Chove's Log

[DaveAgain]

And even in English I should be allowed to skip bits of content that I don't especially care about without thinking of that as "a failure." There are so many books and they take so long to read! So it's fine if I'm partway through three different books and end up finishing none of them, I should relax about that.

If the publisher re-edited the Game of Thrones books into individual storylines, I'd buy the Arya one.

[chove]

Hello, it's been a while

I've been reading (in English) 'Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages' by Gaston Dorren, which is an interesting book that's not so much a 'guide' to those 20 languages but a look at various linguistic phenomena through the lens of one or another language. So it outlines the Indo-European familiy resemblances/differences by looking at Russian, for instance, and looks a bit at the effects of historic colonialism with the example of Portuguese. It was very interesting and exactly the sort of thing I'd like to read more of. I have a couple of similar-looking books on my shelf now, I shall report back when I get round to them.

I've been a bit disheartened with reading in other languages lately, because it often feels difficult and like I'll never improve, even though I know for a fact that it's helped me before. With Spanish it's easier to guess cognates but that likely gives me an inflated sense of how much Spanish I can really understand. I think I'll need to grind vocabulary a bit, which I did at a lower level with German and the results were quite good. I read an Agatha Christie story in Spanish - it was a Poirot one about an Ancient Egyptian curse - and I found that it was a nice level for me in terms of difficulty and the story itself was compelling enough to make it fun.

[chove]

Got caught up doing other hobbies for a while, and language-wise didn't do much more than ANKI most days and the occasional bit of Duolingo, but the good news is I don't seem to have forgotten much of anything and am able to get back into things where I was before.

I've been watching 'Dreaming Spanish' videos (the intermediate ones mostly) for about half an hour a day for the past week, though I don't know how much it is helping as such. I suppose with that sort of input it feels like I'm not really doing anything and from that it feels like I can't possibly be improving from it? Though I know some people on the internet swear by that kind of thing. I'm not willing to watch things I can't at least more or less understand, so that narrows it down a lot. I think I don't have much of that "tolerance for ambiguity" people talk about. Maybe I could build it up somehow?

In English I am reading Gaston Dorren's other book, 'Lingo' which is more or less the same idea as 'Babel' but it covers more languages more briefly. I read about how Scots and Catalan may or may not be languages. I feel like I don't speak Scots myself, so much as Scottish-English with occasional Scots words/phrasings, but I feel like that's probably true of most people where I live in the Central Belt. But I also know that I don't know what is and isn't from Scots in my speech -- I never knew the word "outwith" wasn't Standard English until I used it to an English audience and was told it wan't a real word. Much the same happened with the word "shoogle." I feel like I should know more Scots but it also feels like if I tried to learn more of it it on purpose it'd be affectation, so I don't want to do that either.

[Caromarlyse]

But I also know that I don't know what is and isn't from Scots in my speech -- I never knew the word "outwith" wasn't Standard English until I used it to an English audience and was told it wan't a real word. Much the same happened with the word "shoogle." I feel like I should know more Scots but it also feels like if I tried to learn more of it it on purpose it'd be affectation, so I don't want to do that either.

In my experience, once English people learn of this word, they think it's very useful and start using it themselves! It's not really a linguistic gap because there's "outside", but then you have the debate as to whether it's more "proper" to say "outside" or "outside of", so at least with "outwith" you can opt out of that. It's also common in Northern Ireland, isn't it?

[chove]

It's also common in Northern Ireland, isn't it?

I don't know but I could believe it.

[MorkTheFiddle]

I never knew the word "outwith" wasn't Standard English until I used it to an English audience and was told it wan't a real word. Much the same happened with the word "shoogle." I feel like I should know more Scots but it also feels like if I tried to learn more of it it on purpose it'd be affectation, so I don't want to do that either.

What others may think I don't know, but personally, "shoogle" definitely should be a word in English. Shoogle, rattle and roll!

[chove]

I've got sucked into watching 'Nico's Weg' on YouTube, which is a Deutsche Welle story where the German gets harder as the story progresses. I'm on the A2 section now and can understand almost everything which is nice. I think it goes up to B1. It's a bit soap opera with a lot of dramatic plot twists and so on, I have paused for the day after someone's secret brother showed up unexpectedly! I watched quite a lot of it today, the Clockify app on my phone says I've done 1 hr 45 mins of German today and that's basically all I've done in that language.

I read a chapter of one of the Series of Unfortunate Events books in Spanish this morning, it's not the next in the sequence just the one that was cheapest in the Kindle store but I'm enjoying it so far anyway. I prefer this series to reading Harry Potter, which I have the first three of in Spanish in paperback but I don't really like that story very much so that wasn't the best thing for me to read.

I have been watching some YouTube videos on the channel called 'French Comprehensible Input' and Alice Ayel's similar channel, because I am not really sure how else to approach French when I can understand a lot of it via English and Spanish cognates but that's entirely passive and I don't know enough to read a book or whatever. Similar sort of thing with Dutch really, where I found I can follow the gist of Peppa Pig episodes. What's the usual recommendation for languages where you can follow some simple texts but don't actually know much of the language?

