Not all those who wander are lost

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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 Sep 08, 2020 3:29 am

Just another quick note. I'm having trouble trying to keep up with Spanish. Now that I know that I can read a lot faster than I used to, well, I'm really not that far behind. I've started Irish again along with a little Icelandic deck. I'm not really trying to accomplish anything; the only way that language learning gets stressful for me is when I start to think about goals and plans too much. If I just enjoy today, all is well.
Beyond our COVID and political problems here, we are having a fire season that has been way too close for comfort. A huge forest fire was on both sides of San Jose a week ago, and we had an exciting night where they were telling some of our close family friends that they should evacuatre. The fire burned up to the last ridge before San Jose, and we had two other families ready to move in with us when the fire came in sight at the top of the ridge (damn the COVID, these people are family!)....and...the wind shifted. The fire burned south for a while and within a few hours had made a pretty good fire break between us and the monster. I missed 5 days of walking because of smoke, but I'm back walking now. Lack of walking knocked me off of my Spanish listening. The fire has died down, but it has been over 37 degrees the past three days, and things are drying out everywhere. If we get another lightning storm like the one that set off the last firepocalypse here in the Bay area, it could get bad again.
Luckily enough nobody actually had to evacuate to our place from the fire, which was good. It turned out that one of our friends started showing symptoms about two days later. She was exposed at work, but by the time she got tested, she tested negative. I know that there are a lot of inaccurate results from tests, but I don't know. There has been way too much lying and misdirection by officials in this country, so it is hard to believe anyone. Maybe our friend had an early case of flu. Big blinding headache, fever, and nausea for a week.
Something weird I saw my first couple of days out after the fire slowed down, filled me with foreboding more than anything I've seen out of the news. The first day out after the fire, no birds were singing anywhere. There was complete silence. There weren't any animals outside. It was like everything was dead. The second day after fire slowed down I saw something else that I have never seen before. The birds were silent again, but I noticed some bird calling sounds in the distance. I finally looked straight up and realized that the sky was full of birds. There were thousands of birds, many of them crows or ravens (I can't tell them apart at a distance). The were all flying in the same direction, and I got a chill when I realized that this whole skyful of birds, from horizon to horizon, was flying away from the center of what was left of the fire. It's funny how stuff like this happens and nobody seems to notice. I really wanted to take off and fly away with them.
Animal life has returned to normal, mostly. I still would like to fly away. :D

I'll write more about my students next time. Let me just say that I am honored to be working with such a fine group of 13-14 year olds. There attitude and behavior has been wonderful. I am blessed.
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...

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tangleweeds
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Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 7:09 pm
Location: Portland, Oregon, USA
Languages: English (N)
beginner: Irish
clearing cobwebs: Japanese
on the shelf: French, Latin
wanderlust: Norwegian, Vietnamese
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=705
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby tangleweeds » Tue Sep 08, 2020 6:46 pm

I've been keeping track of what's been happening down there in the Bay, from friends, news, & satellite imagery, and it's very scary! Now it's our turn up here in Portland. I had to tape all the windows shut and cram paper towels around the doors to keep air breathable this drafty old house last night. We are having our first-ever "extreme fire danger" event, with both an extended windstorm and extraordinarily low humidity (we get red flag fire warnings up here often enough, but the extreme was new). Very disturbing, isn't it? Right now we can see the sun and breathe again here, but it all depends on vagaries of the wind. And yes, I hear no birds at all this morning. I wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't mentioned it, so thanks for pointing that out.

Last night, some friends of my Eugene (OR) friends didn't get warnings because power was out, and they only woke because they heard their cars exploding and saw the entire mountain in front of them on fire. They had to flee on foot up the back of their property with nothing but the clothes on their backs, to be rescued by other fleeing motorists. And then they still needed to go the long way around to get out of there, moving a number fallen trees out of the road to escape. You now can see that fire in sattelite photos too. They lost everything: house, cars, animals, medications.

