rpg learns Spanish, French, et cetera

[rpg]

Italian: I finished lesson 19 today, still on a schedule of 1/day. The difficulty has gone up mildly but it's still pretty smooth sailing. I'm trying to internalize as much of the vocabulary as I can, but yesterday's lesson (18) threw quite a few new ones at me that aren't as memorable (asciugamano, pulito, accanto, coperta, cuscino...). Though now that I look at their etymologies I realize that coperta is cognate with English cover, and cuscino with English cushion. Asciugamano seems to come from asciugare + mano and apparently asciugare is cognate with Spanish enjugar, except I didn't know that word either!

Hungarian: haven't made too much progress here, especially since I've been pretty busy this week. I'm on lesson 8 of Assimil.

Spanish: I just watched La noche de 12 años, about three revolutionaries (including Uruguay's current president) who spent 12 years in solitary confinement during Uruguay's military dictatorship. Decent movie, but not as great for language purpose: a movie about solitary confinement means not a ton of talking! A lot of the dialogue was also words or short phrases being shouted, which is speech that I really struggle with sometimes (no context!). I turned on Spanish subs about halfway through because I got a little frustrated, though I was still following along.

Some vocab: la capucha, hood (I already knew this one passively from the Capuchins), un gil, someone gullible or stupid (Rpl), el granizo, hail.

[rpg]

I've been on vacation for the last week and change, so my language learning has been mildly impacted.

Italian: I finished the fourth week (lesson 28), 3 days behind schedule because of the vacation but no matter. The last week in Assimil has been mainly focused on introducing the present tense of some common irregular verbs. Not too bad. I'm happy with how it's going.

French: No real update, but this week I resume French in Action, so things will start picking up in earnest.

Hungarian: Can feel this getting squeezed out already (remarkably quickly after starting...). I did pick up MagyarOK A1 and Lépésenként magyarul 1 and 2 while I was on vacation, though they don't look like the easiest resources for self-study, especially at the beginner level. I think Assimil Hungarian seems to be the best one I've found still, it's just hard.

Spanish: Restarted reading Corazón tan blanco, a book I bought last November but didn't get very far in. I'm now on page 78/303 (though the first 18 pages were intro material that I skipped) so it's progressing okay. I've settled on a preferred method of reading: getting a physical book (not kindle), underlining unknown words or phrases, and then periodically stopping and going back and looking up some or all of the underlined material. This seems to let me actually enjoy reading the book (vs looking up every word when I encounter it, which makes it a slog and makes me not want to read) while also letting me study the vocab a bit more intensively. I've underlined books in the past and I've also found it very nice to be able to go back in the future and realize that I now know many previously-unknown words.

I also bought the novel Patria, a recent one from Spain about Basque separatism. It's pretty big. Not sure if I'll jump it into right after my current book or not, but it's waiting for me in any case.

Listened to a few episodes of this Chilean podcast Relato Nacional. The episodes are short, 15-20m or so, which is nice. Each one tells a single story about something or other. I find them fairly challenging since they extensively include dialogue from normal people, which can be pretty fast and "non-neutrally" accented.

I watched El Ciudadano Ilustre, an okay movie about a Nobel laureate in Literature visiting his rural Argentine hometown, and a slightly dull movie called Al Desierto, about a woman semi-kidnapped in the Patagonian desert. At some point I might consider subscribing to the Criterion Channel and/or Mubi to get my fill of Spanish films, though for now I have enough material.

[rpg]

Another topic I meant to mention: Spanish proficiency. I think my active abilities in Spanish are quite poor (tal vez debería escribir en castellano para practicarlo...). A pesar de esto, hice una serie de pruebas diagnósticas que fueron publicadas por una escuela de idiomas y me sorprendió que podía aprobar todos los niveles que tenían, incluso la prueba de C1. También acabo de hacer una de las cuatro tareas en una prueba de lectura en una examen de C1, la tarea en la que tienes que rellenar huecos en un texto, y he logrado responder correctamente a 12 de las 14 preguntas. Quizás podría aprobar el C1 si estudiara y si practicara hablar... de todos modos no creo que tenga que enfocarme en la gramática ahora, me parece que eso no se me ha perdido.

