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Reineke’s movie extravaganza | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7198 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 33 of 40 19 February 2016 at 3:15am | IP Logged |
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Good to see you after all these years reineke!
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| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6440 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 34 of 40 19 February 2016 at 7:54am | IP Logged |
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Hey Luke, good to hear from you! How's everything? How come you did not migrate? You like
orange too? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6440 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 35 of 40 07 March 2016 at 6:42pm | IP Logged |
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2/21/16 I'm almost finished with the first Torpedo album. In my memory "Torpedo 1936"
has always been a super-cool cult comic. Upon second reading, I have discovered themes that may not be appreciated by all the readers. I looked up some vocabulary. I was especially curious :) I have since encountered many of these words while watching cartoons. 2/28/16 Breaking into a European language without paying attention to what I was doing was never an issue for me. For at least two of my languages I have always only sought pretty pictures and pretty sounds, pretty words and then pretty thoughts - language learning was an afterthought. With others, the first thought I had after coming out of the textbook stage was: "I can't understand what the heck they're saying". I don't remember my second thought about the language or language learning after that. 03/07/16 One of the first expressions I heard watching Nación Z an eternity or so ago was "rueda pinchada". I didn't have to look it up. After some 220 hours of listening I heard it again. RAE'S CREA lists "pinchar" at 31,329th place and "pinchada" is much lower than that. I have traveled over 1.2 million words in between. I am mostly watching cartoons. Last night I was watching Chicho Terremoto, better known in Italy as Gigi la Trottola. I am currently watching/reading Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese (Corto Maltés in Spanish). Comics are good for children and language learners. I will soon dust off Hermann's Jeremiah and Jodorowsky's Metabarones. I have moved from "literatura infantil" to "literatura juvenil". In practice this means there are no more pretty pictures, or they are few and far between. The novels are under 150 pages long. Soon I will read Historia de la Literatura Española by Ángel del Rio. It's an easy read. I picked up a beautiful hardcover version from Amazon for $4. The book has probably not been touched since 1967. I am not surprised :) Books like these are a great source of easy, descriptive, essayistic language. I also bought a Spanish- Spanish dictionary, el Pequeño Larousse Ilustrado and Duden's pictorial dictionary. I may play with them from time to time. I am awaiting Basil Hall Chamberlain's Handbook of Colloquial Japanese. I am very curious how good a job the Harvard bookstore can do with these out-of-print books that contain funny foreign characters. The rare book editions available on Amazon are often OCR'd garbage. All these books will contribute to the eventual collapse of my bookshelves. Language forums have gotten slow and stale. My new, soon-to-be-old log can be found here: http://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1902 ¡Hasta la vista, chavales! Edited by reineke on 07 March 2016 at 6:44pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6440 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 36 of 40 16 February 2017 at 1:19am | IP Logged |
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Spanish (continuation)
Those baby books were the last books I read in Spanish in 2016. However, I continued with TV watching. 6/02/2016 I just learned "loco como una cabra" from Gatchaman. Yeah, those guys in funny bird suits. I also wanted to save this: "In an attempt to summarise all the information available, John De Jong (personal communication) recently presented ranges of time required to reach different levels. The 400 hours for B1 is optimistic according to his calculations, which suggests a range from 380 hours (fast learners) to 1386 (slow learners). For C1 the range is from 1,520 hours (fast learners) to 4,490 hours (slow learners) which neatly straddles Takka’s estimate" of an average of 3,000 hours. "Taking all of these factors into account, only the person asking the question can answer it by logging the progress of the learners in their context. There is no simple answer.” The CEFR in practice, p.98-100 C2 = 4600 - 12,000 hours? My freestyle diving into native material suddenly looks very reasonable. 6/19 I have been watching mostly cartoons and live TV including things such as the Spanish version of "Cops," investigative journalism (sometimes subtitled in Spanish), religious TV, commercials (not on purpose), a bit of Galician programming, talk shows, agriculture programming (very short - I did catch some "bovine" references), soccer.... My TV watching was pronunciation practice, listening, reading and listening-while-reading all rolled into one. A few observations: - Don't confuse telenovela-watching or any single source of entertainment with live TV. - Don't get intimidated with different regional accents. - Don't believe the hype: regular people and their idiosyncrasies are perfectly intelligible after some live TV watching. If you have trouble following a simple life story your troubles are likely due to general listening comprehension issues OR the person is mixing in elements of a dialect. - Channel surfing is very useful. - Read in your strongest languages and watch TV in your weakest language. Always begin with pronunciation and listening comprehension. - drop L2 subtitles ASAP, don't use L1 subtitles In short, I love TV as a language-learning tool. That's how I learned Italian and German from scratch and that's how I improved on my other languages. I am sticking with (in)comprehensible input. 7/5 Slam Dunk (TV series), Stephen King (audiobook), The Tale of Despereaux (60 pages). 7/6 TV - cartoons 7/7 4 short stories; TV - cartoons 7/8 Live TV - 1990's corruption cases, Mafia, Intelligence (TV segment) Update (September 2016) I have started watching Portuguese TV programs. Edited by reineke on 16 February 2017 at 2:22am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6440 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 37 of 40 16 February 2017 at 1:23am | IP Logged |
