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What Expug is doing in 2015 (TAC n more) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 257 of 364 23 July 2015 at 12:08am | IP Logged | ||
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It turns out I'm reading 'The Little Prince' in Russian at the book 'I read Russian'. Not bad, since I already know the story I can follow it in Russian better than other texts.
Today I noticed some improvement in my overall comprehension of Norwegian while listening to the audiobook of Norwegian Wood. At least the first half was quite comprehensible, then I got a bit tired and lost focus. Still watching 'Les Fugitifs', with comprehension over 90%. Starting to get the hang of some Romanian subtitles as well. The exercises from Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar are easy so far. It's great to realize that some Mandarin word order rules I used to find weird now come up quite natural, for example, when I'm asked to translate from English into Mandarin. And those exercises will help clear the doubts I might still have at this stage. Only today I realized that I haven't been watching the short news clips in Papiamento. Well, that can wait till next week (I think I won't be able to study either on Thursday or on Friday). I don't think my comprehension will drop substantially if I skip those days. In fact, I had thought of bringing the textbook in Spanish here so I could study from it and consolidate grammar, but that can wait, too. Things are going well with German. I'm understanding almost everything from the film 'Das Experiment' and I had to look up much fewer words from Futurama. Soon I am going to try without subtitles, but for this I'm gonna make use of some resources I'm not that much attached to. Ideally I'd pick a dubbed series, but these are hard to get. I finished the chapters of Colloquial Uzbek and now I'll be doing some drills. These are basically reviewing the most important sentences of each chapter. Next week I will probably be done with this book and will try to figure out what to use next. I'd need something that starts slowly, introducing the basic verbal forms and proceeding in a graded way, but beggars can't be choosers. Another day of full studies, probably the last this week. I'm not writing on my target languages but I am supposed to actually get some real rest at least for one thing during holidays. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 258 of 364 28 July 2015 at 12:36am | IP Logged | ||
I'm back from this plateau...
...to another plateau, the one in my studies. No big changes in terms of Georgian or Russian reading skills and Norwegian listening skills. I've had a good share of extensive reading for the former two and listening/watching for the latter, but as I've been aware of for several months, I need to complement this with intensive activities. I dare say most of my progress comes from those short intensive activities, and that extensive learning, though it takes most of my time, works only on consolidating what I already know. For example, I wouldn't learn a new word just from watching a series if I weren't at an already advanced level (which is the case for French, surely not for Norwegian). I took a 4-day break from routine studies (Thursday+Friday plus the weekend). I did much less than expected, though the SC scores aren't under threat. I read 41 pages from a new Georgian book. It's an interesting collection of stories about characters with disabilities. I don't understand enough to know what actually is going on, but the stories do seem interesting. In the case of Russian, 30 more pages from the book I usually read at home. Less than expected, but at least now there are only 80 pages left. I didn't watch any video on these 4 days, which proves my point that having a fixed routine really works better when there are so many options out there. I had started watching 'One and a half summer' on Viki, English-subtitle only (I don't think Viki enables double subtitles). This experience is going to be useful for my listening comprehension of Mandarin. I didn't finish the first episode yet so I didn't count it, will do so when I finish it. Sometimes I wonder if Georgian would be easier to learn if it actually had a cursive writing, or if at least I would get to practice the language more, do written exercises and the like. I can write cyrillic easily (though there may be mistakes in the shapes of the letters, of course) and I'd be glad to write in Georgian, which I like better than Russian, but every word is like a 5-y.o. spelling attempt at the kindergarten. I shouldn't underestimate the effectiveness of just reading the subtitles in the L2. It is a communication boost. I was starting to learn important stuff in Romanian, which I'm not studying. That also means my French isn't that bad, because I'm able to understand the speech quickly enough to compare it to the subtitle and understand it as well. Well, that's partially true. I really missed some full audio sentences, among the longest ones, but I can follow the story normally. I had one of the easiest days of reading 'Allegiant' in Russian. I read two pages extensively first (no translation either) while I was at the bank right after lunch. Then later in the afternoon I read the English equivalent and realized I had understood almost everything correctly. Then I read the missing pages so as to learn words properly. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 259 of 364 28 July 2015 at 11:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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Today I finally remembered to resume watching videos from TeleCuraçao. For some reason Youtube stopped making the automatic playlist that had been so helpful in the past months, preventing from having to scroll down from the first videos on. It was an automatically-generated playlist with over 10k videos. Now the next video suggested from Youtube is always from a different user.