[rpg]

Spanish: I've barely done any reading, only on page 95 of Corazón tan blanco. I've watched a few more episodes of Gran Hotel as well; I've now watched through S1E8. I started watching this series with Spanish subs, but I switched them off at some point. I don't need them to follow along, but they were nice for looking up vocab. Now I'm just rewatching short segments with Spanish subtitles if there was something I didn't catch the first time around or a word I didn't recognize.

Some vocab: this show taught me two more words for "pregnant", which was funny: encinta and preñada (and the corresponding verb preñar). A few other words that stuck out: el aseo for toilet, el latón is brass, la cera is wax (and encerar to wax, a good minimal pair with encerrar), una costurera is a seamstress.

Some selected vocab from the book, though there are a lot of words and phrases I didn't know: desde luego means "of course" (not sure how I got this far without picking this one up, bit of an embarrassing hole; already seen it several times since I learned it), una lata is not just a can but also something tedious, un forcejeo (and the verb forcejear) is a struggle, quitar hierro means downplay, una venda is a bandage (this also came up in Gran Hotel now that I think of it), a medida que means "while" with indicative and "whenever" with subjunctive (I've doubtless been taught this before and forgotten it...), una mecedora is a rocking chair (verb mecerse), decir algo con la boca pequeña means to say something half-heartedly or without meaning it (that's a fun one!), padecer means to suffer (also transitively, like suffering a cold).

Loads more too, I'm only scratching the surface of what I have underlined. If I could retain even just one new word/phrase per page I'd be pretty happy. From eyeballing it I've got maybe... 7? underlines per page or so on average, and the average page has something like 35 lines x 10 words/line = 350 words. That would be 98% coverage which seems about the right level.

Italian: Finished lesson 34 of Assimil. Difficulty has been going up; this week has been about the passato prossimo and a bit about object pronouns, and the avere/essere distinction is I think the first really new concept Italian has thrown at me (though I think French has it too, but I haven't gotten that far yet). Changing endings to match the direct object pronoun is also new to me, and I can already see trouble on the horizon with the pronoun ne. Still, things are progressing fine. Only two weeks away from the active phase, so that's exciting.

Hungarian: I actually did something this week here: I did Lesson 9 in Assimil and started Lesson 10. Not an easy language... I'm struggling to make the vocab stick, and Assimil has quickly introduced a lot of directional verb suffixes that are starting to blend together for me. I also did chapter 1 of MagyarOK, a very brief one of greetings and such, though it did help me with vowel harmony. Chapter 2 is when it gets properly into it.

French: We started FiA chapter 5. By the end of this week hopefully I'll have actually started moving forward!

[rpg]

Well, the big update this week is that I'm considering picking up Mandarin (!). I'm considering trying to take an intensive summer course at a nearby university (3h/day, 4d/week, 12 weeks-- so 12h/week and 144 classroom hours total). I'm working full-time, so this class would mean shifting my work schedule a bit to accommodate, and I expect I'd be really busy all summer (3h class, 8h work, a couple hours studying/homework, rinse and repeat...). But the idea still interests me anyway: Mandarin is a language that could probably really use some serious, dedicated study, and is probably a good candidate for formal instruction as well (vs something like a Romance language or German where I'm pretty confident I can do just fine on my own). The university's Mandarin program should be excellent as well. I need to get my manager's approval since I want to shift my work schedule, so I'm waiting to hear what he says.

One thing that fascinated me when reading about Mandarin is the existence of serious, full-time language immersion programs like IUP in Beijing and ICLP in Taiwan. ICLP in particular seems really fascinating, as a super-serious language-learning environment in Taipei, a place I think I'd enjoy living for a year. You're supposed to have at least two years of university courses in Chinese or at least HSK4 before doing it, so my new daydream is doing this summer course, studying on my own until HSK4+, and then ICLP.... we'll see though.