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Portuguese through incomprehensible input
Sept. 18, 2016 Portuguesification. What an ugly word. Nevertheless, I am happy to report that I have watched 10 hours of Portuguese-language programming this weekend. That's the most time I've ever spent on Portuguese. Prior to this, I may have spent a few hours listening to a Portuguese-language audiobook in short 5-10 minute bursts. That was maybe 2 years ago. I have noticed a difference in my comprehension level between yesterday and today. I needed the full ten hours and one night of sleep to be able to make such a claim. I am far from being able to claim I actually understand Brazilian Portuguese, but I can now catch entire sentences. Portuguese is still largely incomprehensible. Jensen (1989) showed that the Portuguese (speakers) understand speakers of Spanish to a significantly higher degree than the other way around. I am still far from being considered a speaker of Spanish but I am hopeful that my background in Italian will be of help too. Sept. 23, 2016 Portuguese: 20+ hours of TV. Spanish TV: 500 hours since January. I can now follow some crazy "fast" stuff in Castilian. I have also sampled some audiobooks. Feels like a walk high in the Alps. One moment you're groping around and the next you can see for miles. Listening to a passage from Brothers Karamazov was easier than watching Caillou. A show glorifying Roman debauchery was easy. Abelha Maja, in European Portuguese, was incomprehensible several days ago. Today I was able to follow the story. Maja is still hard, however. Sept. 26, 2016 30+ hours of TV. "Sun Tzu said: In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them. 2. Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting... The rule is, not to besiege walled cities if it can possibly be avoided. The preparation of mantlets, movable shelters, and various implements of war, will take up three whole months; and the piling up of mounds over against the walls will take three months more." Sun Tzu (also) said: "There are three ways in which a ruler can bring misfortune upon his army: 1. By commanding the army to advance or to retreat, being ignorant of the fact that it cannot obey. This is called hobbling the army." In other words, at the very least, learn to differentiate your front from your rear. Learn the pronunciation, master some vocabulary and develop basic listening skills before you start engaging in other activities. Portuguese castle: I estimate that the friendlies outnumber the enemies 3:1. There are numerous ogres in the tunnels below (low frequency items), but they come out rarely and when they do, more often than not, they're on my side. Half of the remaining enemy force are potential deserters. The rest can easily be surrounded and captured once the friendlies become a cohesive, maneuverable force. The friendlies' uniforms take a little getting used to, but I can now easily recognize entire regiments charging full speed in the heat of battle. Portuguese subtitles are not available for any of the programs that interest me at the moment. Maybe it's a good thing. I didn't look up any words. I don't own a Portuguese dictionary. I could live without it, but in order to have the freedom NOT to use a dictionary, you need to own at least one. Sept. 30, 2016 TV (Br. Portuguese) 40+ hours I listened carefully to three different episodes from the same TV series. In each case I counted 30 consecutive sentences and in each case I fully understood approximately 28 sentences. When I hit a hard spot the main reason for a breakdown of comprehension seems to be the inability to make out individual syllables. I didn't try to assess whether I would have been able to understand a troublesome word/words. I can spot new words and I have picked up new vocabulary and expressions. I am able to sink into the content at which time my ability to make observations is limited. Recognizing and decoding cognates in real time leaves no time for thinking (or conscious recognizing). If the sentence is isolated and I hear something like "O meu chapéu!" I may snap out of it and notice the similarity to French. If I heard "melhor" in a similar situation I am not sure I'd be comparing it to other languages. I don't think I can remember when or how I first noticed most of the words I am now able to comprehend. Sleeping on previously covered material helps. I am more likely to analyze and notice if I'm not particularly interested in the content. The more vocabulary the better, of course, but decoding and processing takes precedence. Oct. 1, 2016 Br. Portuguese is going well. Regarding Portuguese being an enemy castle... it turns out I missed the "hotel e churrascaria" sign in the back. Everything's 50% off. Live and learn. I can follow detective shows. My comprehension dropped after I switched to a different show but it quickly recovered. Today I spent 50 mins watching a program in European Portuguese. Listening to European Portuguese feels like I've just started listening to the language. I got a bit of a discount compared to where I was when I started listening to Br. Portuguese, but in order to cash in that IOU I'll need to spend at least 20-40 hours listening to European Portuguese. The idea to start listening to Portuguese was born