Not all those who wander are lost

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jeff_lindqvist
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Tue Mar 29, 2022 1:23 pm

You don't say...

Image

(Source: https://lidenz.ru/russian-cursive/ )
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Le Baron
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby Le Baron » Tue Mar 29, 2022 4:43 pm

First time I learned cursive small T is 'm', I just looked at it for ages with a frown and thought 'but why?'.
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IronMike
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby IronMike » Wed Mar 30, 2022 12:59 am

Jeff beat me to the best image of the issues with Russian cursive.

I've told this in other threads, but a real issue for many of us when I went to DLI for Russian Basic (86-87) was writing checks at the base exchange. Russian cursive. I'd write cursively "dollars" and it would look like "goллops". I wrote VOID on many checks that year!
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby Amandine » Wed Mar 30, 2022 6:47 am

When I was in Russia, I taught at a summer camp in a forest north of Moscow. The camp cafeteria was staffed by babushkas who took the printed menus they had left over from the Brezhnev era (based on the paper quality) and wrote over the top by hand the day's offering. So not only the cursive but even harder to read with the printed text underneath it. Incomprehensible, I just tried to puzzle out one key word and go with that.
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Thu Mar 31, 2022 3:54 am

Sometimes I wind up getting wanderlust for activities rather than languages even though it has the same effect. Tonight I have been dragging myself around because I really just want to settle down and read a book, but I can't do that in Russian, and it's going to be a while before I can.
So wanting to read a book pushes me toward Spanish or French.

Ah, wandering... :D
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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sfuqua
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sun Apr 03, 2022 1:42 am

My progress in Russian continues to be sort of like a big truck trying to climb a hill that is too steep for it. Grind down slower and slower, down shift, down shift, and finally roll backwards to try to build up more speed to get over the hill.
I switched to the newer Assimil Russian book first, since it seems to be easier than the el nuevo ruso sin esfuerzo, at least the learning curve seems less steep. I need all the help I can get. I have a vocabulary list in there too, made from a bunch of frequency lists I found online, both lists of lemmas, and some lists of tokens. It seems, at this point, to be absolutely magic. My Russian vocabulary is tiny, so it doesn't take much to increase global comprehension.

Russian almost got me into trouble
.
As I write this, there is a part of the world where a larger country has invaded a smaller country and seems to be determined to change the government of the smaller country by force.
I have been studying the language of the larger country recently.
I bought a t-shirt with something rude on it about the leader of the larger country, written in the language of the larger country.
After I got the t-shirt, I decided not to wear it when I'm going around town, because I don't really want to have a confrontation with someone from the larger country who is offended by the insult to their leader. If I talk to someone from the larger country I will listen to them because you learn more by listening than by talking.

There was a minor family emergency, and I had to rush to the store to buy something, and when I arrived there I realised that I was wearing my shirt with the insult. I decided that the chances of running into someone who reads the language the shirt was written in at our local store was nil, so I went in to do my shopping.

30 seconds after I entered the store, the security guard came up to me and said, "I love that shirt!" He told me that he was from the country which was invaded. He took a bunch of pictures of me, telling me that he needed to send them to the family back home in the smaller country that is being invaded. Let's call that country Ukraine just for discussion. Perhaps I'm on a Facebook post. I hope I don't wind up on VK.

So it you see a dumb looking American standing next to a Ukrainian security guard, wearing a t-shirt with something rude written on it about the leader of another country, well that idiot is probably me.

I'm probably going on a black list somewhere., which is a shame, since I understand how painful it can be to listen to idiot foreigners talk about a place you love. Filipino politics is so much less black and white than the media in the US portrays it. I shut up and listen when Filipinos talk about it, even the Filipina who is watching gardening videos on YouTube in the corner.

One of the nicest things I came across on the Internet today is this little clip:https://belsat.eu/en/news/russian-tv-anchor-cannot-stop-laughing-over-news/

She just looks so happy, beautiful, and full of joy. In this world with all its darkness, I'm glad the news cracks her up. I wish more US anchors would have the same reaction to some of nonsense they have to read. I hope she doesn't get in trouble; I hope she gets promoted. RT says that she is not in trouble.

Alexandra Novikova, you're my hero.
added: Now I found an article saying that she quit. OK...
16 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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IronMike
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby IronMike » Wed Apr 06, 2022 1:33 am

Ah, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, I love that town. I recall watching a far-off volcano smoke lightly while I was eating what is still the best scallops I've ever eaten in 55 years on this earth.

Aleksandra, I also love you.

