Expug's 2019 Log - Reasonable Learning

[Expugnator]

Towards the end of the novel, I'm finally starting to enjoy listening-reading. This probably means it has become easier and the unknown words are very few now. I hope the next novel will be even easier, on the verge of a breakthrough. I remember this stage from German and Georgian.

I'm doing the exercises on Assimil Hebrew all in cursive. It needs some tweakening and reviewing some forms, but I'm glad I'm practicing. My current level is that I'm familiar with most common verbs, with some glances in the past and future forms. I could do well with some more input from actual dialogs, but I can't complain because the textbook writers seem to take for granted that one who focuses on Modern Hebrew wants to learn the colloquial language. They always tend to present most colloquial forms and warn on the formal ones. Even if some are less formal than the others, there is an overall concern about raising the learner's awareness on register, which is something I tend to welcome.

I lost my Indonesian streak on Clozemaster yesterday. I simply forgot it, I left it to work on at home with the TTS and forgot. Ironically, t's the one I need Clozemaster the most for. Anyway, today I could do everything on time plus some Duolingo.

[Expugnator]

An important change in Aruba, following Curaçao:

Unu ku ta importante tin di hasi ku e kambionan na skol preparatorio arubano e aña di skol binidero: lo no duna lès mas na hulandes sino na papiamentu.

One which is important has to do with the changes in Aruban preparatory schools next schoolyear: they won't be giving classes in Dutch anymore, but rather in Papiamento.

I know that listening-reading is a good exercise, but I'm a bit bored with doing it in Mandarin. There's a lot of prep involved: opening the pge with the text and the translation file at the computer, opening the audiobook at a browser window in my phone, then scrolling to the timestamp where I've stopped the previous day. Moreover, the book Inferno is much unlike its predecessors, to my frustration. Long descriptive and narrative paragraphs and few dialogs. I'm looking forward to finding another Harry Hole adventure in Mandarin, really.

Louis de Funès' Le Gendarme à New York has a lesson starting with "My tailor is rich" during the trip.

Modern Hebrew: An Essential Grammar went into a morphotrip that is getting me sleepy. It's the usual attempt to expose all the varieties within each subroot in each binyam. Not my cup of tea, as I rather learn the main rules and deal with the peripheral rules as exceptions which I acquire through input. To make things worse (and this is a habit in whatever Hebrew grammar), they want to keep the same root when explaining forms across the binyanim, so we are granted with examples that cover a common verb and a pretty obscure or virtually non-existant one just to keep the same root. I'd rather have only frequent verbs used as examples.

The Guarani lessons are already tricky enough. Morphology isn't that simple. Moreover, even the simplest predicative sentences involve dealing with ordinary verbs, no verb at all and/or adjectives.

[DaveAgain]

Louis de Funès' Le Gendarme à New York has a lesson starting with "My tailor is rich" during the trip.

Assimil crops up in 'la vache et le prisonnier' too. Fernandel gives his assimil books to his brother POWs (? perhaps conscript labour STO) before escaping. And 'la cantatrice chauve' is allegedly inspired by Assimil's french>english course.

[Expugnator]

The weekend was reasonably productive. I could do my Clozemater quota, plus a Duolingo streak and some Speakly.me . I even found a Duolingo-based way to Wanderlust: I'm doing a Russian-Lithuanian deck, as tgus one is grouped by frequency levels, while the Lithuanian-English or English-Lithuanian levels aren't. Some pairs other than English have these groupings as well, such as French from Serbian and Spanish from Bulgarian, though I'll keep it as only two Slavic languages for the moment.

Lithuanian seems really interested. There is some sort of Slavic discount, at least in the beginning. It's not ideal to do the inverted deck as the supposedly TL-language text is much larger and catches up the attention, but it will do for the time dabbling.

I also gave esperanto and latin podcasts a try. Esperanto might become transparent after some proper study, especially those podcasts on familiar themes I'm interested at. Latin is as opaque as any other non-indo-european family other than Romance, Germanic and Slavic.

Other than that, I got some more episodes dubbed in Georgian and the next film in the Gendarme series. No anticipated reading, though.

