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 » Fri May 15, 2020 2:37 am

Only 21 pages today. I had a big fade out for a few pages at one point. I wonder why these things happen... page: 1-10 easy, 11-15 huh?, 16-20 easy. Broken Earth keeps jumping between viewpoint characters, and I think I lost track of who was who for a while. The pages I read today had one of the most unerotic descriptions of an act of sexual intercourse I've ever seen. I've said before that, at least for me, eroticism doesn't translate very well, but in this case it was about like hearing about an apendectomy with no anesthesia, and it was a consensual act. I bet it reads the same in English. I think the author had a point to make.
My reading speed is a little faster today. If I can get up to 150-160 in this genre, I can start using a tts voice to drag me along. I enjoyed this during my first personal, "kind of unofficial super challenge" in Spanish.
My daughter is going to take German in the Fall in high school. I've told her that I have resources that can actually teach her German, instead of just talking a class and learning a few things. I may do some German in the Fall, to give her someone to bounce things off of.
She didn't want to do Spanish or French, because everybody does Spanish and French.
I wonder if she would enjoy Irish, Old English, or Icelandic? Wait, I think they actually do have a Latin class...
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...

Lawyer&Mom
Blue Belt
Posts: 980
Joined: Sun Mar 04, 2018 6:08 am
Languages: English (N), German (B2), French (B1)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=7786
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Fri May 15, 2020 5:39 pm

sfuqua wrote:
Learning a language to a high level is a fascitnating thing. It really does seem that I am reading Spanish recognizing tenses and the like, without any conscious thought about it. I know that native speakers experience their language that way. But why did I enjoy pounding through declensions and conjugations with Irish and Old English. I suppose there is more than one way to enjoy a language.
...


You learn a lot about a car by methodically rebuilding its engine, and you learn a lot about a car by taking it out for a backroads spin... And someone who loves cars will probably enjoy both, at different times with different cars!
2 x
Grammaire progressive du français -
niveau debutant
: 60 / 60

Grammaire progressive du francais -
intermédiaire
: 25 / 52

Pimsleur French 1-5
: 3 / 5

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 May 19, 2020 12:14 am

I've slowed a bit.
Some people can sing, some can draw, some can throw a fastball. Me I have headaches. I had a miserable time for a while, and I only did some listening. Next, I hit my working out routine again., and somehow hurt my achilles tendon. It hurts so bad that I am on steady painkillers. I have to keep my foot up or it is a throbbing mess.
I'm a hurting puppy.
(News nobody cares about)
--One of the ancient populations that my DNA matches is from a medieval cemetery from Italy. I was surprised because I don't really have any DNA or paper trail in my genealogy that leads to Italy. Well a closer look at the paper where the ancient DNA came from that I have a match to shows that it was from a cemetery which contain remains from Lombard people. It is interesting because the cemetery contains remains from multiple generations of the same families. I match the earliest one, the Lombard folk who were part of the "German Migration" and who came from somerwhere Germanic at the fall or the Roman empire. The generations get more and more Italic as time moves on; obviously they married freely with locals. The first generation of Lombards seems to have DNA that overlaps almost completely with Anglo Saxons, who were migrating in another direction. So I show a connection to Italy because I have some Anglo-Saxon DNA.
--From the first time I set foot in Ireland, I felt like I was coming home. I was sure that DNA tests would show a big dash of Irish DNA. There are a few Irish connections in the genealogy, but nothiing recent. Well, I'm part Irish, but most of my DNA is from Britain. Nothing wrong with Britain of course, and there are tons of connections to Britain, but what about Ireland? This week, I finally was able to put together a DNA connnection and a "paper trail" connection to Ireland. I bet nobody anywhere is excted
(\dumb things I do while my foot hurts)
Anyway, we're quiet and healthy here.
Starting sex-ed with my students online has been a nightmare of technical difficulties.
How many different ways can I say, "Please read the instructions."
2 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 May 19, 2020 3:55 am

I just reloaded my Irish/Old English anki deck. Maybe I could just do a few cards of it and keep up my Spanish reading and listening/watching.

At least I have loaded the Icelandic one...
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...

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 May 20, 2020 4:33 am

Only 14 pages. I was very busy with school.
I got the irish deck out of anki before i fell into it.

No listening today

Went to the doctor online for my injury. I guess I just have to heal.

Im going to study harder tomorrow. :D
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...

