2021: The Learned and the Loquacious [de, zh, es, ko, gd, ar]

[LunaMoonsilver]

Wow. I can't imagine reading an author like Terry Pratchett in a target language. I've only read him in Swedish, and only the first four in the series. (Eventually I got to know the translator of those.) This was 30 years ago, so I might be able to pull it off in English now. But not in German. Impressive and inspiring.

Oh, thank you! I mean, it's definitely helped by the fact I've read them all before and that I'm very much on Pratchett's cultural wavelength (his original books were a bit before my time, but I got there in the end) - but we'll see how it goes. The first four to five Discworld books I found the least transparent even in English, and I'm halfway debating reading through the 'series' within the series (like the Wytches books, the Night Watch books) once I've re-listened to the first two. Ultimately, though, Pratchett was great and I'm just glad I have another excuse to read his books again!

My two favorite talks so far were (1) the Latin one and (2) the one about 30 translated books.

I am tempted to quit Latin every other day, and her talk gave me so much enthusiasm for the language and some really interesting resources.

Nearly every book from the translated fiction talk went on my Goodreads TBR list, and I have subscribed to her podcast.

Do you have any talks to recommend? I still have quite a few that remain unwatched. The FB group turned out to be a lot of fun

Ohhh yes Skye's was amazing! I've been fighting off the Latin bug ever since lol. And same for Elle - I've already started reading Frankenstein in Baghdad but I've got a bunch more on my list too.

The other talks I marked as particularly interesting were: Bahamian Dialect in the Bahamas (just so cool!); Revitalising the Michif Language Online (interesting to learn about the language but also the concept of language as commodity vs. language as community); Learning Languages the Agile Way; Passion-Driven Language Learning (I don't feel like anything in this talk was ultra ultra new but Caitlin's a great speaker and it did spark some ideas); and Let Me Speak: 10 Things to Tell Your Inner Critic (I redownloaded Tandem because of this talk ).

I use FB so much for work now that I barely go on it for myself, so I've definitely missed a lot of the joys of the group - but I did join the spin-off craft group not that I've worked on anything recently!

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18.03.2021

• [de] - Listened to more of Die Farben der Magie; I'm about halfway through, now.
• [de] - Writing; wrote about sleep (or a lack thereof).
• [ar] - Anki reviews.
• [de] - Reading; more of Ein Gutes Omen.

Chill day today, but I'm feeling better, so back on it tomorrow! Or... probably Saturday Definitely seeing an improvement in writing daily, by the way; I mean, I'm still incredibly terrible at it, but it's easier to get into the flow of it than it was at the beginning of the month.

[LunaMoonsilver]

Quick catch-up! It's been a fun weekend.

19.03.2021

• [de] Finished listening to Die Farben der Magie. Will start Das Licht der Phantasie tomorrow.
• [de] More writing for r/WriteStreakGerman.
• [ar] Anki reviews.
• [de] Read a little more of Ein Gutes Omen - I'm about 70% of the way through it now.

20.03.2021

• [ar] Worked on DLI Unit 2; I finished going through the audio and then worked through the rest of the unit - including the reading/writing at the end. And then I realised that the audio starts with the vocab/dialogue, which is halfway through the unit, and it meant I skipped the grammar etc. at the beginning! Saved that for today instead.
• [de] Wrote about CampNaNoWriMo for r/WriteStreakGerman. Also have joined the English 'sister' subreddit so I can get started on helping correct some texts myself next week.
• [ar] Anki reviews.
• [es] Anki reviews.
• [es] Reading - some more of Los juegos del hambre. I watched all the films (in English, they're on Amazon Prime) last week, which has made the book a little easier for me to follow.
• [es] Worked through Living Language L14 - did okay on the test at the end except for the translation part (EN>ES) but it's a very useful exercise, so gotta keep at it! Lesson 15 is gonna be another overall review, though, and I did terribly on the Lesson 10 one, so gotta make sure I work through a bunch of stuff in Anki and practise some more output.

