Not all those who wander are lost

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IronMike
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby IronMike » Mon Aug 09, 2021 1:12 am

sfuqua wrote:I find it strange that Icelandic and Old English seem familiar, even with all of their complex case marking and the like.

Check this out, sfuqua:
Image

from: The Story of English, Robert McCrum, 1986 (p 70).
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sfuqua
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Mon Aug 09, 2021 4:40 am

A very cool discussion. I am just a beginner with these Germanic languages, but I find them very appealing. I need to shovel a few thousand words and a bunch of paradigms into my head before I can start to have an opinion about them that anybody should listen to. I can't wait to read Old Norse/Icelandic. There is a whole world there that is familiar, yet alien.

There must have been huge differences between the variety of dialects that we call Anglo Saxon. The span of time, the span of geography seem to assure this.

Irish is strange. I've actually built up enough vocabulary that I can understand a bit of the TV on RTE. I try to listen to it every day, but it is a bit of a slog. Things seem to be falling into place in my head pretty quickly these days, but I have a long way to go.

Right now I need vocabulary more than anything else. I know that there is no clear agreement on this, but it always seemed to me that grammar sticks a lot better when you have a bunch of vocabulary in your head.
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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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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Mon Aug 09, 2021 12:38 pm

sfuqua wrote:Things seem to be falling into place(...)


Same expression in Swedish. I once used it, speaking to a German here in town. They couldn't understand it. I even said the English expression to clarify. The German said that "falling" is always something negative. :roll:

And here are we, wondering whether speakers of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse could understand each other 1000 years ago. :D
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby jeffers » Fri Aug 13, 2021 3:54 pm

The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England by Marc Morris, just published in May 2021, has a lot of good reviews. For those in the UK it is available today at 99p [edit: I should have said the 99p is on Kindle. However, the physical book itself looks gorgeous!]. For those elsewhere, it's probably still worth it a full price if you're interested in the subject.
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Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien (roughly, the perfect is the enemy of the good)

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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sun Aug 15, 2021 2:05 am

I have to believe that what I did today was effective language learning. Right now, I would swear that Spanish comes out of my mouth easier that English. I have to believe that there was some language learning going on. Let me tell you what I've been up to today.

What I really am most interested in in language learning is reading books. I would love to be able to able to speak fluent Spanish, French, Icelandic, German, Danish, and whatever... In truth, I really spend most of my time reading books and watching stuff. Even if I were in Madrid, I probably would wind up reading books a lot. I was thinking what can I learn from books?

Well, I would like to be able to read silently and rapidly with complete comprehension. I would like to be able to read aloud rapidly and with pefect pronunciation and complete comprehension. A related skill would be being able to shadow someone reading aloud at normal speed. This is not always easy with ones native language.

I'd like to be able to understand TV shows, including dramas with rapid speech...

OK, I fell off the Whale Road a bit. I was fooling around looking at the many resources that might help me level up my Spanish and my French, especially my French, and it occurred to me that none of them would work. There comes a time when one has to live the nest and either fly or not (we have some baby birds doing this around the neighborhood right now. I haven't seen one go this year, but some of nests are suddenly empty. I'd like to believe the ghappy reasons, not just successful cat raids.) No course will teach you everything you need, and I am way past the need for courses with Spanish.

Anyway, today I decided just to try to learn from books. I took one of my favorite books in English _The Winter King_ in a Spanish translation and I just started reading it silently, looking up every word I didn't recognize immediately, even if they weren't vital to comprehension. After a half hour, I went back to the start of the section I had been reading and shadowed along with a tts voice for a half hour. I shadow faster than I read silently while looking up all the words, so I went into "new" territory toward the end.

(Winter King isn't the best book I ever read, but it does bring back happy memories of reading it to my children)

I'm sure most of you, who know a few languages, must have realized that there is a certain amount of "shifting gears" that one has to go through before one can fluently use one of your languages that you haven't used for a while. It's like the brain and the mouth have to get warmed up. Anyway, my brain happily shifted into "Spanish mode" with an hour of this. It felt nice.

I'm going to park the "Whale road deck" for a while, at least a few days.

I'm going to try the same thing on a French tomorrow... I wonder if I could shift back and forth between French and Spanish modes for a few months, if I wouldn't make a lot of progress in both. Or perhaps I will go nowhere.
Only books for a while...
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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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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sun Aug 15, 2021 10:21 pm

Well, French wasn't as dramatic in its effect. I think that ones level in the language effects how much effect shadowing can have. It worked, but not as dramatically as with Spanish. I wonder what a few weeks of daily shadowing would do...
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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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Wed Aug 18, 2021 3:03 am

OK, I have a big dilemma that is driving me crazy.
Should I improve stronger languages, or should I work on weaker languages?
I don't think anybody can answer it for me. I really want to do both.

