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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6696 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3689 of 3959 31 August 2014 at 1:53pm | IP Logged |
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I have discovered one event in the 'Festuge' which I would like to attend, namely a free concert with 80 students from our local music academy in our expensive Musikhus ('Music House') so I haven't got much time to write here. But basically I have watched Serbian TV several hours today plus a bit of Spanish, Italian and English TV, and in my Serbian vocabulary project I have reached a milestone: I have reached the end of the alphabet and done at least two repetitions of all the words on my original wordlists. Not all words have been through 3 rounds: 'П' and 'Р' got their second and last review after 4 weeks, and the letters from 'Y' onwards (Latin 'u') were reviewed after one week so here I assume that the 2. round just was delayed - although the control situation was more like a third round without round 2. And then I discovered to my dismay that I had skipped a column in 'T' during the 1. and 2. round (round 2 was affected because I just did that round by annotating the checklist from round 1, whereas I wrote a new copy of the words for the 3. round - and then I discovered the missing section)
Results: 1. round (always after 1 day): 4780 words, missed 958 (20%) 2. round (mostly after 2 days, at the end of the alphabet after 1 week): 4810 words, missed 805 (17%), incl. 278 (6%) overlap with round 1 3. round (after 2-4 weeks) 2669 words, missed 431 (16%), incl. 239 (9%) overlap with round 1,2 The most striking thing here is that the percentages for missed words are almost the same in the three rounds - but the words I couldn't recall were to a large extent new ones every time, which suggests either 1) that I relearn the words I miss in a given round, or 2) that there always is a certain amount of background memory malfunction which in principle can hit any word. That 1) could be true is a matter of course, but there are also cases where 2) is the more likely explanation. Such as missing "шеик", which according to my dictionary is a loanword which means 'milkshake' - but when I saw it in round two I immediately translated it as 'sheikh' in my mind, and then it counts as missed. The slightly better results in round 2 and 3 suggest that relearning plays an important role, but if my relearning functioned really well the percentages for missed words should fall more. I can't say for certain whether it is time pressure during control sessions or the general 'noise' that should be blamed for this situation. Before this experiment I did my 1. (and mostly only) round like a relearning situation, whereas this time I did more rounds, but I did them as control rounds where I didn't review the words before testing my memory - which is the situation Anki users always find themselves in. From now on I think I'll revert to my earlier review method where I first look the words through, then copy the words 'blindly' (with covered translations) adding translations wherever something is dubious or inaccessible. But I think this experiment has shown that at least one extra round is beneficial. And then I think I'll add one element: if you run through the translations in the original wordlist immediately after doing a repetition round most of the original can be recalled - but the decay rate is fairly high: I am much less successful just a day later. My hunch is that doing such a round based on the translations might help to keep make the relation from translation to original word stick, which should be relevant for the later activation phase. And now I have probably missed the first half hour of the downtown concert... Edited by Iversen on 07 September 2014 at 7:59pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6696 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3690 of 3959 01 September 2014 at 12:00pm | IP Logged |
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Actually I missed the whole concert - I decided it wasn't worth taking a bus for 20 minutes to hear one half concert. Instead I stayed at home and prepared some things for the Novi Sad event.
