Not all those who wander are lost

Continue or start your personal language log here, including logs for challenge participants
User avatar
Amandine
Orange Belt
Posts: 177
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2021 8:45 am
Location: Sydney, Australia
Languages: English (N), French (B1/B2), Russian (B1), Romanian (A1, casual playing on Duolingo), Yiddish (ditto)
x 893

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby Amandine » Thu Apr 07, 2022 11:28 pm

If its on a streaming service you have access to or you can find the DVD , may I recommend the film The Commissar, definitely my favourite Soviet era film (made in 1967 in a brief thaw but banned and not seen until 90s), based on a short story by definitely my favourite Soviet author Vassily Grossman. Being from Berdychiv, I've been thinking about him even more than usual lately.
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 » Fri Apr 08, 2022 12:12 am

Thanks for the advice. I'm watching The Commissar now.
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...

Beli Tsar
Green Belt
Posts: 384
Joined: Mon Oct 22, 2018 3:59 pm
Languages: English (N), Ancient Greek (intermediate reading), Latin (Beginner) Farsi (Beginner), Biblical Hebrew (Beginner)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9548
x 1294

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby Beli Tsar » Sat Apr 09, 2022 9:14 am

tangleweeds wrote: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!)

While I use Anki over Memrise, it's because of the flexibility with which I can tweak things, create, modify or get rid of cards. Memrise is, in my experience, far superior as a mere memorisation tool. It shows you a word, then tests you both ways with easy multiple choice, and does this all with good short SRS steps as Sfuqua has described: this is how it should be done, and it makes words stick!

For what I'm learning right now, I don't need that, and Anki's a tad faster, even with the learning steps tweaked as above. That said, I really hope someday someone creates a mod for Anki that allows you to replicate Memrise's learning experience. If they did that, they could take out the bit in the Anki manual that says Anki is for remembering, not learning. Memrise has solved the problem for how to make SRS do both.
3 x
: 0 / 50 1/2 Super Challenge - Latin Reading
: 0 / 50 1/2 Super Challenge - Latin 'Films'

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 » Sun Apr 10, 2022 2:06 am

I like Anki because it is so flexible. I don't know why I didn't play with the learning intervals sooner. I wonder why the big anki advocates mostly don't talk about it more.
Oh, well, maybe I'm the last person on earth to figure it out. :lol:

I continue to plug away at anki, and shadowing. I'm thinking about trying a super challenge in Russian. It is ridiculous of course, but perhaps I can get some ways in it. Having a challenge might force me to push past my comfort zone. I was experimenting with a translation of a Follett book earlier, and I have to translate almost every word, but when I do I can follow it, especially since I am familiar with the story. I have a couple of weeks to think about it; we'll see.

I still haven't finished Dr. Zhivago in English; I've been reading other things at the same time. I first read this book as a teenager, and I am amazed at how much my view of human nature has changed since then. Everyone in the book was rare and amazing. Now, fifty years later, the people seem much more like the normal, foolish humans that I think the author intended them to be. Of course normal, fooling humans are absolutely amazing creatures too. :D

We have had our first really hot days of the year already, hot enough that I walked in early mornings to avoid the midday heat. It certainly seems that the winter is over. Gulls, our usual winter visitors, seem to have gone back to the ocean, a few miles away. For some reason we have a very large crop of mockingbirds. If you stick out your head in the middle of the night, you can hear mockingbirds singing from a couple of different directions. Singing their hearts out. From what I understand, mockingbirds who sing at night are usually males who are as yet unattached, or older males who have lost their mates, So they are lonely perhaps.

Some people don't like mockingbirds singing at night. :o Robert Frost said:

I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;

Have clapped my hands at him from the door
When it seemed as if I could bear no more.

The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.

And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song.

Because of course there must be something right about wanting a decent sleep at night.
:lol:

Mockingbirds don't bother me at all. :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...

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 » Sun Apr 10, 2022 3:32 pm

Hmmn. I did more experimenting with trying to read a translated Russian novel, and I think I could read it, as long as I allow myself massive rereading. I can build up a few pages that I know the vocabulary of and that I can read aloud and understand, and then I can build from there.
Long ago, in another century, I decided that I was going to read the Samoan language newspaper every week, no matter how long it took. It was a very productive strategy.

