SC bookkeeping and other language learning whimsy

[Cèid Donn]

I wanted to start a log again mainly to help me keep track of my SC progress since we still do not have a bot, as far as I know. This is not to put pressure on whoever is working on the bot--I completely understand that life in the year 2020 is weird and challenging and there's just too much stuff going on everywhere. This is simply for my own accounting. It's going to take me a bit to record everything I've been doing since the challenge started so this initial post is just to get things rolling and put pressure on myself to actually follow through before we're several months into 2021 and I've forgotten half the things I've done.

But since I am easily distracted and diverted, there will be other things, I'm sure.

As for the state of things, I decided to just blow off any pretense of being a disciplined, focused language learner for most of this year. Spending so much of this 2020 at home has allowed me to indulge in far more languages than is ever advisable for anyone, and to say I have too much on my plate right now is a charmingly amusing understatement.

For starters, I have my "California Project" which is focusing on languages spoken in California other than English. My main foci are Spanish, Russian, Tagalog, Vietnamese and Hawaiian, with some less intensive foundational study in Japanese, Mandarin and Arabic. I started this project before the pandemic showed up in the US, and that I managed to keep at it, with all the distraction and anxiety and chaos on this year, has been amazing. Around April or so I decided I wanted to dabble in a bunch of Romance languages, and so I did. That impulse now has mostly waned, but I'm still keeping up my streaks in several Romance languages on Clozemaster because why not? It wasn't a complete waste of time, I must say: I know can read articles online in Catalan, Portuguese and Galician with significantly less effort. (Wish I could say the same for Occitan, which just seems much harder than most of the Western Romance family.) More recently I wanted to dabble a bit in Estonian, Finnish and Dutch, and now that I got that mostly out of my system as well, I feel I need cut back on my dabbling and detours so to focus back on my SC languages and my California Project.

This is not to say I've neglected my SC over this time. For one, I've watched A LOT of Ros na Rún, telenovelas and whatever Netflix has had in German and Russian, thanks to many sleepless quarantine nights. And I've taken up cross-stitch again after many years so I can do something with my hands while I listen to my French audiobooks. And our local library started curb-side check-out a couple months back, so I'm back to reading Spanish books again, as well as re-reading some of the French and German books I have. I'm currently on my 3rd Welsh book and after that I have a backlog of Irish e-books that I collected over the summer that I need to get on.

So, yeah, my SC is happening. I'm just not really recording my progress anywhere. Next update I'll start doing that.

[Cèid Donn]

[No correcciones, por favor. Gracias. Simplemente necesito practicar la escritura en mis idiomas de destino (IDD) en este momento. La perfección no es necesaria. ]

A veces tengo episodios de "niebla cerebral" (o "brain fog") y dolores de cabeza relacionados con otros problemas de salud, así que me resulta realmente difícil estudiar o leer. Y no sorprende que estos episodios han empeorado desde el debut de la pandemia. Hago lo que puedo, pero algunos días, no puedo hacer mucho. Como resultado, no he escrito mucho en mis IDD en los últimos 8 meses. He trabajado con regularidad en mis diarios para los idiomas hawaiano y irlandés, pero no mucho más.

Quería escribir una entrada el domingo pasado, pero no me sentía bien una vez más. También el domingo pasado, Rafael Nadal logró su 13º título de Roland Garros y su 20º título de Grand Slam. En caso de que no lo sepas, este no es poca cosa, en especial para el mundo del deporte español.



Después de ver a Nadal destruir a Djokovic, pasé mucho tiempo viendo y leyendo cobertura deportiva en español, y no hice mucho más además Clozemaster y Memrise esa día. Ayer hice aún menos. Oh well...

Anyhow, I think, if I recall correctly, I signed up for a Romance language family double SC, but I'm going to change that to separate French and Spanish double SCs. I'm not going to bother with other Romance languages for the SC as I need to narrow down the number of TLs I'm prioritizing.