I've been talking about a lot of new languages lately on here, which is probably a bad sign (I value higher-level proficiency in fewer languages vs lower-level proficiency in many). Until not long ago I didn't let myself consider any language besides Spanish so I think this is a response to that. Mandarin is one that I've wanted to learn my whole life (I've been around heritage speakers my whole life, among other things) so it's not that crazy, perhaps. I think the Hungarian is going to have to go which is probably not such a bad thing anyway-- it seems like a really interesting language but it's really hard to justify when I have these other highly appealing languages to learn.

Spanish: I watched three more episodes of Gran Hotel this week. Good stuff. Some vocabulary from S1E11: las ataduras, ties (like family ties); una chispa, a spark; lencería, linen room (?) in this context, but apparently more often lingerie (I guess those words are probably cognate now that I look at it...); turbio, muddy or murky (this word not totally unknown); el pozo, a well; señoría, a very respectful term (like for a judge-- a little surprised to just learn about this); desprenderse can also mean "be deduced"; denegar also means deny, but a different type of deny than negar (ie refuse to do or grant something, vs negar as deny an assertion); una pesquisa is an investigation; algo tejante is something definitive or unequivocal; encausar means bring charges against or indict; vedar means ban. And those were just (most of) the words I didn't know that I noticed!

I read another 20 pages or so as well of Corazón tan blanco. I won't go through the underlined vocab since I just typed up all these words from Gran Hotel, though.

Vocabulary acquisition is imo one of the most important things for me to improve my Spanish to the next level so I'm trying to focus on it a little bit, though it's still tricky since there are just so many words I don't know.

French: My SO and I decided to decouple our French learning so it's easier on both of us. That meant I finally picked up FiA back up and am currently in the middle of Lesson 5 (revisiting some stuff I studied before I paused). I also rather ambitiously bought a parallel text of short stories (and one for Italian as well) though I don't expect to be particularly successful with it once it arrives. Nice to have something to dream about though.

Italian: Assimil lesson 41 down. A couple recent lessons are a little trickier, they're throwing a lot of vocab at me now. I'm chugging forward and hoping that it all works out in the end. Not much else to update. Active wave starts in a bit over a week!

[rpg]

New log title. As you can see, I'm really doing it with Mandarin: I'm taking an intensive university course for the next 6 (well, 5 now) weeks (and hopefully the second semester after for another 6), 12h/week of class, while also balancing my full-time job. Wish me luck! Just finished day 3 and it's already a bit of a doozy... I spent hours last night writing about 35 different characters. If you ask me I don't think characters should be taught from day 1 as the spoken language should have primacy, but oh well.

That means Hungarian is officially dropped. My brief fling with it couldn't last... I do feel good about replacing it with Mandarin, though, because Mandarin is going to find way more use in my life.

Last week I didn't do tons of language study as I was super busy (was out of town all weekend, for one). In Italian I've broken my streak and haven't done any Assimil in over a week now; I'm currently on something like Lesson 47 or 48. Partly I was feeling guilty about not dedicating that time to French since I'm actually (tentatively) planning on going to France next year for half the year... Since the last update I've finished Lesson 5 of FiA and (finally!) moved on to Lesson 6, though I'm still at the start there. I'm hoping to finish it this week.

After all this floundering around, Spanish is like an old reliable friend. I finished S1 of Gran Hotel and am thoroughly addicted. I also watched Hable con ella. Almodóvar really has a thing for creepy incel protagonists...

Mandarin is taking up all my time right now so I'll keep this short and sweet!

[rpg]

A quick update: Mandarin is pretty tough! I think if I didn't have a job and were a normal college student I would be enjoying the class, but as it is I'm mostly spending all my time either at work or racing to keep up with class. The character load is particularly brutal, about 70 characters a week. If I were just learning the spoken language it wouldn't be so bad, but keeping up with the characters is just a lot. I'm mostly using Skritter to learn them, since I can do it in all my minutes of downtime (like commuting or waiting in line or what have you), in addition of course to the homework and classwork.