And sfuqua, I'll look for you on FB.
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You're not a C1 (or B1 or whatever) if you haven't tested.
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sfuqua
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Thu Apr 07, 2022 2:11 am

It's way too early for me to be getting very much out of Russian media, but it is fun to roam around the Internet and try to see if I can understand anything. With pop songs, I can usually understand a word or two, but I never get enough to actually understand what the song is about. It's OK; I like mysteries. I may start trying to read a book pretty soon. It will be very, very slow, of course, but maybe I can understand something. Russian is cool. :D
I'm really liking the effect of starting out the life of each of my anki cards with a bunch of "extra" reviews on the first day. I guess I read the descriptions of anki and the supermemo algorithm and took them at face value. After rereading and experimenting with "overlearning" in anki, I"m pretty sure that they got carried away with the idea of reducing the number of reviews at all costs.
Adding in some extra reviews at the beginning can make a bunch of cards that are difficult and slow into a bunch of cards that are easy and fast. Why isn't this a good thing? They report that cramming can make you able to pass a test. Why is this a bad thing?
It is a well known principle that overlearning, cramming in supermemo lingo increases memory over shorter time intervals, but that after longer intervals it has no advantage. Why is this a bad thing? Overlearning new material is just a way to get it to the next day, when one would start to review the material at increasing intervals, using the regular anki/supermemo algorithms.

I hope my writing was coherent enough to follow; I had a wisdom tooth pulled earlier, and right now I'm steaming along on painkillers. I'm not supposed to drive; perhaps I shouldn't post.

I'm watching the big Russian spectacular movie from a few years ago, "Stalingrad." The movie is very beautiful in its horror. Who would have guessed that a destroyed city could be so beautiful. It reminds me how glad I am that I never had to fight in a war.



There is something perverse about watching a war movie while people are fighting in a war right now. :o
I should just watch Nyusha https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QY8trLkHMc8

I deleted a paragraph about my time in the Philippines; it was too stupid to leave in.
Last edited by sfuqua on Sun May 08, 2022 5:31 pm, edited 2 times 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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sfuqua
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Thu Apr 07, 2022 4:48 pm

i'n feeling a lot of frustration with Russian right now, not that my anki deck and shadowing isn't working, but just that I want to be further along. I know I need to do the work, but.... :D

Anyway, Russia is a fascinating country, at least to me. It is so huge. It is so varied in geography and people. It has great literature and media. Yet all of this depends on facility in the Russian language to access. It builds a hunger for learning the language, and that is a good thing with a language that is difficult. :lol:
At my present rate, I've got a year or two before I can realistically start reading extensively. I've added in the anki versions of courses from memrise and duolingo again. The Assimil decks continue to be the backbone of what I am doing with anki.

I've been thinking about the L1->L2 cards that I have in the deck. I have them offset by a month or more from the L2->L1 cards, as Assimil does it, but I'm wondering if they are worth the effort. I'm not really planning to try to develop productive skills, so I'm just using them to better learn the material. However I'm not sure that the time wouldn't better be spent working on more L2->L1 cards.

I haven't made up my mind yet. I've got a lot to learn about Russian cases... :D
Last edited by sfuqua on Sun Apr 10, 2022 2:05 am, edited 1 time in total.
3 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

the rough sea / stretching out towards Sado / the Milky Way
Basho[1689]

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

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tangleweeds
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby tangleweeds » Thu Apr 07, 2022 5:03 pm

I have the same issue with Anki, only it feels a bit more extreme: I simply fail to learn the word/expression at all without a good dose of what they'd call "overlearning" at the beginning, which is why I much prefer other apps (e.g. Memrise) until I get around to (re)modifying Anki to suit my needs (augh, major updates! and reinstalling on new/different machines! augh!)

And as you said, some words/expressions stick permanently almost immediately, so only the problem ones need the spaced repetition treatment. But the spacing of repetition that works best for me seems significantly different than the average person's that the Anki algorithm uses, thus my recurrrent need to hack Anki.

I just snipped out personal details about how my IQ/memory skills test out above/below average, but for various reasons I've had lots of testing over the years, and the results have clarified why the standard SRS algorithm doesn't work for me. Syntax/grammar has always been not only effortless but fascinating, but accurate pronunciation has always been extremely difficult because of auditory processing deficits. So I've always had to customize Anki and other parts of my learning process to compensate.

So I'm hardly surprised that there are a number of us out there who need to work differently with Anki, because, while most people might, the nature of the bell curve is that not everyone tests near the center. But it makes sense that the majority at the center are what SRS systems are based on, and we outliers need to compensate.

My last dog'd breed is theoretically of one of the most intelligent, but unfortunately, my dog landed at the far left end of the bell curve. She was very loving, but boy was she a dumb, dumb dog. The nature of statistics is that while outliers are definitely less common, we most definitely exist.
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