The following is all old hat for those of you who already know a highly inflected language.
Of course with its complex inflections, particularly case marking, there will be difficulties.
Alaric Hall, the creator describes two basic strategies for handling a highly inflected language (Old Norse in this case):
How should I put sentences together? There are basically
two strategies for translating Old Norse into English:
1. Translate each word as it comes without worrying about its
grammatical function, and, if necessary, shuffle them about
afterwards until they seem to make sense. Much of the time
this will produce a correct translation, because the word-order
of Old Norse and English is similar.
2. Work out the grammatical function of each word and build
the translation up from there.
Both methods have their place, but the second is much more
reliable:
* Fisk át Óláfr looks at first sight like it should mean ‘a fish ate
Óláfr’. But fisk is accusative and Óláfr is nominative, so it must
actually mean ‘Óláfr ate a fish’.
* Hann drápu dýr looks like it should mean ‘he killed an animal/
animals’. Hann could be a nominative singular, and dýr (a
strong neuter noun) could be an accusative (singular or
plural), so this looks plausible. But the verb riðu is plural. Hann
can be an accusative singular but not a nominative plural: the
only word which can be a nominative plural is dýr. So the
sentence must mean ‘animals killed him’.
* Langan hundr át fisk looks like it should mean ‘a long dog ate
a fish’. But langan is accusative, so it must agree with fisk
(accusative), not hundr (nominative). So the sentence means
‘a dog ate a long fish’.


I will, of course hit the first strategy at first, since I don't know squat about Russian case marking. The examples he gives show the problem with just translating word by word and hoping for the best. Dr. Hall suggests a strategy for breaking down an Old Norse sentence:
When reading grammatically, try following this checklist. It looks
complicated, but soon becomes automatic:
1. Find the main verb (i.e. a verb which is not an infinitive). Is it
singular or plural?
1a. If the verb is first or second person, you automatically know that
the subject must be ‘I/we’ or ‘you’ respectively. Bonus!
2. Find a noun or pronoun, of the same number as the verb,
which could be a nominative. Hopefully there’s only one! This
is the subject.
2a. Two singular subjects require a plural verb: Óláfr ok Egill tǫlðu
gjafar ‘Óláfr and Egill counted gifts’.
2b. If you can’t find a nominative noun or pronoun, look for a
nominative adjective: these can stand in for nouns, as in The sick
should be sent home.
2c. If there isn’t a subject at all, add in a pronoun corresponding in
number and person to the verb. Thus tǫlðum gjafar means ‘we
counted gifts’; þótti mér undarligt means ‘it seemed strange to me’.
3. If the sense of the verb allows it to have an object (e.g. ‘I killed
him’; contrast with ‘I died’), look for nouns and pronouns in the
accusative.
3a. Some evil verbs turn their objects into genitives or datives. If so, the
glossary/dictionary will tell you, and you should look for one of these
instead of an accusative.
4. If there are any adjectives around, match them up with nouns
or pronouns of the same number, gender and case.
5. You’ve now got the core of the sentence in place. Slotting in
prepositions, indirect objects, and adverbs ought now to be
pretty intuitive (hopefully!)

I would try to develop a similar strategy for breaking down sentences this way, and I should be able to read very, very slowly.
Now, very, very slowly won't finish a super challenge. However, if I read the book in overlapping segments, I may be able to spend much of my time reading parts of the book that I have already decoded, so that I can begin to cover enough pages to get through a super challenge.
I probably shouldn't actually join the super challenge in that I will move very, very slowly at first.
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...

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 Apr 19, 2022 3:44 am

I've had a crummy few days, actually more pain than I can remember since I had dengue fever decades ago. Apparently they damaged a nerve when they pulled my tooth, so there has been a long painful recovery. I got sick with some virus or another during this process, which means I was a sad puppy for a while. :o
Somehow, pain changed my perspective a bit. I started thinking more about things I never finished instead of new things to start (for a change). To add to this fun, my wife, who always has a few monolingual Spanish speakers in her classes, said she wanted to do Pimsleur Spanish. I set up a course for her on anki, and started doing it again myself. I never got through 90 days of Pimsleur, so it wouldn't hurt me much to finish it out, and by staying a day ahead of her I can check if there are any problems with the cards she is going to hit that day. :D
There is nothing hard for me about Pimsleur, but I can actually feel some good effects from it, as I build sentences from the pieces that Pimsleur builds up. I started doing a Pimsleur French deck at the same time. This deck is actually probably quite useful; my word order in France gets messed up when I try to speak quickly. I drive through the cards quickly to try to mimic the rhythm of the course.
My wife and I have started having occasionally "Pimsleur Spanish" conversations, just as we did years ago when she went through Pimsleur level I a few years ago. :lol:

Anyway, I'm screwing around with Pimsleur with a couple of languages that I am already quite familiar with. I'm going to keep up Pimsleur Spanish for a while more, to support my wife, and because it won't hurt.

