A Very Dead Language Log (Abandoned--Admin, feel free to delete))

[Cèid Donn]

I was kind of expecting Duolingo to change my French tree today but it's past the time of the leaderboard reset so I don't think it'll happen today. That means I should be able to get my tree to a level 4 tree tonight. I'm feeling doubtful they'll give me enough time to get it to a level 5 tree, but I will try. The level 5 test-out is a little more time consuming than the level 4--a few more sentences and more English to French translations--but I will do what I can.

I've decided that once they change the tree, I'll switch over to the FSI course and see what use I can get out of that. I liked what I have done so far with the Sub-Saharan French course, and drills wouldn't hurt at this stage seeing I don't get any conversation practice. There are only 2 things I particularly don't like about the FSI courses. One is that the public domain digital materials are a kind of a pain for me to use--apps like Duolingo have me a bit spoiled, I confess, where I can just open one app and have all the text and audio there together, but also, reading PDFs can be pretty hard on my aging eyes. If I like the FSI French course enough and end up using it a lot, I might shell out for some used copied of the Barron printed texts. The other is I've never liked using materials designed for a classroom setting for self-instruction. I have in the past, but it's definitely not my preferred approach. But it seems the FSI courses give you plenty of content you can do on your own.

Voici une chanson de Buridane, juste pour le plaisir



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The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge : 48 / 365

• Day 48 (Feb. 17) -- Welsh: Worked on Units 10 and 11 in Intermediate Welsh. Did an hour of review on Duolingo, in which I tried to find out how many times I could get the sentence "Sut bydd y tywydd yn Aberaeron ym mis Ebrill?" wrong due to some random, dumb typo without throwing my keyboard out the window until I realized I had a migraine coming on (which likely was causing me to type sloppier than usual) and so I had to stop and lie down. Sadly didn't get as much done with Welsh today--only about 2 hours worth of studying--as I had hoped but I did get some stuff accomplished.

[Cèid Donn]

Ok, so Memrise is going to move user-created courses to a different website in a few weeks, which will not support the two features I like the most about Memrise Pro. I still have 4 months left in my currently paid-for plan.

<drums fingers in a loud, obnoxious manner to express great displeasure>

Oh, and this new site will not have an app. I currently use all user-made courses, via their app. I also have some of those courses downloaded to use offline while at work since my work prohibits us from using their internet for personal use and I can't afford roaming internet charges. The new site will not have an offline mode at all.

<drums fingers louder>

See, this is one reason why I hate giving these companies my money. There is never any guarantee that if at some point during the time you've paid for that if they overhaul their site/app and features that you can get any money back if the site/app is now is less appealing to you. Granted, this is not as bad as Learn French with Alexa when they completely redid their payment plans and content layout in the middle of my one-year sub, effectively nullifying it and cheating me out of 6 months. I tried to get my money back, but they're in the UK, I'm in the US and basically, they only had to ignore my attempts to contact them long enough to get away with it, which they did.

PSA: Don't give Alexa your money, folks.

Well, I wasn't actually planning on renewing my Pro sub in June when my current plan expires, but now I doubly, TRIPLY won't! Take that, Memrise!!!



Yes, yes, I know...Anki. But here's the thing with Anki: you have to read up on how to do anything with it, google this, download this, edit this, import that, trouble-shoot it when it doesn't work, go back to GO and don't collect $500, etc. I've been working with PCs since the 80s. I can deal with not-user-friendly software. The thing is, now I'm aging. tired and in poor health, and I only have so much time left in this life, most of which I hope to spend studying languages, not trying to tame wild software. So I'm really hoping Decks won't be so bad as to make me switch to Anki. All the same, never underestimate an IT company's potential to disappoint their users!



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The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge : 51 / 365

• Day 49 (Feb. 18) -- Welsh/Gaelic/French: This was one of 2 or 3 days since this challenge started that I came close to not getting anything done. I was in very severe pain for most of the day, and all I wanted to do was take all the analgesics and hide under my bed covers. I did in fact spend most of the day like that. But I did manage to do a couple of review sessions on my Duolingo Welsh tree, watch a couple Look@ videos on LearnGaelic.net, and practice my French pronunciation, 15 minutes with 50languages audio and then 15 more minutes with Pronounce It Perfectly audio. Also, started the French from English course on Clozemaster, because it was something I could do while lying in bed. Managed to do 100 sentences. Overall, not much, but it did take herculean effort given my state.
  
