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 Jul 12, 2021 4:36 am

Well, I'm watching an hour or two of TV in Tagalog every day, and I talk to my wife sometimes. I will hunt around for some Internet resources for Samoan.
I'm back to Irish. Of course I have no discipline about staying focused until I actually get somewhere, so I also started another deck for "dialectical Irish", Munster dialect in this case.https://corkirish.wordpress.com/why-cork-irish/ may have a point. I also started a little deck for Scots Gaelic. I'm trying to slam as many cards as I can into my head, and I've changed my approach a bit. Instead of letting my mind grind down into low gear figuring out cards, I've made a rule for myself that I fail a card immediately if I can't answer it immediately. This makes the whole process of reviewing fast, fast fast. The main card type I am using has two cards with a front and back set up like this.
card 1
Front: Irish+audio
Back: Irish and English
Card 2
Front: audio
Back:Irish and English.
For the card 2's I just made the font color the same as the background, and bingo, a blank card with audio only.

Anyway, I'm not doing any translation. On one card, I am testing whether I can read the card aloud and recoginize its English translation, and on the other card, I am hearing and repeating a sentence.

While I quite enjoy grinding through a conjugation table in my head to answer a question, it is unlikely that a native speaker is going to feel very comfortable waiting for you to pull the correct for out of your head. By reallying driving myself through cards quickly, I start to generate sentences at something approaching the speed needed for conversaiton. I'm not really sure whether slowly translating sentences for anki cards doesn't push the learning to talk too slowly... I also feel like repeating the sentence aloud from an oral prompt forces me to pay attention to the details of pronunciation. Let me show an example:
Tá mé ag ól: I'm drinking
Tá mé ag gol: I'm weeping
I have a lot of trouble hearing the differences between these sentences. One right after the other is easy, but in random order in an anki deck, they sound very similar, especially since dropping the g sound in ag in the second sentence is common. For me it has taken time to see that the big difference between these sentences is the o and ó which is the next to last letter in the sentences. What is obvious in written language can be nontrivial to recognize in speech.
Another thing that has recently popped into better focus for me is the whole differentiation between "broad" and "slender" consonants. Irish has two forms of consonants, and well, I finally can start to hear the difference between them in rapid speech. For some words, the broad and slender forms of the consonants are the only difference between them. Anyway, this is coming into focus. I think that, more than anything else, I need a ton more vocabulary to improve my comprehension.

My flirtation with Scots Gaelic, is fun. Of course it is very close to Irish, closer than Spanish and Portuguese. Some of the grammar in Gaelic really seems to open my mind to what is going on in Irish. I have no ambitions with Gaelic. I probably actually have more ancestors from Scotland than I do from Ireland, so the idea of learning the languages of ancestors should encourage me. I know so little about Scottish history that it is embarassing. I mean, I've watched a couple of movies and some episodes of Outlander, but I suspect there is a lot more to it than that. I'm reading a history book.

I keep planning to shadow a bunch of my Irish courses, but I never seem to get around to it... I'm trying to watch a TV show in Irish every day, but my comprehension is still pretty dismal. Step by step...

One thing that I am still adjusting to is the amount of freedom that I have, now that I am retired. I can do a lot of approaches to language learning that I avoided before because it would push into my hours where I really should be doing something else...


I seem to be making strong progress with Irish, and I'm pretty happy otherwise. I sort of doubt if I will do a midwinter trip to Iceland and Ireland. We may have a big family expense coming up in the next few months, so I've got to take care of that first...
It would be so much fun though! We are definitely going to Ireland and Scotland next summer, unless covid is still messing things up. My whole family loves Ireland, and my daughter shocked us tonight, as she seriously was asking what she would have to do to move permanently to Ireland when she becomes an adult.

All is well. The forest fires near us haven't started yet and the mornings are cool for walking. I have more good books to read than I can ever get through. I'm happy.
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 » Sun Jul 18, 2021 4:48 am

Well, I noticed that I barely have time to complete the Superchallenge I started, and I played around with it for a bit, and suddenly switched course. Irish is very hard, and when you are done, there is not a huge amount of literature, or media to consume. For me, Irish has a huge coolness factor, but not a huge practical factor.
If I can keep my act together, I can upgrade my Spanish and French by the start of the new year. I find that one of my favorite things to do is to read French. I am not sure why, but it just feels nice. Maybe I'm at a stage where I am still surprised to discover that I an actually understand it. I read 36 pages of French today, back with my old favorite, Françoise Sagan. I'm going to hit Isabel Allende tomorrow, or maybe later tonight. Doing both Spanish and French at the same time slows down progress, but who's in a hurry? I need to do some actual study of French at some point. I can recognize French verb conjugations, but I couldn't produce one; my reading seems to be mostly sematic interpretations.

