Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

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StringerBell
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Re: Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

Postby StringerBell » Sun Oct 21, 2018 11:51 pm

I discovered this really fascinating doctor of neuroscience, Dr. Robert Bjork (How else? Mentioned by my buddy, Steve Kaufman.) He focuses much of his research on learning. He doesn't specifically apply his findings to language learning, but it's very easy to see how it would apply. Watching his videos changed some of my preconceptions of language learning and caused me to rethink some things. One of these being Anki. I'm going to include some of the videos I found particularly relevant, but there are others on YT if you are interested.

EDIT: Don't be afraid, each video is only ~5 minutes. Each was cut from one long video into bite-sized morsels.

I think the title says it all (and interestingly, it's not even about language learning). This video made me question the efficacy of doing all input with zero output, and was why I decided to start talking at least a little bit every week in Polish even before finishing my 1100 challenge.


Luckily I was already kind of interleaving my studies before watching this video, but it helped me to realize that it's probably better to work on many skills in rotation rather than just one at a time until I reach "mastery" and then focusing on another.


This video helped me to appreciate that slow learning is better for long term results.


And lastly, this is the video that made me reconsider using Anki. I still don't like flashcards for language learning, but I think that I can find a way to use them as a complement to my routine in a way I don't totally hate. The thing is, reading and listening and speaking is a viable way to ensure that you repeatedly encounter words over time. Anki just ensures that you encounter specific words at specific intervals.
Last edited by StringerBell on Tue Oct 23, 2018 10:13 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Chmury
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Re: Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

Postby Chmury » Mon Oct 22, 2018 12:39 am

StringerBell wrote:However, I am saying the words on the cards out loud, including all the sample sentences I've added (which I do for every card). I'm treating this as a simultaneous memory practice and pronunciation practice. Maybe that's how everybody does Anki and I should have known that to begin with? Compared to how I was doing Anki initially (going through the cards silently) this is working much better. I also think saying all the words out loud is better for my memory. When I don't get words/phrases correct, I say them out loud 5-10 times. I also don't let myself move away from the deck until I've come up with the right answer for each card at least once that session. I will say more about Anki later.


Haha I’m not sure if everyone does it that way, but I know I certainly do and find reading everything out to be very effective.

Just wanted to drop by and say your log is fantastic! Really enjoying it and lots of great info and updates, and your dedication and progress in Polish is really impressive. Awesome work. Polish is a language I’ll be returning to at some point in the future. Do you listen to much Polish music? They’ve got such a strong music scene over there and are putting out some really great stuff. One of my favourites of late is Bitamina. Beautiful voice and some really unique backing sounds. Nie Wiem Jak from her album Kawalerka is stunning, so moving. She’s got a gift for melodies that Bitamina.

Also in regards to finding books in your target languages, have you tried Book Depository? Free international shipping, good prices, and a decent range of books in foreign languages. Just ordered the first Harry Potter in German from them for $20 Australian dollars. Cheaper than buying it here. Just do an advanced search and in the bottom right corner, choose the language you’re looking for.

Anyways keep up the awesome work StringerBell, really enjoying following your progress and the discoveries you make in Polish.

By the way, are you mainly learning Polish for your kids? Are you living over in Poland? Just curious. The reasons for learning a language are endless and each I find interesting.
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cjareck
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Re: Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

Postby cjareck » Mon Oct 22, 2018 4:53 am

StringerBell wrote:In Polish, you say: "jest ptak" (it's a bird) or "jest ryba" (it's a fish) to mean the thing is up high or it's down low. cjareck, did I get that right?

I wanted to say that I hadn't remembered that, but I asked my 8th-year-old daughters and they said that the group tells it to the searcher at the beginning of the play to give him a general idea where to look for the object. Also "pies" (dog) is used to indicate that something is between high and low levels.
When the search starts we say "ciepło" (warm), "cieplej" (warmer), "gorąco" (hot) and "parzy" (burns) if someone nearly touches it. If the searcher looks in the wrong place, it is "zimno" (cold) or "zimniej" (colder) respectively.
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Re: Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

Postby StringerBell » Mon Oct 22, 2018 8:44 pm

Chmury wrote: Just wanted to drop by and say your log is fantastic! Really enjoying it and lots of great info and updates, and your dedication and progress in Polish is really impressive.