  
• Day 50 (Feb. 19) -- Indonesian/French: Reviewed chapters 10-12 in TY Indonesian. Leveled a couple of units on my now-level 4 Duolingo French tree to level 5 and then worked on chapter 12 in PMP Complete Fernch Grammar to review the use of the conditional tense, which it something I struggled with when reviewing my Duolingo French tree. Did another 100 sentences on Clozemaster.
  
  
• Day 51 (Feb, 20) -- French: Reviewed 200 sentences on Clozemaster. Did 12-4, 12-5 and 12-6 in Complete French Grammar and started on the unit "Révision générale des emplois du conditionnel" in L'expression française. I'll probably do more later today, but that is enough for today's update.

[Cèid Donn]

Happy International Mother Language Day!

Despite the attempts by so many language learners to avoid politics, language is inherently political. And sadly, most people don't even notice it until marginalized people are trying to stand up for themselves, their languages and their communities in the face of a dominant culture and language whose politics are the norm. Most people in the dominant culture don't even blink at the politics of their own language. It's like how one of my old guitar teachers would say: we are always aware of trends, except the ones we follow. We only notice a language's politics when they make us uncomfortable, when it challenges the norms we never had to think about before.

One contemporary norm is that dominant languages are inevitable or natural. They're not. Lingua francas have had their place historically, but dominant languages that beat down all other smaller languages in their sphere of influence aren't the historical norm at all. Dominant languages arose because they have served a distinct political purpose over the past 300 or so years, and arguably it's not a purpose that is in the best interest of either a healthy, peaceful human society or the future of this planet. So the more this norm is challenged, the more people made uncomfortable by it and pushed toward accepting more language diversity--and with it, more diversity in ideas, perspectives, solutions and so forth--the better, methinks.

There is an interesting thread on Twitter by anthropologist and language researcher Gerald Roche about language denialism that's gotten some attention today.

I thought the thread contain a lot of really great information--his comment about Mock Spanish, Mock Asian and "digital blackface" (using AAVE and the like to sound "black" online) hit homes because in my very irregular PT job, I have to confront this all the time and my insistence on kids not using other people's languages, dialects, accents, culture, etc as jokes hasn't made me terribly popular among some my adult colleagues who have some status and rank where I work, which in turn hasn't helped my prospects of being offered more regular work. But it feels like I'm failing as a teacher, an adult and a human being if I don't stop kids when I see them doing this and explain to them why it's not OK.

Anyhow, I do have a small quibble to make, because of course I do. I know Roche is a scholar, and he is speaking as a scholar and making distinctions for scholarly purposes. But I kind of grit my teeth over him trying to so firmly demarcate the differences between what scholars mean by language oppression vs. language denialism because in the real world, these distinctions blur, overlap and sometimes just disappear. He is talking about distinctions between types of biases based on intelligibility, and I understand that. And in scholarship and research, I understand why such distinctions matter. But I also know from my Gaelic and Breton studies that, wow, it's often not clear when the denialism ends and the oppression starts, This is made even less clear with speaking populations like Gaelic and Breton speakers, because monolingual speakers of those languages (including speakers who know some of the dominant language but aren't fluent, like can't read or write in it) are virtually gone, save for maybe a handful of very elderly, isolated individuals. So there is the expectation from the dominant language and culture that speakers of Gaelic or Breton shouldn't be accommodated because they can understand English or French well enough. I'll post this clip again, that I posted at the start of the year to mark 2019 as the Year of Indigenous Languages.





Our "hero" in this clip holds out, although in the real world, that is often not the case. But this clip illustrates how in the real world, when the dominant culture uses its power to resist accommodating minorities, it gaslights those people by throwing it back into their faces as if they're the ones being difficult and unreasonable, even in cases where forcing a speaker to use the dominant language over their own language puts them at a disadvantage (as often is the case in legal, educational, medical, financial or employment situations), which is intentional, although not always conscious or explicit, on the part of the dominant culture. Ultimately it's about maintaining cultural hierarchies by wearing down marginalized people until they stop fighting and accept their de-powered, de-privileged roles in that society.

This clip also illustrates how blurry the line between denialism and oppression is. In situations like this, denialism, like goading a speaker about how they supposedly can just swap between their language and the dominant language just fine, and oppression, as in coercing a speaker out of their right to legally advocate for themselves in their own language, feed into each other, with one being a tool for the other. So it's fine to make distinctions between levels of intelligibility, privilege and social strata in scholarship, where it's about communicating ideas clearly, but in the real world, it's all just very messy, hurtful, bad and, as I said above, arguably not in the best interests of our species' future.