This is my progress for my Spanish double SC so far (I'll fiddle around with the progress bars later):

Film/TV

La ley del corazón - 22 episodes - 946 minutes
La riena del sur - 10 episodes - 422 minutes
El bandido honrado - 5 episodes - 215
El laberinto del fauno - 110 minutes
El hoyo - 93 minutes

Total: 1786

Books

Carrie (Spanish edition) - 210 pages
Zelic, la nueva tierra - 360
El aprendiz - 183 pages

Total: 753

Currently reading: Cantico por Leibowitz

Necesito una siesta ahora. Con suerte, volveré durante esta semana con otra entrada sobre mis otros SC.

[Cèid Donn]

This is a much less ambitious post than I had planned, but this last week and a half have been a little rough on my nerves and energy levels.

First my mother, who's elderly and very high-risk, got sick, so we went into panic mode because COVID rates where we live have been surging and even though she stays home nearly every day, we had to fret over whether she had gotten the virus. We weren't able to get her in to be tested because we decided it was to risky to take her to one of the 2 high volume testing places here where she would have to wait an indefinite amount of time around people who might be positive themselves, and the city phone line for appointments for the drive-thru testing sites was not working most of last week , but her doctor talked to her over the phone and was of the strong opinion it was just a cold. She took about a week to get over it and is fine, and I never got sick (I'm one of those people who almost never get colds), so we are all able to breath a sigh of relief now (and I get to blame my sibling, who does our grocery shopping for us and who also ended up getting sick, for giving my mom the cold ).

But the other mini-crisis was one of my cats needed emergency surgery last Tuesday for a skin growth that started bleeding late Monday night. So Monday night, I had to stay up all night with a bleeding cat who, as cats are prone to do when they are injured, pumped up on adrenaline and unable to settle down, making the bleeding worse. Post-op, he's been terribly uncooperative with being cooped up and forced to wear an e-collar (aka, the "cone of shame") to protect the incision, so I continue to feel pretty drained and sleep-deprived. It's taken 5 days of persistance on my part to get this incredibly stubborn little animal to resign to wearing the cone of shame, and now I'm cognitively a vegetable. A vegetable that could really use a nap.

Needless to say, I did not get much done with language learning since my last post.

One thing I have done in the past week was watch a lot of French Twitch. Mostly I've been watching art streams in French which is nice change from the usual gaming streams I watch. But there was one big event recently in French Twitch that I enjoyed: over the weekend of October 16-18, there was a French Twitch charity event called Z Event. It's only been around a few years and I only learned about it last year from LeSteam, a French Twitch channel about gaming and pop culture that I regularly watch and who participate in Z Event.

Last year, Z Event broke the world record for the most money raised via a Twitch charityevent, with 3.5 million euros. This year they reached that record during the last evening of the event when they included profits from the event's online store (1.4 million euros at that point). Then in the final few hours, they managed to raise another 2.2 million euros. I was watching for most of those last hours because it was quite mesmerizing seeing the whole thing snowball. At one point in last couple of hours, the streamers were attracting so much Twitch traffic that it was effecting other streams on Twitch, with the event's organizer, French steamer ZeratoR, was getting around 280-300k viewers to just his own stream. If you watch Twitch a lot, you know that's way, way, way out of the ballpark for a normal day on Twitch.

The thing is, it wasn't even certain this year's Z Event was going to happen because of the pandemic. ZeratoR was very non-committal about whether it'd happen until the last minute, and when it was announced, the streamers who wanted to participate had to first test negative for the coronavirus and then isolate until the start of the event. They still managed to get over 50 streamers to participate, which itself was a pretty impressive accomplishment. And then they went on to raise 5.7 million euros. Granted, ZeradoR and a handful of other French streamers involved with the event are very popular. But even that can't explain why this year Z Event was so wildly successful. On the surface it was like most Twitch marathon charity events: a bunch a streamers get together, some may stream their own things, others will do co-ops, and it's overall a rest grab bag of stuff. During the Z Event, I watched different participants stream singleplayer and multiplayer games, quiz games, cosplay, karoke (so much Renaud!) and just random goofiness. So it wasn't like there was anything that unique about the content itself. It was just a moment in time when all the right elements came together and the viewers felt especially motivated to donate, I suppose. I will say, it was a lot fun to witness.

The other news I wanted to report was Memrise now has a course for Yoruba, which I'm going to start today after my post-lunch nap. I have been on the fence about nixing Yoruba and/or Swahili from my rotation, but I think I need to check out this Memrise course first before making any decisions there. I have managed to cut down on the languages I'm actively studying to where it's easier to prioritize the languages I want to right now, and I'm trying to settle into a new weekly rotation. Clozemaster doesn't count here, as I fit Clozemaster in around the bulk of my studies, although I did delete my Clozemaster progress for Estonian and Finnish because my list of active Clozemaster courses is just too long and when I have weeks like I did this past week, where I can only do the bare minimum, that long list gets annoying.

As for my SCs, I haven't done much besides reading Cántico por Liebowitz and watch some Ros na Rún and Эпидемия (To the Lake). Weirdly, I really want to dig into some of my textbooks right now. Whenever I have a period of not being able to study a lot, I get the itch to work on grammar or from textbooks, so I may need to do some of that this week.

[Cèid Donn]

Up late sitting with the petulant cat in convalescence and going over my more immediate language learning plans. I've waffled over whether to do the November 6WC and I think I will. I could do Russian again, because in all honestly, I'm not B1 yet, but I'd like to do a different language this time. I narrowed it down to Vietnamese or Dutch, and I think I'll go with Dutch, mostly because I'm not up to pushing myself with a more challenging language. Granted I'm sure Dutch has its own challenges in store for me, but I hope they won't be too bad.

Aside from some casual familiarity with Dutch, I'm a virtual true beginner, so this should be fun. I've never really studied it, haven't a clue about any of its grammar or phonology beyond educated guesses based in my knowledge of English and German, and have only dabbled a little with it on Clozemaster in recent months, mostly just to see how similar or different it is from German.

For this 6WC, I'll try to finish all of the Memrise modules for their Dutch course and make some progress with the Dutch from German course on Clozemaster. Of course, there's 50languages and 101 Podcast too for additional practice. For a textbook or something of that ilk, I'll have to look into what free or super cheap resources are accessible for me, but I'm not too terribly worried about that. If all else fails, I can look into the DLI Dutch course.

Speaking of Memrise, I looked into the Yoruba course and sadly it's just one module with just 80 words. I hope they expand it eventually, but as it is now, it's really not much at all.

[Cèid Donn]

It was snowing here this morning. In El Paso, Tx. In October.

We had a winter storm roll in late last night, and the sleet and wild ripped up the fabric canopy covering the playground at the city park across the street from my house. I spent the night be constantly kept awake by the sounds of loud pops and flapping of the strips of fabric against the metal frame that was amplified by how my neighbor's covered driveway (which is next to my bedroom window) acts like an echo chamber. It was delightful.

Despite being pretty sleep-deprived, I'm getting my SC totals, to date, done today. I expect mistakes and things being unintentionally left out.

French:

Coup de chaud - 100 minutes
Portraite de la jeune fille en feu (deux fois) - 240 minutes
Funan - 84 minutes
Dix pour cent, 7 episodes - 370 minutes
The Hallow (avec doublage en français), saison 2 - 230 minutes
Le fleuve (livre audio) - 89 minutes
Le librarie (livre audio) - 188 minutes

total: 1301 minutes

L'Univers expliqué à mes petits-enfants - 144 pgs
Sorceleur T1 : Le Dernier Voeu - 380 pgs
Journal de guerre écologique - 216 pgs

total: 740 pgs

Livre lu actuellement: Tout s'effondre

Celtic:

Ros na Rún, 38 eipeasóidi - 874 minutes
Ene(z), 6 rannoù - 180 minutes
Ar brezel diwezhañ e Bro-Gerne #1 (abadenn skingomz) - 28 minutes

total: 1082 minutes

Cyfres Amdani: Cawl a Straeon Eraill - 110 pgs
Llyfr Glas Nebo: Enillydd y Fedal Ryddiaith - 144 pgs
Rhwng y Silffoedd - 228 pgs
An t-Iriseoir - 99 pgs

total: 581 pgs

léamh faoi láthair: Fuascailt an Iriseora

Germanic:

Dark, Staffel 3 - 441 minutes
Berlin Babylon, 4 Episoden - 182 minutes

total: 642 minutes

Schachnovelle - 68 pages
Die Verwandlung - 80 pages

total: 148 pages

Meine aktuellen Bücher: Der Kleine Hobbit und Metro 2033

Russian:

Лучше, чем люди, 5 episodes - 259 minutes
Эпидемия, 4 episodes - 209 minutes
The Old Guard (with Russian dubbing) - 125 minutes
The Witcher (with Russian dubbing) 1 episode - 61 minutes
Bookmarks, (with Russian dubbing), 2 episodes - 17 minutes

total: 671 minutes

Currently reading, very slowly: Метро 2033 (parallel reading with German and English editions)


And now, progress bars! Of course, I don't expect to complete all of these. The idea is to push myself closer to either fluency or madness. We will see which.