Thanks!

Chmury wrote:Do you listen to much Polish music? They’ve got such a strong music scene over there and are putting out some really great stuff. One of my favourites of late is Bitamina. Beautiful voice and some really unique backing sounds. Nie Wiem Jak from her album Kawalerka is stunning, so moving. She’s got a gift for melodies that Bitamina.

Also in regards to finding books in your target languages, have you tried Book Depository? Free international shipping, good prices, and a decent range of books in foreign languages. Just ordered the first Harry Potter in German from them for $20 Australian dollars. Cheaper than buying it here. Just do an advanced search and in the bottom right corner, choose the language you’re looking for.


Thank you for the recommendations. I would love to discover some great Polish music, I will definitely check this out, and also look into that source for books!

Chmury wrote:By the way, are you mainly learning Polish for your kids? Are you living over in Poland? Just curious. The reasons for learning a language are endless and each I find interesting.


I have no kids, nor do I live in Poland. My family originally comes from Poland on both my mother's and father's side, though only my mother speaks Polish. I wasn't raised to be bilingual, which has always really bothered me. I tried learning this language many times off and on as an adult, but never really was able to make much progress until I began this year with my new strategy.
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Chmury
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Re: Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

Postby Chmury » Tue Oct 23, 2018 1:22 am

StringerBell wrote:I have no kids, nor do I live in Poland. My family originally comes from Poland on both my mother's and father's side, though only my mother speaks Polish. I wasn't raised to be bilingual, which has always really bothered me. I tried learning this language many times off and on as an adult, but never really was able to make much progress until I began this year with my new strategy.


Ah, apologies. Don’t know where the hell I got that from then. I thought I’d read in your blog somewhere that you had kids but clearly I’m mixing you up with someone else on here. Again, I do apologise.

Seems like we’ve had quite similar experiences regarding our upbringings and languages. I’m half Dutch half Polish and my parents didn’t teach me either of their languages either, something which like you, really bothered me as an adult. Thankfully, I guess, they all spoke a dialect of Dutch at home (though broken English to me), so I managed to get a bit of the feel for the language growing up through osmosis, but sadly didn’t learn a word of Polish. So for the past decade I’ve had the desire to learn both Dutch and Polish to a very high level. I find Polish to be a beautiful and intriguing (infuriating?) language and I listen to Polish music quite a lot despite only knowing a few words. Will definitely be returning to it one day.

I’ll leave you with another of my favourite songs and albums. This is Ślady by Fisz Emade Tworzywo from their album Mamut. The entire album is awesome but this was the first song I heard from it which got me hooked (and I was in Kraków when I heard it for the first time!). Also if you like hiphop, -for some reason Poland does incredible hiphop-, Fisz, and also Fisz Emade’s earlier albums are fantastic.

Well keep up the awesome work StringerBell!
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Re: Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

Postby StringerBell » Tue Oct 23, 2018 10:12 pm

Chmury wrote:Ah, apologies. Don’t know where the hell I got that from then. I thought I’d read in your blog somewhere that you had kids but clearly I’m mixing you up with someone else on here. Again, I do apologise.


No worries, I'm not offended ;)

Chmury wrote:I’ll leave you with another of my favourite songs and albums. This is Ślady by Fisz Emade Tworzywo from their album Mamut. The entire album is awesome but this was the first song I heard from it which got me hooked (and I was in Kraków when I heard it for the first time!). Also if you like hiphop, -for some reason Poland does incredible hiphop-, Fisz, and also Fisz Emade’s earlier albums are fantastic.