Today I finished Parterapi. A really funny series, good for those who are learning Norwegian because it has so spontaneous dialogs. Not to mention the great acting. Now I'm going to start Oslo Zoo at last.

Getting a bit upset with the time spent in traffic. All this to be able to have lunch at home. It was more than justifiable to pay for a parking lot plus the fuel when I had to pick up the girls and drive them home, but now that it's no longer the case I'm actually spending too much time in the traffic, getting to work later than if I were just walking, then repeat it at noon - and paying for that. Having lunch at home and being able to choose what I eat is a privillege, but while it isn't much cheaper than simply staying at work during lunch break and eating up, it's definitely more stressful. The only plus is that I get to see the girls in the afternoon as well, which I'd do before when I used to pick them up, but that's something that needs getting used to as well.

Language-wise, 30-40 minutes of displacement in the traffic each way is more than I spent on desk study for most of the individual languages. I've turned the Romance languages into my podcast/audiobook languages - I plan to do the same with Catalan and Esperanto when the time comes - but if the trend prevails I might consider split the noon commute into 2. Now I listen to the Italian audiobook both when driving home and coming back, while I listening to the Argentinian podcast in the morning and a French audiobook in the evening. I could make the afternoon back time a slot for a weaker language. That is, as long as I keep driving here. Last year I'd come back by bus and so I would be able to read, which isn't an option either when driving or walking. Most productive way is certainly having lunch near the office and enjoying the nearly full extra hour of study time.

Then comes the issue that managing so many audiobooks, remembering where I had stopped (the app does a fairly good job but not a foolproof one) might kill productivity. There's a reason I write down every textbook page I'm studying, every novel I'm listening/reading and every series I'm watching during desk study. While doing so is not so practical for those listening-only activities that take place on the go, turning them into a complex schedule with 4 items and above might contribute to my stress. The daily time spent on both the Argentinian podcast and the Italian audiobook might be too much for two transparent languages for which I'd better off improving output, but just being able to hit the play button and understanding everything without bothering to fully concentrate is a relief.

Then again, as things get busier again at work, I have to think about yet another slot to fill - the background listening-only one while performing repetitive tasks. I used to listen to Grand Bien Vous Fasse, but now I can only do so from the phone and I need to stay tuned in to what's on the computer as well, with the earphones plugged into it. Switching earphones proved even more annoying than switching audiobooks. I'll have to replace it with a resource as straightforward as a Youtube channel, but I have yet to decide on that. Well, there's also the Georgian soap opera but I'm doing it a disservice by merely listening to it as background, even more so now that I can understand much more than before. Anyway, whatever I choose most definitely shouldn't be anything content-relevant, but rather

Sorry for bothering readers with those questions that seem so nitpicky and overly methodical, but they've been rushing through my head at least for the previous month.

I'm finally done with Marc Lévy's book I was listening-reading in Russian. I don't know if this one is cheesier than usual or if it's the fact I'm reading much less in Russian than I used to in French, and though spending much time on it, that's lowering my patience. Anyway, towards the end it started to really work for my purpose of improving my Russian, so I'll stick to easy, contemporary, translated chick-lit for the time being. Guillaume Musso for a change. I'm really looking forward to sound improvement in my Russian comprehension after that book. I'm doing a sort of narrow but not so much reading, because I'm reading within the same genre from translated authors I'm familiar with in their originals.

I keep finding similarities between the Georgian and Hebrew verbal systems. Sometimes I wonder if the Georgian system couldn't be though of as being consonant-based with the vowels just as 'fillers'. For example, you can interpret the 'root' of the verb აკეთებს (he does) as კთბ. Ok, I know that the ბ is not quite a root, but I'm impressed even with the defective verbs reminding one of the other. Those similarities really go beyond surface.

I thought I wouldn't have time for today's Guarani lessons but I did. It's getting real fun now, with verbs and actual transitive sentences. The grammar has some novelties which make it worth learning even from a purely linguistic point of view.

[Expugnator]

Started watching Oslo Zoo. Sounds like a good drama. It's a short series so I have to think about what to do next. Heimebane also seems good but den er ikke tilgjengelig utenfor Norge og jeg har ikke klart å finne dem et annet sted.