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 » Thu May 21, 2020 12:15 am

I got through 10 pages reading, so far. I plan to read more later. I listened to an audiobook for 18 minutes. My book, _The Fifth Season_, is flowing alot more smoothly. It is amazing how one can develop the ability to read with pretty much complete comprehension even when not every word is completely comprehensible. I mean, everybody does it, and I'm pretty sure that it is the only way that one eventually gets up to a "native speaker like" vocabulary levels. I love reading, and the less I am slowed down, the better I like it.

I started doing something in anki that I think may keep my wanderlust under control while I push my Spanish pages read up toward 20000.

I have made a deck out of sentences in three languages,Tagalog, Spanish, and Portuguese.

The Tagalog sentences come from "old glossika" and sentences from Tatoeba.
The Spanish sentences come from "old glossika" and sentences from Assimil.
The Portuguese sentences come from "old glossika" and sentences from Assimil, both Brazillian and European.

I set up the deck differently than I ever had before. By making the text on the front of the card white, I can make it invisible. I set the card up to read aloud with google TTS voices.
The back of the card has the L1 and the L2 both visible.

But wait, there's more! :D
I made two cards for each note, with both European and American versions of the TTS. I made two cards of Tagalog, just to keep it parallel since there is only one dialect of this lanaguage available in android.
The two cards for each note add the varieties of dialect for two of the languages, and it adds repetition to make it more like glossika. I set the decks up so that "related cards" won't appear on the same day, which meamns that every new note will appear over series of days when they first appear.

So what happens, is a card appears. The front side has a nice piece of scenery from a country where the language is spoken and the tts voice reads the invisilbe text. I repeat it. and hit show answer. I check what it says and then fail the card if I failed to repeat it correctly or if I don't know the translation of the sentence, I fail the card. If I repeat and understand it, I pass it.

Why Tagalog? I speak Tagalog, but when I did Tagalog old glossika a few years ago, sometimes the choice of words or the the word order would sound wrong to me. Whenever I would check with my intuition with my near-native-speaker wife (she's a Cebuana), she would usually say, "glossika sounds better." I guess it's part of my not-quite-right Tagalog. The Tagalog deck is very easy, but maybe I'll learn something. :roll:

Why Portuguese? I think back when I started French, that I probably should have done Portuguese instead. I think that I am more of a Portuguese sort of person. When I think of Portuguese, I think of tropics, tropical drinks, and sun. Or port, that wonderful drink that I probably should never drink. When I think of French, I think of high fashion, expensive perfume, and, well, that beautiful exchange student in my high school that I always was afraid to talk to. Sign... Maybe I think I'm not cool enough for French. Of course, I'm not cool enough for Portuguese either. I understand that Portuguese has some features from Celtic language. I sure don't see them yet. I find the big differences between the dialects in Portuguese intriguing too. I've flirted with Portuguese before, but I probably only worked on it for a few weeks. I'd like to give it a shot. :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 May 24, 2020 11:18 pm

Back when I was first trying to do extended reading, I used to get through my pages daily by shadowing my book. While I've been challenged by reading fantasy books, there are plenty of things I can read about as fast in Spanish as I can in English. While I could continue to read and look up words plowing along through my fantasy books, another approach would be to switch to something easier and try shadowing it. I did this today. Since I hadn't done it for a while, I slowed the tts voice down to about 100 wpm, which is a slow talking pace, but which still gets one through 24 pages an hour. It felt nice. I think that shadowing increased my attention on the pages. I did a half hour of _The ancestor's Tale_ by Dawkins and _La reina del Sur_ by Perez-Revert. This also exercises my mouth and may remove my feeling that I need to do anki cards where I talk.
If was a good experience, 24 pages reading and 22 minutes listening (audiobook while walking). :D
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
x 6299

Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby sfuqua » Mon Jun 01, 2020 4:04 pm

