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 Sep 12, 2022 4:00 am

Well, I crashed and burned badly.
I don't know if Chinese, in its various forms, broke my brain or something, but I went through about a week when I spent my study time getting ready to study, and then not actually accomplishing anything.
I hated anki.
I hated Chinese.
I think I got far enough with Chinese where I realised how big a project it would be to get to any level of fluency with it. It is a wonderful language, and I love written Chinese.
I also hate the Spanish course that my wife keeps ploughing through. I don't know if I can stand another minute of it...
I tried doing my old "Whale Road" deck.
If you look at the first post in this thread, I was sick of French and Spanish, especially French, and I decided to just do Irish.

Irish is a very nice language, and I have some ancestors from there. I have more ancestors from Britain, Scotland and England, but I have some from Ireland. I really, really hope that the world will let me get back to Ireland next summer, and perhaps to Britain also.
The "whale road" deck has cards from Irish, Old English, and Norse/Icelandic. This deck is attractive right now,...

I finally decided to take one last slam at French and Spanish before I head into whatever other project tickles my fancy. I decided on a two-month project.

Several times over the years, I have described one of the most exciting language learning periods in my life, the time when I pushed my Samoan from low intermediate to advanced in just a few months. In one of my earliest posts in this community, at the old site, I described the technique I used at the time the advance happened and I claimed that this was what caused my rapid advancement, but I was doing many other things at the same time that might have affected my Samoan, so I really don't have proof...

I have threatened many times over the years to try this technique in French or Spanish, but I always back down. This time, it's for real. I'm going to do a real push. It won't be exactly what I did back in the 1970's, but it will be close.

What I did back then was a very common process that I think many people use on this site, at least those who aren't just waiting for comprehensible input to make them fluent.
Back when, I used to memorise every unfamiliar word in the newspaper every day and then read aloud the section with the unfamiliar words three times. Every day, except on weekends, where I would study by drinking beer. I would review the words at increasing intervals, and I would repeat my reading aloud if I had time. I was doing all this while I was speaking my bad Samoan pretty much every waking hour. During a 6-week period, doing this, my Samoan exploded. I got much more fluent, and the variety of vocabulary I used productively increased a large amount. I started to be able to understand the radio in Samoan a lot better. I got much better at just talking to people...

I don't want to spend a huge amount of time building up a resource for this, so I decided to use a novel in French and a novel in Spanish. I made big sentence decks from some French novels before, but this time I am going to be using word decks instead of sentence decks. I also am doing the same thing for a contemporary Spanish novel.

I made word lists from Demain by Guillaume Musso and Falcó by Pérez-Reverte. I tried to eliminate proper names and English words from the lists, but the lists contain many duplicate words which are just different forms of the same lemmas. One nice thing about working with a list in the order of occurrence is that hard words can appear right at the beginning of the list.

Each day, after I learn my new words for the day, I open the novel where I got the words and read the part that I have just studied the words from, and I read it aloud three times. Back in the day, it seemed to me that reading the section aloud where I just got the words, doing this reading aloud, was just magic for making them stick and improving fluency. I'm studying the words in the L1->L2 direction, since I am not a beginner in either language, and I want to make it a little more challenging.

Perhaps this will work, and I will become famous for revolutionising language instruction. Perhaps everybody will notice that I am only doing what half of the forum is already doing. I hope this will bump up my fluency a bit in these languages. I'm less than a week into this project, and it feels like my listening comprehension in French has picked up some.
There are several reasons why this might not work:
1. It may turn out that the only reason my Samoan improved back in the day was because I was flirting with barmaids, and that all my study had nothing to do with it.
2. It may be that studying two languages at the same time messes everything up.
3. It may be that I am too far over the hill to make rapid improvement.

I've fallen apart on two big, world languages recently, Chinese and Russian, after making big plans to push them up to a high level. I think I need to make short term plans, and then move on without guilt, if I move on.

And I still really want to study that "Whale Road" deck.

Old English somehow sounds right for an old teacher...
15 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 » Mon Sep 12, 2022 8:29 pm

If you want an easy dose of Chinese I’m really enjoying the Paul Noble Mandarin series. Really well done, and affordable.
2 x
Grammaire progressive du français -
niveau debutant
: 60 / 60

Grammaire progressive du francais -
intermédiaire
: 25 / 52

Pimsleur French 1-5
: 3 / 5

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Le Baron
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3507
Joined: Mon Jan 18, 2021 5:14 pm
Location: Koude kikkerland
Languages: English (N), fr, nl, de, eo, Sranantongo,
Maintaining: es, swahili.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=18796
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby Le Baron » Tue Sep 13, 2022 10:38 pm

I think our esteemed fellow is doing Cantonese.
1 x

Lawyer&Mom
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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 » Wed Sep 14, 2022 12:26 am

Le Baron wrote:I think our esteemed fellow is doing Cantonese.


At one point he was going to do both!
3 x
Grammaire progressive du français -
niveau debutant
: 60 / 60

Grammaire progressive du francais -
intermédiaire
: 25 / 52

Pimsleur French 1-5
: 3 / 5

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Le Baron
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
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Languages: English (N), fr, nl, de, eo, Sranantongo,
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Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=18796
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby Le Baron » Wed Sep 14, 2022 1:49 pm

Lawyer&Mom wrote:At one point he was going to do both!

