Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019 -- now with Polish!!

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cjareck
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019 -- now with Polish!!

Postby cjareck » Mon Aug 19, 2019 1:46 pm

StringerBell wrote:Even if someone claims there's a difference, if after 1,500+ listening I can't detect a difference, any possible difference is negligible, so I think of them as being interchangeable in terms of the sound they make, which hasn't affected my pronunciation or understanding, so I wouldn't worry about this at all.
ś and sz = the English sound "sh"
ć and cz = the English "ch"

Only the sh sounds like sz and ch like cz. With ć and ś and ź it is more complicated. They are perfectly distinguishable fo native speakers
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019 -- now with Polish!!

Postby brilliantyears » Wed Sep 04, 2019 4:57 pm

Brun Ugle wrote:Japanese
I haven’t really touched Anki in ages. I guess I’ve reached my saturation point for now. Maybe I’ll go back to it later. For now, I decided to sign up for a year of Satori Reader. It seems like a fairly relaxed way to study and maybe I can absorb enough to feel comfortable watching TV and reading. I don’t really have plans to become good at speaking Japanese, but I would like to be able to read and listen without too much struggle.

I'm very curious what your experience with Satori Reader is. I hadn't heard of it before until I read your post, but it looks interesting!
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019 -- now with Polish!!

Postby Brun Ugle » Sun Sep 08, 2019 8:53 am

Thanks for the help, everyone!

I can’t believe that I’ve been using Wikipedia’s phonology pages for various languages all this time and it never even occurred to me to look to see if they had an orthography page. That turned out to be very useful. Anyway, I think I’ve got my sounds more or less sorted now. I kind of understood the difference before, but wasn’t really sure which letter was which. I’m still not necessarily good at hearing them, but now I know which letter corresponds to which sound and I can at least put my tongue in the right place and hope for the best when it comes to producing them. I find that learning to produce a sound helps me to also hear it with time, and as I get better at hearing it, I can adjust my pronunciation and make that better, which in turn helps me hear it even better, and so on. So, the first step for me is just to read a description to figure out the general mouth-shape and tongue-position and try to follow it as best as I can.

I haven’t made much progress with Polish or any of my other languages these past couple of weeks. All the cats ended up getting sick and it was a big mess. I eventually asked them to take back the two wild cats because I was exhausted and overwhelmed and I didn’t have time for them. I also had a bunch of things I wanted to get done around the house that I hadn’t been able to do earlier when I was exhausted from getting up in the night to bottle-feed the kittens when they were small. Anyway, after the cats got better and the two wild cats left, I spent about a week and a half getting done some of what I didn’t get done earlier this summer. Not all of it, by any means, but enough that I feel reasonably satisfied. So, now maybe I can try to get back into my language routine, but I have a feeling that is going to be difficult. Ever since I got a life, it’s been getting in the way of studying. Back when I was lonely and depressed and had nothing to do, I could often get 8-9 hours a day in.

I think I made it to about lesson 5 of Pimsleur Polish. I’m still planning to finish it, but I don’t really like it much. I had tried Pimsleur once before because my father had it for Chinese. I didn’t like it much then either. It just seemed slow and I hated the whole bit with the obnoxious guy hitting on the woman and not understanding that she wasn’t interested. However, since Chinese isn’t a heavily gendered language like Polish, there was something I didn’t notice which makes the Polish course even more annoying. I have to pretend to be a man the whole time. The whole thing is based on a conversation between an American man and a Polish woman and I’m supposed to be the American man which means I have to say everything using masculine forms. That is, whenever they say, “How would YOU say ‘x’?” I have to say it as a man. I think they could have avoided that whole problem with only minor changes by asking, “How would the man say ‘x’?” and “How would the woman say ‘x’?” They already do that to some extent when they want to ask how the woman would say something, but for the man they always say “you”. If they want to ask, “How would you say…?” then they could just give the answer with “A woman would say ‘x’ and a man would say ‘y’.” As it is, I’m always trying to come up with two answers --- how I would really say the phrase as a woman, and the answer that will be given on the recording, which is the masculine version. The other thing I don’t like is that I don’t think it’s very helpful for learning to pronounce the language correctly. They’ll occasionally say things like “Did you hear the sh-sound in that word?” But Polish has two sh-sounds, and you can’t really expect someone coming from a language that doesn’t have those two sounds to hear the difference, so I think they need to be much clearer on the different sounds and how to produce them.

I’ve virtually ignored Spanish except for a few random articles or short videos that I’ve stumbled across. Since finishing my telenovela, I haven’t even been watching anything. Even at this level, my Spanish goes quickly downhill as soon as I stop working on it, so I need to get back to it soon. I’ve been almost ignoring German too, except for reading a book that I found at the book crossing at the Gathering. It’s a simple chick-lit type of book that I figured would be fairly easy to read in bed without needing a dictionary or anything. The first paragraph threw me off a bit, but that was mostly because I didn’t have any context yet and it was a notation in the protagonist’s notebook in a telegraphic style. Otherwise the book was pretty light and easy to read. I don’t understand every word, but the few that I don’t know I can either get from context or comfortably ignore. It’s definitely not great literature, but it’s a very comfortable book to real in a language you don’t know terribly well. In addition, it has a lot of dialogue and the narration is in the present tense, in case anyone is struggling with past tenses and is looking for a book like that. It’s call “Die Espressologin” (original title in English “The Espressologist”) by Kristina Springer, and it’s about a girl who works in a coffee shop and works out a system to match people with their perfect partner according to what kind of coffee drinks they like. So, pure, light fluff, but great for reading in a foreign language. Someday, I’ll go back to the mystery I was reading, but I think I’ll leave it until my German is a bit better.

