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 » Wed Sep 28, 2022 5:39 pm

Well, I taught for a couple of more weeks and now its a school holiday. I remembered how much I loved teaching, even though it can be tiring. I was lucky to be teaching at a school where I am respected by the administration and I get good backup, not that I need it very much. The trouble with teaching in the US, and I suspect in much of the world, is that teachers are expected to handle emergency behaviour problems in the classroom at the same time that they continue teaching. This is impossible. You really don't have time to talk down a kid who has gone temporarily crazy at the same time that you keep a bunch of other kids moving in the right direction. I had to send one cute little latina out of the room temporarily last week. She kept yelling across the room, and I couldn't stop everything to give her the time she needed. She was mad, and she wanted the world to know about it. She wasn't talking to me, she just wanted to disrupt everybody's day. Since I have administrators and counsellors in the office that I trust and who trust me, I could ask her to go to the office. She left, enraged because she thought she was in big trouble, and I continued my lesson.
The young lady in question was back for class the next day, looking a little nervous, I smiled at her, and off we went for a productive day. What was the problem? She had a big argument with her two best friends during the break before my class, and she needed to talk with somebody for a few minutes. She did not need to be punished, it would have just supported her belief that the world was against her. Furthermore, she did not need for me to yell at her, that would have just made her an enemy who would try to sabotage class whenever she could. She did not need to sit in the office for an hour waiting to talk to someone.
I think we called it right. The next day, she asked to talk to me, and told me that her mother was in surgery and that she was worried about her. She told me that she would probably miss class the next day to take care of her mother and wanted to get some makeup work.
Another boy was pretty rude to me a couple of times, but I decided to ignore it since he wasn't really loud about it. I asked the principal later in the day about him, and it made be glad that I decided to put up with a little static. The principal told me, "He's having a bad day. His father is being sentenced today, and faces 15 to 25 years in prison."
How is a kid supposed to function on a day like that?
Hey, most of the kids were fine, and we just had fun with science.

Oh, language learning. I'm as flaky as ever. Maybe it is just a fashion trend, or maybe it is an effect of their year of being locked down, but about 25% of the kids at any time had were wearing anime or manga t-shirts or sweatshirts. Every day, I was surrounded by a sea of kana and kanji.

Well, I learned the two types of kana in a couple of days and I started trying to read. I started a Remember the Kanji anki decks. I'm moving fast, but I don't know how far I will go.

So, learning kanji and reviewing kana and trying to read manga.

And enjoying life. :D
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...

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 » Thu Sep 29, 2022 4:31 am

I think that way too many administrators in education are just people who:
1. Want to make more money.
2. Can't stand being in a classroom all day.
3. They really like power and love to see people afraid.

Whatever they say, many, if not most, administrators don't want to hear about problems in the classroom. If there are problems, it is simpler to blame the teacher for the problem than to actually have to figure out why a kid is malfunctioning. If you are a teacher, and you have to hide any problems that you are having with students, it throws you back to yelling and punishing as the only ways to get anything done. This makes kids hate you and leads to more problems. Some teachers go through an entire career running a reign of terror. Other teachers just give up and keep collecting their paycheck. As a teacher, you have to learn how to avoid problems where you can, but you need support sometimes.

While educational experts keep focusing on upgrading teachers, I think they should make sure that teachers get proper backup before they work too hard on fixing teachers. Teachers can only learn better ways of teaching their classes if they have room to do it. :o

Thank Goddess, the school where I finished my career, and where I covered a class for a couple of weeks, has the best educational administrator I have ever seen. The office team that works with him is outstanding too, because good people want to work for good bosses. I would follow that administrator into Hades if that is what he said it takes to get the job done. :D

Sorry about the off-topic rant, but US education is even more messed up than usual these days after covid, and I've just been back in the arena for a while.
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...

jeffers
Blue Belt
Posts: 848
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Location: UK
Languages: Speaks: English (N), Hindi (A2-B1)

Learning: The above, plus French (A2-B1), German (A1), Ancient Greek (?), Sanskrit (beginner)
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby jeffers » Thu Sep 29, 2022 8:22 am

I'm a teacher in England, and I found your last two posts to be insightful and thought provoking. So off-topic or not, you found an interested audience here.
3 x
Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien (roughly, the perfect is the enemy of the good)

French SC Books: 0 / 5000 (0/5000 pp)
French SC Films: 0 / 9000 (0/9000 mins)

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 » Tue Oct 18, 2022 6:05 pm

Well I’ve been very busy, and I haven’t updated this log the way I should, but here goes.