I really appreciate the music recommendations, if any others come to mind, please let me know!
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Re: Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

Postby StringerBell » Fri Oct 26, 2018 12:01 am

First, a POLISH grammar question for my sage advisor, cjareck: I am a little confused about future tenses in Polish. In all the stories/podcasts I'm listening+reading, I always see future tense like this:

future tense of być + past tense of the other verb:
będę się opiekował moją żoną. (stupid example sentence)

When I listen to one episode of a quick Polish grammar podcast just to see how it was (Bloggy Polish, I think) they said, "Hey, making past tenses in Polish is super easy, you just use future tense of być and the infinitive of the other verb. I had not seen past tenses done like this at all, so I was very confused.

Then when I was reading a paragraph in Dzieci z Bullerbyn, I came across this paragraph where they use both ways of making past tense:
będziemy nocowały AND będziemy nocować

Here is the paragraph where those two come from:
Pewnego dnia Bosse powiedział do mnie: “Dziś Lasse i ja będziemy nocować w stogu siana. I Olle też, jeśli mu pozwolą.” “Tylko włóczędzy śpią w stogach,” oświadczyłam. “Z pewnością nie,” zaprzeczył Bosse. “Spytaliśmy się mamy, czy nam pozwoli.” Pobiegłam powtórzyć do Britcie i Annie. “W takim razie my będziemy nocowały w naszym stogu,” powiedziały. “I ty też, Liso.” Ach, jak będzie wesoło!


***What is going on here??? :o Is there some difference in meaning between these two ways of forming future tense, or are do they have the same meaning? Does it matter which form I use? Is one way more common/preferred?

POLISH:

Aside from my confusion with this past tense situation, I have been able to do a few extra hours this week. I'm anticipating having less time in the next week due to work-related tasks, so I'm trying to get some extra time in now while I can. So far I've done a few days of Anki and still on the fence about whether I'll continue with it or not. But I did notice two days after starting with Anki (3rd time's the charm?), I did spontaneously use 2 new phrases that I'd just reviewed on Anki earlier that day. Coincidence? :?: If I start seeing this kind of thing happen regularly, I will probably stay sufficiently motivated to continue...as long as I don't start getting bored/annoyed by it.

Side note: Yesterday I was filled with an overwhelming feeling of love for this language. It made me think back to when I first tried to learn it many years ago - with steam pouring out of my ears and endless flashcards tucked into every pocket. This language felt like a Sisyphean task at the time and I can't believe it took me ~10 years to finally figure out how to approach it.

ITALIAN:

So far I'm keeping up the pace with speaking and reading. When I first started out with Italian, I really liked the freedom of doing whatever I wanted because I needed to improve everything. But now that the things I want to improve require doing things less "fun" than watching TV (OK, in the beginning watching TV was not fun, but it is now), making these challenges for myself provides good motivation. I really like checking things off a list, reaching small daily/weekly goals, etc... It gives me a sense of steady progress, and helps to prevent me from focusing on pointless things like, "am I actually improving?" or "but how much am I improving? Not enough? Why bother trying?!"

There continues to be an enormous variation in my speaking ability depending on the day. A few days ago I was on fire; my husband said he was impressed with how much new stuff I was throwing out, I was making very few mistakes, and using some impressive grammatical constructions. Then the next day I was doing so crappy that he said he gave up correcting me because it seemed counterproductive. I know some level of fluctuation is normal and unavoidable, but I wonder if other people fluctuate that much???
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Re: Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

Postby cjareck » Fri Oct 26, 2018 7:40 am

StringerBell wrote:będziemy nocowały AND będziemy nocować
[...]
***What is going on here??? :o Is there some difference in meaning between these two ways of forming future tense, or are do they have the same meaning? Does it matter which form I use? Is one way more common/preferred?

I do not have Grammarly avisor, since I have only my smartphone with me. So you may find in my text more mistakes then usual.
Both forms are often used, but in my opinion byc in the future + past tebse verb is better because you provide infornation about gender and number. But if the that context is clear, it doesn't matter.
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Re: Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

Postby StringerBell » Wed Oct 31, 2018 12:09 am

Thank you, cjareck!

POLISH:

I momentarily considered joining the 6WC for Polish because I am confident that I'm no higher than B1, but then I realized it was pretty pointless. It won't change the amount of time I'm dedicating to Polish already, and I honestly don't think I will see any measurable progress in only 6 weeks anyway. So I will keep doing my own thing.

