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Tangweeds Irish (& French) TAC 2015 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5549 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 9 of 40 20 March 2015 at 7:42am | IP Logged | ||
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I hope you feel much better soon, tangleweeds! It sounds like you're making pretty good progress, and I'm looking forward to sharing notes on using Gaeilge gan Stró, Buntús Cainte (I love the illustrations!), and keeping up with those pesky Duolingo reviews. :)
Edited by Teango on 20 March 2015 at 7:43am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tangleweeds Groupie United States Joined 3568 days ago 70 posts - 105 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Irish, French | Message 10 of 40 21 March 2015 at 4:39am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks, Teango! Encouragement helps so much. I get too guilty when not studying. I kept
trying (ineffectually) to get started on the computer, but when I'm too unwell to regulate my computer use intelligently, I always end up distracted into reading cool articles from interesting friends on chat and social media instead. I would have done better dress warmly, put on my neon earbuds, and take a daily toddle around the neighborhood talking Irish to my phone, where there are fewer distractions. Hopefully I'll learn that opening the computer when sick means I will get sucked into random net surfing, which is a perfectly OK way to pass time when feeling ill. The problem is remembering and accepting that this likely to happen whether I want it to or not, and not plan otherwise then feel bad for failing. Feeling guilty over acting sick when I'm actually quite ill is a waste of energy by any measure. Last night I segmented and labeled the first lesson in Buntús Cainte. Today I will feed it into Anki. I find that I am continuing to prefer sentence cards in Anki; to be entirely honest, I've been struggling with reluctance to make any isolated vocabulary word cards at all. When I think about it, there's a rhythm to language that gets lost when words are broken off into atomic units. I used to write (and read) a fair amount of poetry, and continued writing various kinds of prose for several decades after, so maybe I'm somewhat hyper- sensitized the role of rhythm in effective language use. I don't think single word vocabulary cards will do me any harm, and in the past I've learned well from them; I'm just having a hard time getting excited about them the way I enjoy the rhythm of complete sentences. Edited by tangleweeds on 21 March 2015 at 4:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tangleweeds Groupie United States Joined 3568 days ago 70 posts - 105 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Irish, French | Message 11 of 40 25 March 2015 at 1:43am | IP Logged | ||
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I had a brilliant (doh!) idea which has greatly facilitated my study from both Buntús
Cainte and Learning Irish: enlarge them!! I am 54 years old and suffer from standard age- related vision issues, particularly as print diminishes in size, or suffers from smudgy old typesetting. I used the multifunction printer/scanner/copy/fax everything machine to copy and enlarge Buntús Cainte by 125% and Learning Irish by 120%, to fit standard US 8.5" x 11" paper. Now I can see whether that's a fada over the i, or just a dot, and the cartoons are easier to see too. Also, I can mark up these copies in my standard study mode, and still leave the books pristine. Win! So far I have segmented/transcribed the first two lessons in Buntús Cainte, and Learning Irish's first lesson's phrases, and most of the second lesson's vocabulary, and also about 2/3 of the first unit of Gaeilge gan Stró. I must to get all that stuff into Anki ASAP, as my next review will use up my final fresh cards. But I confess to getting very distracted yesterday, when I ran across the "Easy French Reader" while cleaning (my roommate has ties to Quebec), and discovered I could still read French. Browsing logs led me to Lingvist.io, where the only language offered from English was French, so I signed up to check it out, then spent an hour and a half amusing myself with it with it. I honestly found it more entertaining than Duolingo. So this morning I read the first few chapters from "Easy French Reader". The first "stories" are mind numbingly inane, but that's OK, since they're also very short. And the questions afterward are perfectly calibrated to be satisfyingly answerable by anyone who has successfully read the text. But I bet my accent is a mess, though. So I soon discovered the FSI French Phonology course: http://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/languages/french-phonology.htm l and investigated it via this video (Too bad there aren't more) https://vimeo.com/65233072 which I actually found soothing and meditative. I do enjoy the make-new-sounds-with-your- mouth part of learning languages. So until the end of the month I'm going to see how much of my French I can bring back sans trop d'effort, and still keep up with my Irish. It was starting to make me crazy not to be able to say anything meaningful yet in Irish. French gives me a baseline competence of reading and thinking not-in-English, which feels like a positive step toward liberating my brain from its English-only linguistic rut. Missing background on me & French: My mother spoke and read French, and taught me a bit when I was young, then I studied it through US middle and high school as well. We lived near Canada and traveled there often, and I enjoyed trying to understand French language radio and TV from across the border when I was a teen with time on my hands. Then I moved to the west coast where Spanish would have been far more useful, and didn't use French again for 35 years, so it's a testament to the power of early-life language learning how rapidly my French reading and vocabulary are returning. When my eyes move over readable French text, I hear a voice in my mind speaking the words in French, and I know what it means without translating in my head. It's kind of weirding me out, actually! Edited by tangleweeds on 25 March 2015 at 1:48am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5549 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 12 of 40 25 March 2015 at 4:04am | IP Logged | ||