And I agree with you on COVID. We believe I got it very early (I visited medical facilities 2-3x/week back then, so I'm now loving the telemedicine revolution) but I didn't fit the very limited early set of testing criteria, we can't know for sure. And because my HMO helped develop an unreliable antibody test, that's the only one that's covered for me. It gives so many false negatives my PCP says not to bother, she considers its results meaningless. And I ended up with the "long haul" COVID they're only beginning to study, though thankfully it finally seems to have petered out. It was a mess--my oxygen saturation would drop to what used to be the "go to the ER now!" threshold (the post-COVID threshold is now 5 points lower), and I'd be bedridden for a week whenever I exerted myself as much as mopping half the kitchen.

I'm so happy that the kids you're teaching are eager to learn, and also that you're (re?) exploring Irish--it's a fascinatingly odd language.
5 x
Neurological odyssey is going better! Yay!

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sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
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Location: san jose, california
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 » Sun Sep 20, 2020 3:00 am

I give up.

I am a klutz.

I have managed to lose two long posts about working with my students this year. The last one just happened. I got distracted from my post by something gruesome happening on Netflix, and when I looked back the post was gone. I don't know what I did. I can't find a buffer anywhere with the post. Orange sky, red sun, and disappearing messages... It is the end time :o

Here comes the short version. My students are great to work with. Many like distance learning a lot. Some are really lonely. Most are way more shy than you might expect speaking to other students online. When I set up small groups to work on things, I have to be careful that kids don't just sit there. I always try to answer my students within a few seocnds of an email, pretty much any time of day. I think some of them feel a little isolated. In some cases, I think they just want to know that there is somebody out there. I leave an online conference room open much of the day when I am not teaching, and there are a few kids who like to hang out there. Some families are going through financial hell, and I think the kids are left alone a bit. Heck with the orange skies and red suns we have been having, the whole world seems strange. I can use with some company too.

I used to say that I like to study languages to get away from the humdrum boring life I lead. Now, with the whole world looking like an alien planet, I think I study languages to get away from the strangeness of every day life. Lately I have been plugging away at my anki deck, icelandic and Irish. I spend about 45 to 90 minutes grinding away at it, and it seems to keep my mind clear for other things.

icelandic, besides being impossible to learn :D , has many similarities to Anglo Saxon, and it seems friendly for that reason. There are theories that suggest that Modern English is at least as much descended from Norse as it is from Anglo Saxon/Old English, and a look at Icelandic makes that opirnion seem plausible. It is a wonderful, massively inflected, Germanic language. I wonder if I will every get to Iceland. I probably have a few ancestors from there. I am not a big fan of winter, but right now I would just like to be far away, and Iceland seems far. I think I am a few decades too old to fully enjoy the Reykjavík nightlife, but a country where everybody reads all the time? It sounds like heaven. Right now I'm reading several books from Iceland in translation, and maybe in few months, I can start to push into reading Icelandic.

Irish is a beast also. :D Inflected languages have a tendancy to seduce people with the idea that all you have to do is learn all of the conjugations and declensions, and you will know the language. Of course, little babies can learn Irish, so that suggests that there are other approaches that work, at least when you are a baby. I've been thinking about doing "shadowing Assimil" approach to Irish for a while. I have an excellent book for it, Bunchromhrá Gaeilge agus Gramadach by A.J. Hughs. It is set up like an Assimil book, brief conversations and monologues with native speaker recordings. The speech in it was way too fast for me last year. It is not too fast now. With repeated shadowing one can quickly reach that point where people who do not speak the language will think you are fluent, and people who do speak the language will be annoyed with you because you sound pretty good, but you don't seem to be able to understand anything. That would be an improvement for my Irish. I could keep up my decks and shadow Irish for an hour a day. Of course there is the question of energy and motivation. The air quality is going down tonight, because the wind changed....

Every time they update my DNA report, I get more Germanic, which of course doesn't mean that I changed, but that the populations they are tesing against have changed. Rather than looking at the reports which give these silly numbers ( "You're 18% Scottish!"), I enjoy comparing my DNA to some of the ancient populations. It is fun to know that in a little 1500 year old cemetery, there is a famlily that had eye like mine or a head shaped like mine. I keep showing connections to Anglo Saxons, Celtic folk in Iceland, Roman Britsh folk, and Lombards (the earlier in the migration period the closer). What does it mean? I guess it lets me know which side to root for if I watch Britannia or something

I trudge on, happily, through this strange world.
13 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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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 06, 2020 2:16 am

I"ve been studying mostly Icelandic lately. What a cool language and what a cool country... And all those books once one gets over the hump of learning enough vocabulary and grammar to decipher them.