SER: Као што сам написао јуче, гледао сам телевизију из Хрватске и Србије неколико сати пре подне, а ја наставио томе у вечерњим сатима. ОК, ово укључује концерт в HRT1 из Сцхонбрунн (Schönbrunn) у Бечу, али сам слушао много говори. У јутарњим часовима дошло је дуга емитује из српског (?) града (заборавио сам да обрате пажњу његово име), и одједном сам чуо да они говоре о Оденсе у Данској и Ханс Кристијан Андерсен (H.C.Andersen - jе Ханс Кристијан Андерсен фестивал у Оденсе ове недеље). А увече показала Хрвата слике из музеја уметности Луизијана (Louisiana) у Зеланде, гдје је дозвољено исландском уметнику да баци неколико тона лаве на поду просторије и направи пловни пут кроз гомила. Да ли је то уметност? У Природњачки музеј би много боље уклапа у контекст. EDIT: I suddenly remembered part of the name of that Serbian town, and then I could find the rest with a little help of Goggle and Wikipedia: Сремска Митровица! aka Sremska Mitrovica! The trg on the downtown picture in Wikipedia is exactly the one I saw on TV. And there is one thing more which might make this town interesting: LAT: Oppidum Sremska Mitrovica super oppidum romanum Sirmium iacet. Hoc factum hodie obstinet excavationi omnis Sirmii. Sed quondam situs importantissimus fuit: decem imperatores romani Sermio nati sunt, et dum tempore tetrarchiae - constitutionis pertricosi Diocletiani ubi duo emperatores seniores et due imperatores juniores auctoritatem omnis imperii romani condividerent - Sermium unum fuit de quattuor urbibus imperialibus (cum Mediolano, Augusto Trevorum ac Nicomedia - hodierni Milano, Trier atque Izmit). Edited by Iversen on 07 September 2014 at 7:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4821 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 3691 of 3959 06 September 2014 at 4:51am | IP Logged |
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For a fleeting second, I thought you had passed a day without doing something productive
in languages. I was wrong, of course. Useful to you, but also useful to us. Thank you for being here Iversen. I think it needs saying, now and again. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6696 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3692 of 3959 07 September 2014 at 7:28pm | IP Logged |
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And almost as an answer to Montmorency's message: I have not written anything in this thread since Sept. 1 (shame on me!), but a visit to my internetless mother is part of the explanation. And the days where I don't switch on my computer in the evening are often the days where I have been busy at my job (where I work with computers all day long) and then I prefer working the old-fashioned way from the operational base of my armchair in the evenings.
But since Sept 1 I have done a quite significant follow-up study to my protracted Serbian vocabulary experiment: a word count using two dictionaries: my Serbian<->English dictionary which I used for the experiment and an old Serbocroatian<->French dictionary (Obod Cetinje Medicinska Knjiga) with approximately 26.000 headwords in the Serbian part according to my estimates. Actually the cover says 100.000 words and expressions for both sections, and there are definitely not twice as many expressions as headwords, so I'm not quite sure how to interpret this. This dictionary uses Latin letters which I have tried to avoid, but it has nevertheless been useful in many cases where I couldn't find a word in neither the English one, not the Italian one. I divided the words on 6 pages from the Serbian-English dictionary into known, 'borderline cases' and not known, and I got 252 - 39 -104 words in those categories, i.e. 64% - 10% - 26%. Which clearly shows that my vocabulary marathon with its almost 5000 wordlist words has had a lasting and durable effect on my Serbian vocabulary - and not just an effect limited to the words on the lists. The Serbian<->English dictionary has roughly 12.000 words, so even a third of those is a fairly solid background for further work in the language. But I wanted to check my level on another dictionary - and preferably a bigger one - so I grabbed the old French one from the shelf and went through the left column on three pages, which yielded 166 words: 81 known (49%), 17 borderline (10%) and 68 not known (41%). Those 49% is undeniably less than the 64% from the other dictionary, but quite satisfying if you take into account that this was a bigger dictionary and that it used Latin letters. Actually I only wrote the words from the first page in Latin letters - after that I decided to quote the words in Cyrillic letters, but I don't feel that this had any effect on my results. And now I can presumably speak Serbian? Nope. I have not had time to train active skills too, so even though I can put sentences together in my head now I don't feel ready to speak. Knowing the right words is a good start, but the ability to apply the morphological and syntactical rules on the fly is quite another thing, and whether I can get that put into order in the month up to Novi Sad is still an open question. But I can already now see the effect on my reading capabilities. I have been reading articles from Wikipedia for some time