I have the Whale_Road deck which includes Irish, Old English, and Norse/Icelandic. My big problem with this deck is too many riches. I have put cards from 4 or 5 books per languages into the deck. It would take several years to complete these decks, and the progress is slow. The "Big Irish Deck" is in here too, and it has cards from, well, many books. It has thousands of cards for Irish dialects, standard Irish, a CEFR course, and the kitchen sink. Because of this, the deck is a slow slog. Obviously, I should pick cards from a book or two, and finish those and then see if I want to do cards from another deck...

I also have my L2 deck, which would drive me through decks of the "Old Glossika" and Assimil French and Spanish courses. I am not sure that doing this deck is useful. I find it very boring. I am not as excited by studying reading French and Spanish as I should be. I suppose if I just keep reading French and Spanish books from time to time, but French and Spanish will probably improve...

Thanks for letting me write this down to think about it. I'm going to sleep on it and then make a decision in the morning... :lol:

I walk pretty much every day and I like to see what the animals in the neighborhood are up do. After a time of not being very visible, the squirrels are very visible these days, Maybe they are trying to build up stores for the winter, although we have months of good weather left. Maybe their favorite foods are coming into season.

I think that animals get familiar with humans after a few years, and today I saw something that was funny to watch. I hope I can paint a picture. :D

As I turned do another loop through the neighborhood, I saw a squirrel ahead of me on the sidewalk. It had a huge nut in its paws. I started to walk toward the squirrel, and it started to run away with their nut. Squirrels are not great long distance runners, but this guy ran in front of me for at least 300 meters. It would run ahead with its nut, then stop and look at me getting more and more annoyed with each step I made toward it. When I would get about 10 meters away, it would take off again. It never seemed afraid; there was no panic or anything; I think it thought that I was going to steal the nut. At any time the squirrel could have ducked away or climbed a tree, that meant it would have to leave the nut... Finally, the squirrel realized that I couldn't get their nut under a car, and it hid there while I passed.

I could just hear the inner dialog of that little critter, "D**n, he's still coming. Well, he's not getting my nut." "There he comes again!" It never seemed afraid, just annoyed. The next loop, a squirrel was cursing something from a tree, (I don't speak squirrel, but it was not a happy noise) maybe he was cursing me.
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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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Fri Aug 20, 2021 4:48 am

Well...
I had to speak Spanish the next morning which changed my mind again.
I had my usual, stumbling Spanish conversation. This time I paid a lot of attention to what was making me stumble. Usually I would start a sentence and then have the wrong word from the wrong language pop into my head. I was speaking Spanish, but about every 10th word I would start to say would be Tagalog, or sometimes even Samoan or French. If I would hesitate and look for the next word, sometimes I would get the wrong langauge again. In other words, I suffer a lot from interference between my L2 my L3 and my L4... I think that many people who learn multiple languages as an adult may have this problem.
Well, what to do? Study Icelandic? Maybe...
But it might be fun to try to fix it, or at least improve it. Who knows, maybe I can help somebody else with the same problem.

One thing I noticed with my big deck made up of Irish, Norse, and Old English cards was that the initial problems I was having with interference got less and less as I practiced with the deck, with the cards from all three languages mixed up. This suggests that a deck with French and Spanish, and preferably my other languages mixed up might start to improve my ability to separate my languages.

Maybe.

I didn't really notice any problems getting the grammar mixed up. The problems seemed at the point where I was pulling words out of my brain to slide them into the sentence structure I was saying. So, for today at least, I made a big deck of mixed languages from the http://www.lexique.org/?page_id=250 site. Put them into English->L2 cards that were clearly labeled with the language each card came from. I did a hundred of them, which I found miserably hard. I need to do this for a while to see if it does anything.

In addition to this. I read French for an hour, the first 20 minutes doing intensive reading and the last 40 minutes reading at full speed with a tts voice pushing me along... I'm going to try Spanish tomorrow.

Maybe this will bring a good result.

My wife is waiting out the results of a covid test. She is not very sick, and she is vaccinated, but how is she supposed to go to school and teach 150 kids, half of whom are not vaccinated, with a minor cold in an era of delta variant. I find it hard to be worried about it too much, but I suppose I should. We are all vaccinated.

(rant)
We'll see what happens. I don't know how we can keep schools closed any more, but I don't know how you can responsibly keep them open in the face of normal allergies, colds, and sniffles. How do we do this? As usual, the experts have told teachers, just follow these guidelines and you'll be safe and your students will be safe. This is nonsense, of course. They don't know. "Oh, we have to keep schools open. It is bad for the children to do distance learning. This is a scientific result." This is based on studying students the year before covid versus the year of covid. Of course students were less stressed when their parents had jobs, and could pay the rent.
"Oh, results from England and Ireland show that you can keep a school open safely under covid" What about delta. up to 1000 times more virus?

Experts, you really don't have any data.
We are doing the experiment now.
There is also an undercurrent in the "keep the schools open" expert argument that seems to imply that teachers are lazy, which just makes me want to slap somebody.

Can you imagine how everyone would react if a teacher went to school with what she thought was a minor cold and made a bunch of kids sick. Or killed somebody's grandfather. Or killed a kid.