I looked around for a good Tagalog book, and I found a couple by Joi Barrios that actually taught me something. Tagalog, like many languages form this region, has a way to put the focus on different elements in the sentence, and I, after 37 years of speaking the language, don't do this right. In Tagalog, you can easily make sentences like, "The market is where I bought the vegetables." or "Vegetables are what I bought at the market". I make mistakes like this,
"Steve, where did you buy the vegetables?"
with me answering,
"Vegetables are what I bought at the market."
I am easy to understand, but I sound like a dork.
Anyway, if I never picked this up during 37 years of speaking the language, I never was going to. I suspect that my French and Spanish are full of problems like this. I think you really have to focus on form to get stuff like this straight. Thanks, Joi!


Since I am retired now, I have realized that I can actually let my language learning spread out a bit during the day. Tutors? Friends? All day reading sessions? At this point, I'm trying to keep my language learning into my language hour, but once the rest of the family goes back to school, I am going to have time. Of course, I will have a lot of housework to do, and I need time for my morning and afternoon naps.

Now, a boring, unoriginal rant. :o
There seem to be a lot of language experts on the Internet these days. It seems to me most of the people on this site know as much as most of these experts, at least about practical language learning. I find that the older I get, the more sure I am that nobody knows anything. I have more respect for experience and less respect for academic degrees or "the latest thing." When I restarted learning languages a decade ago, I really didn't find much encouraging in academic writing about older adults learning languages. This community offered help and guidance and pretty soon I could read Spanish. I'm glad I started learning before the current crop of "language gurus" and "instant language learning apps" appeared. I might have gotten distracted. I hope that the practical language learning knowledge, which is pretty common in this community, can make its way into the academic langauge world. I know that some folks here are academics, and I understand it is difficult to get anything other than anecdotal studies out of individuals, but there is a LOT of anecdotal information on these pages. Studying language learning is hard.

I learned to keep my mouth shut around the language learning experts at my school district. If I would say anything, they would roll their eyes, since I obvously don't know anything about language learning. After all, I didn't go to that last workshop. I'm not profoundly excited about the latest fad. Even in our profoundly multiracial and multicultural community here in San Jose, people can assume that they know everything about you because of way your face looks. I've always enjoyed how jaws drop when I start speaking Samoan or (to a lesser extent) Tagalog.
Sorry about the rant :D

Walking is good these days. It's nice and cool in the morning. All of that running around fighting and flirting by the squirrels seems to be over, and they aren't nearly as visible as they were. If you look for the signs, there are a lot of baby birds getting ready to fly around the neighborhood. The flowers seem to be attracting more hummingbirds than I think I've ever seen before. The hills are a horrid brown, like a torch ready to light. My nuclear family is all vaccinated against covid , but none of our extended family in the Philippines is. I stopped by a store near my old school today, and the store owner, who has been selling me diet coke for 18 years mentioned that the guy in front of me in line actually won one million dollars yesterday from a scratcher that he bought at the store. :o
He was buying more scratchers today. :lol:

I hope everybody is doing OK out there. We're all fine here. :D

edited to fix bad English
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...

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 » Sun Jul 18, 2021 7:38 pm

OK, the main thing I can do to upgrade my Spanish and French is to do a ton of reading and listening. When school starts next month, I'm going to try some online tutors.
I reopened my old Assimil decks for French and Spanish. I finished the Spanish deck up to the Using Spanish section already, so I'm just reviewing things. I only did Assimil French up to lesson 27 before, so I should have quite a bit to learn as the deck goes on. I also have downloaded a couple of decks for practicing my conjugation of Spanish and French verbs. My Spanish verbs are a bit shaky and my French verbs suck, so this should help with a specifice weakness.

The main thing, though is reading and listening at this point. Shadowing is a bti more stressful, for now, I am going to just read and listen. With a tts voice, I can get through many pages of Spanish in a day. One of the things I learned about Spanish last year is that I can push up the speed quite a bit without losing comprehension. I don't think I'm ready to do this for French. For both languages I'm doing a lot of reading along to the tts voice. With google voices on android, I have Canadian French, Paris French, American Spanish, and Madrid Spanish, I alternate between varieties daily.