I'm tantalizingly close to my 1,100 goal for this year. Pretty soon it will be time to set a new goal. As of now I'm thinking that I won't set the same kind of goal for next year like I did this year, but will continue to track my hours with the aim of getting as close to 3/day as possible. I'll probably make for myself some kind of speaking challenge like 100 hours for the year (~2hrs/week). Talking is more difficult, so I find myself avoiding it without some kind of motivation. I should probably set some other kind of goal, but I'm not sure yet what...maybe I'll do some kind of super challenge type goal.

Seeing measurable progress is a slippery devil; I don't really ever feel like I'm progressing, but if I think back to where I was 7 or 8 months ago, it's hard to believe I've come this far. So I know that progress is happening, it's just so slow that it's easy to fool myself into believing it's nonexistent.

I found a Polish translation of Robinson Crusoe for kindle on Amazon for $1.29, which I bought. I'm not really ready to read it at the moment since I'm in the middle of a bunch of other things at the moment, but I read the first page just to see what kind of hell I was in for, and surprisingly it wasn't too difficult at all. Nie było wcale mi trudno. (Not sure if that's right, it popped into my mind as soon as I wrote the English sentence). The words that I didn't know at all or well I could easily figure out from context, so there's good reason to believe this book will be more pleasure than punishment :D

I also found W Pustyni i w Puszczy by Henryk Sienkiewicz for $2. I'm familiar with the story, since one of my Polish podcasts was a brief summary of the novel. I saw somewhere mentioned that it was a young adult book, which is tempting me because perhaps it won't be too difficult to understand, but I'm not sure if I can count on that, especially since it was written in 1911. So I haven't bought it yet.

ITALIAN:

I finally took care of something that was bugging me for a long time. As far as pronunciation goes, I knew how to say everything except for a specific combo that I somehow never knew how to deal with.

For example:

I knew how to pronounce: crescere, sconfiggerla, conosciute but then I had no idea about fischiare or scetticismo. Basically, if it was a word that I'd heard said aloud at some point, then I knew how to read it, but if it had a "sci/sce" or "schi/sche" in it and it was a word I'd never heard, I was lost. In the beginning I actually didn't want to learn the rule because I was busy focusing on the other pronunciation rules and was worried that I'd confuse everything.

This strategy would have worked well except for the fact that I got lazy and never got around to learning the rule for these last ones. Finally, enough was enough. I spent like 10 minutes today learning this last bit and it feels like a weight has been lifted; I didn't realize how aggravating it was that when I came across an unknown word with this combo of letters I was kind of in the dark pronunciation-wise and just glossed over it.

It's just so hard to believe that other languages - like Italian and Polish - have actual spelling/pronunciation rules that almost always are followed, unlike in English where you can't really know how something is pronounced based on its spelling unless you hear it out loud from a native speaker in some way. I think I was expecting this last sci/sce schi/sche thing to be more difficult than it was.
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Re: Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

Postby hedgehog.chess » Wed Oct 31, 2018 9:27 am

StringerBell wrote:I also found W Pustyni i w Puszczy by Henryk Sienkiewicz for $2. I'm familiar with the story, since one of my Polish podcasts was a brief summary of the novel. I saw somewhere mentioned that it was a young adult book, which is tempting me because perhaps it won't be too difficult to understand, but I'm not sure if I can count on that, especially since it was written in 1911. So I haven't bought it yet.

W pustyni i w puszczy is out of copyright and you can find it for free with an accompanying audiobook HERE. It’s a real classic and has been on elementary schools reading list for ages.The language used is quite dated, but that can be said for many out of copyright materials.

As a source of out of copyright Polish books and audiobooks you could try wolnelektury.pl. From what I've seen there are even translations of books like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or The Jungle Book with audio.

And I’ve just remembered that there is also some stuff in reineke's thread Polish resources if you haven’t checked it already. It’s the second time I’ve forgotten about it so I better put it in my signature :)
Last edited by hedgehog.chess on Wed Oct 31, 2018 9:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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