My Japanese experiment ended. I learned Kana and about 70 Kanji. I absolutely love the writing system. The shape of the Kanji, the relationship between Kanji and words, the whole complex mess of it is fascinating. I watched a ton of anime, and I think that this might be a rather easy language, at least in terms of finding compelling media. Great fun.

My general impression of Japanese is that learning to read and listen would be a huge task, but in many ways a straightforward one. A few thousand cards and things will start to fall into place. It also seems to me that anybody who speaks an Indo-European language has a great start on Japanese phonology. I think most of us could produce understandable Japanese pretty easily. This is very different from my feelings about Chinese (of both flavours I tried); I was never sure if anything I said was comprehensible. The learning community has a number of prominent Krashenites, who advocate input only, and what seems to be many people who have done a large amount of input without developing any output skills. I am very attracted to this language. Since I don’t really care about speaking or writing Japanese, the Input only path would be very appropriate for somebody like me.

I may still go back to it someday. In fact, I almost talked myself into going back into it. The language is beautiful, the language and culture are fascinating. Japan and the United States have a long history, not all of which is very nice. I dated a woman from Japan while I was in graduate school in Hawaii, whom I took to a Mexican restaurant. I thought I was doing something cool, but it turned out that she had done a year of her undergraduate study in Mexico, and spoke very good Spanish. She knew way more about Mexican food than I did. The cooks came out to talk to her; I guess they thought a Japanese woman speaking good Mexican Spanish was impressive. After the meal, she warned me never to say anything nice about the US bombing campaign in WWII. I assured her that that wasn’t a subject I would ever bring up. It turns out that her father was in Hiroshima on “that day” and she grew up seeing the burn scars on his back. There is a lot of history and a lot of emotion on both sides. My wife’s family has horror stories about the Japanese occupation of Leyte.
History is a horror show sometimes.
Avoid war.
I’m going to continue this later…
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
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 Oct 18, 2022 9:18 pm

I have been fooling around with Spanish a lot more lately. I have been texting in Spanish with several people. I actually like an informal language exchange better than something well organised and committed. Maybe because I am cheap and disorganised, or more to the point, my schedule changes from day to day. It is fun to actually get to know people; reading about people’s day-to-day lives in Latin America reminds me how ignorant I am about this part of the world, even though there are many Latin Americans in San Jose.

I’m not sure that anki has any more use for me in Spanish. There is a lot I could study, but I wonder if just talking to people and reading isn’t better. I’ve been seriously thinking of starting FSI Spanish again, from the place where I left off years ago. The topics that are covered in the last 10 lessons are all areas of weakness, and it would be good to have the bragging rights of finishing. When people ask me how long it took to do FSI, I can answer – 9 years. I could also start off and alternate between advanced and earlier lessons, something like Lesson 1, Lesson 46, Lesson 2, Lesson 47, and so on. I could repeat the last 10 lessons at the end if I find them useful.

French is, well, not there yet.
DLIFLC says that I am intermediate, but I really can’t communicate except with memorised phrases.
Irish, Norse, and Ænglisc all seem extremely fun. I can’t think of any reason why any of them would improve my life, except that I would have the fun of learning them.

Logic says that I should probably just concentrate on Spanish. I don’t know what it’s like post COVID, but even in Dublin, there were a lot more opportunities to speak Spanish than there were to speak Irish.
4 x
荒海や佐渡によこたふ天の川

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

Sometimes Japanese is just too much...

