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 » Mon Jun 15, 2020 3:55 am

Well....
One of the easiest ways to make an L2 more comprehensible is to slow it down. Things, which slip by at full speed, pop out easily when they are slowed down. I even did this a bit with Spanish as I started the super challenge, although lately, whenever I use the tts voice, I've been using it at full speed, about 150 words per minute. One of the things that I like to do is to use the tts voice to push me along, so that I don't grind down to a crawl looking up every word. Last night, going to sleep, I had a crazy thought, what if I need to set the voice faster to kick out the jams and get moving. 10 pages later, at 250 wpm, I was pretty sure I was on to something. There are still unknown words, but there is not time to think about them. Even at the higher speed, my comprehension seems better. It's like the book becomes a movie, and I'm not thinking about Spanish or anything, but I am just blasting thought the story. I know there have been some comprehension studies which show that, for native speakers at least, comprehension often improves when you move to a higher speed. If you think of it, it makes sense; if you are cruising along, you are processing more words per second, and therefore getting more information from the page per unit of time. As long as you can stand the speed, faster is better.

Who would have figured? :lol:

Of course I promptly set the speed too high, and lost comprehension completely, and then retuned down again, but by trying to force things, I seem to have stumbled into a new way to get through my reading and improve comprehension.

I read 57 pages today, 27 of it without the tts voice. The higher speed reading habits from the tts seemed to carry over easily into the "silent reading."
Nice, I wonder if this was what I was doing wrong with French a couple of years ago, when I got frustrated and started Irish.... Irish, now there's an idea... I could drop everything and do Irish,... wait, must concentrate... Spanish first, Super challenge first,... Icelandic... Old English... :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
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 Jun 28, 2020 3:07 am

I continue to chug along. The world outside seems like a horror show, but my world is pretty peaceful. I walk before it gets hot each day, and I enjoy studying. My wife had another serious health scare, but she seems to be coming out of it OK. I'm 16 years older than her, so I'm supposed to be the sick and tired one, but it has sure been her turn to get sick the past few years. I spend the day outisde of the hospital, because of the pandemic, while my wife was inside in tremendous pain. I was able to take her home in the evening. While I was waiting, I watched the COVID overflow tents outside the hospital. All in all, we're doing OK
I have to have a passion for what I am studying in order to enjoy it, and I stumbled over a copy of my old "Big Irish Deck" and when I did a couple of cards I was lost to Irish again.
Right now I'm back working through the big Irish deck.
I am also working on the Spanish super challenge, and I'm still more or less on schedule. Lately I've been trying to read 20 pages and listen to 20 minutes every day. To keep up this pace I have to stay with some authors and genres that are pretty easy for me. Nonfiction is usually pretty easy, as is historical fiction.

I'm happy. We're safe so far.

ON the whole, I wish I was in Samoa.

Edited for typos
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
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sun Jul 05, 2020 2:54 am

Plugging along. I usually got through 20 pages of Spanish a day this week, but I missed one day and then did 40 the next. Most of my listening was done listening to audiobooks while walking. I binge watched Sense8 on Netflix in English with my wife, and I'm watching it in Spanish now, but I haven't been counting it. I'm not sure why... I guess because it's easy.
I've been slogging through my Irish deck. I changed it from a L2->L1 and L1->L2 deck to a simple L1->L2 deck. It means fewer, but harder cards. There are many problems with a L1->L2 deck. Mostly because it is difficult to be sure of your L2 sentence, because there is always ambiguity in the translation. With your L1, you should be able to recognize errors easily. Anyway, building skills at producing L2 sentences is sort of the focus of anybody who wants to talk. I've been using the epseak NG tts voice for Irish, the only one I can find for Irish that works on Android. It has a lot of problems-- it sort of sounds like a voice coming in over a bad shortwave connection, and it has some bloopers. It is way better than nothing. I shadow mp3's from the books which I made the anki cards, which hopefully will bring my pronunciation closer to that of a human being. I'm doing 50 new sentences a day of Irish.
I have slowed Portuguese and Spanish way the heck down, and made them L1->L2. I only do 10 cards or so a day for each. I'm not sure that there is any effect from the Spanish deck. Portuguese is cool.
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 » Sat Jul 11, 2020 12:10 am