now, including a long article about the Triassic period, and I feel less and less need to consult the dictionary or the translation of a bilingual printout so just for fun and in order not to neglect my other languages I have made a number of printouts with other translation languages than Danish or English - like Romanian, Icelandic and Afrikaans. And it has worked quite smoothly. OK, I may not get the chance to discuss the Triassic fauna and weather or the myths surrounding the Hyperboreans with any Serbians in October, but... well, you should never say never. Last time I visited Zagreb I visited the Museum of Natural History, and inspired by my guidebook I expected to see some fine displays with some of the Neanderthal remains which have been found in various caves in Croatia. But I found almost nothing there, and I complained to a custodian. He then led me to a chamber full of employees, and after a few minutes a couple of specialists took me to another room with a table, and then they put a skull on that table. "Say something about it", they asked. I said the usual things about a pronounced eyebrow ridge, no chin, moderately big teeth and a oblong skull shape. Apparantly I passed the examination and I was accepted for a serious talk about Neanderthals. Unfortunately I couldn't speak Croatian back then so we had to use English, but just sitting with a genuine Neanderthal skull in your hand while discussing with real experts is an experience which I won't forget soon. It reminds me about another incident in Tbilisi in Georgia in 2000. I had visited a downtown museum with a treasure room in the basement and several floors above it - but these floors were closed for some technical reason (lack of electricity or heat or something). I asked whether that treasure was their only open exhibit, and a friendly employee said that they actually also had a room with some bones in the back which I might want to see. So I was led over an inner courtyard to a room with - among other things - the first of a series of finds made by Lordkipanidze and his team of: bones from Homo ergaster, which is a precursor to Homo erectus (or maybe an early Homo erectus with less advanced stone tool skills). These bones from a site at Dmanisi are in fact the oldest humanoid remains found anywhere outside Africa - about 1,8 mio years old - and even though the first complete skull was on display in Paris at the time it was very exciting to discuss finds of this quality with a member of the actual research team. And just as an afterthought: I have also worked with other languages than Serbian the last couple of months. For instance I have made some Greek wordlists this weekend, and I have read and studied several articles about paleontology in Bahasa Indonesia from sources like www.tempo.co and teknologi.inilah.com - and of course also the inevitable Wikipedia. One curious article with the title "Apa kata Alkitab mengenai dinosaurus" from www.gotquestions.org ('are-there word(s) (in) theBook concerning dinosaurus' (Alkitab = the Bible)). And it came close to claiming that both the 'tanniyn' (some kind of seamonster) and the famous 'behemoth' were dinosaurs, which in that case they should have survived until historical times - not very likely, but it is definitely possible to learn a language through articles whose claims you can't accept. Edited by Iversen on 07 September 2014 at 8:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6696 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3693 of 3959 09 September 2014 at 12:35pm | IP Logged |
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I spent yesterday doing very little productive language learning - I have just got my photos from the Québec trip back, and it has taken some time to organize them and put them in my oldfashioned photoalbum (no. 50). I did however have a brief look at some of the many versions of the miniature manual to my new headphones. When you buy stuff like that nowadays you get a ton of translations, which may be machine made or written by some translator trainee quack, but you get a fair amount of technical terms from such sources which could be hard to find in a dictionary - especcially an old one. Maybe I should devote a multilingual batch of wordlists to those manuals.
INDO: Namun, aku berhasil mencaripunya waktu untuk mempelajari beberapa halaman dalam buku panduan saya untuk Singapura. Hal ini telah menjadi sangat diperlukan bagi saya dalam studi saya Bahasa Indonesia, tetapi saat ini saya telah menghabiskan terutama artikel dari Wikipedia dan Internet. Edited by Iversen on 09 September 2014 at 12:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6696 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3694 of 3959 11 September 2014 at 3:19pm | IP Logged |
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SP: Hoy he 'estudiado' la paleontologia - el que incluye escuchar (y a veces mirar) un documental en español de NGC o BBC sobre la historia de los dinosaurios. Pero no solo de los dinosaurios - también de otros animales del triassico como l'Archeosaurio Postosuchus ('falso' cocodrillo) y los Cinodontos, que son miembros del terápsides - el mismo orden al qual pertenecen nosotros los mamíferos.