One can whine about why parents don't have their children vaccinate who are eligible, but we (actually they, I'm retired) have to teach whomever shows up. Of course the school district claims that there isn't really any extra leave for teachers needed, but does that mean we are supposed to risk killing students? My wife sees 150 students a day, and that's a lot of dice to roll. As a teacher, you are responsible for other people's kids, so there isn't any room for taking chances with their health. Half of her sick leave will be done before the test gets back. We know that student lives and health are more important than anything else, so we will eat whatever problems we have and argue with the school board.
At least we have a mask mandate in our state, but some families are knucklehads.
(/rant)

I know that my family and I have been very lucky in this pandemic. I have seen the pictures of my students standing next to the graves of parents who were killed by covid.
I don't trust anybody who makes policy about schools, and who has any priority other than student and teacher health and safety. But what are they supposed to do? How much pain and death is acceptable? How can we close schools again? What about the next variant?
I don't have any answers, just questions. And a great deal of foreboding. I hope I"m overly concerned.
My daughter is vaccinated, but in public school.

And before I whine too much, what about the Philippines with our extended family that is mostly unvaccinated? And Africa? And the poorer parts of Latin America? And, well, poor people everywhere.
This war isn't over. Covid doesn't care if people are tired. We need fewer politicians and "scientists" who feel they have to tell people what they want to hear. We need to learn how to live with this thing. We need not to be afraid, but also, not to pretend that all the danger is gone.
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...

jeffers
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby jeffers » Fri Aug 20, 2021 9:34 am

sfuqua wrote:I didn't really notice any problems getting the grammar mixed up. The problems seemed at the point where I was pulling words out of my brain to slide them into the sentence structure I was saying. So, for today at least, I made a big deck of mixed languages from the http://www.lexique.org/?page_id=250 site. Put them into English->L2 cards that were clearly labeled with the language each card came from. I did a hundred of them, which I found miserably hard. I need to do this for a while to see if it does anything.


This feels to me like something that will could make the problem worse, not better. It seems to me that when we drag out words from another language it's because the word in the language we're trying to speak as well as the same word in another language. If it were just that, the mixed deck might work. However, I also think an important factor is knowing the words in a context: the more you encounter that word in normal contexts, the more it will seem like the right word when you need it. When we are speaking a target language and use a word from another language, basically it means we need to keep improving the target language. However, this is all theoretical, and perhaps the mixed deck idea will work. I'm looking forward to hearing from you about how it's going!

Regarding your rant, I'm a teacher in England, and like for you in the USA the push to keep children in school has far more to do with politics than with science. Also, as in the USA, many discussions of education in the media here has the same undercurrent "that seems to imply that teachers are lazy". Although I have to say that there was a growing sense during our lockdowns here that parents were appreciating just how difficult it is to motivate and educate their children.
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Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien (roughly, the perfect is the enemy of the good)

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sfuqua
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Fri Aug 20, 2021 1:30 pm

I absolutely agree that my scrambled word list may make things worse. Words without context are usually not worth the time it takes to learn them. Words connected to a context, words that come from what you are trying to read, well, they can be magic for improving your comprehension.
I'm going to bang on this word list for a week and see if I feel any improvement. If not, I will run away.

(way off topic rant)
I criticized politicians for claiming to have science behind them in their decisions where the "scientific" studies have no controls, have intact groups, and often have confounding factors. Sometimes the studies that get quoted say the exact opposite of what the politicians, and political "scientists" claim that it says. There is a study in the US that everyone says proves how damaging online schooling has been for students. The study lumps together students of many different ages. The study compares rural students with urban students. The study compares students in low covid areas with students in high covid areas. Even with all these differences, the study shows a small difference between kids in the classroom, kids in a hybrid classroom, and kids doing online school. Perhaps they picked their groups to get this result... But even with all these differences, there was no significant difference in the performance of these students. There was a slight difference, but it was not mathematically significant. This means that according to standard science, there is no difference between the groups and therefore online schooling is just as good as classroom instruction, which I don't really believe either.
I realize that people have to make decisions, and I also understand that people have to make decions with less than perfect data. Just don't get arrogant and claim that science is on your side and that anybody who disagrees with you is unscientific.

Covid, sickness, and death, are the problems, not online schooling or lockdowns or lazy/fearful teachers.
(/way off topic rant)

At the same time that I am claiming that I am going to learn something from a brief little try at my vocabulary strategy, I am also going to be reading and listening to French and Spanish. Yesterday I listened in French for 45 minutes and I read 38 pages. If I feel a surge in comprehension or production over the next week, it might have everything to do with reading and listening and little to do with vocabulary.

Today I'll hit Spanish.

We have very questionable air quality today, it is supposed to be unhealthy later, but right now it is OK for people to be outside. Last night, when I took out the trash, the moon was a horrible orange color. I could see the smoke from the lights around the apartment complex. It just goes on and on...

Maybe Icelandic is what I should be studying.
Of course they have volcanoes.

God, I just wish it would rain. Rain...
Last edited by sfuqua on Mon Aug 23, 2021 1:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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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