Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

Continue or start your personal language log here, including logs for challenge participants
User avatar
Expugnator
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1728
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 9:45 pm
Location: Belo Horizonte
Languages: Native Brazilian Portuguese#advanced fluency English, French, Papiamento#basic fluency Italian, Norwegian#intermediate Spanish, German, Georgian and Chinese (Mandarin)#basic Russian, Estonian, Greek (Modern)#just started Indonesian, Hebrew (Modern), Guarani
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9931
x 3589

Re: Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

Postby Expugnator » Fri Sep 14, 2018 8:22 pm

I spent most of the day feeling drowsy, after two nights of not sleeping well enough and staying shorter in bed after working in the evening. Now my studies are suboptimal even if I have plenty of time.

I'm getting used to the format of the lessons in Hebrewpod. Also, the supplementary sentences don't feel that hard anymore. I only feel that the dialogs introduce too much, varied vocabulary, without consolidating the previous ones first. Or at least not in a rhythm that I can follow smoothly.

It's a similar issue that I'm facing with Indonesian, though my Hebrew is slightly more advanced. I think it's not that I'm having issues with these languages now. It's just that I have increased my self-awareness. I have a better idea of my gaps in the A1 level when approaching the A2 one. Now it's a matter of find better strategies to deal with them. I've managed so far with Estonian thanks to a good source of native material. As for Hebrew, I have better textbook sources and still no comparable native material. In the case of Indonesian, I'm short of both, what I have isn't enough.

Speakly has fixed the bugs and now it works for me on Firefox. That opens new horizons. I have to get used to it, as the app is tolerant with diacritics, and the web version is actually typo-zero.

Today I finished all my desk study so early that it was before my first snack in the middle of the afternoon. Now I have no excuses not become bolder with my learning strategies. I only have to organize the app-learning mess and set some priorities.
1 x
Corrections welcome for any language.

User avatar
Expugnator
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1728
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 9:45 pm
Location: Belo Horizonte
Languages: Native Brazilian Portuguese#advanced fluency English, French, Papiamento#basic fluency Italian, Norwegian#intermediate Spanish, German, Georgian and Chinese (Mandarin)#basic Russian, Estonian, Greek (Modern)#just started Indonesian, Hebrew (Modern), Guarani
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9931
x 3589

Re: Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

Postby Expugnator » Mon Sep 17, 2018 8:50 pm

Yet another one of those weekends when time seems to have stopped. I was bored to the point I didn't feel like doing app-learning on Saturday. On Sunday, though, I did the full range. I also read ahead from FSI's book which is my current non-fiction read. Then I tried to catch up with the forum, as I mostly read the logs during the week. Some of the discussions, as well as the one at Xmmm's log, put me even further on the whine mode. I have more than enough time for my musings and I should be doing much better now. The opportunity cost is huge: had I kept studying for another public job instead of studying language, I'd have passed an exam for a much more solid career (except that no superb one showed up in the past years nor do I enjoy studying law and accountability). Or rather, I could have learned to program and develop for the mobile, as there can't be entrepreneurship without computing these days.

On the other hand, I still think I should do more output in my TLs as well as focus on Mandarin and Norwegian while finally starting my dream projects. First-world problems for a third-world inhabitant. I'm fully aware of my situation of privilege and I feel upset with myself both for not giving back and for not living fully up to my potential.

As a follow-up and almost as a coincidence (I tend not to believe these), a good friend who is an enthousiast about my language skills asked me if I'm not planning on emigrating, given the new developments in the national context. He said how I would imagine myself in a really international context, and I replied with what I read in the latest threads, that languages aren't an asset but an accessory, and I don't have a career on my own to which they could work.

Herr der Diebe is proving a much lighter, enlightening, refreshing and instructive read than any of the Tintenherz. Currently I understand much more from it than from the Norwegian fantasy novel I'm reading. I could even start to suspect that my German is surpassing my Norwegian, but it's far from that, especially when active skills come into play. I should also credit comprehensible input from dubbed series+ double subtitles for the good results with German. It's starting to feel natural as I feel tempted to simply ignore either subtitle.

