Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019 -- now with Polish!!

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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019

Postby Philipp » Fri Mar 29, 2019 12:37 pm

DaveAgain wrote:(Germans appear to be very fond of sausages! )


Yes, we are :D There are many sausage related sayings in German:

Alles hat ein Ende nur die Wurst hat zwei. - Everything has one end only sausages have two.
beleidigte Leberwurst - an offended, querulous person
Das ist mir wurst - I couldn't care less.
Hans Wurst - laughable, foolish person
Eine Extrawurst bekommen - getting special treatment, an undeserved advantage

But tellingly we don't say "this is how the sausage gets made." I guess the process of sausage making is too commonplace to make the saying work. ;)
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019

Postby Brun Ugle » Fri Mar 29, 2019 1:24 pm

DaveAgain wrote:
Brun Ugle wrote: I wish I liked German TV better. I still have a few episodes left of the show I’m watching, but then I’ll have to find something else and it’s so hard.
I still can't really understand German well enough for TV, but exploring a little I came across one (comedy-drama?) I liked called "Drei Damen vom Grill": A grand-mother, daughter and grand-daughter start up a snack-bar business. (Germans appear to be very fond of sausages! :-))

Thanks! I found it on YouTube and watched the first episode. It looks like it could be good.
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019

Postby Brun Ugle » Fri Mar 29, 2019 8:29 pm

He leído hasta el capítulo 5 del libro “La sombra del viento”. ¡Es verdaderamente magnífico! La manera de escribir que tiene su autor me hormiguea la piel. ¡Ojalá pudiera escribir así! – en cualquier idioma, aunque fuera solamente en mi lengua materna. Leo en voz alta porque me ayuda con la pronunciación. Mi lengua ya no trastabilla tanto en las palabras como hacía antes. Además, leer en voz alta me hace leer más lentamente y eso me hace fijarme en los detalles de la gramática y estructura. El nivel también es perfecto para mí. Conozco la mayoría del vocabulario, pero hay muchas palabras que todavía no forman parte de mi vocabulario activo. Puedo leer varias páginas sin encontrarme con una palabra completamente desconocida, solamente para toparme con cinco en un párrafo. Pero eso es típico.
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019

Postby Brun Ugle » Thu Apr 04, 2019 6:00 pm

That virus or whatever it is came back, so I’m going to the doctor tomorrow. He probably can’t do anything, but it doesn’t hurt to try. (If nothing else, I can enjoy the view.)

The virus came back on Tuesday, just in time for my conversation with Zenmonkey, who had to suffer through my being practically incoherent. I ended up letting him do most of the talking. My Spanish and German abilities go up and down like a rollercoaster. It seems like I can only speak every other week. I wouldn’t mind my digestive problems so much if my brain kept functioning, but it seems to be directly connected to my stomach.

On Wednesday, I was still feeling sick, but not so exhausted that I couldn’t do anything, so I went to Norwegian training. I was feeling well enough and my Norwegian is strong enough that I could still manage to converse reasonably well in Norwegian, although I do notice a difference. Even my English gets more confused and rambling when I’m sick. It’s a bit of a struggle just writing this.

One of the “students” at Norwegian training is very friendly and nice, but sometimes his friendliness can be almost a little pushy. He’s seen me reading Spanish novels before, and he was very excited to tell me that there was a Spanish speaker at his table and he wanted to introduce me. I was a bit busy at that moment, but he was trying to point us out to each other and the Spanish speaker asked me from the other side of the room if I spoke Spanish and I just said (in Spanish), “a little.” -- I don’t like to get anyone’s expectations too high, especially considering my inconsistency. -- Anyway, I finished what I was doing and went over to the other side where the Spanish speaker was. I suppose I did it in part because the other guy was so excited to be able to introduce me to someone that could speak Spanish and in part because I just felt like I should. I guess it’s the influence of all the people that always say you have to get out there and speak your target language and just be brave and talk and so on. Anyway, I went over to him and tried to ask in Spanish where he was from and he either couldn’t hear me or couldn’t understand me, so I ended up having to ask three times. And it just went downhill from there. I kind of also had the feeling that maybe he didn’t want to speak to me or perhaps just didn’t want to speak Spanish, which is understandable since he’s there to learn Norwegian. So, I just told him I was from the US and then I went back to my own table.

It was kind of embarrassing and uncomfortable though, especially since I could hardly speak. My pronunciation was terrible. I tend to stumble over words a lot when I have this virus-thingy. I guess it makes sense since the tongue is a part of the digestive system and if the rest of the system is out of order, maybe it makes sense that it would be too. The other part of the problem is that I usually have trouble using a language when I’m not expecting to use it. In a way, that might even be a good thing. My languages are fairly well compartmentalized and I mostly keep them apart, but that means it’s a little harder to call up a different language on the spot. And I find it can cause problems when I force myself to switch to the “wrong” language. For example, I once had a conversation with an Italki tutor for Spanish. We were speaking together in Spanish just fine and then she did that annoying thing where they say, “Say something in…..” and asked me to say something in Norwegian. First, I went completely blank. I didn’t know any Norwegian. I looked up in my brain and it was empty. Nothing there. Finally, I managed to dredge up some Norwegian, but when I tried to say it, it came out all strange and awkward like I’d never spoken Norwegian before and was trying to learn the first phrase in my brand-new Norwegian textbook. I mangled the pronunciation completely. And then, having told my brain I want Norwegian, it switched and I couldn’t get it back to Spanish. So, then my Spanish ended up all weird, mispronounced and with a few random Norwegian words and Norwegian syntax. After a couple of sentences, I managed to switch back to Spanish, but it was difficult. So, maybe it’s best to just let my brain keep control over these things and not take out random languages just to show someone if I don’t intend to use that language with them regularly.