21.03.2021

• [es] Anki reviews. I found an FSI Spanish deck - someone's put it together really nicely, with audio, images and everything... so I'm going to work on that, too.
• [gd] Anki reviews/adding cards. Got all the vocab from Teach Yourself Unit 4 in there now.
• [ar] Anki reviews.
• [ar] Finish DLI Unit 2. The grammar was a little confusing at first, but then...
• [ar] ... I did more grammar study. Used allthearabicyouneverlearnedthefirsttimearound.com to learn more about the nominative case, so now I know properly how nunation is being shown on words and what it means. Kind of.
• [zh] Finished working on Colloquial Chinese 2 Unit 1. Also maybe spent 15-20 mins looking up language schools in China. For next year or later, obviously.
• [gd] Summarised grammar/useful sentences from units 4 and 5, which was a nice refresher.
• [de] Another piece for r/WriteStreakGerman.
• [ar] DLI L3 - added the vocab to Anki, though I've got to add the audio (probably tomorrow).
• [es] Read some more of Los juegos del hambre.

There's a loosely-organised challenge starting on 5th April called #40h7dLC (40 hours 7-day language challenge). I'm fairly tempted to give it a try but I'd have to heavily modify it because I don't want to work on one language at the expense of the others - my three lowest ones are still fragile and would also be difficult to do that much work on in one week. Plus, April's a busy month; I've got a lot of writing planned, so that's going to eat into my language time.

Which is all a longwinded way of saying I'm not sure whether I'll do it or not. I might give it an unofficial try, just to see how things go!

[LunaMoonsilver]

22.03.2021

• [es] Anki reviews.
• [gd] Finished summarising the key phrases/grammar from the units I've done so far. Definitely some of it hasn't stuck, but I'm surprised how much has - and now I have a way of revisiting this info without trying to scroll through the (Kindle) coursebook.
• [de] More writing for r/WriteStreakGerman. I did alright on the piece from the day before but I've already got corrections on this one this morning and it looks like there may be a lot of them.
• [es] Reading - more of Los juegos del hambre.
• [ko] Watched the first episode of Crash Landing on You on Netflix. I've been feeling demotivated about Korean lately but not only was this fun, there were some words and phrases I actually recognised! Also, it's fun. Plus, there's only 16 (or thereabouts) episodes, so I know it's not going to be months of slogging through the middle (I love dramas from Mainland China, too, but they're so looooooong so often).

No Arabic at all yesterday, which was the first time for a while, but a day-long break won't hurt. Also, I mentioned I wasn't sure if I'd take part in the #40h7dLC but then I did this last night:



So, I might give it a go. My main reservation was that most people seem to focus on one language, but I saw someone on Twitter last night post their study plan - with three languages - and I was like, oh, okay, I can do that.

My best week re: hours so far this year has been just over 17, but almost all my activities have also been fairly active (aside from the audiobook the last couple of weeks, I'd say 95% or more), so allowing for some passive listening seems to make it quite doable. Plus, I figure it'll give my Spanish a boost - I'm at a weird A2 level where I've got a load of holes in what I know because of learning through school and then abandoning it and then doing that all over again so if I can do a quick boost up to where reading isn't quite so much of a wading through nonsense situation, I think I'll see improvements fairly quickly for a bit after.

Ngl though, there does seem to be some negativity surrounding this challenge that I... wasn't expecting? A few people seem to think it's all about cramming, which I don't think anyone involved plans to do (the guy who 'made it', in this form, has done this multiple times now, as have a couple more people); and there were a couple of complaints about simply having the time, which I get, but you can scale it down? I think what I like about this is that it's a challenge that can't have anything but a positive outcome; in terms of, we know putting in the hours works.

Idk, it seems weird to be bothered about this when it's not hurting anyone. No one involved is making any claims beyond 'you'll learn more of your language and you'll get better at it' which I don't think is a w i l d thing to be saying, tbh. I think the only argument I'd understand is that some people pressure themselves to hit goals and might feel bad if they don't, but this seems to be pretty flexible - and there are plenty of challenges like that out there that don't get these complaints anyway (see: the Super Challenge, any Readathon I've ever done ).

BUT, I am planning a pretty heavy CampNaNo so, ha, we'll see if I manage to do any of this!

[LunaMoonsilver]

23.03.2021

• [ko] Watched two more episodes of Crash Landing on You. I thought I might watch one episode and then study, but I guess I forgot cliffhangers exist.
• [de] Wrote about CLoY for r/WriteStreakGerman - got around 200 words and my corrections written out in less than half an hour!
• [ko] Anki reviews. The minimal pairs deck I got is very useful.
• [de] Read some more of Ein Gutes Omen. Hoping to get through it by next week.