I had a couple of personal developments that added a little drama to my personal life.

A week ago I went to bed on Saturday night, regular time, and fell fast aspleep. A couple of hours later my head exploded into a bright flash of pain. I found myself on the floor next to one of my bookshelves across the room from my bed. Both my daughter and my wife arrived at a dead run, because I my head made a huge crack when I hit. Apparently I had stood up in my sleep, fallen sideways and cracked my head on the edge of a shelf. I had a huge knot on my head, and I generally felt weird. A check with the doctor told me that I had a concussion, but no bleed, so I just had three day headache. I pulled every muscle on one side of my body. I was a pretty sad case for a couple of days. They told me to slowly build back up to full speed over a few days.
I have never done any sleepwalking before. This was totally weird to me, and it really hurt and was frightening. I never had a concussion since I was 14 and caught a left hook while boxing. It didn't feel any better at 67 than it did at 14. I recommend that everybody avoid scrambling their brains on furniture.

We have had smoke everywhere up until yesterday. I missed walking for a few days again. Animals acted weird again. I walked today and things seem to be getting back to normal. The bizarre year continues.

I've been so enthusiastic about Iceland recently that my wife is threatening to box me up and ship me there. It's good to be loved.
Icelandic has some pronunciation challenges that are pretty weird, but I think I'm able to approximate most of them at this point. I would say that Icelandic actually sounds easier to pronounce than it actually is. I've got to get checked out at some point, because I think it would be possible to develop an idiolect of Icelandic that would be very hard for a native speaker to listen to. Unlike Irish, Icelandic seems to have quite a bit of irregular forms to it. It isn't that this makes it super difficult to understand, but it means that sounding like a native speaker is a long way off a native speaker of English. My main goal is probably reading, but part of the fun of learning a new language is learning to make all of the strange new sounds. All of the case marking and agreement seems to make the language clearer to understand for me than some other languages I've dabbled at; if you start to think that a subject is singular, you have other signs in the sentence that can get you back on track if it is plural. Since Icelandic is another Germanic language there are cognates with English, but they are not that close usually.

Vikings are a strange idea, as well as being real historical person. Since Vikings were some of the early settlers of Iceland, and since modern Icelandic is the closest thing to Old Norse, they come up when you look up the language. I've started to get bored with Vikings. The modern country and the modern language are enough to keep my mind working for the forseeable future.
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...

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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 » Wed Oct 28, 2020 1:56 am

We're sort of in the doldrums in my classes these days. It's been a long time since summer (especially if you are 13). It is a long time to go before our Thanksgiving holiday (if you are 13). The novelty of online classes has worn off. I'm getting bored myself. I keep trying to jazz things up, but sometimes I can't come with anything that great. Most of my students have a great attitude, and are still working, but a few kids don't do a thing. In my opinion, we are doing about as well as we can. The lawyers for our school district say that we cannot force students to turn on their cameras for privacy reasons, and I understand, but one of my favorite times of each class is the end when I tell them it is time for our "zoom bye-bye". I've gotten most of them convinced that they should turn on their cameras and wave "bye-bye" to each other like little kids. It is great to see all of us on camera waving and grinning like idiots at each other.

I've been concentrating on Icelandic the past few weeks. I am excited about getting to the point where I can read novels in Icelandic. I've been reading some stuff in translation and I have really liked what I have read. What a cool, book oriented, culture. One book that kind of took my breath away, which was about Iceland, although it was not written in Icelandic, is Hannah Kent's _Burial Rites_. This is a book about the last few months of the life of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, a woman in her early 30s, the last person executed in Iceland. I despise capital punishment; I don't want to argue about it. I'm sure that I am as violent and cruel as the next person, but the whole calculated sadism of an execution disgusts me. Kent's book lets us get to know Agnes during the time before her execution. Since there weren't any prisons, she was just assigned to a family to work while she waited for a proper axe to be procured and the right person for a good beheading. She was the second one beheaded that day, so she got to hear the first chop before it was her turn. I guess they took her head off with one stroke. It rips the heart out to think of it...