Russian might be one CEFR level or two behind German, but it's not bad. I'm doing less for the language but it's all n+1 input: the cartoon Лунтик and Marc Lévy's listened-read novel. Total time is less than some years ago, but it seems more effective.

Thank you Parlons Hébreu! Now I finally have an idea of the binianim I can build on. I recommend reading a book from the series Parlons to anyone who is stuck on a specific grammar feature or wants to have an overview before going for the detail, or finds themselves surrounded with morphology much before seeing the big picture (such was the case with Hebrew, I was introduced to the conjugation patterns when I was still clueless as to their meanings and roles).

Speakly.me has some verbal paradigms for Estonian which show up whenever you make a mistake on a verb form (guilty). Among these, they have a "hakkama" tulevik. People who have studied in the family know that there is no morphological or periphrastic future. I haven't seen this "hakkama" future before, at least not systematically. I can only remember it as "it starts to rain", but even then the "future" doesn't come at face-value. I'd view it as inchoative aspect at most.
0 x
Corrections welcome for any language.

User avatar
Expugnator
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1728
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 9:45 pm
Location: Belo Horizonte
Languages: Native Brazilian Portuguese#advanced fluency English, French, Papiamento#basic fluency Italian, Norwegian#intermediate Spanish, German, Georgian and Chinese (Mandarin)#basic Russian, Estonian, Greek (Modern)#just started Indonesian, Hebrew (Modern), Guarani
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9931
x 3589

Re: Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

Postby Expugnator » Tue Sep 18, 2018 8:31 pm

Today I couldn't get hold of the Portuguese subtitles for the dubbed seris in German, so I had to get by with only the German one. Then I noticed that when the subtitle was too long, I could follow the story anyway through just the dubbed audio. Very few unknown words in the whole. That's encouraging.

Similarities between Hebrew and Georgian keep coming up, not to my surprise. The passive voice is actually a different verb belonging to a different paradigm (I tend to think of conjugations only when it comes to Romance languages and their thematic vowels).

Speaking of the passive voice (pun unintented), Brazilian Portuguese is heading towards a direction similar to Mandarin. We can have a subject followed by the verbal form in an intransitive form, and that is enough. Whether it performs or undergoes the action, it's all left to context. No unnecessary reflexive pronouns or periphrastic passive voices or dumb objects.

So, for example, when saying "The meeting was cancelled", instead of the expected "A reunião foi cancelada", just "A reunião cancelou" will do the job. It's not that "A reunião" is the doer, it's rather a topic.

I've totally forgotten which novel I had lined up next for Spanish. I'm going to read Carlos Ruiz Zafón's next book in Modern Greek, so it doesn't count for my daily Spanish quota, even if I'm going to use the original in parallel. I have one non-fiction planned, which I have yet to buy, but I was sure there was another fiction, which didn't belong to any of the usual offenders (like Vargas Llosa). Ok, found another non-fiction option.

I had more time than usual today, but spent it on app-learning. It's not productive because it's more exhausting. I could have consumed more content in my TLs, or did output.
0 x
Corrections welcome for any language.

User avatar
Expugnator
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1728
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 9:45 pm
Location: Belo Horizonte
Languages: Native Brazilian Portuguese#advanced fluency English, French, Papiamento#basic fluency Italian, Norwegian#intermediate Spanish, German, Georgian and Chinese (Mandarin)#basic Russian, Estonian, Greek (Modern)#just started Indonesian, Hebrew (Modern), Guarani
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9931
x 3589

Re: Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

Postby Expugnator » Wed Sep 19, 2018 8:44 pm

Today I finished listening to one of the best episodes from the Argentinian podcast, one that summarizes the author's insights. I'd like to share it to a friend and to my sister, but I'm not sure thye'll follow Spanish well enough on a complex subject. I might end up transcribing/translating it. You know when you are a language nerd when you feel so disappointed that you can't share that cool content in a TL with your close people.