I've been pluggin along, using mostly audiobooks and reading my book. I stopped shadowing for now. I want to build vocabulary and comprehension some more before I push that some more.
I think I'm going to stop audiobooks for a while too. It's just not the same thing as movies or TV shows. I think for a while more I'm going to move more toward the original design of the supre challenge. Not because it's closer to the original or something, but because I think it was working better right at the start of the challenge when I was watching TV shows.
I'll have a little trouble getting control of the TV. My wife will watch shows with Kate del Castillo that have subtitles, but she doesn't really like many of the other shows. She watched the two La Reina del Sur series from beginning to end. She also liked Gran Hotel. If I can find another couple of shows that she likes, I will be golden for the listening part of the challenge. Otherwise I have to get control of the TV, which can be hard in my family :lol:
Any suggestions?
I'm going to start bouncing around between books more. One thing I have learned is that I am way more genre sensitve than I thought I was. I can read historical fiction and nonfiction pretty easily. I can read "thrillers" pretty easily. Fantasy is harder. Some types of SciFi are hard too. I suspect it's just a question of vocabulary. :o
My anki deck has evolved too. My idea of cards which involve repeating sentences without a visual cue, was too hard for Portuguese. I've changed my cards now so that they are similar to what you do when you are doing Assimil, "the old way." The original versions of anki seemed to advocate: First, listen to the lesson. Second, read the lesson. Third, look away from the page, and repeat the sentence aloud, then, 50 days later, translate to the L2 after looking at the L1. :geek:
The "Using" books skip the active wave.
My cards go like this: Card 1 shows the L2 and the tts reads it aloud (in the correct dialect). I look at the back of the card to see the L1. I look away and repeat the sentence aloud. I reread and repeat if I can't repeat it while looking away. If I didn't know what the card meant immediately, I fail it. My Card 2 for each note is offset by 1000 cards from the Card 1. They are simple L1->L2 cards, with tts voice for the L2 back page. I fail it if I can't produce the L2 verbally... :ugeek:
I have dropped Filipino right now, because if was hard to see what it was doing for me. Maybe I'll rebuild the deck. I added French again. My goal for these decks is to get to the point that I might be able to start Superchallenge like activities with either Portuguese or French.
If you are a newbie and you are reading this, you might wonder how I can be doing 3 or 4 languages at the same time. Well the only secret I know is to just reduce the number of new cards day so that you don't kill yourself. Some of you might ask how I can avoid getting interference between languages? I don't, Interference is just another error. I just repeat the card. One thing to remember is that interference between languages is more common in the L1->L2 direction than in the L2->L1.
I'm happy and I'm cruising along. :D
I just can't watch news without crying. :-(

edited because I forgot to add stuff.
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 » Sat Jun 13, 2020 2:31 am

Still plugging along. I don't know why, but I'm in a big "glass is half empty" poiint in the my Spanish. I'm frustrated that my progress seems to have slowed way down. Usually if a book gets too hard it's because the fun of reading the book does not make up for the difficulty of reading it. This works in the L1 too. Maybe I just need to read something else. I've been reading NIght Soldiers (or whatever it is in English) by Alan Furst. It was fun, but maybe it's slowing down.
Maybe I'm just bored. Maybe I'm bored because it's school holidays. Maybe I'm fearful about what the world is like. I don't know.
Too much time in the same apartment. I need to read something different. I need to do something different.

I know, I know, I'm whining for no reason, and I'm very lucky. I only bring it up in a language log because mood has a lot to do with how successful language is.

Right now, I'm still plugging along.

I'm on track for the Superchallenge, and I'm still fooling around with French, Portuguese, and Spanish in anki.

Portuguese has many cognates with Spanish, of course, but it is a very different language.
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...

DaveAgain
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1968
Joined: Mon Aug 27, 2018 11:26 am
Languages: English (native), French & German (learning).
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... &start=200
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby DaveAgain » Sat Jun 13, 2020 6:08 am

sfuqua wrote:Still plugging along. I don't know why, but I'm in a big "glass is half empty" poiint in the my Spanish. I'm frustrated that my progress seems to have slowed way down. Usually if a book gets too hard it's because the fun of reading the book does not make up for the difficulty of reading it. This works in the L1 too. Maybe I just need to read something else. I've been reading NIght Soldiers (or whatever it is in English) by Alan Furst. It was fun, but maybe it's slowing down.
I think Night Soldiers was his first historical espionage book, it's noticeably longer than his other books, perhaps he just tried to cram too much in there and lost the thread of the story?
Maybe I'm just bored. Maybe I'm bored because it's school holidays. Maybe I'm fearful about what the world is like. I don't know.
Too much time in the same apartment. I need to read something different. I need to do something different.

I know, I know, I'm whining for no reason, and I'm very lucky. I only bring it up in a language log because mood has a lot to do with how successful language is.
Half full! Blue skies tomorrow! :-)
0 x


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