Still enjoying my currently favorite textbook, Учебник Эстонского Языка. Most of the times reading the Estonian is as easy as the Russian, both of average difficulty. I think I already have most of the grammar I need. If I weren't with little time now due to working more fiercely on other languages I'd be glad to start reading and watching videos with subtitles. The 'I read Russian' reader is finally working as a graded reader, giving me constantly n+1 input. Those readers usually have such a steep learning curve. That's why it was much harder to go through the first lessons. You're supposed to know many words to read just a basic text, and only then it's possible to effectively dose new vocabulary. That's what happening with me now, and this after almost three years of Russian. Only now I'm able to read those texts intensively. A real confidence boost: I understood more sentences from the Norwegian audiobook and I understood a lot from Karl & Co's soap opera today. The secret: just paying attention, not reading the forum or worrying about what I'm going to do next. I still think I need more exposure to written Norwegian in order to consolidate the vocabulary or just to put in context that amount of input I'm getting from both sources but for which I don't have the explicit transcription in Norwegian. Enjoying Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar Workbook so much. There are a lot of output exercises (into Mandarin) and I'm not doing that bad. And I just started the communicative section, so far I was only at the 'raw' grammar of the workbook, which means I'm going to learn much more. The first exercises from the communicative section involved learning to address siblings in context, quite interesting as an exercise. 我有一个姐姐和一个弟弟。 Georgian is slowly getting on track. Understanding a lot from the novel in parallel reading, and today I also paid more attention than usual to the soap opera and understood quite some scenes. Conversational Georgian, like any other languages, is less about grammar and vocabulary cramming than about role-playing. If my goal were just to learn exactly what to say in Georgian at the most usual contexts and also to understand what is being said in most contexts, that would be easily done. This is what the polyglot webcelebrities do, after all. But then, as I might have said before, I took the longer but more consistent path, and I want to actually learn the language and not just to role-play a Georgian speaker. This is valid for my other languages as well, which partially explains why I learn so slowly. What I learn, though, is consistent. I don't have any pressure for speaking now but I could if I wanted to. Speaking at a tourist level is coming naturally after having learned the language consistently. Had I been invited to Georgia the day after, I'd just need a phrasebook as a warm-up (which I did for German and Italian, for instance). On the other hand, even my limited knowledge is by no means superficial or limited to preset situations. Either in Georgian or in my other intermediate languages (Mandarin, Norwegian and German). So, I don't take a consistent path from A1 to A2 then to B1 because I don't learn all the supposedly tourist-based phrases before moving on to B1. I approach the language through layers and vocabulary and grammar cores that I build upon time after time. One day I just realize that I know, or understand, enough to actually use the language. Until that happens - it did for French and Papiamento and might soon happen for Norwegian - I think it's intelectual dishonesty to claim I can speak a language just because I can role-play the most evident situations, before I have read a single novel extensively in the language and been able to follow the story or after I personally admitted I never spoke the language, just knew it passively). But that's just my opinion, and I don't know why I'm writing all this other than the need to explain to myself and to others why it takes me - apparently - so long. (Needless to say, if instead of 1 hour Norwegian, 1 hour Russian, 1 hour Georgian, 1 hour Mandarin I did 4 hours Georgian a day, for example, I would know much more Georgian than just 4x what I know now, and would probably be at a comfortable B2, but studying many languages at once is a choice of a lifestyle by someone who lives in a monolingual country and already knows each of these languages enough to survive as a tourist in a weekend-trip to the country). Finished watching one of the best films ever (not just in German, I mean ever). It's Das Experiment. Few films portraited human nature so densely. Now I'm going to watch 'Otto der Ausserfriesische which will probably my first attempt into no-subtitles (will gladly get back to another film with subtitles if I notice it isn't working; watching stuff without subtitles is the most tiresome activity, seconded by reading extensively when you can't understand what's going on well enough). Still working on the "advanced" (read: intermediate) Russian exercises from Goethe Verlag. I'm starting to guess the words before even looking up the options available to fill the blanks. Russian is starting to 'click'. If only my active skills weren't so limited when compared to my other intermediate languages... The Starmedia channel on Youtube has lots of content in Russian with English subtitles. For example, Distorting Mirror of the soul. (Why do they all have poetic names, like 'Wind in the face' which i'm watching?). One of the best Futurama episodes today. It was interesting and I had few words to look-up and could understand a lot just from the audio. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Elenia Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom lilyonlife.blog Joined 3857 days ago 239 posts - 327 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Swedish, Esperanto | Message 260 of 364 29 July 2015 at 12:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know that I would call your progress slow! I'm making much less progress in few languages. Of course, I am not nearly as consistent as you, and I don't have any real methodology or approach either.
