Expug's 2019 Log - Reasonable Learning

[Expugnator]

Finished Le Zoo de Mengele. A great book indeed. No wonder Norwegians went crazy about it in the late 80's. Now I'm going to spare a hunded of bucks and use what I've already got from other sources before moving on to volume 2. I'll be reading Erlend Loe's début novel Tatt av kvinnen. I'll be reading it extensively. No translation, no listening (will save money on the audiobook too). Once I'm done with it I might resume Mengele Zoo's 2 book at my favorite method.

The novel I'm listening-reading in Russian started proper. I'm impressed with the amount of dialogs. It's the type of material I need to finally break thhrough the upper-intermediate stage in Russian.

My studies got derailed in the afternoon. I tried to complete one task then the other but kept being dragged behind, till I noticed there wouldn't be enough time. I should just remember to do Guarani's lesson tomorrow.

[Expugnator]

Started reading Tatt av kvinnen, extensively. I have read stuff extensively in Norwegian very seldom. This time I can clearly follow the story without any trouble, even if it's rather the stream of conciousness type. I'm still missing several words I could have learned just through a glance at the translation, but this time I will renounce to doing that. I'm already watching series intensively anyway, and that involves enough pausing-looking-up.

Urbanism is one of my favorite topics alongside with languages. Today I was reading on El Juego del Ángel about the planned Eixample de Barcelona. Then I searched and found this video:

http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/te-acuerdas/acuerdas-150-anos-del-ensanche-barcelona/620141/

I'm done with reading the Modern Hebrew grammar. The exercises seem interesting but they are not dotted, so I see no point in doing exercises without noticing how to sound words out when I have Assimil and Clozemaster+TTS. So I'm saving the exercises for latter. I said I wouldn' drop a Hebrew book again, but i can't help this time, really. Why not have the exercises through the text as in other books in the series? Anyway, I've read the grammar part and it left me with a good background knowledge and eager for more.

Now comes the time when I waste a good deal of my afternoon deciding what to do next in Hebrew for this specific timeslot - if anything.

What can I say? I don't think I need to read more about overall grammar - syntax is rather straightforward and morphology without a repertory will fall into oblivion. Still early for Linguaphone - and I'm already doing Assimil anyway. I could buy an audiobook and give it a try - but this old Assimil is long enough and I still have to review the newest one and later on this one as well. So, since I've been spending way over 10 minutes in the grammar in the past weeks, why not make it even at 10 minutes of a double-subtitled native TV series? Here we go, Hebrew native materials! I expect it to boost and motivate me to do Clozemaster and Duolingo even more. I'm timidly starting to do text input for the earlier levels at Clozemaster and once I get better at spelling and used to swyping things are likely to progress at a steady pace.

I've just checked and the language seems to have "volumed up" last time I checked: the sounds seem clearer now, not as much mumbling as before. Double subtitles will do me a good job.

For the sake of practicality, I'm going to invert 30 shekels for hour and Assimil L'Hébreu from tomorrow on.

Now came the thought that reading a reference grammar extensively in the middle of a busy schedule that involves switching resources every 15-20 minutes might not be cognitively optimal. I'd be mentally exhausted from the grammar and its sentences, so when the time came to study from Assimil I wouldn't be able to absorb the new words that readily, still struggling with the known words as my mind was tired enough for Hebrew for that given day. I expect to balance this out now with doing the lengthy Assimil L'Hébrew lessons first, followed by the lighter Hebrew series (actually with an Indonesianpod101 lesson inserted in between).

Indonesian has some particles which are difficulty grasping, for example nih and sih:

- Aku lagi cari restoran yang memiliki ruang serbaguna nih.
- Oh... cari yang masakan apa?
- Sebenarnya sih masakan apa saja oke.

Boleh juga reminds me of 还可以. Or maybe 很不错！ ?

Funny how Guarani has a compulsory prepositioned indirect object for persons, like Spanish. Now that I studied more logical sentences with typical indirect/direct verbs, Guarani seems more accessible. Actually the nominal predicates are the most unindo-european ones. I expect to catch up and start forming sentences more easily.

[Expugnator]

I'm having trouble getting down to doing Duolingo Hebrew and Indonesian. I don't have the mental energy anymore, at least not when I have to do Duolingo Guaraní right before, which is tiresome enough. Clozemaster demands much less mental effort.