One thing that has become very clear is that a tts voice reading a book and a shouting actor in a TV show are different enough that there is not a huge overlap in the skill sets. Maybe listening to books would eventually lead to good comprehension of TV, but so far it hasn't happened.

Now, back to work.
8 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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luke
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby luke » Mon Jul 19, 2021 8:37 am

sfuqua wrote:OK, the main thing I can do to upgrade my Spanish and French is to do a ton of reading and listening. When school starts next month, I'm going to try some online tutors.

Sounds fun.

sfuqua wrote:I reopened my old Assimil decks for French and Spanish. I finished the Spanish deck up to the Using Spanish section already, so I'm just reviewing things.

Do you know if that's the new Using Spanish from about 2015, or the older one from 1996?

One way to tell might be by the first lesson. In 1996 Using Spanish, lesson 1 is on andar and presents a whole lot of usages of that verb.

I noticed a newer Using Spanish deck on Ankiweb, but haven't downloaded it. It was clearly not identical to the 1996 version, but don't know if it's "all new".

Also curious what your experience is with Assimil in Anki. As everyone probably knows, most lessons cover a theme, and occasionally they tell a short story. Wondering if one uses the deck without the CDs it changes the Assimil experience. I.E., that it seems more random (which could be good).
0 x

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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 » Tue Jul 20, 2021 2:41 pm

I didn't notice that Assimil had a new Using Spanish. I bought the mp3's for it and already made an anki deck out of it. So now my Spanish deck has two With Ease courses and two Using courses. I got over 1900 anki cards out of the mp3's. I'm going to buy the book that goes with them next month, after payday.

Doing the lessons through anki messes up the little stories in Assimil. Some of those little stories in Assimil can be a standin for Shekhtman Islands. When I was first doing Spanish I used to talk about Spain with some ot my Mexican students and use quotes from Assimil Spanish with Ease. I was always surprised that many of my students didn't seem to know anything about Spain. Of course, even though I've read books and try to listen to the news, I'm sure my students would say that I don't know anything about Mexico... :D

Anyway, I think I'm going to read the Assimil lessons and shadow them along with the lessons in addition to doing anki. For me at least, there is nothing like shadowing to build accurate pronunciation.
8 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 » Fri Jul 23, 2021 5:10 am

Interesting, I had reality hit me about my language learning lately.
I am doing a few things wih anki lately, and I have built up big anki decks based on different editions of Assimil books. I Finished the old Spanish with Ease, but not the old Using Spanish and I got up to lesson 27 with the old French with Ease before I flaked out... There are new edtions of French and Spanish with Ease since I last worked with them, and there is a new edtion of Using Spanish. I decided to start my anki decks by going through the new edtions first; in general they looked easier to me than the old editions.
I am on my passive wave now, where I hear and read aloud the L2, then repeat it aloud without looking at the print. I pass the card if I can do this and I understand the meaning of the card...
I haven't missed a beat with Spanish; I'm just reviewing, and maybe getting some "glossika-like" reps in.
I hit a pretty hard wall with French after lesson 15. I understand the sentences easily enough. Mostly. But repeating the sentence aloud??? Not easy at all. I've been taking many repetitions to get so that I can repeat the sentence without mistakes. These sentences are not ridiculously long, but they are challenging for me. I think this just shows the difference between my Spanish and my French -- Spanish is an FSI course and 6000 pages of reading ahead of my French. What I'm doing with French now is closer to those "backwards buildup" drills from FSI than it is to Glossika reps. I'm learning vocabulary too.
Speaking of reading, I've been reading Dune in French and Spanish the last couple of days. I started the French version because I wanted to read the essay by Denis Villeneuve that starts out the book, and I have to shift to a really low gear with dictionaries and rereading to make sense of it. The book itself is easier. I've read some of the book in Spanish already.

One thing that is weird about brain performance is that after my recent struggles with some French sentences, I have started waking up and falling asleep with French sentences ringing in my brain.
Bad French sentences.
Sentences that I am trying to complete and failing.
My brain is chewing on French anyway. :lol:
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
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 » Sun Jul 25, 2021 5:20 pm

French Assimil got much easier. I made a change in the way I have my deck arranged. I "shuffled" the New French with Ease with the old French with Ease, so that I am going through both courses at the same time. This should produce a slower learning curve and allow me to read through both French books at the same time. As soon as I did this, the French got much easier. If you are going to beat your head against hard stuff, it is good to interleave it with easier stuff.
I did the same thing with Spanish, interleaving/shuffling the older courses with the newer courses. Spanish continues to be very easy.

