Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

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schlaraffenland
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Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Sat May 13, 2017 3:15 pm

2017 log begins below || 2018 log begins here ||
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Hello! This is my first language log. I set myself some goals a month or two into 2017 with the aim of completion by the end of the calendar year. Here they are, along with some notes about materials.

GERMAN. I'm in maintenance mode here.
Complete a Super Challenge. AV portion completed June 2017, reading portion completed July 2017
Expand vocabulary by 1,000 words drawn from whatever I'm reading/watching.

FRENCH. Come roughly to a high B2.
Complete the videos-only portion of French in Action. Completed 2017-06-30
Learn approximately 3,800 words. I'm using Langenscheidt's Grund- und Aufbauwortschatz Französisch, which claims to provide 9,000 (?!) total words and terms and bring the learner up to a B2 vocabulary level. If that's so, I don't possibly see how it actually has 9,000 words. I would expect more like 4,000 for B2 for a Western European language. When I count roughly the entries per page in the index and multiply by the length of the index, I get about 3,800+ words. I guess I won't know how many until I've entered and learned until I've finished it. But, basically: Learn every entry in the book.
Complete Practice Makes Perfect: Basic French. Complete Hueber's Großes Übungsbuch Französisch. Revised goal: Draw from these books on an as-needed basis to strengthen weak spots.
Complete a half-Super Challenge, but no real pressure here; we'll just see how far I get.Watched 50 films, read 33 books
Maybe do a Tadoku in June. Read 780 pages

JAPANESE.
I visit a weekly class, so, first and foremost: Complete all assigned work for once (heh). Learn the accompanying vocabulary. Completed late May 2017
Learn all the vocabulary included in Minna No Nihongo I, which I actually should've known already...
Learn to write at least 2,000 of the kanji in Heisig (I'll worry about the readings next year).Completed 2017-12-31

NORWEGIAN.
Complete Assimil Norwegisch ohne Mühe.
Work parallel with NTNU's Norwegian on the Web (no predefined goal here).




Corrections, questions, and suggestions are always welcome!
Last edited by schlaraffenland on Tue Jan 02, 2018 12:20 am, edited 5 times in total.
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Expugnator
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby Expugnator » Sat May 13, 2017 3:18 pm

Hyggelig å møte en annen lærer av norsk! Jeg gleder meg til å følge loggboken din. Jeg ser at du har gitt mye nyttig råd om tysk på den tyske gruppen, og jeg vedder på at du kommer til å ha det veldig moro med norsk.
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schlaraffenland
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Languages: English (N), German (C2)
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On ice for now: Spanish, Korean, Turkish, Norwegian
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Sun May 14, 2017 3:43 am

Expugnator wrote:Hyggelig å møte en annen lærer av norsk! Jeg gleder meg til å følge loggboken din. Jeg ser at du har gitt mye nyttig råd om tysk på den tyske gruppen, og jeg vedder på at du kommer til å ha det veldig moro med norsk.


Tusen takk! Jeg snakker ennå ikke så mye norsk, men jeg gleder meg også til å samtale med dere.
(I hope that wasn't too awful :lol: )
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schlaraffenland
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Posts: 130
Joined: Sat Aug 13, 2016 11:50 pm
Location: West Side
Languages: English (N), German (C2)
Actively studying: French (C1), Japanese (~N5)
My old flames: Latin, Ancient Greek (Koine, Attic, Homeric)
On ice for now: Spanish, Korean, Turkish, Norwegian
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Sun May 14, 2017 4:16 am

As a jumping-off point, here were my YTD totals as of 30 April.

GERMAN.
Super Challenge: I think I had read about 70 books and watched about 80 films. I'll report my backlog once the bot is working again and I can flush out the unreported queue.
Vocabulary learned: 203/1000

FRENCH.
French in Action eps.: 23/52
Vocabulary learned: 800/3800

JAPANESE.
Vocabulary learned: 409/(1500, will change over time)
Kanji learned: 590/2000

NORWEGIAN.
Assimil Norwegisch ohne Mühe: 12/100 + active wave: 0/100
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby tomgosse » Mon May 15, 2017 10:57 pm

Bonjour et bienvenue ! Je vous ai ajouté au groupe. Nous sommes impatients de suivre vos progrès. :D
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Rejoignez notre groupe français ! Les Voyageurs

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schlaraffenland
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Posts: 130
Joined: Sat Aug 13, 2016 11:50 pm
Location: West Side
Languages: English (N), German (C2)
Actively studying: French (C1), Japanese (~N5)
My old flames: Latin, Ancient Greek (Koine, Attic, Homeric)
On ice for now: Spanish, Korean, Turkish, Norwegian
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Tue May 16, 2017 2:12 am

tomgosse wrote:Bonjour et bienvenue ! Je vous ai ajouté au groupe. Nous sommes impatients de suivre vos progrès. :D


Merci beaucoup ! :D
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schlaraffenland
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Posts: 130
Joined: Sat Aug 13, 2016 11:50 pm
Location: West Side
Languages: English (N), German (C2)
Actively studying: French (C1), Japanese (~N5)
My old flames: Latin, Ancient Greek (Koine, Attic, Homeric)
On ice for now: Spanish, Korean, Turkish, Norwegian
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Tue May 16, 2017 2:55 am

Mid-month thoughts...