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Great idea about enlarging the text, tangleweeds! The typesetting can indeed be a little on the small side in these coursebooks, and enlarging the pages will also give you more space in and around the text to pencil in notes. Next you'll be posting copies on the walls and ceiling to score bonus reviews... ;)
I can relate to your long hiatus with French, by the way. It's been well over a quarter of a century since I studied the language, and after proverbially applying a little bit of WD40 (restarting yesterday), I find most of the cogs are still there in my head and turning surprisingly smoothly. If only I'd learned a bit of Russian in my teens as well...! Edited by Teango on 25 March 2015 at 4:09am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tangleweeds Groupie United States Joined 3568 days ago 70 posts - 105 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Irish, French | Message 13 of 40 28 March 2015 at 5:16am | IP Logged | ||
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I definitely envy my friend who did get to study Russian in high school. She and I order
these amazing Russian language fashion/art crochet magazines (from the Ukraine, actually) that are light years beyond the "quick and easy!" patterns that get published in English. I'm pretty good at deciphering the diagrams, but I'd love to be able to read the instructions and notes too. I fed Mr. Anki more Irish in time for the neverending quiz to continue (though he's getting hungry again, pesky fellow). I also made yet another card be created from each of my Anki sentence/phrase/word notes, bringing the total of cards per note to five: --1) For my first card, I hear the sentence/clause/phrase/word audio and need to know what it means. --2) My newly created card is card two, wherein I again hear the sentence/phrase/etc, but this time I need to repeat it into Anki's recording option, until I get a recording I'm satisfied with (or not), and evaluate how hard that was. I had somehow optimistically thought I'd spontaneously do this recording and comparison on my own, but alas that somehow never happened, so now it's enforced by having its very own card. --3) In card three, the phrase appears written out, and I have to speak it, thus navigating the treacherous Irish writing/pronunciation transition. --4) For card four I go in the opposite direction, hearing the audio and writing down the phrase (I've been writing on paper, under the theory that writing engraves deeper memories, but more on that later) --5) In the final card five, I see English and must produce Gaeilge in response. As I wrote, I realized that my Gaeilge answer to this final card is both spoken and written, but written out in my mind's eye rather than on paper (which actually takes a fair amount of concentration and working memory). But I've been wondering if perhaps there shouldn't be a text box to type Gaeilge into somewhere along the line, to make sure I can't let mistakes slide. Typing answers into Lingvist's French has helped me focus on such details. Now that seems like a gazillion cards off of each word or phrase, but that quantity makes them (mostly) very easy cards, and thus easier to punt deeper into the future, sifting out the troublemakers for more needed work. Also, it mixes up the variety of memory retrievals I'm forced to make for each phrase, and both task switching and more mental connections for each factoid are supposed to promote better learning. The Anki is all for Irish. For French, I've been continuing to enjoy Lingvist and the FSI Phonology course; they're a pleasing combo in that they're entirely different from one another. I also embarrassingly flunked the Duolingo French placement test, so I've been churning through un garçon et une fille, la femme et l'homme, and suffering agonies as the robot fails to understand my pronunciation (but comes up with amusingly far flung guesses). I've been finding reading much easier than listening, a common problem it seems, therefore enjoying doing more reading, and feeling like I need to psych myself up before doing any listening. My new plan is to, with any text/audio combo I can find, listen to the audio a few times before letting myself look at the text, because seeing the text reliably provides a huge leap in understanding. Post text I listen again, to practice hearing what I now know they're saying. ETA: I've been working on remembering to use the time logging software on my phone (Android: Awesome Time Logger), but with mixed results. When I'm relaxed at home I'm good about remembering to log my study sessions, but when I need to squeeze bits of study in around errands and socializing, I forget to log anything at all. Edited by tangleweeds on 28 March 2015 at 6:16am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tangleweeds Groupie United States Joined 3568 days ago 70 posts - 105 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Irish, French | Message 14 of 40 01 April 2015 at 8:54am | IP Logged | ||