The second half of what I am trying to do, the Super Challenge, has hit a few bumps. French is slowing me down too much to finish the challenge the way I have been approaching it. I either have to switch entirely to Spanish reading, or I need to find something easier/faster to read.

I'm thinking of going back to the old Follett Trilogy that I used to start my extensive reading with Spanish, years ago. I'm not sure if it will be fast enough. I also might shift over to Harry Potter, but I don't like Harry Potter very much. It is just too cute for my taste. I think the movies spoiled it for me.

I am willing to stand "too cute" to finish the Superchallenge if I must. I probably would learn something. Years ago my son theorized that the way to produce good readers is to teach them to read up to the level of Harry Potter, and then turn the loose with Harry Potter, and then have the follow Potter with Tolkien. And then get out of their way. It worked for him I guess. :D

Maybe I should take his advice. He says Potter gets darker and better in the last few books. Hopefully less cute. :lol:

As usual I edited this because i don tipe no gud.
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
sfuqua
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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 Jul 27, 2021 6:44 pm

Ah, I just can't do it. A couple of days of forcing myself to read Harry Potter made me hate the whole process. I'm not sure what I do next. Study Irish some more? Maybe doing some sort of personal superchallenge for it? Aim for a CEFR test at some point? :D

Finish the Superchallenge in Spanish?

Watch a movie that has little to do with anything?

Yes, a great solution! :lol: I just watched "Arrival", a movie I have been meaning to get around to for years. I was quite affected by it :o I wasn't expecting the emotional impact of it. Nice movie. "‘Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch..." It does have something to do with linguistics; the scientists trying to translate what the aliens were saying reminded me of a graduate school course I took where a bunch of us were trying to analyze a langauge just based only on a very limited set of interactions with a native speaker. Quite challenging even with a human language.

Anyway, "Arrival" reminded me of another movie (somehow), "Ondine", which I also watched. I seem to be the world's biggest fan of this movie, or at least the biggest one of my family and my acquaintances. It has 2 of my favorite things, Ireland and Sigur Ros. When I first watched the movie, I thought, "Well at last I'm hearing Colin Farrell's real accent." Then I read about the movie and learned that he was using an exaggerated Cork accent for the movie, since that is where his character is from. His girlfriend at the time, a nonative speaker, said she had a hard time understanding him when he was speaking in the film. I guess the "more mainstream Irish English" accent I've heard out of Farrell in interviews is what he uses when he isn't acting. I think he was born near Dublin. There is a lot more going on with accents in Ireland than I register. I was talking with a guy in a pub in Dublin who said that folks in Belfast could tell what block you were from by accent, and therefore what side you were on during the troubles. Sad. Here in the US we have to see what channel people get their news from on TV to be sure whether we should despise them or not. :lol:

For me, I have been watching the Weather Channel more and avoiding news... I'm probably not upset over something that I'm "supposed" to be worried about. :o
I'm going to check what the weather is in Reykjavik and Dublin and then I'm going to decide what to study today. :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...

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IronMike
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Re: Not all those who wander are lost

Postby IronMike » Tue Jul 27, 2021 10:52 pm

sfuqua wrote:Yes, a great solution! :lol: I just watched "Arrival", a movie I have been meaning to get around to for years. I was quite affected by it :o I wasn't expecting the emotional impact of it. Nice movie. "‘Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch..." It does have something to do with linguistics; the scientists trying to translate what the aliens were saying reminded me of a graduate school course I took where a bunch of us were trying to analyze a langauge just based only on a very limited set of interactions with a native speaker. Quite challenging even with a human language.

I love that movie so much. Finally, a "linguist" movie that's good.
3 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.

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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 Jul 28, 2021 1:24 am

We have a fire about 7 kilometers away. It blew up during my first half hour reading French tonight. It is not burning toward us, and it hasn't chased anybody out of their home yet, but my eyes are burning indoors. It is visibly smoky outside. Firefighters are making progress on it, but it stinks, and it gives us a little taste of what is coming.
It's near Cisco, if you know Milpitas, but it also jumped Coyote creek into San Jose.

I wish it would rain...
I really, really wish it would rain...
I really, really wish it would rain over the whole state...
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...


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