German
I'm a good way into Paul Auster's "4 3 2 1" in German translation. I find it easy to read and interesting, though I could do without all the explicit stuff. :oops: (Ach, meine angelsächsischen Hemmungen...) It's particularly useful to read translated works so that I can see how a translator would choose to render idiomatic American expressions in German. I'm storing these up as I go along.
I finished the audiobook translation of Julian Barnes' "Der Lärm der Zeit" (erm, I actually don't know the original English title!). That was really lovely and very engaging. I've already met my monthly goals for audiovisual material, so I had better tone down the easy stuff and focus on the other languages.

French
I'm meeting my quantifiable goals, but I feel I could be doing more. I am somewhat stressed about the fact that my output ability doesn't match the degree of what I take in, even though I know that this is a perfectly normal issue that I've faced in every other language. I tested my French reading last night with DIALANG and got C1, which I find very weird, because nothing above B1-B2 is taught in our secondary school system here, where I originally learned French. The kicker is, I know I couldn't confidently produce anything on my own of the caliber of what I was being tested upon in the reading. I know I'll get there eventually, but I wonder if I should be challenging myself more or taking in massive amounts more of reading and AV material. (Probably.)
I have wanted to L-R a book for weeks and began with about ten pages last month, but I haven't gone back to it -- always, "OK, tomorrow I'll set aside a big chunk of time for this..." I really like Le journal en français facile and L'avis de Marie. Thanks to the group for those recommendations!

Japanese
I am grudgingly coming round to accepting that my "normal" for Japanese is and will remain lower than my "normal" for other languages. It's just frustrating to get 98% of vocabulary reviews right on an average day in other languages, and the same average for Japanese kanji will be consistently 85% (a good day) or even 75% (meh), or, once in a blue moon, 93% (an extraordinarily good day; why can't I replicate those at will?). And these are characters that I have already written, in some cases, a hundred times.
I don't find the Japanese grammar conceptually difficult at all so far, but my mind simply operates far more slowly when it has to call things up in this language, except for the phrases I had learned as a kid and can rattle off rapidly.
I just have to realize that there's nothing wrong with me, there's nothing wrong with Japanese... it's just that, time commitments being equal, I will not come as far in Japanese as I would when I spend the same amount of time on another language. I also don't have the same motivating factors as many of my friends when it comes to learning the language (a Japanese spouse, love of anime/manga/martial arts, etc.), so my efforts feel extra robotic right now. That's why I won't make a serious commitment to learning new grammar after my course ends next month. I will still learn kanji and vocabulary on schedule and practice them religiously, but that's about it. I hope for the vaunted "bow wave" effect... and if I have a stopover in the coming months at Narita or Haneda, at least I can always rest assured that I don't have to fall back on English.
At least when it comes to kanji, it's nice to look at things I couldn't read three or four months ago but which now make some sense. This is true of omamori, Japanese packaging, and also, Chinese signs around town. It's cool to have a suggestion about the meaning leap out at me suddenly. Also, for some months, the kanji for a given word leaps into my imaginative memory as soon as I hear one of the English words that it encompasses. That's been funny.

Norwegian
Alas, poor Norwegian! You are not getting the attention you deserve. I piddle around in Duolingo for perhaps 35 minutes a day. My Assimil course is sitting right here, untouched for some weeks. The core issue is the very fact that Assimil demands speaking out loud (stunning, I know). It mortifies me to do anything performative when others are around. I gave up piano for this reason and won't sing or dance around others because of this, too. So I must wait until way into the early morning hours to use Assimil, all due to my own self-imposed prison. And putting it off until so late means that it doesn't get done, of course.
That's the difference between people who meet their goals and people who don't (I'm often in the latter category). The people who meet their goals really couldn't care less what others think of them, or at least learn to recognize and deflate superficial anxieties, and so they persevere. I cannot imagine doing shadowing in the orthodox way prescribed by Professor Argüelles, despite being fully aware of how incontrovertibly good it would be for my progress. Nobody cares one bit about me practicing out loud except for me; marching around shouting in a foreign language is actually among the less weird things one could do in this household. :lol:
It's interesting how certain activities reveal the places where one could really benefit from growth and development. My lack of practicing Norwegian aloud, as shown above, has nothing to do with Norwegian or language-learning. It has everything to do with deeply rooted personal inhibitions and unhelpful, self-punishing behavior.
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schlaraffenland
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On ice for now: Spanish, Korean, Turkish, Norwegian
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Fri May 19, 2017 10:38 pm

French
I feel things are beginning to take some shape in my mind. I still have thousands of words to learn -- don't we all? -- but I am beginning to recall vocabulary and formulate sentences automatically and with ease, instead of feeling like I'm pulling something with great effort out of the very darkest corners of my memory. I no longer reply in the wrong language when I have to come up with something in French. Sometimes, I can guess at how a spoken sentence is going to finish before the speaker has completed it (say, in French in Action). I did French listening at DIALANG and got B2, but it gave me a run for my money. I am definitely better off than I was in January, however.
Now seems like a good time to introduce more reading and writing. I want to complete Practice Makes Perfect: Basic French in the next three weeks. Hueber Großes Übungsbuch Französisch is on the back burner for now. It was disheartening to get so many basic things wrong in every exercise, especially in the translations from German to French, which I utterly butchered. My mind doesn't seem to like to extract a French sentence from German word order. I think that suggests that I need to build up a more solid foundation first.
I will allot more time for reading in June. I read now, but not consistently. I have another week or two to collect a few works, I guess. There's a lot of stuff lying around here, but something tells me that it wouldn't be the best idea to start out with a volume of Provençal medieval verse (gosh, you think?). The trick is finding things where I don't have to look up more than about five words per page, or it will be too much of a slog. I have a couple of shorter, simplified versions of classics that are around B1/B2 level. That's not a large body of work, but it is a start.
I will have learned about half of my core B-level vocabulary by the end of July. With the way my queue is timed, June will be almost exclusively devoted to learning words about travel, vacations, and the like.

Norwegian
No Assimil progress to report, but actually, I don't think that's so bad after all. I have spent a couple of weeks piddling around in Duolingo just to reinforce what I had already once learned. I take 30-40 minutes per day reviewing material and learning some new things very incrementally. It is difficult for me to imagine someone "learning" a language entirely through Duolingo, if there exist people who've made such a claim in the first place. It seems more to me like wooden alphabet blocks, where you literaly play with the material and gain some tangential familiarity with it that way. But, just about all practice is good practice, as long as it is time effective.
I have begun to watch "Skam," and I must surely be the last person on earth to have heard about it. I'm watching with Norwegian closed captioning, which is a huge plus. I'm surprised by how much is comprehensible when one has a background of English and German. I'm understanding the jokes and understanding words I've never heard before, all because of their English/German cognates. I'm still not clear on some major points -- why do all the girls in the school hate the main character? What happened in the past? -- but I understand the deal with russefeiring and so on. Man, I'm glad I wasn't a high schooler during the social media age. It looks just miserable trying to stake your own course in the face of intensified peer pressure, social feedback, etc.
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schlaraffenland
Orange Belt
Posts: 130
Joined: Sat Aug 13, 2016 11:50 pm
Location: West Side
Languages: English (N), German (C2)
Actively studying: French (C1), Japanese (~N5)
My old flames: Latin, Ancient Greek (Koine, Attic, Homeric)
On ice for now: Spanish, Korean, Turkish, Norwegian
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Mon May 29, 2017 9:29 pm

It looks like I am on track to hit my quantifiable goals by the month's end, which is a nice feeling. In fact, it's difficult not to want to cram in an extra few hundred words here and there when I've already met my quotas. And this is even after having built in a couple of extra rest days during the week. I'm not sure how I got ahead of schedule, but I'll take it!

German
I have only a couple hundred pages left in 4 3 2 1 and will almost certainly complete the Super Challenge with this book, since it's over 1200 pages long. I've found it engaging and have really gotten used to the translators' voices (four were hired to complete it!). It'll be hard to pare down time spend on the Super Challenge and reapportion it to other languages, since German is "easy," whereas the other languages require work. I also finished the audiobook version of Michel Houellebecq's Unterwerfung, and that was a good eight hours. I must be nearly done with the AV component of the Super Challenge as well. Now I have to begin tearing myself away from the "easy" stuff in German and focus more on the other languages...