Both?! Now that's just masochism.
2 x

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jeff_lindqvist
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Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=2773
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Wed Sep 14, 2022 4:39 pm

Le Baron wrote:
Lawyer&Mom wrote:At one point he was going to do both!

Both?! Now that's just masochism.


You know you're a language nerd when...
4 x
Leabhair/Greannáin léite as Gaeilge: 9 / 18
Ar an seastán oíche: Oileán an Órchiste
Duolingo - finished trees: sp/ga/de/fr/pt/it
Finnish with extra pain : 100 / 100

Llorg Blog - Wiki - Discord

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 Sep 14, 2022 7:32 pm

I just bombed badly in a converstion with one of my students here in San Jose, who speaks French.
Mom is from France, and he seems pretty much to be a native speaker.
After a few sentences, he just sadly shook his head and switched to English. :lol:
Outclassed by an 11 year old...
7 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
Le Baron
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3507
Joined: Mon Jan 18, 2021 5:14 pm
Location: Koude kikkerland
Languages: English (N), fr, nl, de, eo, Sranantongo,
Maintaining: es, swahili.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=18796
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby Le Baron » Wed Sep 14, 2022 7:48 pm

sfuqua wrote:I just bombed badly in a converstion with one of my students here in San Jose, who speaks French.
Mom is from France, and he seems pretty much to be a native speaker.
After a few sentences, he just sadly shook his head and switched to English. :lol:
Outclassed by an 11 year old...

I hope you gave him a lot of homework?
2 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 » Mon Sep 19, 2022 12:36 am

It has been an excellent week. :D

I figured out a lot of things, and it has been nice.

I worked every day as a substitute with 11-year-old kids last week, teaching science, my old subject. I became a substitute teacher because I wanted to work part-time to fund family travels next summer. But our school district is desperate for teachers, and I have a hard time saying no. A friend of mine (from Turkey, by the way) has a mother getting heart surgery, and I had to help... She wanted a real science teacher to cover her class, and I was it. I finished each day with my knees shaking, I was so tired. Keeping 32 pre-teens moving in a useful direction takes a lot of energy, not so much physical as mental. You have to be so ON all the time. You have to be watching and responding every second. It is exhilarating and very tiring. I would say that I'm getting old, except I can remember similar amounts of fatigue years ago... :lol:

One thing I did learn is that, since the beginning of the COVID epidemic, when I was last, my hearing has dropped off a lot. I talked to an audiologist, who told me that I have hearing loss, but that it is borderline and should only bother me with really difficult listening situations, like in a classroom. I would assume that listening to a second language that I am trying to learn might be a difficult listening challenge. I don't know if it really has a big effect on my listening comprehension of foreign languages, but I have an excuse now... and I have to make sure that I can hear clearly whenever I am trying to listen to an L2...

Well, I ruined my "experiment" in only 11 days. I found myself completely unable to face a bunch of L1->L2 vocabulary words after a day of teaching. I first tried reducing the number of new cards, Then I tried switching them to L2->L1 cards. Everything went great, and I was making great progress until I woke up an hour later. :lol:

Well, what could I actually do? I just started reading French, and I discovered that my French reading was a lot better than I remembered. I found that I could stay awake reading even though I had trouble with anki. I wasn't reading aloud, just reading. I seem to have had some sort of breakthrough in French reading.

Nice. :D

I doubt that it had that much to do with a few hundred anki cards, but maybe it is just time. I keep making the mistake of thinking that whatever I am doing has caused the change just because I happen to be doing it at the time that a breakthrough happens. Correlation does not equal causation. I'm not sure if what I experience as a breakthrough isn't just the time when I recognize progress that has happened over a period of time. :D

I officially dump my dumb experiment. French looks more attractive, if I can read it better...
I have made new decks with a bunch of hard sentences in Spanish and French, which is all the anki I'm going to do. Just a few hard sentences a day. I'll quit if I need more time.
Mostly, I'm just going to read, and listen to audiobooks while I exercise.

I'll just get comprehensible input and wait to start speaking fluently. :D

Or, more realistically, I'm just going to read. And read.
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...

Online
galaxyrocker
Brown Belt
Posts: 1119
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 12:44 am
Languages: English (N), Irish (Teastas Eorpach na Gaeilge B2), French, dabbling elsewhere sometimes
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby galaxyrocker » Mon Sep 19, 2022 9:34 am

sfuqua wrote:I worked every day as a substitute with 11-year-old kids last week, teaching science, my old subject. I became a substitute teacher because I wanted to work part-time to fund family travels next summer. But our school district is desperate for teachers, and I have a hard time saying no. A friend of mine (from Turkey, by the way) has a mother getting heart surgery, and I had to help... She wanted a real science teacher to cover her class, and I was it. I finished each day with my knees shaking, I was so tired. Keeping 32 pre-teens moving in a useful direction takes a lot of energy, not so much physical as mental. You have to be so ON all the time. You have to be watching and responding every second. It is exhilarating and very tiring. I would say that I'm getting old, except I can remember similar amounts of fatigue years ago...



That was always one of the biggest thing I think people don't understand about teaching. It's mentally exhausting trying to keep 30+ kids who often don't want to be there moving. It's fun when you succeed, and well worth it though. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't somewhat missing teaching currently (and am even considering getting back into it in Ireland once/if I get permanent residency).
4 x


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