Fun stuff, I know. I've mentioned I used to be a grad theo/phil student, yeah?

[Cèid Donn]

So this week in Indonesian....bees!

Or rather, one really, really big bee...



From the article, written by conservation photographer Clay Bolt, who was part of the team who rediscovered the Wallace's Giant Bee (Megachile pluto) in the North Moluccas islands of Indonesia:

Now that Eli and I have returned to the United States with photos in tow, our mission is to work with Indonesian researchers and conservation groups to ensure protection for this magnificent species, which Messer called the “Raja ofu,” king of the bees (although I prefer “Rotu ofu,” meaning queen bee, since the female is nearly twice as big as the male).

So, this "Rotu ofu" business got some attention because according to several Indonesian and Malaysian speakers on social media, it should be Ratu ofu. Granted, they seemed fine with ofu for "bee" even though I have yet to find it any dictionary or glossary. Perhaps it's from one of the indigenous languages in that part of Indonesia?

Anyhow, this was a nice reminder of how I got interested in Bahasa Indonesia in the first place, through the work of French-born conservationist, Chanee, who founded the Kalaweit Project that works to save gibbons as well as other native species, along with their natural habitats, in Indonesia. He is a particularly outspoken opponent to the ever-growing palm oil industry in Indonesia, due to its causing so much habitat loss, destruction of rainforest, soil erosion and pollution, endangering both wildlife and humans.



(English translation is available in the video's description on You Tube)

He is married to an Indonesian native and they have a son together, and from videos it seems he speaks both Indonesian and French with his son, which is rather cool, I think. A lot of Chanee's others videos and post online about his work are in usually French, which have been a nice French resource for me over the years (when I remember to catch up with his postings). There is an English-language documentary about him, from a few years back, called Radio Gibbon, which is how I first learned about him and his work.

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In other business, there was a blog post on the Clozemaster blog about the alphabet in Swedish, and there was this little nugget of info tucked away in it:

Often in handwritten Swedish, the dots on Ä and Ö will blend together and appear as a small line. This is a fully accepted way of writing these letters.

How did I not know of this sooner??? I love this, and from now on I'm writing all letters with dots/umlauts like this, regardless of the language.

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I have been spending so much of my reading time trying to finish Metro 2033 that I have completely forgotten about reading a short story for this week. I suppose I will have to read something tomorrow.

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The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge : 53 / 365

• Day 52 (Feb. 21) -- French/Indonesian: Did the second exercise in the conditionnel unit in L'expression française and then did another 100 new sentences on Clozemaster. Earlier I mentioned making a push to finish one of the two Indonesian Memrise courses I've started...well, I finally started. But after completing 3 new units on the longer course I decided I should try to finish the shorter one, because I will likely be able to finish that one before the Decks migration. Even though Memrise swears everything will go smoothly, I'm counting on it not.
  
  
• Day 53 (Feb. 22) -- Indonesian/Breton: Reviewed about 300 words on my second Indonesian Memrise course, as well as continued working on my first one. I reviewed 300 sentences on the Breton Clozemaster course, which I have been neglecting for so long that that's only half of the sentences that were due for review. That pretty much ate up all of my lunch-time study time.
  
  

[jeff_lindqvist]

Often in handwritten Swedish, the dots on Ä and Ö will blend together and appear as a small line. This is a fully accepted way of writing these letters.

How did I not know of this sooner??? I love this, and from now on I'm writing all letters with dots/umlauts like this, regardless of the language.

I've noticed it in Arabic/Persian too. Two dots make a line and three dots make a hook.

[Cèid Donn]

Thanks! I am still planning on starting Moroccan Darija later this year, and any tips or tricks that would make handwriting in Arabic script easier for me are welcomed.

Speaking of handwriting in different languages, a while back when I was writing something in my Gaelic notebook, I suddenly realized that I have hardly ever seen handwritten Gaelic. Some Irish yes, some Welsh...but virtually no Gaelic that I could remember, aside from some writing on the classroom chalkboard by our teachers when I took those summer classes at the Gaelic College in Cape Breton years ago. No Breton either, although the thing with Gaelic is I've been studying it for so long, it's rather depressing to think about how I have no idea how native speakers would write it in their own hand.