A more experienced Hebrew learner shared the site Pealim with Hebrew paradigms, like this one for the verb לְדַבֵּר : ledaber

Today's Papiamento news articles were quite useful with daily life vocabulary, in spite of being...news articles. Papiamento is pretty much uniform in terms of register, and this does help the case.

When I started studying Mandarin, the amount of synonims and different roots with similar meanings, words related in meaning derived from different roots felt overwhelming. But then, who am I to complain, as we have standard Portuguese words, then some words formed on vulgar or classical Latin roots, then other more technical ones formed on hybrid Greek-Latin roots...Anyway, now I'm at one point in Mandarin where I start to intuitively detect those derived words, sometimes based on only one of their syllables, and either on sound or on the character. I haven't studied radicals properly, so it's a rather intuitive knowledge, but I'm glad I've seen some progress.
1 x
Corrections welcome for any language.

User avatar
Expugnator
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1728
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 9:45 pm
Location: Belo Horizonte
Languages: Native Brazilian Portuguese#advanced fluency English, French, Papiamento#basic fluency Italian, Norwegian#intermediate Spanish, German, Georgian and Chinese (Mandarin)#basic Russian, Estonian, Greek (Modern)#just started Indonesian, Hebrew (Modern), Guarani
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9931
x 3589

Re: Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

Postby Expugnator » Thu Sep 20, 2018 8:46 pm

Yesterday once again I did only the first set of Clozemaster. No time for the remaining text input for my B1ish languages. I went out in the evening, which is great because it's something I haven't done for a long while. I had few hours of sleep as a result, so I went to the gym after dropping the girls at the kindergarten, which means fewer hours of study today. That's still better than not exercising and then feeling sleepy and less productive.

I "found" another Spanish non-fiction book which I want to read next, but I still can't think of a fiction one. Actually I'm more tempted to read in Catalan. I'm looking forward to contemporary, urban fiction in Spanish so as to optimize my vocabulary learning.

Finished Manon des sources, and with that the story. A great work. Now I'm watching Le Comte de Monte Cristo both epoques. I remember watching such film in the 90's, but it might as well just be a different version.

I'm becoming more confident about my Indonesian. A vocabulary boost now would bring it to an A2ish level, probably higher than Hebrew, and allow for me to start reading scattered sentences. I still don't know which resource to use for that, though. I wonder if I shouldn't keep repeating the first Clozemaster as well, just so as to reinforce the really essential words.

It's a trend that my Indonesian surpasses Hebrew. I started both at around the same time (ok, I still can handle two beginning opaque languages at the same time, and I won't do 3-4 again, promise), with 2x more time dedicated to Hebrew, but given the lack of a phonetic alphabet vocabulary I'm likely to retain much more Indonesian vocabulary than Hebrew in the future.

Has anyone tried Mindmeister ? I'm thinking about using it with a friend on some projects.

A little less done today, as I didn't have over an hour for SRS. I focused on the early Clozemaster and on Speakly.me . Having started later than usual, I did procrastine a bit more in the afternoon by reading some newsstories, talking to colleagues in real life and online. That's not necessarily a bad thing, because on the other hand I didn't feel overwhelmed as I have felt the past days when everything used to fit into 5 hours.
0 x
Corrections welcome for any language.

User avatar
rdearman
Site Admin
Posts: 7231
Joined: Thu May 14, 2015 4:18 pm
Location: United Kingdom
Languages: English (N)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1836
x 23123
Contact:

Re: Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

Postby rdearman » Thu Sep 20, 2018 9:15 pm

I used that tool briefly with Google Drive to open some Freemind files. I have used Freemind which is an opensource mind mapping software which has been around for decades. http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/in ... /Main_Page

I prefer Freemind, but might just be cause I've used it for so long.
1 x
: 0 / 150 Read 150 books in 2024

My YouTube Channel
The Autodidactic Podcast
My Author's Newsletter

I post on this forum with mobile devices, so excuse short msgs and typos.