Started the new Russian novel. Sounds a bit more challenging so far. I had downloaded a translation that didn't match the audio - we don't have such issues with original L2 novels, except for the renowned abridged German audiobooks. Anyway, after some minutes I managed to track the text to my audiobook, and now I'm really looking forward to enjoying the read. I am not entirely against increasing my daily reading quota if I notice I'm gaining momentum in Russian.

I'm already tuned in to my current Spanish novel. I don't regret having started it. Looking forward to reading even more from the author, who is hard to find, though.

A couple of weeks have passed since I turned my German Clozemaster into All sentences, text-input. Right now I'm not only starting to become comfortable with the sentences and consolidating key vocabulary; I'm also better off at separating German and Norwegian in my head.

Started listening to an Esperanto podcast, the deceased archives from Radio Verda. While it's not one-hundred percent transparent, I can follow way more than the gist. I wonder how much of this will revert into active skills later on, which is a dearer goal to me. I absolutely have no time to do the ordinary transparent-language path with Esperanto now.

It was a particularly busy day with things getting back into the normal rhythm. I was lucky to have a headstart in the morning, because I could barely make it to Assimil Hebrew.

[Expugnator]

Yesterday I could get hold of everything, including Duolingo Hebrew and Indonesian. I must acknowledge that Duolingo has been useful both for Guarani and for Indonesian. With Indonesian I still feel that I'm being introduced not so essential words. With Hebrew, I might actually have surpassed the current level I'm doing at Duolingo, because the sentences don't seem that hard anymore. Still useful for the sake of learning, but not as hard as in the beginning. If only Duolingo had a mor straightforward interface and better curated vocabulary...I could be using it for most of my languages as I'm doing with Clozemaster.

The day started pretty well but I got derailed by the stress and the noise caused by the discussions on the upcoming security system reforms.

At the old Assimil Hebrew, the readers, especially the women, pronounce ver clearly a glottal stop for the א and ע when they are independent in their syllables. I tend to overlook this and I'm aware that this has some sociolinguistical implications. I wouldn't expect to get along in Hebrew by making all glottal stop instances silent. I'm learning to respect them from Guarani, where they're pretty much distinctive, though still subtle.

Not a successful day. I could barely do the exercises for the Guarani course, it was a complex topic and I didn't manage to pay that much attention. I need to read a grammar book, fortunately I have more than one, but they aren't at my favorite format where they come with sentences, but rather mostly tables.

[Expugnator]

Yesterday I managed the whole set of resources, and even some extra Clozemaster. Had I had a little more time, I'd have to think about some new activity.

I'm enjoying Yabla's current series of videos, as they are taken from a TV series. Short excerpts with double subtitles allow me for actual intensive watching. Besides, the syntax is more direct and less formulaic. I've had trouble with some other videos where the syntax is closer to that of the written language. In the same tune, I'm having trouble even with the syntax of the translated novel. There seems to be more juxtaposition of terms instead of the terms orderly placed orderly with conjunctions, particles, adverbs and prepositions in between. And I don't have chengyu in mind when I say that, these are the least of my troubles as they tend to be translated instantly on Pera-pera.

I'm a bit fed up with Musso's style and the way of starting a novel with gossip news stories and email exchanges is an utter commonplace, but surprisingly it's doing real good to my Russian and I'm resuming from where I'd stopped at the previous book, in the sense that it doesn't feel like I'm starting an entirely different book with different vocabulary - which I'm not, indeed, as they are both French authors who think cool stories are supposed to take place in contemporary America.

I don't know how learning how numerous adjectives can be derived from verbal roots is better than simply learning the adjectives as they appear, as new words where the roots is already a suficcient clue. This categorizational etimology seems superfluous. Hebrew is not the only language where textbook and grammar writers try to do that brute force etimology-based vocabulary teaching, so I shouldn't be so hard on them, but I thought I'd express my ennui anyway.

[Expugnator]

Yesterday I was too tired to do DUolingo Hebrew and Indonesian, even though I had time. The Hebrew one has been particularly helpful so I plan to resume it. I always start with Guarani so that's how I keep my streak.