I've been working with an anki deck which has a bunch of cards from Alaric's Icelandic course https://alarichall.org.uk/teaching/modern_icelandic.php
He was nice enough to create a memrise course that I brought into anki. My deck also has cards from the brief grammar notes on his site, and the "Icelandic phrasebook" at https://wikitravel.org/en/Icelandic_phrasebook
The rest of the deck is a bunch of vocabulary cards from _DNA_ (_The Legacy_ in English) a recent Icelandic crime thriller by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. I have never had a lot of luck building my comprehension by using general frequency lists. Maybe a little bit with Spanish, but in general, not. However, learning the exact words for a certain book can be absolutely magic. I've developed a word list of all the words in _DNA_ in order, and I'm going to try reading it each day, and see how far I can get understanding it from the word list. I have the book recorded by a nice IVONA tts voice, and I can also try repeated listening. I have such a small vocabulary in Icelandic that there is a lot to learn. So my early goals are just to get up to kind of, sort A2ish tourist levels in speaking Icelandic, and getting up to the point where I can read a crime novel in Icelandic.
Learning to read novels can help conversation also. I mean what if I visit Iceland and have my usual "Pimsleur conversation" and invite a woman to my hotel to drink beer. If I keep with phrasebook stuff, I would be lost if instead of saying, "I would like to go to your hotel room to drink beer." she says "I prefer erotic asphixiation to beer" or "I can't drink beer, I have to murder somebody with a vacuum cleaner." You never know what is going come up in conversaiton. At least some languages in Pimsleur never have the woman say yes to offers of beer drinking, which always cracks up my wife. She says, "what if a girl wants to say yes to a beer." She also suggests that girls might want to ask a guy to the hotel for a beer. PImelsur and phrasebooks are limited.

When I first saw Samoa as a young man, I remember being breathless at the sheer beauty of the place. All the time I lived in Samoa, i was surrounded by beauty. I wonder if people feel the same way about Iceland. The place looks breathtaking. You can love a place above and beyond loving the people who live there. I suspect that I would absolutely love Iceland. The people there sound pretty cool too.

Now, to think of something interesting for my students to do for the rest of the week.

I kept editing and adding words. Now I really need to get to lesson planning....
9 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
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Spanish: read
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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 Nov 22, 2020 1:34 am

Well, I've lunged back in another direction. As soon as it started getting chilly in California, I started to lose some interest in Icelandic. It is a wonderful language, and I really really want to learn it, but maybe not right now...
Maybe it was the cold, or maybe it was because for some random reason I spent an afternoon reading in Spanish, and I remembered how nice it can be to use a language that you are at an advanced level in. I guess I liked the feeling. I tried some French too, and found that I can actually read a lot of French. Even with my weak French is way beyond word by word translation.
Let's look at where I am with these two languages.
Spanish: I've tested at more than a 10000 word vocabulary, at least recognizing the meaning of words from a list. I've read about 8500 pages total in Spanish. I've watched about 250 hours of TV/movies in Spanish. I can read most novels in the genres I like. I can pretty much lose comprehension whenever I hit an unfamiliar accent, especially for accents which are pronounced quite differently from the spelling. I can listen to audiobooks at a faster rate than I can read with pretty good comprehension. I don't talk very well, because I don't talk to people that much in Spanish.
I've worked through Assimil and 3/4 of FSI Spanish.
French: I've always had a little bit of a bad attitude toward French. Nobody is making me learn it, but it is a wonderful language that has a great culture, great literature, and a worldwide community. It is close enough to Spanish and English that I see a ton of cognates. I quit French Assimil after about 25 lessons, and decided that I was so brilliant that I could just take off reading and listening :D I started off reading and listening to French without proper preparation and I have suffered for it ever since. Then there was my family's disasterous visit to Paris a couple of years ago. Our hotel was near the Tour Montparnasse, and this area turns into a pretty nasty neighborhood at night. Paris was hot and dusty. Our hotel was crummy. The windows in the room would not stay open. We paid for three people in our double room, and they refused to give us a third pillow. They told us we could buy one. I know that Paris has been tired of tourists for a thousand years at least, but most people were nice enough. However at night, the bars a few blocks away would fill with screaming young men. After midnight, groups of them would begin to wander around the streets screaming, and harrassing young women who were unfortunate enough to be outside. A particularly nice touch were the young men having noisy oral sex through the window of a parked car directly in front of our hotel. I'm glad they were enjoying themselves, but I really didn't want to be a part of it. Around 3AM, groups started trying to take over cars that stopped at the stoplights by the Tour. I was unimpressed with French civilization at this point. It appeared to me that most of the dangerous, drunken crowd were immigrants. Heck, maybe they were Americans. Who am I to judge anybody else's country as a guest?
I'm not such an idiot as to think that I saw anything that should reflect on the whole of France, but then look at the other part of our disasterous visit. We just didn't give ourselves enough time to do anything thoroughly. Museums that deserved days of study got 45 minutes. It was our own stupidity. So, the most impressive thing I saw in Paris was antisocial behavior. There are other groups of crazy young people in many other parts of the world, and if it weren't for covid, I am pretty sure I could find a similar scene within a few miles of where I am.
I've read about 2000 pages in French, very slowly and badly. I think I should probably go back and finish Assimil before I try to push ahead that much with French. One thing I find fun about French is pronouncing it. I'm always shocked when I speak French and I can hear my voice "sounding French." I need more vocabulary and more automaticity to get strong in French.