while I was watching a football game in Romanian. I'm tired of being a conformist so I officially give up calling the game "soccer". Oct. 19, 2016 According to Kodi, I have spent around 150 hours on Portuguese-language TV programming. The first 20-30 hours were almost pure incomprehensible input and now I have no trouble understanding detective type TV shows. The best way I can describe the process is that it's a bit like turning on the world's slowest defogger. I cannot routinely string together 30 fully understood sentences with some material but I am getting close. I am learning new vocabulary daily. I am also hearing the newly learned words and expressions on a daily basis: droga, cara, legal, Nossa, mandachuva, a gente, ainda, barulho, turma, tá ligado, tá this, tô that, achar (several meanings), lembrar... My Oxford Portuguese is still shrink-wrapped. Cognates remain my no.1 priority. Not bad for a month's worth of TV watching. Conscious vs subconscious noticing. Eh, I don't have time to contemplate what's happening between my ears. Nov. 06, 2016 The idea to start listening to Portuguese was born while I was watching a football game in Romanian. The game was at first impossible to follow. Before the game was over, however, I was able to pick up words, expressions and shorter sentences. Watching the commercials was very motivating. "Mastering the vocabulary of most European languages means simply learning to recognize a number of old friends under slight disguises, and making a certain effort to learn a residue of irrecognizable words, which, however, offer less difficulty than they otherwise would through being imbedded in a context of familiar words. The higher vocabulary of science, art, and abstract thought hardly requires to be learnt at all; for it so consists either of Latin and Greek terms common to most European languages or of translations of them." Henry Sweet, The Practical Study of Languages (1899) . Portuguese: around 250 hours of TV watching. No subtitles. I can comfortably understand dubbed shows. Related: You are still watching a staggering amount of TV every day Unless you are a millennial. Then you’re only watching an enormous amount of TV every day. Nov. 16, 2015 Portuguese-language TV: 300+ hours. My Portuguese dictionary is still shrink-wrapped. My listening comprehension keeps improving. The idea that I would not improve, that I would keep parsing Portuguese through my knowledge of other Romance languages and that my knowledge wouldn't grow because the brain is "happy" with simply understanding a message and everything superfluous gets ignored... is a load of theorizing nonsense. On the other hand I do believe that particles and word endings do take a fair bit of time to filter out from the stream of (in)comprehensible audio input. There's always a chance that the brain isn't catching everything. Tá Falado, "Brazilian Portuguese Pronunciation" course is supposedly good and I should probably check it out. Wireless headphones are the best language learning tool I've been able to discover in my quest for improvement. I will soon start watching "real" Brazilian movies: http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2014/25-essential- films-for-an-introduction-to-new-brazilian-cinema/ http://www.adorocinema.com/ I've ordered over a dozen books in Br. Port. including non-fiction (mostly history) and a couple of Portuguese classics (Saramago). I'm aware of the spelling reform since newer books advertise their compliance with the new rules but I'll be damned if I pay $50-$90 for popular fiction. Since I'm shopping the bargain bin my collection is rather varied and contains books by Umberto Eco, Dan Brown, Brazilian pulp etc. Speaking... Brazil is already full of parrots and while the same can be said for Mexico I have plenty of practical reasons to practice Spanish. The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is alive and well. Most of the time, however, I am not encountering obscure words and the a-ha moment is a culmination of many encounters 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5368 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 38 of 40 03 March 2017 at 2:30pm | IP Logged |
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What is the Spanish version of "Cops" and where do you watch it? That sounds good.
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| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6440 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 39 of 40 10 March 2017 at 7:49pm | IP Logged |
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I am not a faithful follower of any show. With
foreign TV programs there's the added difficulty that it's impossible to subscribe to some channels. I believe that the show is called Policías en acción: http://www.lasexta.com/programas/policias-en- accion/ It's an adult show. You will find some free episodes on Youtube but be warned that because of the generic title you may run into all sorts of inappropriate videos that have nothing to do with the show. Categoría:Docu-realities de España https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor%C3%ADa:Docu -realities_de_Espa%C3%B1a 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6440 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 40 of 40 30 August 2017 at 10:19pm | IP Logged |
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Apparently Costco's "web resource guide" that they
are putting into their notebooks includes a link to Htlal. It does not seem that Costco customers are using these notebooks for language learning or the forum concept is played out. Spanish update: I am stll listening to native Spanish sources. Lest you think I'm "inputting" for the sake of getting sufficient exposure to this language, let me state that I am listening attentively and with interest. Edited by reineke on 31 August 2017 at 12:51am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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