Polish has been mostly Duolingo, which is not the best resource, I know, but it's quite useful for drilling things like case endings. I think I still only "know" about four cases so far, maybe I will finally learn the rest of them if I keep doing the Duolingo course. It seems a lot harder than the other DL courses that I've looked at, but I find Polish the hardest out of the languages I've ever tried to learn. I think a large part of that is just the lack of easily-guessable cognates like there are in Spanish, etc. It's very difficult but I really like that language for some reason. I can't remember why I initially decided that I should learn some Polish, but it was right at the beginning of my interest in languages, before I did my OU German and Spanish courses. I should be good at it by now, but I've not put in the hours so I'm not. But I find that a little bit of it goes a long way when I meet Polish people, who are mostly a bit bemused that anyone would learn it if they didn't need to. I suppose there's novelty value for them there

Anyway, I am hoping that watching and reading things is going to help me even if I am not doing "proper studying" most of the time. I suppose if nothing else it probably can't make me worse at my languages. Right? It's practice if nothing else, even if I am not sure how convinced I am that just watching YouTube videos will wire up my brain to speak a foreign language somehow.

[chove]

I could update but I'm mostly just slowly chipping away at things, spending an hour or two a day on various activities and languages, and I'm not sure how to make it seem interesting

In Spanish I am still on the Series Of Unfortunate Events book, where I have learned that "llevarse" can mean something is fashionable, cool, "in." I've never seen it used like that before, so that was quite interesting to me. I think I'm about a third of the way though -- the baddy has shown up and there has been a trip to a salmon-themed restaurant.

German is at an annoying level where it feels like I can't do anything, by which I suppose I am just aware of how much I don't know and how many unknown words there are when I try to read things. I suppose I need to grind vocabulary a bit, probably based on what words I encounter when reading. I'm some sort of "intermediate" level in German, and I did an online test that reckons I know about 6000 words but that seems like a lot so I have my doubts.

Yesterday I reached the point in DuoLingo Polish where I'm going to have to stop and make myself learn some declension tables, because the "typing out sentences and hoping it sticks" method is not quite working. I'm currently trying to learn the demonstratives, all that Ten/Ta/To stuff. The tables make it look like there's a pattern but if there is I can't figure it out, so it'll have to be memorisation, which being difficult is a task I keep avoiding. But! It'll make my Polish better and more accurate, so I should do it. I've always struggled with Polish, partly because I've not done some basic-but-difficult things like this.

I'm also doing DuoLingo French, but it's weird because I can guess so much from knowing English and Spanish, so I can outperform myself in terms of how much I can read versus how little I actually know of this language. I seem to spend a lot of time going "oh, so it's like in Spanish?"

In terms of "reading about language(s) in my native language" I finished Gaston Dorren's "Lingo" and have started Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" but I'm not far enough in to know what it going to be like. Seems interesting so far, though.

[munyag]

Any advice for learning those little two or three word phrases that won't stick? Things like "en cuanto a," "en vez de," "asi como" where I can go over them again and again but then by the next day I've forgotten what they meant. At best I can learn such things at a rate of about one a day, which seems very slow indeed. I tend not to use mnemonics that rely on English, because doing more than one language can mean getting those confused, so I'm a bit stuck. I really need to improve at these in Spanish (and etc but I'm not quite there yet) and I seem to end up skimming past them when reading because I just don't know what they're saying.

Maybe if I learned them in longer phrases that give context to make the meaning clearer? Any tips appreciated!

Hi Chove

I am still patiently going through your log. I have a suggestion. Is it worth you going online and seeing where those three times are used in context in Spanish. Reverso Contexto might give you some example sentences and you could drill one grammar it
m each week (write it out/use anki) and see how you get on? All the best

[munyag]

Currently working on a Spanish assignment for my course, I had to get a two week extension on it but hopefully now I've got started I'll be able to get it finished by the deadline. Marked coursework always stresses me out, even though I tell myself it doesn't really matter whether or not I pass and that based on my marks so far I am unlikely to actually fail the assessments.

Picked up 'German for Reading Knowledge' by Hubert Jannach based on a recommendation on this forum, I'm only a couple of chapters in but I like it so far. I had to abandon the previous book I was working with because "A2" turned out to me A-Level which is B2 not the CEFR A2 as I had assumed the book to be. I did wonder why so much of it was beyond me... Oh well! Also reading an Enid Blyton book at the stirring pace of about two pages a night. I'm in no rush with that but possibly I'll speed up as I get more used to reading German.

I ordered the DVDs of El Ministerio del Tiempo which I know have no English subtitles but hopefully they have Spanish ones and if not then I suppose there's a lot of listening practice in my future. It's one of my favourite shows, regardless of what language it's in, and it's recently disappeared from Netflix. (Possibly it will return if Netflix purchase the 4th season that's currently being made?) Still slowly reading Pequena historia de Espana, I'm up to about the French Revolution.

And Polish these days is mostly DuoLingo for practicing the cases. I've done Nominative (obvs), Accusative, Genitive and Instrumental so far. Having some trouble with plural forms and the ten/ta/to variations (not sure what they're called) but otherwise it seems to be slowly going into my head. This also helps with German by getting me used to slowing for a moment to work out what case a noun should be in. (Due to it being shoved in at the end of most textbooks I am can *recognise* the German genitive but I can't use it reliably.)

Hi Chive

You can get El Ministerio on RTVE.es. It's not geo-blocked (for the UK) and I access it here in Inverness just fine. Hope this is useful/helpful