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I've discovered the free French in Action videos, which are the perfect simple level to let
me to watch with a satisfying degree of understanding. It's interesting to experience old vocabulary rising from the grave. There's not a sense of translating, I simply know what the French means most of the time. I watched the fourth video today, watching one per day and feeling something missing until I'd watched the day's episode, which helps with consistency. Today I made the non-surprising discovery that it's also a great way to get my brain moving in French, as a prelude to further study. Lately I've been appreciating Lingvist for graded reading and listening practice, rather than favoring its memorize function for vocabulary building as I used to. Memorize has gone beyond re-awakening old vocab I used to knew well, and now it's feeding me less familiar verb forms and vocabulary, so my progress has slowed dramatically, and I've been craving more grammar and verb tables. For more structured grammar study, I'm reading Dover's inexpensive little Essential French Grammar via the iPad Kindle app, which is a nice overview and review of the basics. Also on the iPad/Kindle (plus on my phone), I have Practice Makes Perfect Basic French, which prods me to generate French, then permits me check my answers immediately, via cross links between the exercises and their answers. Meanwhile, I've been reading the archives in search of my ideal French grammar reference (English language), "the last French grammar you'll ever need", a book where I can satisfy my curiosity about grammatical conundrums found when reading above my level (as in the vast majority of existing French text). I'm looking for something very comprehensive, and worth owning on paper in one's reference library. I've been neglecting Irish badly, doing a isolated round of Anki every four days or so. I'm overwhelmed by the bounty of electronic resources available for French study. Irish involves a lot of audio editing and transcription, and while I do find ways to make it as educational as possible, Anki prep still consumes a good chunk of motivational energy. For now I'm enjoying this experiment in comprehensible input, of which there exists quite a bit for me in French. Edited by tangleweeds on 01 April 2015 at 8:56am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4681 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 15 of 40 03 April 2015 at 9:21pm | IP Logged | ||
Plenty of people here swear by Anki, but after giving it a go a few times I've decided it's not for me, and for precisely that reason. I barely tolerate explicitly educational resources (like textbooks, courses) in the first place. I don't want to spend endless hours creating my own artificial resources. Reading and listening things in the real world (as opposed to the artificial world of courses) will reinforce the vocabulary you need better than Anki anyways. For example, while I could do endless Anki repetitions and never get a word to stick, even when I tried to use memory tricks, after watching this video, I could never again forget how to say "Cén fath?" 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tangleweeds Groupie United States Joined 3568 days ago 70 posts - 105 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Irish, French | Message 16 of 40 04 April 2015 at 10:29am | IP Logged | ||
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I felt guilty after posting about neglecting Irish, so the next day I made a new start and
was pleasantly reminded how much I do enjoy doing Anki. I've read of research where scoring a correct flash cards caused a dopamine releases in the brain, similar to what happens when people get a desired ping on social media (e.g. that little happy dance each time someone votes up a post as useful). The real problem for me with Anki is card prep, particularly audio editing and transcribing text into the card, where a good chunk of energy needs to be spent up front. I must admit to being one of the people who actively enjoy what many people feel is dry study; I find it interesting and soothing a to sit down and learn stuff on purpose. As a personality indicator, I also study math for fun. There's many ways of studying though, and different ones work for different people; or the same person may need different approaches given different contexts. Contrast the free-flowing, open-ended way I've been interacting with French learning resources, which has been much more of a childlike playing with interesting toys, with the multifaceted Anki regime I built to bootstrap Irish from scratch. But there is also the factor that I studied French when young, making me the kind of "false beginner" for whom most introductory materials comfortably reactivate dormant memory zones. Irish learning materials aren't thick on the ground (or the bookshelf, or the web), nor are they anywhere near as evolved and polished as what's available free for French. But this led to the interesting experience of building my own, self-optimized toys for Irish (though they do require ongoing upkeep). It's interesting to be having two such widely divergent experiences. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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