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| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 261 of 364 30 July 2015 at 12:26am | IP Logged | ||
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@Elenia: these rants are part of the process. I can't help but think I could be progressing faster, but now I need a little more patience because I'll be reaching higher levels for those languages simultaneously and that itself will be a reward. I don't have a methodology either, no SRS, mostly skimming through textbooks instead of actually getting down to study in depth, but it's been fun and so I can't complain. I wouldn't start all 4 at once again, this was my mistake at first, but we learn from mistakes and I'm satisfied now.
@1e4e6: realmente estoniano e georgiano têm poucos materiais, mas acho que são suficientes. Alguns eu encontrei na internet, outros eu comprei, pela Amazon. Com relação a romances para praticar a língua, costumo comprar ebooks. Em georgiano mesmo, são muito baratos, cerca de 1 a 2 dólares cada, a ponto de eu achar que compensa eu aprender georgiano bem e começar a ler esses best-sellers mundiais em georgiano mesmo. Yesterday I listened to meditation in Norwegian again before sleep. Still don't understand as much as French or even German, but I'm getting there. It helps that meditation is perhaps the slowest and most well-articulated naturally-spoken audio you may get easily from Youtube. Today's Georgian excerpt was mostly dialogues and thus easier to follow. Some words and word order still strike me. I have the impression Georgian needs one, two extra words within a nominal phrase that includes adverbs for expressing the same thing as of the English translation. I get this impression from my other read too, the novel I'm reading in English. So, if I don't figure out this myself, I might be better off picking up some of those sentences and studying them intensively. I know, have I been using Iversen's hyperliteral method more often I'd have a better understand from such sentences. Here is one: მაგრამ როცა ამის თქმა და, ნუ, ნივთმტკიცებულებების დადება გადაწყვიტა, მე უკვე მოვასწრე მესიჯის გაქრობა. (the original is in Georgian, by Lasha Bugadze). and by the time she decided to tell me about it, you know, to confront me with her allegations, I’d already had time to delete it. (translation by Elizabeth Hemingway, a renowned translator of the Georgia language). Now for the hyperliteral translation of the Georgian: but when its saying and, so, evidence's conclusion decided, I already triggered message's disappearance So, it's really not simple to read literature in a language so distant from English. The mere sum of the words don't help much in terms of meaning, and word order is an extra complexifying factor. The author in Georgian wants to reproduce hesitation, colloquial use of interjections and particles and this makes comprehension much more difficult. Best day of listening to the 'Norwegian Wood' audiobook in Norwegian ever. I understood most of what was said, and criptic passages are becoming the exception now. I think there's a synergy going on between this and the series 'Karl & Co' I'm watching without subtitles. Both involve exposure to a lot of words. Mediterranean/Balkans/Eastern Europe/Asia Minor. An alphabet. Assimil and/or Duolingo. These are the ingredients that make a powerful wanderlust melting pot that drags me closer to it each day. I am not going to add a new non-transparent language soon, but I keep thinking about what I'm going to start after Turkish and Modern Greek (Indonesian is no longer a priority). By the way, I lost the sequential list of languages I had planned to study, the one I posted some years ago in a no-longer existing forum. Will see if some friends have backup, because it used to work well against wanderlusting. It turns out Internet Archive has that. So, I'm posting here as it makes at least a second and a third backup: My hitlist
Still watching the Georgian soap opera without subtitles. Today was the best day ever, again. I am starting to enjoy the sentences. I'm able to understand enough now to more or less have an idea of what's going on and actually have some fun. It's no longer just a chore time. If that actually gets confirmed in the following days, these will be the greatest news from vacation time. I understand much more from Norwegian than from Georgian, that's for sure, but now in Georgian i'm somehow closer to where I started Karl & Co without subtitles, which means I've improved in both and I'm likely to keep doing so. That's encouraging, considering that I can already read Norwegian - that means my vocabulary is higher - and I only have a vague idea of what's going on when I read in Georgian. It seems I'm building upon vocabulary that has been repeated over and over and it is finally starting to stick, to make sense and to become perceptible within the listening blur. Started watching Otto der Ausserfriesische, my first German video without subtites. I'm thrilled. I understand enough to follow the story. More than Norwegian. It matches with my idea that German is easy to listen to, to the point of being able to transcribe the sounds even if you don't know their meaning. But in this case I do know the meaning more often than not and I'm surprised that I'm able to understand some mumbled sentences in context. It's fascinating to get to know more about current life in Russia (series 'Wind in the face'), Georgian (Shua Qalaqashi, Chemi Colis Daqalebi) and France (contemporary novels, films). This is what language-learning is about, for me. Nothing against the classics, I just prefer to start learning from the Now. I think that instead of getting the remaining DVDs for Futurama in German I'm going to search for the Russian instead. Not sure it's dubbed or just subtitled, but either way will do. I do need to practice more Russian now, and watching intensively by looking up subtitles wouldn't be a bad idea. Accomplished language textbook: Colloquial Uzbek 