French
I feel on much stronger footing than I was in February, but I don't know if I am doing too little work or if it's just right (probably too little). I am nearly done with the French in Action videos and find news radio pretty simple to follow, even if it doesn't feel "transparent" upon listening, in comparison to German. I had ambitious goals about completing Practice Makes Perfect: Basic French but have not been very consistent. One annoyance, which is totally the fault of my own pickiness, is that I've found several errors even in just the first six or seven units, and/or instances in which a grammatical construction is presented but not properly implemented in the exercises. For false beginners, this is no problem, since one could fall back on one's previous knowledge and rest assured that there are several ways to express something. But I imagine that this could be exasperating to a person with no French experience who tries to use this book and wonders why it contradicts itself so much, and without any hint of explanation. I find myself skipping over exercises I find fairly pointless ("Where would you expect to find the following items? Mark the appropriate column with an X"). I guess I have to give myself permission to do so.
I had grand plans to L-R a couple of books but haven't touched them for weeks. I can't work up the motivation to devote solid chunks of time to it (and this was supposed to be "French weekend" for me!). It's difficult for me to imagine what L-R would bring me that following along with a French written text and audiobook wouldn't. Is it the repetition factor? That, for me, is among the big hang-ups, the monotony of it. I suspect that the creator of L-R would very justifiably point out that one can't expect the same good success others have had with the method if one doesn't follow the method to a T. My text and translation are not interlinear, for one, and I am not crazy-interested in reading them. Just mildly, politely so. I can't think of anything I'd be absolutely crazy about reading right now in any language, but that speaks more about my anhedonia than about my language learning. If people have had raving success with L-R, I'd love to hear about it. I suspect that my approach is fundamentally flawed because it deviates from what is recommended, and that's why I can't excite myself for it nor feel as though I'm getting anything out of what I have already tried.
Anyway, maybe I'll pull out my reliable old Petit Prince in the coming few days and listen and read along.
I have switched my phone language to French after three years of it being in German. It looks so weird.
I've subscribed to a French news magazine that should begin coming within a month or two. I need to read a lot more. I will do the June Tadoku and aim for about four hundred pages.

Japanese
I miscalculated how many kanji I had learned already and realize that the total comes to 875. So I guess I'm on track to learn not just 2000 this year, but the whole jōyō list and then some, as compiled by Heisig. I'll buy the second volume of Heisig the day I finish the list -- not a day sooner! -- and begin formally learning the readings next year. I still miss up to 20 percent of recently learned kanji every time I practice, which I find quite irritating. Perhaps I don't visualize the stories very well. It really does seem to take me getting a kanji wrong 5 or 6 times before it's really in there.

Norwegian
I still haven't done any further Assimil lessons, but I re-listen to what I have already done, and I spend at least half an hour per day with Duolingo. This has actually been really helpful in terms of establishing and perpetuating the habit of playing with the language. I remember the uneasiness I felt a couple of months ago with the indefinite versus definite articles, and that has vanished, I realized. I seem to have assimilated the genders of the nouns I've learned, too, without really having made an effort. And here I was, suspicious all this time of not relying on my beloved SRS to beat such information into me.
Perhaps when the 6WC is over, I will try to spend less time on Duolingo and devote more of that time to Assimil. Maybe one Assimil lesson per day without fail, while sounding modest, was too ambitious a goal. But perhaps it will be easier to jump back into it after having really solidified what little I already knew. I would really like to say by year's end that I have finished the course, both active and passive phases, even if I don't feel like I can speak or understand at a ~B1 level.

If I am good and have completed Assimil Norwegian around year's end, then I'll let myself have a treat and will order their Occitan course. I've been interested for years in learning one of the langues d'oc. But I can't let myself have it right away. Otherwise, I'd just be ordering and starting (and abandoning) a new course every three weeks, which is not wise on a number of levels.
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schlaraffenland
Orange Belt
Posts: 130
Joined: Sat Aug 13, 2016 11:50 pm
Location: West Side
Languages: English (N), German (C2)
Actively studying: French (C1), Japanese (~N5)
My old flames: Latin, Ancient Greek (Koine, Attic, Homeric)
On ice for now: Spanish, Korean, Turkish, Norwegian
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=5831
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Re: Willkommen im Schlaraffenland [DE, FR, JA, NO]

Postby schlaraffenland » Thu Jun 01, 2017 3:04 am

YTD totals as of 31 May:

GERMAN.
Pages read this month: 441 ( = 8.8 Super Challenge books)
Hours of AV consumed this month: 20.05 ( = 13.3 Super Challenge films)
I don't know exactly where I stand as for SC completion, but I believe I am about 90 percent of the way through.
Vocabulary learned: 319/1000

FRENCH.
French in Action eps. watched: 42/52
Vocabulary learned: 1200/3800

JAPANESE.
Vocabulary learned: 846/(1300, will change over time)
Kanji learned: 875/2200

NORWEGIAN.
Assimil Norwegisch ohne Mühe: 12/100 + active wave: 0/100
Not a lot of progress. :( But I have done about 30 minutes of Duolingo a day for three weeks and have watched 8 episodes of "Skam." Next month, I will work more Assimil into my days, especially as the 6WC drops off (paradoxically enough). I am also working through Norwegisch: Grammatikübungsbuch from Buske Verlag, which appears great for reinforcing what I am learning through other sources.
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