[rdearman]

Watched two more episodes of Crash Landing on You. I thought I might watch one episode and then study, but I guess I forgot cliffhangers exist.

This is my wife's favourite K-Drama.

[Raconteur]

Oh, wow. I'm loving the spreadsheet! Are the fields expanding automatically (as needed) or do you have to rearrange/color manually? Example: when you have 1 cell for German on Tuesday, but 3 cells for German on Wednesday... do you have to change which cells count towards German's total minutes, and also where the mint green Mandarin cells go, or does it all just adjusts itself automatically when you add another line for German? I don't know if my question makes any sense...

Anyway, please share more designs you use!

[LunaMoonsilver]

This is my wife's favourite K-Drama.

I totally see why; I'm already pre-emptively sad about it ending and I'm three episodes in.

Oh, wow. I'm loving the spreadsheet! Are the fields expanding automatically (as needed) or do you have to rearrange/color manually? Example: when you have 1 cell for German on Tuesday, but 3 cells for German on Wednesday... do you have to change which cells count towards German's total minutes, and also where the mint green Mandarin cells go, or does it all just adjusts itself automatically when you add another line for German? I don't know if my question makes any sense...

Anyway, please share more designs you use!

Thanks! Makes perfect sense and the short answer is that it's pretty much all manual I can do some lil spreadsheet tricks but they didn't really apply here - I just planned everything out, got it all added up and then coloured it in at the end. (Although looking at it, I am realising I can add some more formulae in here and there, but eh.) My fave spreadsheet is still Jeffers' SC one but sadly I couldn't duplicate it in Google Sheets.

The end of the month is the end of Q1 though so I'll probably have a load of pics of my kind of 'dashboard' sheet then, which tracks a lot of (possibly unnecessary - yet fun!) data!

[Raconteur]

a lot of (possibly unnecessary - yet fun!) data!

Unnecessary yet fun data is the best kind of data

[LunaMoonsilver]

24.03.2021

• [de] Anki reviews.
• [es] Clozemaster - I decided to give this a re-try after seeing the thread about it here. Probably not going to use it again for a while; I prefer Anki now.
• [es] Anki reviews.
• [de] Wrote about the Irish language for r/WriteStreakGerman.
• [es] Reading - more of Los juegos del hambre.
• [ko] Crash Landing on You E04. Ugh, it's still great, I love it.

I delivered my Expolingua talk yesterday and nobody died! So, that's great.

No, but it was a lot of fun - the team were excellent in terms of getting everything set up (we had some tech issues last time, which meant I started late and a little flustered - and I was also already trying to cram too much content into 30mins - so this one ran wayyyyyy smoother than that) - and people seemed (??? I couldn't see them, but in the Zoom chat) to not hate it, which is really all I ask for. Got some fun questions at the end, as well.

On the other hand, it left me kind of wired so once I'd finished work I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with myself. Which basically translates into clicking around the internet until something catches my attention. In yesterday's case, it was this post from a guy called Brian about how he passed the Italian C2 exam. I think I first read it a couple of years ago but it's a fun read and I got some interesting reminders/tips from it, wrt transcribing (which I rarely do and should try more often) and how he uses Anki in a way that works for him.

Today I've got no specific focus language, so I might spend a little time with Anki - I've got a fair bit of audio to sort through for Arabic and Korean - and also do something with Spanish; it's the language I'm most behind with this month!

[LunaMoonsilver]

25.03.2021

• [ko] Watched Crash Landing on You E05. I want to say things are starting to come together, but there's 11 more episodes, so we're really just getting started.
• [ko] Anki reviews plus added missing audio for LL lessons one and two. I watched the episode before doing this and then added audio, so reviews were a lot easier as a result.
• [de] Wrote ~200 words for r/WriteStreakGerman. Hopeful that I'll get to 5k words for the month.
• [de] Read more of Ein Gutes Omen. I'd like to finish the book this weekend - my Kindle estimates I've got just under three hours left on it.

Pretty quiet yesterday; back onto Arabic today!