It is an enhanced phrasebook with audio. No grammar explanations, no graded introduction of vocabulary, no exercises. It does this limited job well, since there is not much out there for Uzbek which has audio. A drawback is that it has neither the cyrillic nor the Latin orthography, but uses its own transcription of the cyrillic alphabet. This left me with no clue of how Uzbek words actually look like. Also, the audio is too slow with English then Uzbek twice then long silence. What to do next? I'm on a tight schedule right now, want to do Italian and Kuxnya and don't want to spend time revising materials again, will do so tomorrow. I'd be glad to hear a word from our team captain, anyway =D By the way, the same series I used for Georgian also has a Uzbek volume. I liked the Georgian one, though it differs from the usual textbook layout. Here is the Uzbek one: 
Is it already part of our resources' list, Chung? Finally I made it to a Kuxnya episode again. No big changes in comprehension, but perhaps this is a good sign? I might be finding the Georgian dubbing as understandable as the computer translation of the Russian transcripts. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 262 of 364 31 July 2015 at 1:55am | IP Logged | ||
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Yesterday I managed to finish my Kuxnya's episode. Maybe I was too lost in the story, but I didn't manage to evaluate how good my Georgian listening comprehension was throughout the episode.
My wife said she wanted to take a business English course. Three hours a week, and the price is ok, the course is offered by a business school and not by a money-hunting boutique language school. Three hours a week, she says, which is roughly what I spend on each of my languages. Better than just 1 1/2 or 2 hours. But then I helped her diagnose what her actual needs are. Her level is probably high B1, and her skills are almost evenly balanced. She has low vocabulary, she is good at listening for actual conversation and for TV series but she is limited at speaking and at reading by her low vocabulary, so, it's not that she's B1 active and B1 passive, rather she can have a conversation but miss out a lot on a given text. Her grammar skills are also a bit behind, in terms of interpretation and usage of complex verbal tenses. So, she needs to build up vocabulary, and for that going to classes might not be the better option. I told her that by doing parallel reading at the beginning she would be able to see quick improvements in her vocabulary and that would also feed her speaking skills. Besides parallel reading, I also mentioned to her the TED talkings that can be used with double subtitles in an iOs app I got. Yesterday she tried the parallel reading first, with a book that has a lot of business vocabulary, The 4-hour week by Timothy Ferris. She would read the English in one tablet and look up the translation at the other. Since she is starting I told her to note down unknown words. It helps to give her a feeling of studying. Later on I will try different techniques. She read 4 pages and noted down 14 unknown difficult words (that is, she found it difficult to assess the meaning even with the translation). Considering 200 words a page (it's an epub and was set up to large fonts), that would give 98,25% coverage. Sounds perhaps too high, but she has a much lower comprehension of the discourse than that of the individual words. For example, she hasn't seen 'however' used in an affirmative sentence before ("You can work however you want"), and this also involves grammar instead of just vocabulary. I will see how it goes in the next days. Starting with a lighthearted book is perhaps a confidence boost and maybe we can get into stuff such as marketing manuals and insightful textbooks later. Now I think I'm not confusing the Estonian locative cases anymore. This is a turning point. I know that if I find it easier with this book it's because I've already been through all other books. Even so, I do think this one explains it better, or at least uses better examples:
The Russian texts from 'I read Russian' are getting incredibly easy. I barely have to look words up. That think about time employment is arbitrary. Reading those two pages intensively now that they are at an n+1 level takes me about 5 minutes, but works perhaps more effectively than parallel reading with stuff that is more difficult. More on Georgian and the difficult of cracking up an 'alien' language: - კაცო, მე არ მწერდი მაგ წერილებს? ეგ არ ნახა? Man-vocative, I not me-wrote those letters? those didn't see? {literal} “Hold on. Weren’t those emails to me? Was it my emails she saw?” As you can see, the მე is in the initial position of the sentence, which is assumed to be a subject. But from the verbal form მწერდი we figure out that the subject is third person (the ი ending) and that the object is first person (the მ particle, which I can't help but recall Indo-European languages upon). Why the მე pronoun at first then? Well, it's there for emphasis. It is at first place in the sentence for emphasis, too: "Wasn't if for me that she wrote those emails?". And why is it in the same case form as the subject? Well, because genuine personal pronouns in Georgian don't change for case, unlike everything