French Double SC : 1301 / 18000 : 740 / 10000
Spanish Double SC : 1784 / 18000 : 753 / 10000
Celtic Double SC : 1082 / 18000 : 581 / 10000
Germanic SC : 642 / 9000 : 148 / 5000
Russian Half SC : 671 / 4500 : 0 / 2500

For Dutch, I'm starting these this week and hope to get a lot done during the 6WC, but I'm giving myself ot the end of the year to finish them. I got pdfs of the old versions of Colloquial Dutch 1 and 2 off of Scribd (hat tip to SCMT for mentioning Scribd in the Spanish Study Group thread).

Dutch Memrise Crunch : 2 / 164
Colloquial Dutch Speedrun : 0 / 29

This is going to be largely review and practice, starting Nov. 1:

30 hours of Navajo : 0 / 30

[tangleweeds]

I've been meaning to send empathy over the recalcitrance of sick kitties, as I've been dealing with a lot of that myself this autumn, but now too, bummer how bizarre noise issues transformed an interestingly unseasonable weather event into an insomniac nightmare!

But mostly I'm impressed with the breadth of the language fun you've been having and both the number of hours you've racked up and your meticulous tracking of them. Great work!

[Cèid Donn]

Thanks. As for meticulous tracking, that is what I have been struggling with and the main reason why I made this thread and then spend most of this morning tallying up what I've done since July. Ugh. I knew if I had waited much longer it was going to be too much.

My cat, by the way, is doing better with the cone of shame but still tries to engage in unnecessary dramatics (like sulking in the litter box, because he knows as long as he's in the litter box, I won't put the cone back on him ). But unfortunately yesterday, my other cat was playing with him and pulled out 2 of his stitches, so we had to go back to vet again to get him stitched back up, and now my poor kitty has to wear the cone an additional 3 days and has to be kept separated from his pal when we humans aren't able to supervise them.

***

I forgot to mention this: I had signed up originally for an Austronesian SC too, but I'm not sure how doable that is right now. So far, I've only watched a few episodes of Kick Andy on You Tube and while I know where to get books in Indonesian, Tagalog, Hawaiian and Maori, cheap used copies are hard to come by and I don't have the money to pay full-price for them right now. With how things are going with the pandemic and the US economy, I don't see myself able to buy enough for even a half SC to make it worth the headache, so for now I'll continue puttering away at these languages with the resources I have right now.

[Cèid Donn]

Last night I watched the 1st episode of Barbaren on Netflix, which has been heavily criticized by some German viewers who thought that the German actors mumble too much (because German speakers NEVER mumble, right??? ) and that there are too many modernizations, including some viewers getting mad over a character named "Thusnelda," which they thought was a made-up name in order to shoe-horn in a major female character and not, well, an actual historical person of enough historical import that art has been made her.



There is, as you might suspect, a character named Ari that is apparently based on Arminius as well. These displeased viewers seemed able to figure that much out, at least.

That aside, the episode wasn't stunning but it was good enough for me to want to see more. The Latin dialogue was fun for me and my very atrophied Latin knowledge to try to pick out without looking at the subtitles, and the plot of the first episode made me wish the series played up Roman superstition more rather than just hint at it, because that would be fun. Some of the German actors are indeed hard to understand, but after years of listening to German mumbling, I'm used to it.

Amazon is offering 2 months of Kindle Unlimited for $4.99, which I snagged, because I do find it a useful service for my language studies (especially with the 6WC because you can often find grammar, dictionaries and the like that are free to use with Kindle Unlimited). I don't know if that deal is available for anyone outside of the US or even to all of the US, but if you're interested, be sure to check it out. And if you're like me, and only sign up for services when you can get them at a bargain price like that, be sure to enter a reminder on one of your devices' calendar to cancel it is before it renews and charges you full price.