[Cèid Donn]

I've been dreaming in French over the past few days, both when I sleep at night and when I nap (I'm a nap enthusiast ). It's likely due to my focusing on French more in recent weeks, although it's still kind of odd since this past week I'm doing more reading in other languages (especially German) and I haven't be doing as much writing in my French journal this week, aside from grammar exercises. I have been doing a lot of Clozemaster and Memrise for French, though. After finishing my short story today, which was in Gaelic, I took a nap and had a dream about writing an entry in my French journal about Metro 2033. I'm not sure if it's amusing or a little sad that I'm dreaming about writing in my language journals.

For my French SC I've been watching some French TED talk videos on You Tube. While there have been some notable TED talks by people I really respect over the years, I'm not really a big fan of the whole TED talk thing in general, for reasons I won't go into here, but it's something different for me in my French studies and they cover some topics I likely wouldn't be exposed to with my regular routine. This was one that I've watched:



Naturellement, j'ai mon propre avis et peut-être une touche de cynisme à ce sujet comme quelqu'un qui a lutté contre la dépression et SSPT depuis de nombreuses années. J'ai particulièrement aimé cette remarque dans la section des commentaires.

Comment by Frederique Badoux 1 year ago (edited)

Parfois, je me demande si cet obsession du bonheur en tant que tel ne tourne pas à la tyrannie, genre "pensée unique", surtout en jouant avec l'entrainement cérébral qui, pour moi, est l'inverse de l'authenticité. Peut-être est-ce ma nature artistique qui me fait dire ça - c'est fort probable - mais je trouve que la tristesse, la peine, le deuil, la colère, la déprime, les regrets, la douleur, l'insatisfaction, la déception, etc, tout ce qui nous fait dire que nous ne sommes pas heureux, qui sont même assimilés au mal-être, sont tout aussi grisants et surtout très inspirants et créatifs ! Une fois conscientisés, ces ressentis dits "négatifs" sont moins toxiques sans perdre de leur pouvoir. Pour moi, ces contrastes-là, c'est la vie ! Sans eux, je n'aurais pas d'histoire à écrire. Vous imaginez un roman où tout le monde s'est entraîné à être heureux tout le temps ? La constance du bonheur... quelle platitude !

"Vous imaginez un roman où tout le monde s'est entraîné à être heureux tout le temps ?" Oui, les romans dystopiques, tel que Brave New World.

Je connais bien ce sentiment tyrannique dans la société moderne qui est intolérant aux authentiques expériences comme la tristesse, la colère, la douleur, l'insatisfaction et le désespoir. Pour paraphraser l'écrivain américain Walker Percy, le depression est peut-être une réponse rationnelle à la réalité du monde.

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Short Story challenge

• Week 1: Gaelic -- "Top Twenties" by Michael Klevenhaus, from An Claigeann aig Damien Hirst, Leabhar 1
• Week 2: French -- "Les révoltés de la Bounty" by Jules Verne
• Week 3: Welsh -- "Côt Ruby" by Sarah Reynold, from Cawl: a Straeon Eraill
• Week 4: Gaelic -- "A' Bheinn Òir" by Iain Mac a' Ghobhainn
• Week 5: German -- "Vogelfrei" by Alastair Caimbeul, from Der Schädel von Damien Hirst. Band 1/An Claigeann aig Damien Hirst, Leabhar 1
• Week 6: Welsh -- "Dewis" by Lleucu Roberts, from Cawl: a Straeon Eraill
• Week 7: Irish -- "Madra na n-ocht gCos" (from oral tradition)
• Week 8: Gaelic -- "Tha Adhaircean Mòra air a' Chroadh a tha as Cheò" by Màiri Anna NicDhòmhnaill, from An Claigeann aig Damien Hirst, Leabhar 1
  
  This was a pretty short one, but since I forgot about picking a short story earlier in the week, I had to pick one I know I could finish quickly.

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The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge : 54 / 365

• Day 54 (Feb. 23) -- French: Did another 100 sentences of Clozemaster, then worked on conjugation practice focusing on the conditional in between watching videos on You Tube. Corrected the exercises on the conditional from L'expression française that I've done so far using the key--overall I didn't make a lot of mistakes, but I still need improvement.

[Cèid Donn]

I think Lianne's insomnia must be contagious because I'm stricken with it now myself.

It's almost time I would usually get up and I haven't slept at all. I haven't really had the concentration to due proper studying or reading, so I've spent the night piddling around with some video games with the interface/audio/text set to French--Stardew Valley, Hero of the Kingdow III and a couple of free mobile games that had a French language option. Then I messed around on You Tube. I found a channel with a lot of documentary videos in French on a wide variety of contemporary topics.



