Morgana's log

[Brun Ugle]

If you don’t like Swedish TV, and you say you don’t like TV so much in general, how about books? There are lots of Swedish books, especially if you like crime fiction, and audiobooks are pretty popular in the Nordic countries. Or maybe you could find some podcasts you like. Listening practice doesn’t have to be just TV. Even in German, a much bigger language than Swedish, I have trouble finding TV shows I really like and that are available to me, so I make do with a few TV shows, documentaries, some news, audiobooks, podcasts, etc. In Spanish, there are tons of TV shows I like, so many that I feel like I’ll never get through them in my lifetime, so I have a much easier time with Spanish as I’m usually in the middle of a series and don’t have to think about what to watch next. But even in German, I manage to find enough TV, movies and documentaries to at least keep up with the Super Challenge and that’s without counting podcasts, audiobooks, news or YouTube videos.

[garyb]

I've always thought of Italian as being a bit of an "odd one out" in the FIGS in terms of relative lack of quality resources (both learner-oriented and native materials), having a relatively low number of speakers mostly concentrated in just one country, not having a huge amount of political and commercial importance, and not having many serious learners. Someone choosing to learn it needs to accept all that, especially if coming from something like French or Spanish. I'd guess it's only a "big" language because tourism and culture make it seem desirable and so many people want to learn it, but even at that it's a somewhat niche choice and people usually only get serious about it if they have some kind of personal connection.

There is plenty media out there, but you do have to lower your standards and/or supplement with dubbed/translated content if you really want to do massive input.

[StringerBell]

Additionally I just can’t get myself excited over FIGS lol. How much easier my life would be.

I think of FIGS like sirens; they seems really beautiful and draw you in with the promise of an easy time learning them, but once you get sucked in and really commit, you realize they are way more complicated than you ever could have imagined. Then, due to the expectation that they will be easy you start feeling more and more incompetent. At least, that's my experience. I went into Polish with the expectation that it would be hard as hell, so when I have trouble it doesn't bother me because I've been expecting it. So in a weird way, those higher category languages can sometimes be easier because they don't carry any false expectations of easy mastery.

BTW, since you just did it a bunch, how do you create multi-quotes with different people? You would not believe the ridiculous strategy I've been using, there's got to be a better way.

I've always thought of Italian as being a bit of an "odd one out" in the FIGS...

This made me feel a bit better because anytime I say something about lack of native media in Italy, I instantly doubt myself and assume that I'm just bad at finding it, or that I'm being unreasonably picky. Seeing that someone else has a similar take about Italian media at least reassures me that I'm not doing something colossally wrong. I'm still determined to find something more, so I'm planning to try out MHz Choice. Have you seen any of the shows they offer? (Lingua listed them in her last post)

********

*Morgana, I was just about to ask you if you'd ever tried MHz Choice because I didn't know if you saw Lingua's post, but I figured that I would check how much Swedish stuff they have in case that was one of the languages that only had 1 show, and I saw that you already responded about it there! Are you seriously going to sign up for it?

[Lianne]

You guys have me worried about my plans to learn Italian next year!

This might be a long shot, but if any of your public libraries have subscriptions to Kanopy, there are some Italian films on there! I just checked the Italian language category and there are 145 films listed (though some have multiple languages so they might not be primarily Italian). I was even pleasantly surprised to find 34 films listed under Swedish!

[Systematiker]

I’m not quoting, because it’s too much hassle on a tablet, but, yes you largely got me right.

Knowing a bit about what those classroom hours looked like when they calculated the numbers and a bit about what DLI looks like now, I think a lot of the optimizations we autodidacts come up with make much of our hours equivalent in results (plus/minus handy native speaker), at least to the older calculations.

With the experience bit, yes, dead on: most of the time it simply gets easier because you know what works for you and what doesn’t.

[Brun Ugle]

You say you want to learn a language with a lot of native media and yet you aren’t interested in FIGS or several other languages that have that and you keep finding yourself interested in smaller languages like Swedish and Finnish. So I was wondering, was is it you find attractive in a foreign language? The sound? The culture? Perceived exoticness?