Right now, I find myself being pulled toward my old Whale_Road deck with Old English, Irish, and Norse. I actually have made quite a bit of progress with Irish and Old English. I think part of my attraction to these languages is because there is absolutely no practical reason to learn them.

Just fun. :D :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
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Fri Apr 22, 2022 2:22 am

Well...
It's my 69th birthday and I've had a great day with family. :D
It's my day, and I get to do whatever I want, so I've been studying Russian.
Russian is the girl that is bad for me, but I just can't stay away from her. Everywhere I look something reminds me of her. She is so, so hard, but I am making progress. I've got to believe that it's going to take years to get to the point where I can read with any facility, but it just seems so cool. :D
I wonder why I never developed a love of French the way that I did for Russia. I've been plugging away at French for years, part time, but I don't care about it as much as I do Russian. I have nothing against the French or France, but somehow I just don't get excited about it. :o

As part of the birthday fun, I went out to eat lunch with my wife and several teenage girls yesterday. They ran the music in the car, and so I got to listen to a lot of new songs about some guy who really likes some girl a lot, and it all sounded very repetitive. I mean in my day songs were meaningful, so I insisted that they play a song from the part of the United States where my family is from (not where I grew up, but from where 100% of my ancestors came from.)
I'll leave you with this, the highly meaningful song, I'm My Own Grandpahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYlJH81dSiw

The teenagers were sooo impressed. :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...

BeaP
Green Belt
Posts: 405
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2021 8:18 am
Languages: Hungarian (N), English, German, Spanish, French, Italian
x 1990

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby BeaP » Fri Apr 22, 2022 4:39 am

I hope you'll live to be 96 and I can read your advanced Russian log.
sfuqua wrote:I have nothing against the French or France, but somehow I just don't get excited about it. :o

Me neither. What I try to do is buy the best resources, and then I can be excited about the resource at least. Great vocabulary compilation! Superb graphics! :D I really like the French in Action videos for example, I find them funny and very useful. I almost forget that they're teaching French.

I've bought an old Russian textbook recently. I had to study Russian as a compulsory subject for 6 years in the primary school. My husband thinks that we know a lot and it'll come back when I start reading the book. We'll see.
4 x

User avatar
Teango
Blue Belt
Posts: 766
Joined: Mon Jul 06, 2015 4:55 am
Location: Honolulu, Hawaiʻi
Languages: en (n)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 9&p=235545
x 2943
Contact:

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby Teango » Fri Apr 22, 2022 5:00 am

Hau'oli lā piha makahiki ia 'oe, e sfuqua! Glad to hear you had a great birthday with family, and let me offer you a virtual fist bump, Cap'n, for persisting and progressing with that beautiful, alluring, and fascinating siren that is the Russian language! 8-)
2 x

User avatar
IronMike
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2554
Joined: Thu May 12, 2016 6:13 am
Location: Northern Virginia
Languages: Studying: Esperanto
Maintaining: nada
Tested:
BCS, 1+L/1+R (DLPT5, 2022)
Russian, 3/3 (DLPT5, 2022) 2+ (OPI, 2022)
German, 2L/1+R (DLPT5, 2021)
Italian, 1L/2R (DLPT IV, 2019)
Esperanto, C1 (KER skriba ekzameno, 2017)
Slovene, 2+L/3R (DLPT II in, yes, 1999)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=5189
x 7265
Contact:

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby IronMike » Fri Apr 22, 2022 7:12 pm

sfuqua wrote:Well...
It's my 69th birthday and I've had a great day with family. :D

Happy birthday! Mine was yday as well. Taurus!
1 x
You're not a C1 (or B1 or whatever) if you haven't tested.
CEFR --> ILR/DLPT equivalencies
My swimming life.
My reading life.


Return to “Language logs”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 3 guests