Amanda's 2021 Log: Spanish, French, Italian, and Ancient Greek

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philomath
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Re: Amanda's 2021 Log: Spanish, French, German, and a little Ancient Greek

Postby philomath » Sun Jul 18, 2021 2:24 pm

Spanish
17Jul21: I watched two episodes of the Netflix show Valeria.

French
16Jul21: On my way to work, I listened to another episode of Transfert. This episode was only 20 minutes, but I listened to it for 40 minutes because I kept replaying parts I didn’t understand. I did manage to catch a lot, but I was being too much of a perfectionist—I wanted to hear every single word! On my way home, I listened to the episode again. This time I could follow the plot of the story much better, even though I couldn't understand all of the words.

17Jul21: I listened to the same episode of Transfert as the day before, but this time I listened on YouTube so I could read the French subtitles. This helped clear up some of my earlier confusion! For example, it sounded like the narrator said he looked for his neighbors' names on "les toilettes", but really he had said "les boîtes aux lettres", which makes much more sense! :lol:

As I listened, I paused to look up all of the words I didn't know, and I wrote down the most interesting ones, filling up a whole page in my French notebook. Some of the phrases were: "ranger ton linge", "dépasser les bornes", "de surcroît", etc. Maybe I will make some Anki flashcards later.

The podcast is really interesting. Each episode consists of someone telling a secret or an interesting story from their past. For example, in the first episode, a man talks about how he became obsessed with his neighbors and started stalking them. It was definitely a disturbing story. The people in the podcast talk very naturally, which I think is great for my learning!

I also practiced speaking for 15 minutes. I pretended I was speaking to my French teacher (because I've booked another lesson with him!) and was telling him about my recent language studies. I spoke pretty well since it's an easy topic for me.

German
17Jul21: I reviewed my Anki flashcards.
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Re: Amanda's 2021 Log: Spanish, French, German, and a little Ancient Greek

Postby DaveAgain » Sun Jul 18, 2021 3:32 pm

philomath wrote:17Jul21: I listened to the same episode of Transfert as the day before, but this time I listened on YouTube so I could read the French subtitles. This helped clear up some of my earlier confusion! For example, it sounded like the narrator said he looked for his neighbors' names on "les toilettes", but really he had said "les boîtes aux lettres", which makes much more sense! :lol:
YouTube is super for listening practise. Sometimes you get subtitles, and you can rewind the video, and slow it down. Very helpful. :-)
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Re: Amanda's 2021 Log: Spanish, French, German, and a little Ancient Greek

Postby luke » Sun Jul 18, 2021 4:05 pm

DaveAgain wrote:
philomath wrote:17Jul21: It sounded like the narrator said he looked for his neighbors' names on "les toilettes", but really he had said "les boîtes aux lettres", which makes much more sense! :lol:

YouTube is super for listening practise. Sometimes you get subtitles, and you can rewind the video, and slow it down. Very helpful. :-)

I love YouTube subtitles as well. The auto-generated subtitles are generally very accurate. Sometimes they're incorrect. I've noticed that more with proper names.

I've seen twice where YouTube guessed the language wrong. Once, don't know why. Native speaker of Spanish showed up with Italian sub-titles. All of this speaker's other videos have been properly guessed to be Spanish. That was disappointing because repeated reloads of the page didn't change YoutTube's original guess on the language. The second disappointment was that when I chose to translate the video to Spanish, it apparently used Italian as the intermediary language. I.E., audio was translated into Italian, then the text of Italian was translated to Spanish, which lost something in translation.

The other experience was an Italian Native speaker with excellent Spanish, but a small Italian accent. That video ended up with Italian subtitles. This time it wasn't troublesome as the content was easier.

And "les boîtes aux lettres" as "les toilettes" is very funny. Did a quick search in Bing on the translation and agree that "les boîtes aux lettres" makes a lot of sense in that context, but I prefer the humor in your first impression.
Last edited by luke on Sun Jul 18, 2021 6:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Amanda's 2021 Log: Spanish, French, German, and a little Ancient Greek

Postby DaveAgain » Sun Jul 18, 2021 4:53 pm

luke wrote:I've seen twice where YouTube guessed the language wrong. Once, don't know why. Native speaker of Spanish showed up with Italian sub-titles. All of this speakers other videos have been properly guessed to be Spanish. That was disappointing because repeated reloads of the page didn't change YoutTube's original guess on the language. The second disappointment was that when I chose to translate the video to Spanish, it apparently used Italian as the intermediary language. I.E., audio was translated into Italian, then the text of Italian was translated to Spanish, which lost something in translation.

The other experience was an Italian Native speaker with excellent Spanish, but a small Italian accent. That video ended up with Italian subtitles. This time it wasn't troublesome as the content was easier.

I think Blaurebel mentioned her Argentinian husband 'spoke spanish like an italian' when he wanted italians to understand him. :-)

---

Mistakes in the choice of individual words can sometimes help too, you recognise them as wrong which steers you towards refining what you actually think you're hearing.
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Re: Amanda's 2021 Log: Spanish, French, German, and a little Ancient Greek

Postby philomath » Sun Jul 25, 2021 10:08 pm

This week I was very busy, so the only language learning I did was listening to Transfert during my commute. On one of the days, I downloaded the subtitles from YouTube and read along as I listened. I kept pausing to write down words and replay certain parts. At first it was nice to learn some new words and understand the episode better, but toward the end I got frustrated. The auto-generated French subtitles weren't very accurate, and the downloaded subtitles were in a weird format so it was hard to read along sometimes, especially during my commute.

The next day I went back to listening without subtitles. I think maybe I’d been underestimating my listening skills; I can understand a decent amount when I can actually hear! The Boston subway gets pretty noisy though, and noise-cancelling headphones only help so much.