Well, Irish knocked me on my behind.
I am studying two strands of Irish, one which covers the offcial, govenment and school approved dialect, which pretty much nobody speaks as a native speaker, but which everybody who is well educated understands, at least a bit -- and another strand which covers some of the dialects that are used out the in places where Irish still has native speakers. There are three main dialects used by native speakers, Southern, or Munster Irish, Northern or Ulster Irish, and Western, or Connacht Irish. Right now I'm doing Munster Irish, along with school Irish. Munster Irish has a set of verb forms that are more similar to the ancient forms of Irish than those used in the other dialects (or so I've been told; I'm no expert).
I made about 70 anki cards to learn these forms. most of my cards come from automatic processing of files I made from ebook versions of the Irish textbooks. My cards for the Munster verb forms got messed up; my automatic text processing didn't work right for this part of the deck. Since this happens from time to time when one makes thousands of cards automatically, I also have a field on the card which is a simple google translation of the Irish, just to make sure that you don't learn nonsense. Sadly, Munster verb forms break googletranslate too. So I had 70 cards which I had put into a L1(nonsense)->L2(unfamiliar). If there was no particular reason to think that a particular card is important, I would normally just delete them, but this is a key point of understanding for the whole Munster dialect, and well, darn it, I'll just fix the cards by looking everything up in every resource I have and get something that makes sense on the cards. After a few hours, I had a pretty good version of the L1 side of the cards. Then I set down to learn them, and promptly had my brain go "splat" like a poor bug on the windshield. Gee, lets see, all I've got to do is change the front part of the verb, and then change the back part of verb, and I've got to remember the correct base form of the verb, and I don't even know that and then I get the number or tense wrong, and.... what was I trying to do anyway?
A full day of frustration ensued. Finally I went into the card type for anki and clicked on flip, and changed the cards back to L2-L1 cards. After a few more days these verb forms started to seem more familiar, and I'm moving ahead again...
I also changed my decks around a bit. I had been using a reset ease addon to anki, and avoiding the easy and hard buttons to simplify things, but I think that the original anki paradigm is better. I set my whole deck to a 250% ease, and made myself some mental rules about how I am going to score my cards...
Right now I'm opening a card hearing the card read, and then tryig to:
1. Repeat the card aloud without reading it.
2. Say an English translation of the card without reading it.
If when I check the card, i got them both right immediately, I mark the card easy.
If I need to read the Irish sentence aloud to get it in my head so I can repeat, or if I need to read the print to translate it, but I do it successfully, I mark the card, OK.
If I need to read the print version of more than once to repeat the sentence, or translate it, I mark the card hard.
If I get the translation wrong, I fail the card.
This leads to me hitting easy more often, and pushing reviews of easy cards out into the future further, which should lighten the load as I move along.
Irish is hard, way harder than any other language I have ever studied seriously.
I'm back to cruising at 50 cards a day now, and I easily recognize those danged verb forms now. My pass rate on cards is a little low for Irish, but I repeat, Irish is hard.

During my Irish anki debacle, I stopped my other anki languages, and I don't think I'm going start them again for a while.

I continue on my Spanish super challenge at 20 pages a day and 30 minutes of listening. I have found out that for easy Spanish stuff--historical fiction, detective novels and things, I can listen and read at about 300 words a minute, which means that I can read 20 pages in about 20 minutes. This leaves me more time to torture myself with Irish and get infuriated at vile American politicians.

My local world is pretty nice. Gee, it will be fire season soon here in California.

The comet is pretty.

The way this year is going, I'm expecting an asteroid impact soon.

I'm keeping my head down.
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 » Wed Jul 22, 2020 3:52 am

Just cruising along enjoying the boring, dystopian science fiction novel we're living through. I have active coronavirus cases that live within a hundred meters of me in two directions. The federal secret police haven't come for me yet, and my family and I are healthy, so we are great.
Language learning is going well.
I am over 1000 pages reading and 2500 minutes listening. I am reading Spanish faster than I have ever read it before and I definitely can understand spoken Spanish better than ever before. I'm not much better at reading really hard stuff in Spanish, but the easy stuff is rolling through smoothly. I think that you have less visible progress going from 7000 to 8000 pages than you do going from 100 to 1100. I think things are fine.

Irish is pretty alien compared to other languages I have studied, even Samoan and Tagalog. However Irish is a very regular language. Once you learn a pattern, it reappears. Even the (horrors!) irregular nouns and verboften follow patterns that are identifieable. Anyway, a lot of things fell into place the last few days.
One thing I did was to push my "dialect" cards out into the future. I decided to do the "school Irish" cards first. It was dragging me down learning more than one way of doing the same thing.
So a lot is going right with my Irish. I decided the other night that I would just sit down and listen to Irish on the radio. I listened for about 15 minutes, and.....I understood one word. It appeared several times. Whatever they werre talking about, they used the Irish word for "and" several times.
There is obviously a limit to what you can get out of anki grammar and vocabulary cards. I've got to start shadowing more and listening to stuff that is a lot harder than what I've been doing. I did some experimenting with speaking and I found that I can chatter simple sentences, probably even correctly, mostly.