I felt a little bad yesterday when I made such a mess of Spanish, but now that I’ve had a bit of time to think about it, I feel better. As I said, part of the problem is that I’m sick and this illness greatly affects my abilities to communicate. The other part is that my brain tries to keep me from speaking the wrong language to the wrong person by creating rules about what language I should use. I can switch fluidly between Norwegian and English with my ex because I associate both those languages with him. I don’t switch as fluidly between German and Spanish with Eugenio, but now that I associate those two languages with him, it’s gotten a lot easier and as my abilities in those languages get stronger it will probably get even easier. And I’m sure if I were to start regularly speaking Spanish with the guy from Norwegian training, I’d have little trouble switching between Norwegian and Spanish with him.
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019

Postby Brun Ugle » Tue Apr 09, 2019 12:36 pm

I just made the mistake of browsing the Easy Languages YouTube channel and now I want to learn all the languages, especially Welsh. :?
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019

Postby rdearman » Tue Apr 09, 2019 12:55 pm

Brun Ugle wrote:I just made the mistake of browsing the Easy Languages YouTube channel and now I want to learn all the languages, especially Welsh. :?

LOL. Seems someone is doing my work for me.

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 10#p126506
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019

Postby Brun Ugle » Tue Apr 09, 2019 2:39 pm

rdearman wrote:
Brun Ugle wrote:I just made the mistake of browsing the Easy Languages YouTube channel and now I want to learn all the languages, especially Welsh. :?

LOL. Seems someone is doing my work for me.

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 10#p126506

I can do that all by myself. I really don’t need anyone else to distract me.
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019

Postby rdearman » Tue Apr 09, 2019 3:55 pm

Yeah, it is a bit like shooting fish in a bucket.
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019

Postby Brun Ugle » Wed Apr 10, 2019 5:55 pm

I'm so excited! :D :D :D :D Today was the Red Cross Norwegian Training at the library. First, I went to my friend, AG's apartment to fetch her. She is blind and needs someone to either drive her or walk with her, so whenever the weather is reasonably nice, I go to her apartment first and we walk to the library together. She is a really cheerful and friendly woman in her 70's and has lived in this town most of her life, so she knows a lot of people and people often call her name and come up to us when we're out walking. Today, as we neared the library, an eldery woman came up to us and started talking to us. I didn't know her from before, but she was very nice and friendly and it turns out --- Japanese! So, before I could get too nervous, I spoke to her in Japanese. She was very surprised and of course, wanted to know why I spoke Japanese. I didn't go into the whole story of my on-again-off-again relationship with Japanese, so I just told her that I'd started learning because I'd had a Japanese boyfriend back when I was about twenty. But I told her in Japanese! 8-) So, I actually managed to speak a few sentences of perfectly understandable Japanese today. After my Spanish fiasco last week, it was very satisfying. It's kind of funny that I failed on Spanish in spite of speaking it every week and reading or watching TV nearly every day, and yet with Japanese, which I haven't tried to speak in years and which I haven't been doing much with lately except the minimum of anki cards, I had no problems. The experience brought back a bit of my enthusiasm for Japanese though, so maybe I can use this to encourage myself to do a bit more work on it again.
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019

Postby Brun Ugle » Thu Apr 25, 2019 9:56 am

Hmmm. Five stars for my Spanish fiasco and 17 for my Japanese success. I guess happy stories “sell” better. I’ll keep that in mind. I do think that it’s good to include stories of one’s failures though. It keeps things realistic and that’s perhaps especially useful for those who’ve not yet successfully learned a language. It shows that we all struggle and failures are a natural part of the process.

I’ve kind of fallen out of my study routine lately. Part of it is that we’ve suddenly had a period of nice weather and I’ve got more energy. Somehow, that makes it harder to sit still and concentrate, but at least I’ve been getting a few other things done. German is especially difficult because I feel like I never know where to begin. I’m struggling to develop a good study plan for German, and to some extent for Spanish. With Spanish, I actually started learning from the beginning in a normal fashion, so I learned the basics well. My problem now is that it’s just hard to make progress at a higher level. I know I need to do some intensive work on writing and that that would push my level up a notch, but it’s hard trying to decide every day what to write and so on, so I tend to fall back on fun, easy activities like reading and watching TV. Lately my Spanish has been getting worse though, so I really need to find a way to get back to real studying. German is even worse because I’ve never properly learned the basics and I can’t find a good course or textbook that really suits me, so I end up just reading and watching TV and relying heavily on Norwegian to help me.

Japanese is easier to actually study at the moment than Spanish or German. And that’s because I have a simple routine and I know what I have to do every day. I basically just keep plugging away at my Anki deck. I’m more than a third of the way into the Japanese core 6K deck and it’s still going well, but it’s starting to get a bit harder. There are more and more words that mean basically the same thing or very similar things, and more words with rather abstract meanings. There are also more words written with the same kanji but with different meanings and pronunciations, which means every time that kanji or combination of kanji comes up, I have to think of all the variations because I don’t know which one is being asked for. Also, the reviews are starting to build up a bit more. I seem to be taking a break (planned or unplanned) about once every ten days. Unplanned means I just forgot, but if I intentionally decide not to do it because I don’t feel like it or whatever, I try to do at least some of the reviews so they don’t build up too much. I look forward to taking a slightly longer break during the Gathering. I’m hoping to just do reviews for a few days before to prevent a big build-up, and hopefully, I’ll even find a few minutes here and there to do some reviews during the Gathering which should make for a fairly relaxing start with relatively few reviews when I get home again.
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