[Cèid Donn]

Oh my, November 1st. So much madness right now. Tomorrow the cat gets his stitches removed, his incision looks closed, flat and clean, so hopefully this will be to end of his period of convalescence (and the cone of the shame!) and there will be no more high-maintenance cat drama disrupting my sleep and study schedules.

Update for my SCs:

Эпидемия, 2 episodes - 96 minutes
The Witcher (with Russian dubbing), 1 episode - 60 minutes

Berlin Babylon, 2 episodes - 96 minutes

Ros na Rún, 2 episodes - 48 minutes

I am finding The Witcher dubbed in Russian to be delightful. It takes me forever to get through an episode because Netflix only has Russian dubbing but not Russian subtitles, at least not any I can get to come up when using the Russian dubbing, so I stop every so often and use Google Translate to figure out words I want to note down. Learning lots of fun words this way, like Плотва (the name of Geralt's horse), ад, эльфы, чародей and хаос. Not sure if knowing Соединение Сфер will ever come in handy outside of reading the Russian Witcher Wiki but hey.

Not much reading this week. I read a bit of both Fuascailt an Iriseora and Cántico por Liebowitz, and I added the Spanish edition of Metro 2033 to my multilingual parallel reading, so that's going even slower than before and most of my work this week on that book was reading just the Spanish edition to get caught up with where I'm at with the Russian and German editions.

French Double SC : 1301 / 18000 : 740 / 10000
Spanish Double SC : 1784 / 18000 : 753 / 10000
Celtic Double SC : 1130 / 18000 : 581 / 10000
Germanic SC : 851 / 9000 : 148 / 5000
Russian Half SC : 827 / 4500 : 0 / 2500

Dutch Memrise Crunch : 4 / 164
Colloquial Dutch Speedrun : 2 / 29

30 hours of Navajo : 1 / 30

[Cèid Donn]

So I spent way too much time trying to find a way to watch Coco in Spanish, now that Disney has removed it from Netflix, without needing to pay for Disney+ and nada. I can't even find a blu-ray version for my region that has the Spanish dubs. So now I'm wondering if I should upgrade my Hulu sub to the Hulu/Disney+/ESPN+ bundle.

At least there's some of the Spanish versions of the Coco songs on You Tube that got me through this year's Día de Muertos here in COVID hell:



If I knew that the Disney+ sub with give me access to most non-English versions of Disney films and not just a handful of the ones some monolingual Disney exec farting in their Herman Miller office chair decided would get the most views in the US, I'd jump on it. And as expected, Disney+ is not being exactly transparent about the finer details of their audio options so I can't really confirm my suspicions without signing up for the service and seeing what I can access.

In other media news, I just realized the 4th season of Нюхач (The Sniffer) is on Amazon now, although not included with the Prime sub like seasons 2 and 3 are. I'm still mad that Netflix removed it (or lost the rights, whatever the case may be) while they have 2 of their own Netflix series starring Kirill Käro (who, at this point, I practically see as my Russian tutor ) that I don't find quite as enjoyable. Also, on Netflix I could access Russian subtitles but on Amazon, there's no option for Russian subs and the English subs are hard-coded into the video. I hate that Amazon does this.

(There are some episodes on You Tube that have auto-gen CC in Russian but if you're ever watched a You Tube video with that feature in your own native language, you know how laughably bad it is. )

Nonetheless I intend to purchase the 4 season. I have gotten so much out of this series, and I find it very re-watchable, so I consider it a decent investment, despite the subtitle issue. And it's still cheaper than Pimsleur!

As for the 6WC, I'm there. I'm doing it. It's happening. Honestly, though, with the holidays and the exceedingly grim election and the COVID nightmare raging through my city, I haven't been able to give it my full attention. It feels weird to not be doing Russian as my 6WC language, and I have to remind myself I'm doing a different language this time. Dutch so far isn't that difficult, which was kind of the point of doing Dutch, but at the same time, it makes me feel like I'm not doing enough, if that makes sense.