Someone on Duolingo mentioned the music artist Pomme. I was checking out her YT channel too--her songs are quite interesting and she's clearly not afraid of making an impression.



When I watched that the first time I was like, "Cyprien?" Yep, that is Cyprien, So I had to go see if he had any recent videos worth mentioning.



If you need a resource to practice listening to fast-spoken French, Cyprien's your man. He's wildly popular so he has plenty of folks who do subtitles in various languages for nearly all his videos too. He's not always as funny as he aspires to be, but he has some good moments.

Then I ended up on this old video--this was the first song in French I learned (not counting choir pieces), mercifully sung in a comfortable (for me) alto range and so, so easy. Singer China Forbes said she and her co-writer just wanted to write a song in French (Forbes' paternal grandmother is French) and did what they could with they "mediocre high school French skills." It ended up being one of Pink Martini's most popular songs. The video is super cute too.



Well, it's time for breakfast. Glad I don't have to work today--I'm betting I will pass out right after sunrise.

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The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge : 55 / 365

• Day 55 (Feb. 24) -- French: Leveled up 5 units on my Duolingo tree to level 5. Had to spend some time reading up on quand vs lorsque because the Conjunctions 2 unit gets me all mixed up with the connotations of each--it's not one of that tree's better units. Worked on the 3rd set of exercises for the conditional in L'expression française and did 20 minutes of conjugation practice, plus 20 minutes on Memrise.

[Cèid Donn]

I've been having to deal with my chronic anemia for the past few days--it's likely the cause of my insomia the other night, and it's been making it harder to concentrate in general. I'm starting to feel better tonight, but for the past couple of days I've been taking it easy with studying, mainly just working a little on my SCs each day as well as doing enough other stuff to complete the 365 challenge, plus a little Memrise and Clozemaster. I definitely won't be able to finish Metro 2033 by tomorrow, but I don't have too much to read still, about 3 more chapters. So hopefully I can be done by the end of the week and can start the next book for the book club, Les Hirondelles de Kaboul. I'll be reading that in the original French.

I got my access code for the free 3 months for the Ranganna course although I haven't used the code yet. I want to start when I am feeling more recovered from this recent bout of anemia. If i continue to improve as I have today, I hope that means the end of this week.

Last night I started watching Jusqu'à la garde. I was too tired to watch the whole thing in one sitting so I'm watching the rest tonight. I really liked the first half--rather emotionally tense, but I think the writing and acting is incredibly on-target with the topic. I hope the second half is as good as the first.

For those who might be interested, Langfocus' most recent video is on the languages of India. It's a pretty nice overview of languages that seem too often underrepresented in both academic and non-academic language learning. I'm personally been wanderlusting for Telugu for many months now, even since I read a news article about the growing number of Telugu speakers here in the US. However, I've been wanting to learn Moroccan Darija for much, much longer, so I don't want to deviate from my plans to start that later this year.


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The 2019 365 Day Language Challenge : 57 / 365

• Day 56 (Feb. 25) -- French: Leveled up 4 units on my Duolingo tree to level 5 and now my tree is all level 5 up to the 3rd checkpoint. Finished 3rd set of exercises for the conditional in L'expression française and checked my sentences against the key.
  
  
• Day 57 (Feb. 26) -- French: Did two 20-minutes sessions of conjugation practice before dinner and after dinner, leveled up 4 units more on my Duolingo tree. Stopped there so I could make time to finish watching Jusqu'à la garde tonight.

[StringerBell]

I tend to have sleep issues, so I can really sympathize with insomnia problems, they're terrible! (I also had anemia for over 20 years, though now I mostly have it under control... that's another crap thing to deal with.) I'm sorry you're dealing with both of those things. I had sleep issues 4 days in a row last week where I couldn't fall asleep, couldn't stay asleep, woke up way too early... just terrible overall. Even after a good night of sleep I generally wake up feeling more exhausted than when I go to sleep, so I don't actually ever know what it feels like to be rested. Paradoxically, I sometimes feel better after a night of insomnia!

Anyway, I started keeping my MP3 player+headphones next to my bed so that when these sleep problems kicked in, I could just relax in the dark listening to my audiobook in Polish. I got a lot of Polish listening done and I think it might have even helped me fall asleep one of those nights. At the very least it was better than laying awake being annoyed that I couldn't sleep. Have you tried listening to anything in French (or another language) when your insomnia kicks in?