This morning I had a proper headstart. I came earlier from the gym, about 10 minutes which were enough for me to do the Clozemaster I usually do in the morning then read over 10 pages from non-fiction. Splitting those 20 pages into two is what actually makes my reading more productive. Last year I'd do that when going down for a snack and when leaving for picking up the girls, to finish on my commute back from lunch; this year I had been reading those 20 pages straight away after doing the Russian L-R, which is its normal position in the schedule, and it wasn't much productive. To add to that, the italian fiction (3 pages) and Spanish fiction (10 pages) come rightafter and even though they are a refresher from the non-fiction, they still get suboptimal due to the hard time I have concentrating on those 20 pages at once. So from now on I'll try to always do some pages from those 20 during some hidden moments.

I also worked on solving the issue with Clozemaster so I can at least work on the downloadable Fluency Track decks. I suspect my problem is specifically with the Greek deck. It happened both on Android phone and iPad. I had tried with Greek on both. This morning I tried with Indonesian on the iPad and had no issue. I hope it works because being able to work offline on the Indonesian deck will be a huge boost during the Carnival extended holidays. Unfortunately not all fluency tracks are available. I got Russian, Indonesian, Greek (which I better not try using), Norwegian and German, but Hebrew isn't available, nor are the Romance from Portuguese decks.

An example of two infinitive forms being used one right after the other in Estonian:

- Nii et sinu arvates ei pea ma muretsema?
- Mis siin muretseda?

A rough translation would go as:

- So in your opinion I need not to worry?
- What is here to worry?


Notice that even though the second sentence is a reply to the first one and roughly a nominal sentence itself, it still has to abide to the infinitive usage rules. The native speaker does it automatically in his reply, just like a Russian would automatically reply negative to a question with the noun in the genitive even when it was in the accusative in the question.

Looking for a new Norwegian series to watch. Suggestions? It doesn't have to be new, actually. I haven't watched much yet.

Today starts my new routine. No more commuting for lunch. At least 30 extra minutes of study. Less time for listening to the Italian audiobook. which means I won't split lunch time with a second audiobook source in a different language. Today I even had an important phone call and so the average 50 minutes of Italian audiobook were less than 15, but they might stick around 20-25 minutes, more when I happen to run some errands during lunchtime.

Not much action on the first day watching "30 shekels for hour". Some scenes are in Russian and for those I'm left with only the Hebrew subtitles. I usually understand more from the Russian audio, then look at the subtitles to see if they help with anything else I'd have missed.

Normal, transitive verbs are way more straightforward indeed. Just had another lesson where the only difference was in morphology, a minor one.

Now off for Carnival holidays, back into full study probably on Thursday.

[Expugnator]

Back from the extendest holiday, which is Carnival. Although we (as in the city where I live, not my home state) can now boast to have one of the largest carnival parties in Brazil, starting from almost zero some 10 years ago and owing no typical musical genre or subgenre of its own, I prefer to invariably drive to the countryside and get some rest.

For those 4 and a half days I had some reading lined up. No proper study was possible as there was very limited mobile connection and no computers.

I was expecting to give my Guarani a boost, but I forgot my newly purchased grammar book that I keep at the office. I am planning to open it on a calm day when I have plenty of time for considering some more textbook study, especially reviewing. A day that never seems to come: I wrote at the first page of this log that I plan to do this proper reviewing textbook study for some languages, but the books are just kept awaiting. Without my preferred grammar, I just skimmed through the official, newly released Gramática de la Lengua Guaraní. Its billingual format is rather distracting.

Another one of these review items could be Tsibahashvili's manual, in Russian. I never studied it in due time because my Georgian tends to be better than my Russian, and the resources I've used in Russian for learning Georgian tend to be very direct manuals. This one is rather like a graded reader followed by an interesting enhanced phrasebook. Now that I feel that reading through the Russian explanations is pretty much accessible, I bothered checking and realized that also the Georgian would be a solid review, almost like an Assimil. So I'm going to study it when time comes. It will be better to start from it than from simply reviewing one of my favorite grammar books.

Back into the holidays issue: I struggled to keep my Clozemaster streak, language by language. Even refreshing the Dashboard would take a good minute after several loading error messages. I'm still having trouble with working on the Fluency Track at the offline mode: whenever I connect I get an error and I can't open the app any more. I had this on my phone and had to reinstall the app. I was lucky enough to have a stable connection for a couple of minutes that allowed me to do so. Better luck with the iPad: I have played around a bit on Indonesian, Icelandic, German and Russian (got stuck at Norwegian, not loading or moving further) at the fluency track/offline mode and I could successfully sync it in to my weekly progress. It was awfully slow if we consider it's mostly text: it took over an hour to sync around 2k phrases and the sync would simply stop when the iPad went on stand by. I'd then have to click the top button and unlock the device so the sync would be resumed. Ok, I regret not doing more, as what I did all those days was less than 50% my score on a typical 8-5 weekday. Regarding the technical issues, I really hope the Clozemaster team pays attention to them this time, because so far they've ignored my messages and I don't really feel it's worth signing for yet another pro year when the time comes.

During holidays I've also dabbled in Hungarian. I took my copy of Le hongrois sans peine, only to realize yet again that there's way too much new vocabulary and not enough linguistical uniqueness (I mean, not now that I've studied Georgian, Estonian and Guarani) to justify jumping into the language now. Hungarian will have to wait. Its neighbors are equally appaling cultures and more accessible languages (I though I'd never say this of a Slavic language! - now I mean Czech, Slovak and Slovene obviously).

Another highlight of these holidays was finally finishing my current non-fiction read. It was over 600 pages and not an easy one. Now I'm aiming for something more straighforward even if equally enlightening.

Got home yesterday before noon. I could get some things done, though not as many as I had hoped. I resumed Duolingo but not Speakly.me . I also gathered enough Norwegian series which, alongside with those tilgjenglig utenfor Norge, will allow me to stop bothering for a good couple of years. I just have to be more attentive now so I can revert this exposure into linguistical competence. So far I'm splitting my attention with Clozemaster and glancing at the subtitles.

I'm getting used to Reading Norwegian extensively, even started to improve my speed.I still hope I can read a bit more intensively so as to consolidate some high-frequency words that I still don't know entirely well.

Regarding Norwegian series again, I'm done with Oslo Zoo. A nice series. It helps acquiring a less romanticized view of Norway, though writers and screenwriters all seem to exaggerate at their attempts of depicting Oslo as 20-million third world megalopolis. It all gets down to first world problems, really. I say this directed to other series and the vague perception I have from Norwegians seeing Oslo as just a big city that happens to be their capital and nothing else. It's a vague perception anyway, as I know very little about life in the country and I've never been there.

Next series is Mammon, and I hope it lives to its positive reviews. Then Heimebane. Having short series in Norway - in Europe in general - allows me to experience many more stories and landscapes than I'd do from watching an American series (which I do watch as dubbed - it could be worse, it could be telenovelas, which means that whenever I pick another telenovela language, such as Turkish, I should be prepared to see the same characters over and over again - which isn't bad per se languagewise, from my Estonian experience. Anyway, even Turkey, Mexico and Brazil are tayloring their production to international, Netflix-friendly audience these days).

Finished the first episode from 30 shekels for hour. It's still a struggle to follow the dialogs, but I'm absolutely satisfied with being exposed to authentic dialogs and colloquial expressions. Not to self: I use subtitletools to convert the subtitle from .ass into .srt and then the syedgakbar tool to translate the subtitle in a playable format (which you don't get when you paste the content of the .srt file as normal text elsewhere.

[Lawyer&Mom]

How can Latin possibly be opaque to you? You are a native speaker of a Romance language! I’m confused. (This is in reference to the Esperanto and Latin podcasts.)

[Expugnator]

How can Latin possibly be opaque to you? You are a native speaker of a Romance language! I’m confused. (This is in reference to the Esperanto and Latin podcasts.)

It was supposed to be so, but the reading knowledge of a handful of Romance languages doesn't translate directly into being able to understand Latin, not before basic study (how much study remains a mystery, but what I'm sure of is that Romanian is more transparent than Latin itself). Words have changed their meanings way too much and the basic daily vocabulary is simply too different.

=============================
I'm still not having the extra amount of time I'd expect after I've resumed having lunch at work. Yesterday I had a lot to do plus some random browsing. I managed to do Speakly.me, despite being tired. Much of the Clozemaster was left undone when I went home and so I had to finish it before that. Then I was too tired again to do Duolingo Indonesian or Hebrew, even though there was time. I have to find a way to put these back on my routine as they have been useful.

Instead of Duolingo I did some forum reading, and learned from reineke's log (there where we learn that everything we did, are doing or will ever do re language learning is wrong) that the best to do in order to consolidate A's and B1's vocabulary is to overlearn it through exposure to material that covers very high frequency words, such as cartoons. Exactly what I've ben doing for Russian with Luntik! With a plus on my side that it's not dubbed cartoon, but native one. Really, I it might sound as an acid remark but I really mean it, it does work. I was about to write about this overwatching and how I should do it for my A2ish languages such as Greek or maybe Hebrew, only to meet it at reineke's log.

Seeing that I'm about to master the sentences from HSK2 at Clozemaster, I decided to start doing HSK3 as text input as well (I do All sentences as Random first). I noticed that the corpus has very important words that I'm on the verge of knowing well; I know them passively pretty much ok and I although they're not promptly accessible I can recall them most of the times. This is a suitable level for doing Clozemaster text input. If all goes well, I'll have a boost in my vocabulary after that. Since I'm starting it before I'm done with HSK2, there will also be a motivating gamifying factor as my score will be higher when I get to HSK3-only. I'm getting so comfortable at swyping Mandarin on my phone that it has naturally become my option for extra Clozemaster for a given day while on the phone. When typing I prefer latin-based stronger languages, but when it comes to swyping over the phone it's actually more practical to type just the fewer syllables a typical Chinese word has than to worry about spelling in French, Norwegian and Spanish.

I started watching Mammon, but there's something wrong with the original audio. It's actually only background, no voice. I watched the first 10 mins in Russian voice over, but it seems too good of a series to waste on another target language. Getting the largest file doesn't always equal receiving the best-prepared one.

Plugging along through 30 shekels for hour and its linguistic diversity. I could swear one of the characters was speaking something that can only be Arabic, while the other one was replying in Hebrew. Consonant-wise and syntactically it sounds like Hebrew, but with different words of course.

Something annoying about Speakly.me is the number of sentences that are simple flashcard sentences: you have the English translation and you have to provide the Estonian one. The problem is that such sentences don't allow you to score for the day's streak, and they are actually the majority. So you spend most of the time not working on something that will keep your streak, nor will it challenge you enough to think in the L2 as the cloze-deletion exercises do.

Now I'm finally on track. Just did Duolingo Indonesian and Hebrew. Tiresome, a bit demotivating but useful. If it weren't so tiresome to work on each individual Duolingo lesson, with all those screens to flip through, I'd be working on a few more languages. The way it is now, I'd rather wait till I finish one of the current incomplete trees I'm working on, which are Guarani, Hebrew and Indonesian. I'm really looking forward to doing Greek.

Finally found time for reading this article on Estonian:

http://www.gloss.ee/2018/08/18/10-tipic ... go-yazyka/

Not much enlightening from it, though the final remark seems rather bold in trying to explain the entire distribution of infinitives into one rule-of-thumb:

Все, что относится к душе, т.е. возможности, воля, чувства, умения и желания, имеет —da инфинитив. Все, что относится к телу, то есть движение, активное действие, начало действие, обязанности, имеет инфинитив —ma.

That page seems to have really cool texts about Estonia, though I'd rather read them in Estonian itself. Not that I struggled to read this one in Russian, on the contrary, which was quite motivating.

I even found time to dabble in Lithuanian. Whenever I decide to start it, I won't have any trouble with resources in German or Russian. There are few textbooks overall (including the ones in English), but they might do the job. Surprisingly, though, the best resources seem to be for Latvian, except for Glossika Lithuanian and Beginner's Lithuanian which might resolve the game. I wouldn't mind transitioning from one into the other after a couple of years, whatever the order. I'm already attached enough to the region and I'd enjoy getting to know more about Estonia's neighbors.

[StringerBell]

Hungarian will have to wait. Its neighbors are equally appaling cultures and more accessible languages (I though I'd never say this of a Slavic language! - now I mean Czech, Slovak and Slovene obviously).

A typo that was perhaps a Freudian slip? I'm assuming you intended to write "appealing" and not "appalling"!

[Expugnator]

A true-typo really

[Lawyer&Mom]

Opaque is relative I guess. I mean Latin isn’t transparent, but it isn’t Russian, Chinese or Greek either. Skim a Latin text and even as a English speaker you (often) at least have an idea what it’s about.

[Expugnator]

Yeah having an idea of what is about is fine. What I mean to say is that I don't automatically read in Latin as I'd probably read any Romance language from Spain, Italy or France which I have never studied.

===========================
Another ACATT Weekend. I managed to catch up with the three days of holiday and do even more, finishing the week well-placed. How does it impact language-wise? Well, whatever I'm doing extra tends to be split through my stronger, desktop type languages, but I still think it's helping a lot. I've noticed that typing a non-pan-Romance-cognate word within a Romance language has become much faster. I may think of a pan-Romance cognate in a blink of eyes and not even start typing it because I'll have already judged it wrong and typed the authentic unique word in a blink of eyes. I've seen this happen within Spanish, French, Italian and Esperanto. It's also getting way better at German, though I don't tend to do more than my daily quota in German but rather in Norwegian.

As for the other languages, I am getting even better at typing Hebrew and recalling vocabulary from the most frequent level. Way to go, really. Even Indonesian starts to fall into place as I see the most common words often enough so as to stop confusing them. With Mandarin I've kept working on the HSK 3 level text input and I've noticed some improvement.

I also did Duolingo - all three languages - and Speakly.me throughout the weekend. I listened to the Italian podcast while preparing my snacks for the week as well. No non-fiction reading ahead during the weekend but I did some this morning. I gathered more resources which might include starting native materials in a language I'm still not using them for.

I'm getting better at reading Norwegian extensively each day. Not feeling like a chore, not even the sense of "oh I could be learning so much more if I were reading in parallel instead". Though I'll resume listening-reading next time because it's a task I enjoy doing.

I got Mammon with proper, original sound. I don't regret it. It's a really vocabulary-intense series, ideal for brushing up one's Norwegian, bringing it up to a higher level. I'll be doing double subtitles even, which I only find for Norwegian series that got spread worldwide. That will be my main parallel-reading resource while I'm reading books extensively.

Reading Georgian is also becoming smooth. I managed through really long paragraphs before checking translation, i.e. basically reading extensively, close to merely skimming. I used to do that when I wanted to speed up, but today I noticed I was actually understanding way enough when doing it.

Reading Russian is more and more productive. The novel is a real light read and this is favoring my Russian as I'm able to pay attention to individual unknown words which are fewer and fewer.

I apologize if my remark about reineke's log might have sounded off-putting and inconsiderate. I didn't know about his temporary ban when I wrote about his log. I really hope things fall into place for the better and that he keeps contributing

Hebrew Assimil old edition isn't that much of a chore any longer. Now I only write down one of the exercises, as the first translation one has a different format, a Q&A one, which makes it too long anyway. Trying to understand and answer the text interpretation questions mentally is another skill being trained, anyway.

Indonesianpod's lessons are really well-written when it comes to understanding both grammar an the involved sociolinguistics. The Upper-beginner level slows down on vocabulary in order to take a deeper look at structure. Thanks to it and Clozemaster, I have a much better grasp of syntax now, spreading into morphology (it's harder to pay attention to morphology details when syntax isn't round up yet).

The Hebrew series isn't fully productive yet. First because the longer dialog lines really lose me. Second because there's still too much Russian with Hebrew subtitles and only that. It might be good for my Russian, as I understand 50% as for now and the number might increase, but I'll make sure next series is nearly Hebrew-only.

So this is the day I started native materials for Indonesian. I went with a French series which is on Netflix. That way I can enjoy the original dialogs as well, It's become easier to follow French and so it's not like I'm studying two languages at the same moment from the same source. I've done this subtitle reading before for Estonian and it did work. So far, the Indonesian lines sound really authentic, much of them contain words I see all the time. Maybe following conversational Indonesian vocabulary won't be that hard.