User avatar
sfuqua
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1642
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 5:05 am
Location: san jose, california
Languages: Bad English: native
Samoan: speak, but rusty
Tagalog: imperfect, but use all the time
Spanish: read
French: read some
Japanese: beginner, obsessively studying
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9248
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Tue Oct 18, 2022 9:21 pm

FSI and read...? Spanish is so cool.
I really loved it, however, when I was only doing Irish
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...

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 » Mon Nov 07, 2022 4:56 am

I've been pretty busy working and studying.
The weather has changed here, in a way that is exciting for drought ridden California. It got cold and dark, and it has started to rain. The first day it started raining, the kids I teach (12 years old that day) went absolutely nuts. It was all I could do to stop them from all running outside. As soon as classes changed, all the kids started running around in the hard, driving, cold rain like it was a great gift from heaven. Come to think of it, if you are 12, you probably don't remember hard rain.
I hope it rains for months...

In language issues, I am facing a real challenge. I don't know if I am going to get past this.

I keep going back to Japanese.

I did a week of concentrated work on Spanish and French subtitles, and then I went back to Japanese.
I pushed ahead my Whale Road deck (Irish, Old English, and Norse)... and then I went back to Japanese.
I decided to just read and get a tutor a couple of times a week... and then I went back to Japanese.

I find it hard to explain exactly what there is about Japanese that I find so attractive. Obviously the writing system is fascinating and delightfully hard. Some of Japanese media is fascinating.

In a way, I'm mad at myself. My plan was to do a little bit to level up my Spanish and French and then to moving into the "Whale Road" deck for a good long push.

I still want to do this. If I move slowly and steadily into Old English, Irish, and Norse, well there is so much to learn I could be a nice busy lad for the foreseeable future. I've just got to get on to the Whale Road again.
But first I may want to learn a few more Kanji.
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
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Wed Nov 09, 2022 2:12 am

Well, I'm going to do Japanese for a while. :D

There is a lot of information on the web about learning Japanese; I think half of the people on earth are learning Japanese. There are a ton of good resources on anki to learn Japanese. Japanese is a language which appears to require a lot of memorization at the start of study, just to get the tools to begin to read.

What follows is just what I am doing so far; there is nothing at all revolutionary here... :o

I've decided to follow a path which is used by some of the people who advocate an input based approach. This suits what my goals are, since I don't care if I actually ever can speak Japanese worth mentioning. What I hunger for now is the ability to read Japanese, and understand anime. I'm sure I can make at least some progress on this. I might dream that I will suddenly start speaking fluent Japanese at some point, but I'm not holding my breath. :D

OK, there are many ways to approach learning to read Japanese. One involves learning kanji in isolation, and the other involves learning kanji in sentences. I have an instinct that tells me that learning kanji in sentences is the better path, but if the whole sentence has too many unfamiliar kanji in it, things won't work well. So I have decided to take a multitrack approach and do both. Eventually I will learn kanji, maybe better for approaching them from two sides.
,
For learning individual kanji, the most famous resource is Heisig's _Remember the Kanji,_ a multi volume set of books that teaches understanding of what the Japanese educational system sees as the most important kanji for literacy (more or less). A multitude of anki decks have been prepared to cover the material in these books, some of which have material that is probably better than the original book. This system teaches the meanings of, 2300 or so kanji, without teaching how to pronounce them in Japanese. When you are done with this system, you are in the position of a literate Chinese person, who can recognize the meanings of the characters they see in Japanese, but who can't pronounce anything. I'm going to work through this deck. Apparently, some people claim that they can "read Japanese '' after learning the meanings of these characters, because they can slide their eyes over text and have some idea what is going on. This would be way ahead of where I am now, but of course this is a strange definition of reading... :shock:
Just search of "Heisig" of "RTK" if you want to see examples of Heirig inspired decks. :D

The other approach to learning kanji is to learn them in sentences. There are two approaches to this. One, that is more appropriate for beginners, involves learning kanji in sentences, but only scoring the cards based on knowledge of one kanji in the sentence. At least in part of the web, this is called the JP1K approach. The idea here is that after you learn 1000 characters, you should start mining sentences and learn the rest of Japanese this way.
The second approach to learning Japanese is just to start off with very simple sentences, and learn the kanji by brute force. Reading a simple sentence in Japanese, and then pronouncing it and giving its meaning. There are a couple of decks that take this approach, that get their lists of sentences from different places, newspapers, manga, or anime. These decks involve learning many more characters and learning more sentences, but they also advocate that the learner start mining sentences after a thousand cards or so.