Japanese is also getting ignored, but now I need to get back to doing Satori Reader, especially since I’m paying for it. I think it’s a pretty good resource. I’ve only read a few parts of one series so far, but I think it could be very useful. Each instalment of the story has two versions, easier and harder. I read the easy one first and then the hard one. There is an accompanying high-quality audio recording of the entire story for both versions and you can also listen to each sentence individually. I use this for shadowing. You can click any word to see the definition and to show any extra notes about the expression. There is also a button to show the translation of the whole sentence if you’re still unsure. There is a discussion thread under each story and it looks like the answers to the questions people ask about the expressions used in the story eventually end up as part of the notes that you see when you click on those words. So, I imagine if you read a completely new story, there will probably still be a few things you might wonder about, but most of those things will be part of the notes already if you read one of the older stories. You can also add any words you click on to flashcards and review them in a built-in SRS system. I was doing this at first, but quickly found that I got just as frustrated as I was with Anki, so I think I’m better off just reading the stories and the notes and moving on. Some of it is sure to stick anyway. I think they could use a bit of work on things like a how-to section and other things to make it a bit more user-friendly, but once you figure out what you’re doing, it isn’t so bad. They really should find a new rating system though. As it is, the users rate each story according to how interesting they found it and also according to how difficult they found it. So, all the difficulty ratings end up in the middle since people naturally look for something that is suited to their level. I think it would be much better and more useful to have a more objective rating of difficulty, like CEFR level, JLPT level or even terms like upper-beginner and lower-intermediate. As it is, all you know is that the readers on average found the story “just right”, but you don’t know if those people are beginners or advanced students.
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019 -- now with Polish!!

Postby Brun Ugle » Sun Oct 27, 2019 7:30 am

After another long absence, I’m back again. I’m kind of thinking of making a fresh start with a new log even though I usually wait until the New Year for that kind of thing, but I’m making major changes in my life and routines and also this log has been kind of a bust, so maybe I’ll just do that. But first a wrap up of the past month or so. My studying never really got back of the ground after the Gathering and it still isn’t going so well, but it is just about starting to pick up again. The three kittens are now gone off to their “forever-homes”. Of course, I cried when they left. But it is a lot quieter and easier to study without them. Now I just have a big tomcat that hides under the sofa most of the time, so he’s not much work. I really have a new-found respect for the parents out there with two or three little kids who still manage to study. I don’t know how you do it. For a month or so before the kittens left, I could hardly manage to sit down long enough to actually learn anything. As soon as I sat down, one or more kittens would be climbing all over me demanding attention or they would get into something so that I had to run off to stop them or to clean up the mess they’d just made.

The kittens and I became briefly famous (at least among the age 60+ crowd who watch local news and listen to local radio) when we were asked to appear on local radio and TV for a segment about the animal protection society. So, that was exciting. I was rather nervous about it though and I think it shows a bit, particularly in the radio piece which is the one we did first. My voice sounds rather high and thin :oops: . At least my mind didn’t go completely blank when they asked me stuff. I didn’t know ahead of time what they would ask except that it would, of course, be cat-related. Here is the program from the local radio. There are several bits about the animal protection society (Dyrebeskyttelsen), but the one that I’m in starts about one hour into the program. It’s the third one on “Dyrebeskyttelsen”. Here is the piece from the local TV news. You can click on number four “Dyrebesyttelsen” to see me and the kitties. And now that I’ve embarrassed myself thoroughly, I think I should definitely start a new log.

My life and study routine have also been disrupted by my having a new boyfriend, the same fellow I said I was going to turn down as being too young; he convinced me otherwise. But now that the newness has worn off and we have settled down into a routine, I find that he doesn’t really disrupt my studying too much. I just try to rearrange my studying so that I can do most of the bits where I do a lot of talking to myself while he isn’t here. Not that he would be so bothered by my talking to myself, but that I find it a little embarrassing to have him hear me, especially if it’s a language he can understand somewhat.

At the moment I’m sick with a cold that has lasted nearly two weeks already, but I’m feeling confident that I’ll be able to get back into proper study mode in time for the November 6WC. The last time I did a 6WC was February, I think. I didn’t do May’s because it always gets interrupted by the Gathering and that brings my score so far down that I get rather demotivated by it. And August was complicated by the page being gone and the bot not working the first week, so I didn’t bother on that one. I wouldn’t have done well anyway since I was being disturbed by kittens 200 times a day.