MattNeilsen
Orange Belt
Posts: 145
Joined: Sat Aug 11, 2018 9:32 pm
Location: Sunnyvale, CA
Languages: English (N)
Hebrew (studying - beginner)
Spanish (passive, beginner)
Mandarin (mostly forgotten)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... php?t=8869
x 183

Re: Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

Postby MattNeilsen » Fri Sep 21, 2018 12:22 am

I might have missed this, but out of curiosity, how much do you focus on Review sentences versus New sentences in Clozemaster? I've noticed some of the top scorers have a ton of mastered sentences but (relatively) fewer total sentences played, whereas you seem to focus more on new sentences in your various languages.

My thought was to focus on getting through the first 1,000 Words as quickly as I can while consolidating reviews along the way. I'm more interested in inundating myself with vocab at this point, though I do find every 3-4 days I'll spend a larger proportion of my time on reviews to let the new sentences "settle" in my brain, so to speak.
1 x
Hebrew
Pimsleur Level 2: 21 / 30
FSI : 3 / 40
Clozemaster 101-500 Most Common Words: 1600 / 4825
Srugim Season 3: 1 / 15
1100 hours of study/input : 160 / 1100

User avatar
Expugnator
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1728
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 9:45 pm
Location: Belo Horizonte
Languages: Native Brazilian Portuguese#advanced fluency English, French, Papiamento#basic fluency Italian, Norwegian#intermediate Spanish, German, Georgian and Chinese (Mandarin)#basic Russian, Estonian, Greek (Modern)#just started Indonesian, Hebrew (Modern), Guarani
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9931
x 3589

Re: Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

Postby Expugnator » Fri Sep 21, 2018 7:51 pm

My focus depends on where I am for each language. For brand new languages, I don't envisage any text input. I only start text input, from the earlier rounds, when I'm comfortable with answering at the Multiple Choice - Random mode. It doesn't mean I have to go through a specific % of a given deck, as there are huge decks such as a Russian one. I just have to start feeling that whatever sentence comes up will be easy enough for me answer at the multiple choice mode and almost always get it right, no wild guessing. That's probably a B1 stage. That's when I start doing the earlier decks as multiple choices. People usually neglect the multiple choice mode but when you are a beginner you probably won't even recognize which part of speech a word belongs to just from comparing it with the translation, at least not for opaque languages.


==========================
Part of my low productivity these days can be explained by the worsening of my sight as the astigmatism reverts back, 7 months after the surgery. I have another surgery to be scheduled,a sort of a touch-up and the last attempt, probably. After that, if all goes well, it's either getting rid of classes at least until the forties or reverting back to them fully.

FSI's book on how to write language courses has some appendixes that are excerpts from courses. The past two days I've been reading a Swahili Synopsis - which is how they call a grammar reference with just the necessary for beginners. At one point I noticed it was irrelevant to my current goal and so I skimmed most of it, just trying to pick some fun facts about the language. Noun classes are definitely no fun fact! I wonder if knowing Swahili would help with an afro-asiatic language as well, in addition to the other way round (Arabic helping with Swahili given the number of loan words). I say this because those noun classes and their derivational processes vaguely remind me of Hebrew. It's like having a similarly complex derivational process, with suffixes, infixes and umlauts, but with vowels fully marked on a transparent orthography. Still, too many language classes. I will get to Swahili eventually, but no way I'm diving into a drill-based frenzy on those noun classes. I'll just let the most important ones sink in, like I did with Mandarin classifiers (and now it occurs to me that the mere fact of informing oneself on a less-studied language family, and in this case even by hyperpoliglot standards, allows for so many rich insights and unexpected connections).

