, but I have learned a lot more about my weaknesses, and the cards are a way to get practice. :o

I"ve always been blessed with a brain that can be easily swept up by art. For instance, I remember the effect of seeing Michelangelo's Pieta in 1965 in New York city. I was with my parents and I had a horrible ear infection. I was 12 years old, but I had a hard time not breaking down and crying, and then we popped out in front of the Pieta, and I literally lost my breath, God, what beauty! Perfection in so many different ways... My earache immediately went away, at least for a few hours until my eardrum burst later in the day... I have never forgotten the absolute thrill zinging through me as the slow conveyor belt I was on revealed another angle, and then another, and then another. Glory...

I do get carried away :lol:

Well... When I was in high school, the local classical music scene had rules that were just wonderful for students. If tickets to whatever opera or symphony they were presenting did not sell out, they made the tickets available to students for next to nothing. It made for a nice date night to take a young lady to enjoy some classical music. Since the tickets that did not sell out were often expensive seats, I often got to go to watch from absolutely wonderful seats. Being the kind of guy who gets carried away, I remember those nights as some of the greatest of my life. I became a big fan of classical music and opera. The same time I was listening to the Rolling Stones, I also was listening to Bach and Verdi... :D

My love of classical music stayed with me as I bounced around the world after college, although my interest in Opera faded after a few years, until two days ago... The music algorithms have trouble figuring me out. I am not the demographic that they are designed for.. Let's see, he likes Sigur Ros and the Corrs, and Led Zeppelin, Tahitian dance music, and he seems to know several languages. Finally google's algorithm tried opera, and I realised how much I used to love it. I've noticed before that if you know Spanish, chunks of Italian come through pretty clearly. The idea occurred to me that I could probably get to the point where I understood the lyrics to most of the big operas pretty fast.... and I started looking for resources on my hard drive. A few hours later I had 20000 Anki cards from Michel Thomas and Assimil. At the last minute, I suspended the deck, to avoid wiping out my current French and Spanish product. I still have a few months to go... :roll:
7 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...


Return to “Language logs”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests