Expug's 2019 Log - Reasonable Learning

[Expugnator]

This was a busy weekend so I did very little app-learning. I watched My Happy Family/ჩემი ბედნიერი ოჯახი . I mostly read the subtitles, but I noticed I could have follow it if the volume was louder. It's great to watch anything Georgian, that gives some insight on people's daily lives.

It seems my Norwegian audiobook comprenhension has improved a bit more. I listened to it on the background and could follow the story way more.

Er det bare meg eller på Side om Side later Celline som hun ikke forstår dansk?

I got hold of a copy of Hugo's Greek In Three Months. I like this format, it's one of the books that finally helped me leave the A levels in Norwegian. Maybe it's become a bit too basic for my Greek, but it's still a good review both in terms of vocabulary/conversation and basic grammar. I like it how this series manages to have both vivid, long dialogs and to-the-point grammar explanations (with translation and such) at one volume.

At the Guarani Whatsapp group, the helpful native started giving actual classes, through sharing chapters from the book, recording audio on his own and opening up for us to answer the exercises. I wonder how this instruction model might come along, I'm really looking forward to know. Today once again I had to be out for longer than expected so I didn't go as far as Hebrew, Indonesian and Guarani, but I'm looking forward to following those WP-lessons regularly.

[Expugnator]

I'm finally back to reading in my stronger languages and I hope I can get all the tasks done for today. I've finished my current novel in Spanish, the short, long-titled Lilith, el Juicio de la Gorgona y la Sonrisa de Salgari, by Juan Antonio Cotrina. I like it a lot, it's a genre I really appreciate, but its sequels aren't proper books but shorter chronicles inserted into antology books which I'm not really willing to go after one by one.

So now non-fiction for a change. I'm going to finally read Dinero y Conciencia - a quién sirve mi dinero. Next one by this author will be in Catalan.

I can't believe I'm following the lessons at Langenscheidts Hebräisch without great struggle. I thought I'd have to drop it like other resources.

A doubt: are all Hebrew verbal forms in the past stressed in the first but last syllable? Most of them? Can I take it as a safe path?

Assimil Hebrew old edition starts to get harder already at lesson 4. The second part of exercises has no transcriptions or dots, except for the missing word. I'm used to Clozemaster anyway.

Ok, I'm back into the game. I finished the schedule activities about 40 minutes before leaving. Not much time for app learning, let alone other tasks, but at least I know that it fits my time. I'll probably have to restructure my entire routine if I want to achieve more and better, though.

[Expugnator]

At Side om Side, I'm not that much happy that Christian Kopperud er tilbake.

Taiwan must indeed be a big island to have railway lines. Probably more railway lines than Brazil, if that means anything.

It's not wise to do my extensive reading 30 minutes before having my snack. I'm usually hungry and fail to concentrate for long. I had better watch the series in Georgian and then have the snack, and get to reading after eating.

Just bought the tickets for São Paulo for the date reserved for a Polyglot Congress which will be in September. The first editions took place in Fortaleza which is far away in the Northeast and expensive. This Congress is just starting so it isn't that famous yet, but I'm looking forward to it. As the Polyglot Gatherings keep taking place in Bratislava, I'll probably only consider going there once I'm B2-ish fluent in Czech and transfering /activating it into Slovak.

I wonder how efficient the Bus Rapid Transit system in Jakarta is? Here in town we were also victims of the bus system being swallowed down us as an excuse that the subway, which we actually need, would have been too expensive. And we are a much smaller metro area.

I'm forcing myself to do both types of exercises by hand at Assimil Hébreu old edtion. Besides orthography, I'm also training

Another day when I had enough time but then got distracted. I'm working on the causes but also planning some changes. For the record, it might not be necessary to watch 20 minutes of dubbed series in Georgian any longer. I might still watch the same series but do 10 minutes in another language instead. How practical that would be remains yet to be seen - as I'm watching 4 series in two languages, I could add 2 more languages and just make it 1 series - 1 language. Only that I'd have to find 10 extra minutes for that instead of saving 10 minutes as was the plan. I don't discard 10 of these minutes being with subtitles in Indonesian while keeping the English audio.

So I started following the lesson and answering the exercises at the Guarani WP group. My first WP course. Let's see how it came along. Took me a while to do the translation/version exercises, which was cut from app learning.

[iguanamon]

...Just bought the tickets for São Paulo for the date reserved for a Polyglot Congress which will be in September. The first editions took place in Fortaleza which is far away in the Northeast and expensive. This Congress is just starting so it isn't that famous yet, but I'm looking forward to it. ...

Cadê o link à conferência, Expug? Eu buscava mas não consegui encontrá-lo. Pode ser uma boa razão pra mim voltar ao Brasil este ano!

[Expugnator]

...Just bought the tickets for São Paulo for the date reserved for a Polyglot Congress which will be in September. The first editions took place in Fortaleza which is far away in the Northeast and expensive. This Congress is just starting so it isn't that famous yet, but I'm looking forward to it. ...

Cadê o link da conferência, Expug? Eu procurei mas não consegui encontrá-lo. Pode ser uma boa razão pra eu voltar ao Brasil este ano!

Seria uma boa, amigo! O site deste ano ainda não está disponível, mas em poliglotar.com você consegue ver um pouco de como foi ano passado (foi em Fortaleza, mas este ano será em São Paulo).

A data já está confirmada, 21 e 22 de setembro, no fim de semana. Anima aí!

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Watching Side om Side has been pretty intensive-learning. I've paused and looked up many new words, especially now with Christian Kopperud.

I'm trying to get back on track. Today I managed to do almost all of the Georgian reading before leaving for lunch, even though I arrived some minutes later thanks to a class in the morning.

Not the first day I'm trying reversing extensive reading x Georgian watching, as I am way ahead of the past days. Before I forget: I can watch the very same series in CW as well, so I can make it 1 series in German 10 minutes, 1 in Russian 10 minutes and 1 in Georgian 10 minutes. As they are in 4, I'd use the 10 minutes I'd save from Georgian daily for watching the remaining one in English with Indonesian subtitles. Sounds like a plan. I'd also assure all series progressed evenly. As a matter of fact, though, I'm way more compelled to binge-watch some 5 episodes the weekend on Netflix so as to catch up, but binge-watching and I are like water and oil. After all, I can hardly do all the Clozemaster set during the weekend.

Finally back at reading Estonian more intensively, pasting the text and looking up individual words instead of just reading in parallel.

Modern Greek listening-reading remains productive. It could be even more so if the paragraphs weren't so long, which makes it harder to concentrate and to folow the text within the page.

Finally managed to finish tasks 2 hours before going home. If I keep that rhythm that will probably mean I'll manage to make progress in other tasks as well. Moreover, the current studies have been quite productive also in the newer languages (M. Greek, Hebrew, Indonesian and Guaraní). In February things get a bit busier, so I might have to evaluate the process again.

[Expugnator]

The period of the day where I tend to get stuck the most in my studied coincides with the resources I've been using for the longest, ininterruptly: the German novel, the Taiwanese series, the Russian cartoon Luntik and the translated novel that I find utterly boring. Usually I renew my interest when I'm done with a resource and replace it with a new one, but within this timeframe I've been using the same resources for several months.

Today I only listened to the Hebrew text and read in German. I was risking getting even more distracted. Another environmental tragedy took place in my surroundings, near a renowned Modern Art institute.

At Indonesian, I'm not making heavy use of word-by-word translation for the dialogs. That means I'm starting to get the hang of grammar.

[Expugnator]

The weekend wasn't of great learning but it was way above average. I could spend more time home and I even went to the club and went to work for a couple of hours on Saturday. On Sunday we had a barbecue at home. In short, staying longer at home allowed me to take good care of Clozemaster in both days, besides gathering some films to watch.

I had one breakthtrough: I noticed I can do Catalan text input. That is strong evidence of the efficiency of Clozemaster. Other than Clozemaster I've only had a couple of lessons from TY and Assimil years ago. Just through forcing myself to work more and more on Catalan - it's the one I lile to review the most in multiple choice mode once I've been through all languages already on a given day - I managed to actually start activating it. There's a lot of non-cognate Catalan vocabulary to be learned, but I seem to be familiar with most phonetic changes in relation to its surrounding languages. Catalan has vowel reduction just like Portuguese, and just like Portuguese a final -i takes the stress by default, which contrasts to the Spanish translation Clozemaster's deck uses. That makes even more conscious and attentive while writing, which on its turn enhances my understanding and memorization of the sentences I study.

I wonder if I shouldn't turn Catalan into a properly studied language, slowly, like I did with Italian and Spanish. I think I'm being hard-working enough with my opaque languages to allow myself to finally harvest some low-hanging fruits this year. I didn't work on any new transparent language last year, for the record.

It might be a bit too early but I also feel like going all text inout for German, which would have been another breakthrough. It was also last weekend that I started to consider that. I've been text-input only for Norwegian for several months, more due to the fact I've had all sentences as ready already, and it's not actually easy yet to answer. So why not try it with the entire German vocabulary, which might be easier anyway? Currently I'm doing text input only for the earlier levels. Well, let's see if I can give it a try today, if things go as planned and I have enough time.

Mandarin listening-reading keeps improving slowly. Today I could decypher a couple more sentences before reading the text or the translation.

I have so much work to do these days, in the form of non-urgent tasks, that I've resumed listening to Grand Bien Vous Fasse. Still unsure whether I will actually follow the content. Language-wise it's pretty much transparent, but these are all interesting subjects I'd really like to understand. Moreover, the playlist is very good and I keep mining songs to listen to. Which is better than mining sentences to put into Anki.

If this amount of work turns into a trend and I end up listening to that podcast more and more, I might actually do my going-home audiobook slot in another language, as I'll have heard enough French for each day already.

[Expugnator]

I was hopíng for a sound headstart in the morning but power went off and I lost half an hour between waiting for it to be restored and just having to set the computer and the applications running again. Then when walking to the parking garage before lunch I was addressed by a marketing surveyor and had to answer a 15-min survey from a bank. Tomorrow is expected to be even busier so I'm really looking forward to getting everything on track today. Guarani Lesson 03 has been shared by our tutor, which means I have an extra task in the evening. Fortunately there's much less work today.

So, today was the day to try my strategy of watching the dubbed series in Georgian first, before having my snack, while I was still hungry, and doing the extensive read part afterwards. It worked, as I spent less than 30 minutes on extensive reading. I did go to the reading part more tired and felt a bit dizzy, so it's something to keep an eye on.

The final texts at Langenscheidt Hebräisch got too hard. Vocabulary-wise mostly; grammar-wise it's a rather well-paced textbook. Fortunately there are only four lessons left so I'm going to finish this one for once, not putting yet another textbook on hold.

Another change on Clozemaster: just tried text-input only for German, and it's useful, productive and not so strenuous. I was using text input only for the earlier levels, and that brought me into the same issue as Russian and Esperanto: I keep seeing the same words over and over again, as the decks are so large that I have thousands of sentences that cover only the 100-500 most common words. It's way beyond overlearning and rather counterproductive.

[Lawyer&Mom]

I wish Clozemaster had a setting where you could limit the number of sentences for a given word. Something like 10 would be way better than hundreds and hundreds of sentences per word in the Russian set.

[Expugnator]

I wish Clozemaster had a setting where you could limit the number of sentences for a given word. Something like 10 would be way better than hundreds and hundreds of sentences per word in the Russian set.

I think they've erred on the side of excess with those hundreds of thousands of sentences, among which there is so much repetition. Either sheer repetition (mostly in the Russian deck) or just too close sentences. I have the impression, which I didn't bother checking, that when I do a subdeck that has 5000 sentences on the 100-500 most common words I'm actually just seeing the same 50ish words again.

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Now that I have both German and Catalan on text-input only, and I prefer to do Roman-script languages at the computer, I couldn't do much of a headstart to Clozemaster on my phone, as I prefer not to do so many dabbling-only languages before the active on-activation ones.

Today I learned that crutch in Papiamento is krùk, alternate spelling krek. Probably from Dutch. I'll be watching an interview as background video, for a change.

Just had the best time with the Estonian soap opera. There were barely any difficult sentences to process. I remember when I reached that stage with German, and it was quite encouraging, even if I kept double subtitles.

Just for a change, Mandarin listening-reading has also become more productive. My guess is that most of the long, paragraph-initial descriptions and over and there is more action, but I also saw myself being able to follow some long periods. Maybe a mix from both: having fewer long periods leaves me more relaxed to tackle the existing ones, which on its turn enhances my ability of dealing with them, flipping from L1 text and translation while still following the audio.

Never heard this song before, thanks to Side om Side's season 6 finale:



So, Side om Side is over again. Not sure when a new season is comming. This one was a bit more on the fun side. Also productive as I watched most episodes intensively. Now I'm going to watch Parterapi, maybe it puts me in the mood for starting the Argentinian En terapía in the end. I do have many
other tilgjenlige i utlandet series from NRK. though.

On French, I learned the synonym ristourne for rabais.

The interruption in the afternoon for a meeeting wasn't so great but involved some catching up and speeding up. I brought my stay-at-home tablet, which means I'll be able to benefit from the TTS languages that only exist on iOs when doing my Clozemaster in the late afternoon.

The Guarani lessons at the WP group basically follow the grammar-translation method, from the book El Guaraní a su alcance. I have two words in defense of this method: as much as one might complain that you learn to speak in a dry, non-conversational way, look a the other side: it's much more fun to learn grammar in graded lessons than to simply read a grammar book cover to cover. So I learned to incorporate grammar-translation textbooks in my routine and avoid existential discussions on that matter.

Finished the first volume of the Blackout trilogy by Andreas Eschbach. It got boring midway but picked up again. I'm still rather annoyed by abridged audiobooks, but that is German.

To my surprise, Firefox has the Icelandic TTS which lacks in either Chrome, Android or iOs. Yes to wanderlust.

The defective verbal forms for 'say' in the past and future in Hebrew remind me strongly of Georgian. You have one root that only exists in the present, another one being used in the future.