I've repostioned my old Assimil decks into anki. I have a deck with Spanish with Ease, the new Assimil Spanish course, and Using Spanish and the Glossika. I have cards set up with passive and active cards for each note. I have the active cards offset from the passive cards by 1000 cards so that they will show up as new cards 50 days after the passive card. This is very easy in Spanish, although the active wave cards can be hard. I have done the same thing with French with Ease and Using French. Since I can't stop wandering, I also put the Assimil Brazillian and Portuguese courses into another deck along with the respective Glossika courses. I'm going to try to restart my participation in the Suprechallenge for Spanish. I can tune up my Spanish while I get my French up to speed (and eventually my Portuguese). My first impression of Portuguese is that it is familiar because of all the cognates, but it is more different than it appears at first glance. My mouth wants to turn it into Spanish, so I have to fight that.

Every night, when I am falling asleep, when let go of my thinking and have random sentences go through my head, the beginning of dreaming -- I find that I am thinking in Spanish. I wonder why. Brains are mysterious things. Why not Tagalog? I watch and hour or two of TV in Tagalog each day. Why not Samoan? This is by far my strongest language. Why not Irish or Icelandic? I'm a beginner in these languages, but I've been listening to a hour or so of them each day while studying. Why not French, the language of that lovely foreign student in my high school I had a crush on in 10th grade. (why, oh why didn't I talk to her? She might have liked me :roll: ) Nope, my brain likes to fall asleep in Spanish... :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
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Tue Dec 22, 2020 5:50 pm

I've been particularly happy lately, for 2020, and my language learning has been part of it.
As I continue to drift around between languages, I've stumbled over something fun. Last year, I tried Old English for a while, and quite liked it. In fact, I have drifted into highly inflected, "hard" languages, several times in last few years. I mean, who doesn't love memorizing declensions and conjugations? But Old English is something else. First of all, there is nothing written in it about coronavirus or fascist politics. In fact the whole world of Old English is often unclear and vague. Some aspects are clear as can be; other aspects are mysterious. Of course the same could be said for many old languages. Old English takes us back to a strange world that somehow changed into our modern world. In many ways, the world of the Anglo Saxons seems more alien than the Greeks or Romans, at least to me.

I don't do very well when I try to learn a language because it "would be a good idea". Since I'm not really trying to get anywhere, I'd better enjoy the trip.