None of this is terribly informative if you are one of the people already studying Japanese, but I thought that I would explain what I'm doing in case I use terms later on to describe what I am doing.

I still can't explain where this huge lust of Japanese is coming from. Sad feelings about a long-lost girlfriend? A feeling that I stayed in Samoa too long, and should have done a stint in Japan, like almost every other English teacher in Asia.

I don't know.
I'm happy, and I'm moving fast at a rate of about 50 cards a day right now.

I edited to fix a bunch of my usual typos :lol:
14 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...

munyag
Yellow Belt
Posts: 68
Joined: Tue Jul 09, 2019 4:22 pm
Languages: Shona (N), Spanish (Beginner), French (Beginner)
x 62

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby munyag » Fri Nov 11, 2022 1:07 pm

DaveAgain wrote:
sfuqua wrote:Her: Of, I'm from England. We don't have silly holidays like Black Friday.
I'm in England, and there are currently lots of TV adverts for Black Friday sales, so we seem to have this here too now.

Halloween has also travelled, we used to just have Bonfire Night.


@DaveAgain- Halloween started with the Celts in Ireland UK(possibly Scotland) and northern France. They had this celebration called Samhain. Pope Gregory the 8th I think then made All Saints Day Nov 1st. October 31st was All Hallows Eve. My memory is jumbled up but you can easily verify this online
1 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
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Sat Nov 12, 2022 4:37 am

This is just a quick note about how much I am enjoying Japanese, specifically memorizing Kanji using an anki variation of the Heisig method. This is just a disjointed ramble. :D
Heisig developed a system that could get a person from zero to knowledge of the 2000 or so kanji needed to be considered literate in Japan. He uses mnemonics, and different anki decks use different mnemonic sets. A few of these online are full of disgusting, misogynist clues that make a respecter of women want to throw up. Not everybody who studies Japanese is an incel. :shock:

Mind you, I use disgusting, stupid, outrageous mnemonics myself all the time, but I am wise enough not to publish them in an anki deck. Does this make me a hypocrite? Maybe, but I think it mostly makes me wiser than the people who revealed their idiot mnemonics to the world. :D

There are women who are studying Japanese too, but I haven't found equally outrageous clues that are disrespectful to men. I mean, women must have outrageous, stupid, disgusting thoughts about men from time to time.

Maybe women are just smart enough not to publish them on the Internet.

When I talk to 11-year-old boys who are completely outraged by "the way girls are" (usually an early stage of puberty), I always tell them that they should just accept that girls rule. If they say that that is unfair, I just tell them that their life will be simpler once they just accept that girls rule, and try to adjust their expectations in life to that fact.

It has always made my life simpler.

But seriously, learning Kanji is fun. I have added an extra step into the standard review sequence for new cards. I find that I do better that way if I am working with a non-Latin script. So I'm doing 1 minute 1 minute 1 minute 10 minutes instead of the standard 1 minute 10 minutes sequence in anki. The extra cards are fast since they are "overlearning" and they just make the deck feel fast and easy.

It always seems to me that the whole anki idea that one should avoid extra repeats of cards is wrong-headed. It feels to me that a little extra repetition can turn a hard deck into an easy one. Of course, you may have to reduce the number of new cards if the deck takes too much time. My advice would be, if you are finding a deck just too hard, increase the repeats and decrease the new cards. You may not need to reduce the number of new cards very much.

Speaking of new cards, I'm down to 30 new kanji a day now. The way that this kanji stuff works, you are recognizing parts of the kanji you have already learned in the new kanji you are learning, so if you don't give the new kanji you learn time to sink in and get automatic, learning more new kanji can be very hard.

I suppose if one was a fanatic, one could rush through at pretty much any speed, but I'd rather have time to stare into space, listen to old music, read manga (sorry, in English), and basically enjoy the rest of life.
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...


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