else including 3rd person sg and pl pronouns which are coined from demonstratives. So, you have a sentence where a subject pronoun in its normal form and in initial position isn't the subject of a sentence. This adds extra difficulty, for sure, and requires more experience with the language for figuring out a sentence. Another best day watching Karl & Co. (no subs). I followed some full sentences and even got the humor. This is getting really interesting and fun. If my comprehension increases even just a bit I'll be actually having fun watching this comedy series besides practicing my Norwegian. Now that my passive skills are finally seeing some progress, maybe it is time to resume writing and go for longer texts. Finished Eckhart Tolle's first book, listening-reading in German. Already looking forward for more. Meanwhile, and considering I couldn't find a German audiobook for his second book, and since I had already decided to go for fiction, I started Herr Alle Dinge, by Andreas Eschbach. Don't remember whether someone suggested it or I found it through similar authors, but I really like it so far. This fiction is easy, I could practically read it extensively, German only, and follow the story just fine. The audiobook is quite interesting and it is read nicely, too. I'm really enjoying this L-R thing for my intermediate languages, I am taking the best from it while I can. At a point when you're at a comfortable B2 reading, it doesn't make sense to listen to a slow audiobook when you can read much faster and understand almost everything and thus learn the missing words faster as well. Then you won't need to practice listening from enunciated audio anymore, you can stick to just the films and series and consider getting rid of the subs. Like I said a few weeks ago, L-R has a specific timeframe of use. It's fun and it's effective, but one has to learn to let go just like one does (or at least, should) with beginner textbooks =D . I'm getting a bit tired of Futurama, and maybe it's not worth it investing over a hundred euros just to have the remaining pack with German audio. I'm actually doing enough German listening now, as I do L-R instead of just reading, plus I watch a film and then over 20 min of Futurama. I will probably reduce my German altogether when I finish the 4th season of Futurama. If I find it in Russian, I might continue in Russian. If not, I will just watch it in English with Russian subtitles. The Uzbek materials listed are all too good to waste on a dabbling season. I'm sticking to the colorful, cumbersome DLI pdf because even the Peace Corps Competencies are too useful to waste now. There is a high chance Uzbek is my second Turkic language years from now, when I start and become proficiency in Turkish. Weird how they added a 'lar' suffix to formal plural to make it differ from formal singular which originally was formal plural, too. Another episode of Kuxnya, and I caught myself following the episode with just the audio in Georgian while searching for the spot I had stopped at at the subtitles. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Via Diva Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation last.fm/user/viadivaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4235 days ago 1109 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German, Italian, French, Swedish, Esperanto, Czech, Greek | Message 263 of 364 31 July 2015 at 3:21am | IP Logged | ||
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Hehe, I started Herr aller Dinge on July 1st, according to my log, but I haven't progressed a lot because of the
internship and laziness. Fortunately, 6WC can probably deal with the second problem, whereas my internship ends today :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 264 of 364 31 July 2015 at 10:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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@Via Diva: the second day, 10 more pages, was a bit harder. The reading is a bit fast in the audiobook. I understand just the German most of the times, but when I have to take a look at the English I usually get lost in the page. Still, sounds like a fun book!
Back to work. I expect things to go faster now. There are many distractions at home, stuff I had to take care of during vacation. The screen is larger here, better for parallel reading :P The exercises at Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar are getting a bit complicated. Today was about resultative complements. My understanding is much better now, but I still haven't mastered all those usages. It is harder to read in parallel and L-R when paragraphs are split differently in L1 and L2. The problem is when the translation has longer paragraphs, and thus a line that stands alone in the L2 copy is in the middle of a paragraph in the L1. This is the case with Herr alle Dinge, where the English translation has longer paragraphs, and so when I need to look some words up I have to flip through long paragraphs instead of having a closer correspondence. But one gets used to that. A good day of Kuxnya, though there were still moments when subtitles were awkwardly translated by GT and I couldn't understand the Georgian either. Like I said, I really finished earlier than expected - 2 hours earlier than in the past two days, but still later than I'm supposed to. I should go for output training, but I have an online course to finish so I can bring the certificate to work, which has weekly deadlines, and it is too risky to let everything to be done on Sunday. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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