The approach I decided to take this time I approach Old English is closer to the traditional approach. I've restarted Old English from scratch, trying to memorze the everything in sight. I've been working through “Introduction to Old English” by Peter Baker, 'An Anglo Saxon Primer' by Henry Sweet, Mitchell and Robinson's 'A Guide to Old English', Complete old English by Mark Atherton, and Pollington's "First Steps in Old English". I've been making anki cards out of exercises in the books and I've been just reading and working through the books. I have a 10 000 cards of Old English Poetry that I have put later in the deck, and which make the whole thing look bigger than it is. We'll see if I ever get there, but they are a goal. Pollington and Atherton have mp3's which come with the books, which help me get my pronunciation right. Michael Drout has a ton of Old English recorded, and this makes for some nice listening while falling asleep.
Other things in my life have been nice. When I fell, I got some nagging injuries, from my fall, that affected my walking, which in this coronavirus world, is one of my big joys of life. I finally got through my usual routine yesterday. It has been infuriating to be limping around for months, but little broken bones and strained muscles and tendons need time to heal. California has switched into it's cold, clear, climate change winter. Little rain, cold by California standards, and mostly clear. A few of the birds are still singing for part of the day. The geese are doing their usual "migration" routine for this time of year, getting into big V-shaped flocks and flying around in circles. My daughter has been walking with me a few times lately, and it is a good time to catch up with what is going on with her life. The forest fires seem to have been killed by the little rain we've had, but now we have smoke from people's fireplaces. I hope they are buring wood to stay warm and not for style. The wind is cold for us thin blooded Californians.

One of the things, which still kind of takes my breath away, is that our school district has offered me a retirement package to retire now, so they can retain younger teachers when the inevitable, covid related, budget cuts hit next year. As an old teacher, I cost a lot, so the district has decided that offering a few of us a chunk of money to go away is cheaper than keeping us around. I have said yes, and it looks like the whole thing will go through. The assumption is that I willl retire, but I really don't have to, I just have to resign. It tears at my heart to think of leaving my school, but it seems like the logical thing to do. The reason I have been working the past few years has been to save up enough money so that my daughter can afford to go to whatever college she wants, and the retirement package takes care of that. The whole thought of retiring stuns me, and being paid money to leave is sort of insulting. I'll have to think of that while I'm sipping a Guinness next year. I've got to redefine myself somehow. I refuse to describe myself as a retired teacher. Maybe I could become an Internet influencer. I could take pictures of the T-shirt and jeans I wear everyday and post them online. Maybe I should try to contact extraterrestrials using smoke signals.
One annoyance is that my wife is way too young to retire, and my daughter really wants to go to high school and college in California, so I'm going to stay here for a few years more. I am a Californian, so that isn't a big hardship. I'll be poorer here than I like, but we should be OK. We can't travel safely anyway with covid around, so I shouldn't be in a hurry anyway.

I wish everyone good luck during these next few month of chaos and plague. My main goal is to stay alive and sane. And to learn enough Old English that I can annoy people at pubs. If they ever open safely again...
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
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Thu Jan 14, 2021 4:15 am

Still just drifting along.
Old Norse has many similarities to Old English. In some ways it is like Old English on steroids. There is so much material to read. Since knowing Old Norse is a shortcut to learning modern Icelandic, it is also a path toward the huge number of books published in modern Icelandic. I'm pretty sure that one can be just as annoying to people in a pub reciting Old Norse poetry as one would be reciting Old English.
Iceland itself is a fascinating place. It is beautiful, and it has an amazing history. The people of Iceland have created an admirable country.

And they love books; that would be enough. I have talked about the geology of Iceland with my science classes for years, which makes me feel like I know the place better than I actually do, I suppose. People in Iceland seem to know how to have fun, and fun is a good thing.

It also is far from the United States and the agony my country is going through these days. I know this is not a good place to discuss politics, but my feelings about my native country -- US racism, materialism, and willful ignorance -- have always made me feel like a stranger in my country, ever since I was a little kid. I spent half my life outside of the US, but since I returned, I have found a home in California. I have learned that America is for kids like me too (I'm 67 :D ) and my beautiful, mixed race family. My feelings of alienation were what led to my interest in languages and travel.

Weirdly enough, recent events in America have ruined my enjoyment of studying modern languages. I need to get farther afield to enjoy myself. I certainly don't plan to "die on the barricades" fighting for democracy, but if I do, I will probably be muttering in some ancient language. Probably with bad pronunciation.