He también leído algunos artículos de www.academika.edu sopra la paleontologia, y no, estos no son sciencia popular. La mayoría estan escribidos en Ingles, pero hay varias articulos en otros idiomas. Pero talvez es demasiado decir que la lengua es inglés. Unos ejemplos para divertir a Vds.: ENG: In the exciting tale named "Mass Extinction of birds at the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary" the topic is for once not the distinction of dinosaurs in general, but the dire fate that befell a large group of dinos within the one group that survived, namely the birds. And this is done in such vivid and enticing prose as in the following random excerpt: Following their remarkable diversification in the Early Cretaceous, birds underwent a major evolutionary transition between the Cretaceous and the Paleogrene. Archaic birds (i.e. outside the known clade Neornithes), such as the Enantionithes and basal ornithurines, failed to persist beyond the Cretaceous, and identifiable members of most modern orders make their first appearences in the Paleocene and Eocene. There is very little fossil evidence for modern birds in the Cretaceous. The only definitive neornithine known from the Cretaceous is the anseriforme Vegavis; Teviornis may also represent an anseriform, although its affinities have not yet been examined in the context of a phylogenetic analysis." And why didn't we know this long ago? Well, because of this bombshell: [the bones] have never been subjected to phylogenetic analysis. Instead, species have been shoehorned into modern orders on the basis of overall similarity. (...) Species have often been erected on the basis of nonoverlapping elements, meaning that some species may have been named several times. I'm sure that you'll agree: this is shocking, and it is about time that somebody does something about it. PS: "anseriformes" are ducks and critters that look like ducks. I have also read about the claimed mass extinction of the middle part of the Vendian (approx. 650.000.000 years ago), , about the Cambrian explosion and a few other things - but I think I'll leave the article about "Trophic differences, originations and extinctions during the Cenomanian and Maastrichtian Stages of the Cretaceous" till tomorrow. Plus the article "De cómo Mylodon robustus surgió de los huesos de Glyptodon clavipes. El comercio de huesos con el Río de Plata y la sistemática de los mamíferos fósiles en 1840" about the critter that fueled my paleontological reading spree of today, the Mylodon, when I saw an article that claimed that it might have survived on the pampas of Patagonia. But nah, I don't think a 3 meter long, fat, slow and probably grumpy animal with halitosis could have escaped the sharp-eyed vaqueiros in the open countryside. Edited by Iversen on 16 September 2014 at 1:14am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6696 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3695 of 3959 15 September 2014 at 2:35pm | IP Logged |
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This weekend I stayed at home, but most of the time I did other things rather than study languages. I did make green sheets concerning Serbian plus some wordlists and further of texts in a number of languages, but only concerning topics which I already have mentioned here. The thing that kept me from languages was another hobby, but in this case a defunct one: my musical compositions. I basically stopped composing at the same time I gave up all contacts with other amateur musicians, but before that I had made a tematic and chronological worklist, in some cases with structural analysis. All this material has been waiting patiently until I decided to add these lists to the digital system where I keep not only travel photos and postcards, but also things like the items on my music cassettes and photos of my paintings. I don't know whether I ever will find time to scan the musical scores, but I do know that I haven't got time for that right now.
SW: Jag tittade dock på TV, och i går kväll följde jag de svenska valen på två kanaler, SV1 för de landsomfattande valen och SV2 för de lokala valen i södra Sverige. Ock det ble ett resultat som ingen egentligen gillar. Alliancen som har regerad Sverige i 8 år tappade valet, ock det er ju aldri kul att tappa et val. Parterna til vänster vann, men inte så stort att de kan få en egen majoritet i parlamentet- och vinsten tilfall Vänsterpartiet. Problemet är att Sverigesdemokratene fikk 12,9 %, men dem kann de inte använda för något som helst, för i det flyktingglade Sverige kommer inte någon att prata med dem. Och ingen kan räkna till hundra utan SD's 12,9 %. Men strunt i dett, jag fikk hört mycket prat på svenska med mycket lite bakgrundsmusik. Edited by Iversen on 15 September 2014 at 2:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6696 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3696 of 3959 16 September 2014 at 1:07am | IP Logged |
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The following is a quote from the thread "Anki vs. Gold Lists vs. Iversen-style Wordlists" at Polydog's place. The background is explained in more detail there, but it represents a serious attempt to compare the merits of these three vocabulary learning methods. I decided to try the goldlist method and my own layout on samples from the same language and with equal numbers of words of (as far as possible) similar difficulty. Later I added a third list with words I simply copied from a Russian-Danish dictionary without doing anything more for a month. This third list should serve as a neutral 'zero level'. Given that I hardly have touched Russian since Berlin any gain above this level could be assumed to come from the activity connected to a given wordlist. I had expected my Serbian activities to interfere, but actually I only could identify very few words because of my Serbian wordlists.
Quote: I have now checked my resultats after the Goldlist - 3 column - 'lazy' list experiment. and the results were more extreme than I had expected. First I took my original 4 goldlists with 100 words, covered the translations up and checked how many I knew by writing my best guesses at the menings - but it turned out that I mostly didn't even have a plausible proposal for a meaning. I happened to see the translation of one word, so I had to eliminate this word - the remaining 99 words could be divided into 18 known, 8 'something in that direction' and 73 totally wrong or no proposals. It was a fairly gloomy experience. Then I checked my 'do-nothing' list, where I had chosen 100 unknown (or only vaguely known) words about one month ago and not done anything after that. Here I simply overlooked one word, but the remaining 99 words could be divided into 17 known, 10 'not-totally-wrong' and 72 total failures. That is, practically the same dismal level as with the goldlists. Suitably disheartened I proceeded to check the result of my own three colum wordlists, which I had reviewed twice since I made them (plus one time where I just looked them through), and that was like leaving a black cave: out of 100 words I knew 64, 10 were not too far off the mark and only 26 were totally lost or wrong. These results lie reasonably close to those I found in my Serbian experiments, and the difference could be due simply to the fact that I have spent much more time on Serbian than on Russian in the test period.. By the way - I should probably give some examples of the middle category. For instance I had translated "заграница" as frontier area, but it means foreign countries in general ('udland' in Danish). And I had written 'tålmod' (=patience) for "терпимост", but apparently it means 'tolerance' . However larger discrepances than these were counted as fullblown misses. Now these resultats were fairly unexpected - I had a fairly good feeling about the goldlists and genuinely believed that I retained something from them, but it is pretty clear that I didn't. And I think I know why: I had done exactly as I was told: read the words aloud, but do NOT make associations. And association making is alpha and omega for my memorizing. When I saw the translations to the words in the goldlists again I could see all the golden opportunities I deliberately had missed, like identifications of loanwords ("шпалеры" = 'espalier'), derivations ("лодочник" 'boatman' from "лодка" boat"), sound associations ("срам" - 'shame') and other types of associations ("фокусник" 'magician' - i.e. a person who cleverly manipulates the focus of the spectators) . When I did my own wordlists I exploited these possibilities to their limits, and that's in my opinion the crucial factor behind my good results with my own layout and utter failure with the goldlists. Maybe others have a mind that functions on other premises, and maybe I ought to do a second experiment where I used associations to my heart's delight, but otherwise followed the original rules. But for the moment I prefer spending my time on my own kind of wordlists which suits me like a glove. Edited by Iversen on 16 September 2014 at 11:56pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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