I was in New York this weekend and went to the bookstore The Strand because I heard they had a big foreign-language section. It wasn’t nearly as big as I was hoping though. I really miss Foyles in London and Schoenhof’s Foreign Books, my favorite place ever! Unfortunately it closed a few years ago and only operates online now. :(
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Re: Amanda's 2021 Log: Spanish, French, German, and a little Ancient Greek

Postby philomath » Tue Jul 27, 2021 11:41 am

This week is going to be another busy week at work, and Saturday is the deadline I gave myself to finish the novel I've been writing. So I doubt I will get to much language-learning. Yesterday I was too tired to listen to French podcasts on the way to work, so I listened to an old episode from Actual Fluency Podcast instead.

However I did do one language-related activity: I finally started reading Cien años de soledad. I was inspired by Luke's language log. Right now I'm using the Kindle app so I can highlight words I want to remember and look up the ones I don't know. I can't believe it's taken me this long to read the book; it's really good so far!
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Re: Amanda's 2021 Log: Spanish, French, German, and a little Ancient Greek

Postby philomath » Thu Jul 29, 2021 2:59 am

Today I read the second chapter of Cien años de soledad. When I read the first chapter, I felt annoyed at myself for relying on the Kindle dictionary too much. (It's just so tempting because it's right there!) For the second chapter, I made a rule: no looking up words whatsoever. With that rule in place, I enjoyed the second chapter a lot more, and I still understood everything! I wrote down some of the words I didn't know and looked them up after I finished the chapter. Examples include: alborozo (this word came up a lot, and I eventually figured out from context that it means happiness/joy), extraviado, estremecimiento, tinaja, etc. The frustrating part is that a lot of the words are ones I used to know. I guess it makes sense that I forgot a lot when I took 1.5 years off from Spanish. But anyway, I'm proud of myself for being able to read the chapter without the dictionary! I will continue my no-dictionary rule for the rest of the novel.
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Re: Amanda's 2021 Log: Spanish, French, German, and a little Ancient Greek

Postby philomath » Sun Aug 01, 2021 2:28 am

On Thursday (29Jul21) I finished the novel I've been writing! So I should have much more time for languages now (until I start writing something else :)).

Spanish
29Jul21 and 30Jul21: I continued reading Cien años de soledad during my commute.

French
29Jul21: I listened to a 30-minute episode of Transfert. This episode had a narrator from Quebec, and it was the first time I’d heard Québécois since December 2019. At the time I’d only been learning French for a month, so I didn’t notice any difference between Québécois and the French spoke in France—it all sounded equally incomprehensible. Listening to the podcast today, I was a bit shocked at how strange Québécois sounds! The main difference, from what I could tell, is that the nasal vowels are pronounced differently, but it was very hard for me to understand. I wonder if I should seek out more material from Quebec in order to get used to the accent. After all, I live a lot closer to Quebec than to France so I’m more likely to travel there.

31Jul21: I made 18 flashcards from words I highlighted when reading Chanson douce. I just scrolled through the list of highlights and picked words that stood out to me. Most of them were verbs, like frissonner, nettoyer, and soupçonner. I found example sentences on Linguee and used those in my flashcards instead of sentences from the novel. However, I had trouble deciding what type of flashcards to make. Most of them ended up being cloze deletion cards. I'm trying not to be too much of a perfectionist about my Anki flashcards.

Next, I watched a YouTube video called "Lire des BD pendant le confinement" because I wanted some recommendations for bandes dessinées to read. To my astonishment, even though the girl in the video was speaking pretty fast, I could understand nearly everything she said. Normally, when I listen to someone speak quickly in French, my brain is constantly trying to rewind, pick out the individual words, and translate them to English. But this time, somehow I just...got it. It felt amazing and I hope it keeps happening.

German
31Jul21: I did Unit 4 of FSI German. After such a long break from German, I considered repeating Unit 3 first, but then I saw that Unit 4 began with a review. Perfect! This unit was very long. I felt more comfortable with the voiceless palatal fricative, but this time a new sound combination was killing me: the beginning of the word drüben. I think I got it eventually though.
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Re: Amanda's 2021 Log: Spanish, French, German, and a little Ancient Greek

Postby philomath » Sun Aug 01, 2021 3:07 am

Edit: I must have deleted the contents of this post by accident! I don't remember exactly what I wrote, but the gist of it was that I made summary graphs for July, which I will post below.

Here is the cumulative time I spent on each language:


And here are the activities I did for each language:





Other = FSI German, Pimsleur, etc.
Last edited by philomath on Mon Nov 01, 2021 10:41 am, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: Amanda's 2021 Log: Spanish, French, German, and a little Ancient Greek

Postby philomath » Sun Aug 08, 2021 8:39 pm

Spanish
02Aug21: I discovered the podcast Niñas Bien and listened to one episode, which was an hour long.

04Aug21: I listened to another episode of Niñas Bien.

French
04Aug21: I listened to an episode of the podcast Budget Chéri and watched an episode of Dix pour cent. Next I wrote in my journal for 15 minutes. Today's topic was going to the gym.

06Aug21: I listened to Transfert for 40 minutes.

08Aug21: I had my first iTalki lesson in almost five months! It went pretty well. It was nice to catch up with my French teacher after such a long break. I thought my French was rusty, but he kept telling me I was speaking very well. He also gave me a few recommendations for German resources to try!

German
02Aug21: I did Lesson 4 of Pimsleur German I.

08Aug21: I did Lesson 5 of Pimsleur German I. I was really struggling with the sound [ç]. The phrase "Ich möchte nicht" was killing me! I think I need to repeat this lesson because I didn't feel happy with my pronunciation at all.
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