The only consolation is that the grading so far has been pretty easy. I think if I do ever end up wanting to do some Chinese study abroad some day (like ICLP!) it's probably important to get good grades.

The class has about a dozen people; I'm not the best student (to be expected given I'm working a job, and some people have studied a little Mandarin before or have a high level of Japanese) but I'm far from the worst either.

I haven't had time for anything else this past week, but I'm hoping to watch a little more Spanish TV and to work more with French in Action over the weekend.

[rpg]

Chinese... oof. My life is crazy now: class, work, study, sleep, repeat. The character load in this course is really a lot. It actually irritates me a bit-- I have to spend most all of my study time working on characters when I could be focusing on, ya know, language acquisition. This is work I'd have to do at some point anyway so I can't get too upset about it, but I do still really think the priorities are off for a beginning student.

I didn't mention it, but we're using Integrated Chinese, which seems to be the most popular college textbook series. I've been struggling to find good audio materials to supplement it since the entire audio for the course is very limited. ChinesePod has a lot of stuff but it doesn't seem to fit well with what I want (very basic comprehensible input) as far as I can tell. I just ordered the Mandarin Companion level 0 reader (150 characters) to at least get more reading material. Already I've learned somewhere between 150 - 200 characters (this course is intense!) so I'm hoping it's fine.

I'm barely keeping up, but I am managing...sort of...this is already week 3 of a 6 week course so the end of the first semester is in sight. Then I have to decide whether to take the second semester...

[rpg]

The Mandarin march continues... we're around 2/3 of the way through the course now. The first day of class was 22 days ago; it's crazy to think how much I've learned in such a short time. I've already logged over 26 hours in Skritter (!), and the real time is actually a good bit higher, since Skritter stops the clock between questions where I often pause to re-write things I got wrong several times.

I've heard that it gets a little bit easier to learn characters after you've built a foundation, and I can definitely see that (though I can also see myself getting confused between similar characters more easily...). For example, it was pretty easy to learn 准 from 准备 by just remembering that it's 谁 with the ice radical instead of speech radical. Or 就 has 京 on the left, as does 影. Hopefully that means that the hard, frustrating work in this course gets a little better in the future.

I'm still having some time management problems handling an intensive summer language course and a full time job at the same time. I really don't have time for much else, and I think my job work is suffering a little bit as well-- during M-W I'm constantly trading off between class, work, and sleep, and little else. I do still want to take the second semester, in part because it would open up the door for the regular semester second year course in the fall (9-10am every morning, so I could go to work afterwards and keep normal hours, and at only 5h class a week vs 12h the workload wouldn't preclude me from living a normal life), but if I do I've still got a ways ahead of me of this grueling schedule.

[rpg]

Another week down... there's now only 3 days left in my first semester Mandarin course. I got the green light from my manager to take the second semester, so I signed up today-- another 6 weeks to go! As far as I remember this has been the busiest period of my life, working full time and also taking basically a full-time course load (12h/w). I love language learning but I'll be relieved when this is all over.

I don't have time to do much non-class stuff so I guess my updates here are pretty boring... I have the Mandarin Companion easiest-level reader and I think it's a good level for around where I am now (near the end of the first Integrated Chinese book); there's some grammar and vocabulary that's presumed that I don't understand but I can mostly figure stuff out so far. I've also been watching Peppa Pig clips every so often just to get more audio input in my brain (though I can only make out bits and pieces), and occasionally listening to a ChinesePod podcast, which doesn't seem to work well with what I want as far as I can tell-- for me this is mostly intensive content when what I really want is easy extensive content. I'm already getting a lot of vocab from the course and I don't have time to try to learn other vocab.

Up to 38h in Skritter. It's effective as far as I can tell, though it requires some willpower to steel myself into practicing characters that I've been getting wrong over and over and over again... I figure the main benefit is going to be in retention of all of this stuff, which is important since I'm doing such an intensive, fast-paced course.