Japanese
At the moment, I think of all the languages I’m supposed to be studying, it is actually Japanese that is going the best, and that is really surprising since I’ve had such a hard time motivating myself to work on it for so long. I think it’s because I decided to put it on the back burner and let it simmer and not worry about trying to get anywhere. I’m enjoying the stories in Satori Reader enough that I find myself wanting to read the next instalment each time. I’ve managed to make myself a little routine that feels like almost no work at all, but still seems to help me progress. It’s very simple and since it doesn’t feel like work, I don’t try to avoid it. First, I review the story from last time by just listening to the whole thing once through, sometimes twice. The stories are so short that it only takes a minute or two to listen to the whole thing. If I struggle on some word or expression, I’ll have a quick look at the text to refresh my memory of the meaning, otherwise, I just mark it as complete and move on to the episode I want to work on that day. First, I listen once or twice without looking. Then I listen while reading the text. This usually clears up a few things for me since I often understand the kanji even though I might not know the word when spoken. Then I go through the whole text sentence by sentence, listening to the sentence and shadowing it, clicking on unknown words and phrases as well as any special notes to look them up, and sometimes checking the English translation of the sentence as a whole. Once I understand the whole text and can shadow the sentences individually. I try shadowing the audio as a whole. Then I finish by listening to the audio without looking at the text and leave the lesson marked as incomplete so that I can listen one more time as a review during the next session. I then preview the next story by listening once or twice without looking. Sometimes, if I’m feeling like I want more, I might go through the whole story as described above, but usually I just preview it and leave it for next time. In the beginning, I tried using the flashcard function, but I found that made me not want to do study, so I cut it out. I figure this method is slow in terms of how much I’m likely to learn, but it’s better than trying to do more and giving up. I’ve also decided that Japanese is a language I don’t care about speaking above B1, but I would like to be able to understand well enough to enjoy popular literature and movies.

Polish
I did eventually finish the Pimsleur short course. I hated every minute of it, so I won’t be buying the longer course for myself. Since I’m still struggling to motivate myself for Polish, I’m giving it the back-burner treatment too. At the moment, all I’m doing is a bit of Memrise and watching Peppa Pig. I’m am noticing that Peppa is getting clearer and easier to understand though.

Speaking of Memrise, I’m a bit annoyed with the latest update. First of all, it crashes sometimes, but not enough to really bother me too much. I was annoyed though the other day when it ignored the fifty reviews I’d just done and made me do the exact same words in the exact same order all over again. The thing that really bugs me though is that they’ve tried to make it easier. I generally use the app on my iPad and until recently when you had to type in a word, the keyboard came up automatically, but now you have to touch the blank fill-in space to make the keyboard come up. I liked that I could put down the keyboard and see the little choose-the-letters field with just a few letters when I came across a hard word that I couldn’t answer without that extra hint, but I don’t want the hint if I don’t need it. On the phone version, I think it was always the hint-keyboard that came up, but I don’t really use it much on the phone and on the rare occasions that I do, it doesn’t bother me so much because it can be hard typing on a phone-sized keyboard with tiny buttons, but on my iPad, that isn’t a problem so why this update to dumb things down again?

German and Spanish
I really haven’t been doing so much on these two, just a bit of textbook work a few times a week, not even every day. I really need to start reading a book or watching a series or something in addition or my abilities will start to deteriorate. Even in Spanish, I need to hear it regularly or I forget it. I don’t really forget it I suppose, but it gets lost in the attic of my brain and I start to have trouble retrieving it. I’m supposed to be talking with Zenmonkey once or twice a week, but other than a couple of times in August, I think it was, we haven’t been Skyping at all. We just take turns cancelling. Lately, I’ve been the guilty party because of my cold, but we’re both pretty good at cancelling our sessions.
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019 -- now with Polish!!

Postby MamaPata » Sun Oct 27, 2019 2:21 pm

Adorable kittens! (Your Norwegian sounded great to me, as someone who speaks no Norwegian). Congrats on the new relationship.
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Brun Ugle
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019 -- now with Polish!!

Postby Brun Ugle » Wed Oct 30, 2019 11:35 am

I did it. I started a new log. Brace yourselves. Here it is.
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019 -- now with Polish!!

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Tue Nov 26, 2019 6:43 pm

Brun Ugle wrote:The kittens and I became briefly famous (at least among the age 60+ crowd who watch local news and listen to local radio) when we were asked to appear on local radio and TV for a segment about the animal protection society. /.../And now that I’ve embarrassed myself thoroughly, I think I should definitely start a new log.


I finally listened to the radio clip (and also watched the TV segment) - well done. Somehow, you sounded exactly like a Canadian here in town - she has also lived in Norway for quite some time. Trondersk is probably the easiest to understand for Swedish speakers - the pitches match certain accents of Värmländska 100%.
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Re: Brun Ugle の mehrsprachige bitácora (NO, ES, DE, JA) 2019 -- now with Polish!!

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Wed Nov 27, 2019 2:00 am

Your apartment is super cute!
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Grammaire progressive du français -
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Grammaire progressive du francais -
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Pimsleur French 1-5
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