[Brun Ugle]

I didn’t mean it as “prompting” really. It was just curiosity. I find it hard to say what attracts me to a language too. Of course, I want to learn them all, so maybe I’m just a collector. I also enjoy the process of learning, for the most part. But I think one thing that can kill the enjoyment of language study is feeling like you have to do it. I loved Norwegian until I moved to Norway, then I hated it for a couple of years. There were far less resources those days and I didn’t have the access to those that did exist that I would have today. Learning felt like an obligation, but it also felt like an impossible task because I didn’t have good enough resources. Even today, here in this much bigger town than I lived in then, I see the frustration of the students trying to learn Norwegian. They study their books in Bokmål, but the people around them speak Trøndersk and even though it’s a much lighter dialect here than where I first lived, they don’t understand and feel like their learning isn’t getting them anywhere and it’s going to take forever to learn the language. It takes me much longer to learn my target languages today, but they don’t frustrate me the same way because I don’t have any obligation to learn them.

German sometimes frustrates me because I started it as something I should know rather than something I wanted to know and also because there isn’t so much fun TV as there is in Spanish. But I’ve started to accept that not all languages can be Spanish and I really enjoy reading in German, so I can just read a lot and absorb the language that way and only watch the minimum of TV necessary for my listening comprehension.

Spanish surprised me a bit, because I had always sort of disdained it as the language “everyone” learns (I’m from the US) and assumed that it must be easy since “everyone” learned it. I went into it thinking I could learn it quickly and easily and move on and never thinking I would actually like the language, but I think it has become the language I have most fallen in love with. In part, that’s probably because it’s the first one I feel like I learned by myself. I always felt a bit like my learning Norwegian was a fluke and only happened at all because I live here, but with Spanish, I mostly did it on my own. I also found that there are tons of easily accessible TV shows and books that I like, so that certainly doesn’t hurt.

Japanese, I wanted to learn as a teen because of the exoticness of it, but I didn’t start learning until in my twenties when I had a Japanese boyfriend. I really liked the language, but I didn’t know how to go about learning back then and crashed and burned many times over the years. Now, Japanese is like an old friend that’s just there, and I no longer feel the need to impress. So, I’m finally able to just learn in a relaxed manner. I also have come to realize that I don’t need to speak all my languages and Japanese is one I’m content to have as a mostly receptive language.

I think I’d have a hard time saying what attracts me to languages. And it’s not the same as in the past. Various circumstances have led me to different languages. These days, I think I’m more relaxed about studying and don’t feel the need anymore to be perfect in every language. I’d like to learn Spanish, German and French to high productive levels. Spanish because I love it and because I’m getting so close, and German and French because of their usefulness here in Europe. The others, I think I’d be content with receptive skills high enough to enjoy reading and TV, and my productive skills can remain at the level of awkward chit-chat. And with my tolerance for ambiguity, even my receptive skills don’t have to be all that great.

[Brun Ugle]

Coming from English, most languages seem pretty phonetic. So, that's not going to limit you much.

[Elsa Maria]

Morgana, I appreciate your musings about selecting languages. I feel like I am always doing machinations inside my head about languages and which direction to proceed. You are not alone!
It is interesting to think about the size of the language. Dutch seems like a "big" language to me in comparison to Danish. Gosh, there are so many more resources available. I can only imagine the wealth of resources for the truly big languages! I want a big language in my mix. I thought it was going to be Russian. Nope. Then I thought it would be Spanish. Um, maybe yes and maybe no.

I also appreciated Brun Ugle's comments, especially about Norwegian. When I was living in Denmark, there were times that I would just shut down on learning Danish. Now that I no longer live there, I find it much easier to actually enjoy the language.

[Querneus]

And today is also the 28th day of French. I am through 30 lessons of Assimil. I discovered during this week's lessons, or rather re-discovered because it seemed very vaguely familiar, that the sixty ten, four twenty, four twenty ten system of counting is not how they count in Quebec!

Except... that is how they count in Quebec. The use of septante/nonante is a characteristic of Belgian and Swiss French (in Switzerland there is also huitante for 80).