While I bombed out listening, I'm really encouraged about Itish. I'm improving rapidly.
I'm pretty happy about what's going on in my life, and I'm glad I've got some language projects to keep me out of trouble.
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...

galaxyrocker
Brown Belt
Posts: 1120
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 12:44 am
Languages: English (N), Irish (Teastas Eorpach na Gaeilge B2), French, dabbling elsewhere sometimes
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=757
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby galaxyrocker » Wed Jul 22, 2020 5:01 pm

So, I've actually started a blog dedicated to documenting and discussing things from South Connemara Irish, but I'm also including other tips and stuff on it as well. One post I wrote was how to use Vifax at every level to help improve your Irish listening ability. I'm hesitant to share it here, but I think you might find it useful: https://islinneamaireach.wordpress.com/ ... any-level/ I've done most of these methods myself, especially the transcription one, and it helped raise my listening comprehension quite a lot.
3 x

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 » Wed Jul 22, 2020 5:41 pm

Cool resource!
I need to keep up my anki, but I need to do a lot of other things, obviously. I'm sretching my legs out through new tenses and I feel powerful right now, even though I would be challenged to do much more than order a beer, say my wife is a teacher, and find the bathroom. :D
0 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 Jul 28, 2020 4:37 am

Nice week; a lot of good work and weŕe still kicking.
I really hope that someday soon the coronavirus mess in the US is under control enough that Americans are welcome to visit other countries. I understand; I wouldn't be eager to have Americans around right now either.
I always felt a sense of alienation as I grew up in America. I think that is part of what made me leave the US when I finished college. I've been back in the United States as long as I was out of it, and I still feel like a stranger. I think many people in the US feel that way these days. When a country you live in changes so fast, it can be hard to follow. I hope for the best and try to jprepare for the worst. I don't know what's going to happen next. Nobody does. I just want my happy little immigrant, mixed race, multilingual family to be happy.
Sorry to mention personal feelings here, but feelings are a backdrop to language learning.
I put my dialect cards back into the mix in my Irish deck, and had too many review cards for a couple of days. I am running right at about the maximum rate I can do Irish. I'm pretty fanatical about it, but I may have to slow down soon. There isn't any emergency, but it is really fun to see progress. I now have a grasp of the major parts of Irish grammar in my head at the "I can recite conjugations" level. I have a lot to work on with automaticity and the like. I still have a million things to learn, of course, but I've got the skeleton of the language down. I hope to be able to start working on books soon. I have a huge amount vocabulary to learn. I'm still at the point that every word I learn seems to show up everywhere as soon as I learn it.
Spanish has taken a hit the last couple of days, but I'll try reconnecting this week. I'm still on schedule for the SupreChallenge, and I'm getting up toward 10000 cards reviewed in anki Irish.
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 Aug 11, 2020 10:42 pm

A quick note. I'm super busy. I'm a full-time online teacher of 180 13 year olds. A lot of things aren't working right, but they will. I've got to try to give my students a good year, even in the midst of this boring, slow moving nightmare.

I sadly parked my Irish deck. I just don't have time. I've started going through Spanish Assimil, using the short little sentence files like in repeated shadowing like glossika. I will just repeat the files, and review them at increasing intervals. This should take about 20 minutes a day. Beyond that, I'm just going to keep up my superchallenge rate of about 30 minutes listening (while walking), and 20 pages reading....
I've been starting the Wheel of Time books that were a little to hard for me a couple of months ago. So far, so good.

Now back to my huge, too complex calendar. :D
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...

User avatar
tangleweeds
Green Belt
Posts: 449
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
x 1226

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby tangleweeds » Sat Aug 15, 2020 8:33 pm

sfuqua wrote:A quick note. I'm super busy. I'm a full-time online teacher of 180 13 year olds. A lot of things aren't working right, but they will. I've got to try to give my students a good year, even in the midst of this boring, slow moving nightmare.
Thank you so much for stepping up to do what's needed in the midst of our dystopian adventure. Online education is turning out to be an interesting experiment, unfortunately implemented with insufficient preparation (like so many things).

It's not a new interest--one of my best friend's PhD thesis was an early 1990's study of online education. Interestingly, her class discussion boards had an early implemenation of "Like" & similar response buttons a la Facebook, to cut down on "me too" and other noise posts.

And I'm a big MOOC fan myself, though I've only ever completely finished one and it took two tries. What lesson to be learned there? I mean, I'm an academic geek who studies things for fun, and if I get distracted and accidentally wander off in the middle of things, how are 10 year olds to cope?

So if you find time, I'd be curious to know what you find effective--that's a particularly chaotic age group. Overall, I'm just very interested in how education is unfolding when pushed online, and what we can learn from it all.
6 x
Neurological odyssey is going better! Yay!


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