With dark thoughts like this, you might understand why I would rather read Sagas than the newspaper in Spanish. :o
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
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 Feb 12, 2021 3:42 am

Well, I drifted back to Irish.
I went through a crazy Irish time a couple of years ago, so I have a nice, big Irish anki deck, made up of cards from 1961 Teach Yourself Irish, Learning Irish, Beginning Irish Conversation, Progress In Irish, and Buntus Cainte... about 25000 cards. This is way more than you need for a beginner, but I got carried away and I have all these cards. now.

Hitting a deck after laying off it for a long time, can be a rude awakening. I remember a lot of it, but when I just tried to start again where I was, hoping to just catch up on the huge number of reviews slowly, I found that I have forgotten enough to make new cards very hard, so I reset the deck, and now it is easy.

I do know quite a bit of Irish, but a few months on this should move me up to intermediate at least. At my current pace, I will need 16 months to finish the deck. I will probably start to slow down at some point. I also have audio for the above courses, and I gave it a massage with audacity to prepare it for shadowing. I will shadow through it as I do the deck.

With the virus, I doubt that we get to Ireland this summer, but I now have hope. One week from today, I am scheduled to get my first shot of vaccine. I hope nothing goes wrong.

It is raining right now, but California is having its driest winter since 1849 or something. The fires next year will break records if we don't get more rain. It would take a very rainy couple of months for us to catch up, but it is possible.

I saw something cool the other day while I was walking. As I went by a redwood near our apartment, I realized that it was full of small birds, all singing together. I had not seen that behavior before in that tree, and I wondered what was going on. My daughter was with me and I pointed it out to her. She said something about not appreciating nature very much, so I stopped and told her to watch. We went a little closer to the tree, and then a hawk sort of casually flew up to the redwood next to the one with all the birds. It flew from low up the other side of the redwood from the one with the birds. The hawk landed on the top of its tree, and pointedly looked away from the bird tree. I stopped my daughter and said, "wait." We waited a minute and suddenly the big tree with the birds exploded. There were hundreds of small birds flying in all directions. They were wild and didn't seem to know where they were going. Some flew around us. Some flew straight toward the hawk, although they left her an empty space without getting too close, After a couple of seconds the flock gathered into a huge sphere of birds, there were waves going through the sphere and it changed shape the same way a school of fish does when a predator is near. The wavy sphere of birds went up and then it came down turned into a disorganized blob and blasted around a nearby building low, out of sight.

My daughter said, "wow, I'm glad that hawk didn't get one." I pointed out that hawks have to eat too.

The hawk just sat in the top of the tree, and I swear, she looked disgusted.

Irish is fun. I need to learn the Irish word for hawk.
I'm pretty happy, just chugging along. :D
edited to fix stupid typos :D
9 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 » Thu Feb 18, 2021 3:03 am

I have been having more fun bouncing around between Norse, Old English, and Irish. Each of the language deserves attention, and there is not enough time to do justice to all of them. It doesn't matter really. I haven't seen any reports from Iceland saying, "The country desperately needs sfuqua to improve his Icelandic/Norse." Ireland seems unconcerned about my Irish also. I know that the Anglo Saxons don't care about Old English either. Cerdic of Wessex was quoted in 530 as saying, "What is an sfuqua?"

I randomly read about 40 pages of Françoise Sagan in French yesterday, and I have to admit that my French doesn't completely stink. I read slowly and laboriously, and I need the dictionary from time to time, but I read.
I'm not sure that it wouldn't be more fun to just roam around through the thousands of books that are available in French and Spanish. Logic says that however many cool books there are in Icelandic, there are many more in French and Spanish. I still haven't finished García-Márquez in Spanish, and I love what I have read. I haven't even started Victor Hugo, only 100 pages or so, and there is so much more. :o

Of course I haven't finished James Joyce in English either. :D

I think sometimes that anki has become an addiction for me. I've replaced enjoying the langauges I know with "getting ready to enjoy" the languages.

I've been thinking about just parking anki for a month and seeing how I feel. I mean, I went through most of my life without anki. People lived for thousands of years without anki. What would happen if I just parked everything...?

I haven't made up my mind yet, but the feeling of panic I get when I think about parking all my decks suggests that maybe I should take a break. :lol:
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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