Today I forgot and did Greek review text input after doing the usual review multiple choice. I tend to master level by level in Greek, despite the bug that keeps giving me mastered sentences as 0% again and counting them as viewed again, which leads to absurds such as 270% viewed. Complained openly and privately to the Clozemaster team, to no help. Anyway, I noticed that Greek is on a stage close to that of German, which I've recently changed to text-input only: that's when most random words are known and the app actually helps me recall words I don't know at the tip of the tongue but which I still manage to produce after thinking quickly. That's an optimal point at SRS algorithms, or at least people say. It seems highly effective to me, as I see it as a symptom that these words are on their way to my active vocabulary and I might be using them actively sooner than expected.

Finished You are Wanted. It's a great show. I wonder if there will be a third season. I'm relieved, though. It adresses some issues that are already hard enough to deal with in newsstories. By the way, it was enough to make me realize that my German is getting better each day. I can't see much of a distinction in terms of difficult between a dubbed and a native series in German, at least the gap is not as extreme as it was once in French and English, and the listening difficulties are mostly vocabulary-related.

Some particles in Guarani are as hard to define as some Chinese ones. They seem equally optional as well, which means only time will help develop a feeling for their usage.

[Expugnator]

The weekend was basically ACATT (All Clozemaster All The Time). I admit I got caught into a gamification trip but it was also good for the sake of learning, I swear. It has a good side in that it motivates me to add more and more languages into my vocabulary activation i.e. text input mode. I've tried with Hebrew again, and what I'm struggling with is orthography. I've installed the Swype keyboard on the ipad so I can try swyping at larger characters. On the phone, I'm getting really comfortable with pinyin-based input for Mandarin. Indonesian is the one that needs an extra effort if I want to really master the earlier levels that I'm supposed to have mastered.

The other apps didn't go on ignored and I did both Speakly.me and Duolingo (I only missed Indonesian on Duolingo yesterday). Other than that, I lined up more dubbed series in Georgian and the next film in the Gendarme series. This time I finally did a reading headstart to my daily 2o-page non-fiction quota, which comes in handy because today is going to be a busy day as I have to take the girls to the kindergarten. I've listened to Grand Bien Vous Fasse very briefly but I've already noticed some improvement at understanding French other than from earphones.

Today a friend shared the book A Course in Contemporary Romanian, by Boris Cazacu.This was the first Romanian textbook I've seen. My former university has a copy and in the early 2000's I'd borrow it once in a while, not moving further due to my lack of experience in learning languages and the lack of an answer key at the book. Even so, I'd look amazingly at the pictures of Romania in the 50's and 60's. Now I have all the means at my disposal (I'm doing Clozemaster before I get into serious learning), but finally having this book, after having searched for so long, does bring up some affectionate memories that might push me into finally taking the language seriously.

Guarani lessons remain challenging, especially the version exercises (the equivalent of Assimil's second wave, but the old grammar-translation way). I'm plugging along and starting to form my sentences.

[Expugnator]

This morning I delayed Greek Clozemaster and preferred to read non-fiction ahead. Let's see whether it pays off to have read 8 pages in advance. I did the same yesterday, but I usually feel so tired after lunch that even the 12 remaining pages feel like torture.

Finished the second in the series, Le gendarme à New York. I liked the first one better. Now for Le gendarme se marie.

I can almost understand dubbed series in German. Or maybe I'm already able to, but I'm not brave enough to take the plunge into subtitlelessness on a series I'm following closely.

I was having a lot of repetitive work where I could listen to podcasts, so I decided to give "L'ofici de viure" a try. I can follow it, but the topics are of my interest and I wouldn't be satisfied with missing important words. So I reverted back to the duo Grand Bien Vous Fasse/I provinciali (today was I provinciali). Catalan will have to wait for me to do my proper Assimil study before trying podcasts - or maybe I'll replace it with a not so interesting one for the time being.

I'm noticing a better understanding of the Georgian dubbed series, even if I'm not paying full attention to that.

I had so much work this afternoon that I could barely make it to the Assimil Hebrew lesson. Luckily I'm at a point where the lessons' size is stable and my comprehension has improved, so I can handle them even when I'm not exactly sharp-minded.