I wonder if the 10 Commandments are translated in the future in Portuguese because back in Biblical times they'd already use the imperative most often to render the imperative. Some other languages use the past as imperative, like Georgian.

On a cultural note, I've heard it's customary to congratulate the entire family in birthdays and weddings in Israel. I can see hints of this habit in a baby's first birthday, when lately the parents are congratulated, not only because the baby doesn't know what's going on yet but mostly to acknowledge the job done of successfully going through the most difficult year for the parents. On weddings the parents get congratulated usually but not the siblings.

Today I got derailed a lot in the morning and I so I renounced my strategy of alternating the Clozemaster rounds so as not to put too much pressure and struggle in the end. I regret it once again. I'm a bit sleepy, having forced my sight a bit more, and I don't feel like going on rounds for 18 languages plus the other two apps.
1 x
Corrections welcome for any language.

User avatar
Expugnator
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1728
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 9:45 pm
Location: Belo Horizonte
Languages: Native Brazilian Portuguese#advanced fluency English, French, Papiamento#basic fluency Italian, Norwegian#intermediate Spanish, German, Georgian and Chinese (Mandarin)#basic Russian, Estonian, Greek (Modern)#just started Indonesian, Hebrew (Modern), Guarani
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9931
x 3589

Re: Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

Postby Expugnator » Mon Sep 24, 2018 8:43 pm

On Friday, we had a guest in the evening who told us about his trip to Colombia through Panama and how he got to help Haitians both in Panama and in São Paulo. The first Haitian didn't speak English and so a Canadian served as a bridge by talking to him in English and to her in French. Then in São Paulo he helped another one with very basic English skills. That got me thinking about how I can do this basic assistance in almost all of my languages but the newest Modern Hebrew and Indonesian, which means I have much fewer places in the world to get lost now, and that felt encouraging. I don't speak Haitian Creole like our good friend iguanamon, but I believe I would have been able to help them with French as well.

I came up with a strategy for memorizing when to use the infinitives in Estonian, after making a mistake on the app: I'm going to think of one as being the normal infinitive and the other one as the -ing infinitive in English. That way I might forget the actual form of either one of the Estonian infinitives but still get them right in terms of usage.

At the FSI Adapting and Writing Language Lessons book, there are several synopses on Bantu languages that I at least skim through. It's striking how complex they are, how much fun lies ahead, how being in touch with languages such as Georgian, Mandarin and Hebrew might help deal with their grammar and how absolute nonsense any theory based on cultural evolutionism sounds at these contexts (as in any other contexts, but here the absurd leaps to one's eyes). It's one of the moments that I'm happy I study languages from diverse places.
3 x
Corrections welcome for any language.

User avatar
Expugnator
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1728
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 9:45 pm
Location: Belo Horizonte
Languages: Native Brazilian Portuguese#advanced fluency English, French, Papiamento#basic fluency Italian, Norwegian#intermediate Spanish, German, Georgian and Chinese (Mandarin)#basic Russian, Estonian, Greek (Modern)#just started Indonesian, Hebrew (Modern), Guarani
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9931
x 3589

Re: Expug's 2018 Log - Sustainable Dabbling

Postby Expugnator » Tue Sep 25, 2018 8:35 pm

Yesterday I finished the second volume in Katherine Pancol's second tirlogy on the Cortès saga. I haven't bought the third one yet, and I'll be taking a break from it and listening to more Houellebecq which I already have. So, Les particules élémentaires it is.

Just joined a Whatsapp group created by a Brazilian with Swahili native speakers. Indonesian, Guarani and Swahili are now the most wasted languages in the sense that I could be chatting with native speakers for long if I were the person that learns merely through chatting.

It's not a total waste. Today I went much further away from my comfort zone to chat a bit in Estonian with a native speaker. I'm much better now than last time I saw her at the room. I can make some sentences almost spontaneously, almost natural-sounding.
1 x
Corrections welcome for any language.


Return to “Language logs”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests