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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 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 353 of 364 16 December 2015 at 9:51pm | IP Logged |
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Today I re-red the chapter on Georgian indirect verbs, the ones that denote feelings, states, possession. I used to be clueless about the future and aorist forms but now I finally understood how it works, and from now on I believe it's going to be much easier.
I listened-read Russian earlier today and so I noticed I can understand the text way better. I also read the Estonian novel before even studying from the textbook, and I noticed my skills are getting better each day. Now, Norwegian is the language I need to work more on. I'm going to buy a book which I will then listen-read. The fact I have both a tablet and a cellphone means I can listen-read while waiting in offices and other places where I can sit, and so I can do a lot nowadays without a computer. I tend to study intensively first and later extensively, but sometimes inverting the process allows me to use a better quality time for the extensive reading or the listening-reading, and then I find the texts easier. I also read one Chinese page extensively and I'm happy with the result. If I had a pop-up dictionary (which I do at the new device) I could just look up a few words per page. I can understand the word boundaries and so I know exactly what to look up, it's not that I become clueless when I run into an unknown word anymore. Chinese Breeze level 2 books are surprisingly easy now. I'm on chapter 3 and I didn't have to look up a single word out of the glossary so far. Maybe I should listen first to see how much I understand. I tried the 'normal speed' option but it seems quite slow already. I noticed the pauses I take once in a while - drinking some water, sitting on the couch, talking to people - are important to keep my mind 'fresh'. Even when I finish stuff earlier, because I had started earlier, I feel equally tired once everything is done. So, if I just do everything at once with no mental breaks I will feel too tired once the tasks are over and won't be doing much afterwards even though there will be several hours left. This was the case yesterday, for example, and I hope today is different, even though I still feel a bit sick. While listening on the background, I noticed I could understand a lot from the Georgian series. My Georgian listening is finally seeing some improvement. On noticeable thing not only for Georgian but also for Norwegian and I guess for other languages is that the volume from where I start to understand has decreased. I don't have to keep the audio so loud as to be able to figure out some sentences here and there. Today I finally decided to buy Paulo Coelho's Pilegrimreisen (O Diário de um Mago), and surprise! 30% off. But the shop that provided the discount doesn't accept my credit cards (probably because it's foreign) and so I had to pay the normal price. 'Carga' (load) in Italian is 'carica' with stress in the first syllable. Etimology also helps with figuring out the stress. Even though Portuguese lost the middle syllable, the stress remained at the same vowel. "Dare i numeri" means 'go crazy'. It's my first Fabio Vuoto...oops Volo's books and I find them quite fun, having useful vocabulary. The kind of reading that helped me enormously with French. I'm looking forward to reading something more 'urban' when I start reading original, non-translated novels in Georgian, for example (actually the post-soviet literature is one of my goals for Georgian). When I have to do any activity that demands a little more attention, Glossika is useless, as I can't pay attention at all. It works when I'm randomly chatting or browsing or doing repetitive tasks, and even at such cases I have to consciously make an effort to pay attention. I do believe the method work and has its merits. Chatted with a Taiwanese girl. I decided to stick to traditional characters so I can learn at least the most usual characters in their traditional forms. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 354 of 364 17 December 2015 at 9:31pm | IP Logged |
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A major change in the routine. I am back to the gym, which means I won't have 2-3 hours of study in the morning any longer. I continued my old program of exercises from 4 months ago. There are some exercises I should avoid at least for the time being, for example, reverse crunch (hope I got it all right). It's been almost three months since my surgery of inguinal hernia. The polypropylene mesh was inserted and even though I no longer feel great pain I do feel great discomfort. If this discomfort is caused by the mesh, as my doctor believes it to be the case, then it's a condition I should get used to. At least I feel much less impact when running, and if it weren't for my lower cardio condition I could have run longer than 8 minutes. I usually don't pant when I'm running, so when I stepped off the treadmill I suddenly felt I was out of breath and it took a while to get back to normal. It didn't help the fact I had some allergy and a sore and itchy throat the previous night and I woke up suddenly in apnea and bordering convulsive cough. Well, now I should get back to exercising slowly because it will help with those minor issues. I already feel more energy even after the first day, and it won't take long to recover strength.
So, as I stayed home I even managed to resume watching my daily Papiamento videos. Papiamento is a language I should really cultivate. I understood everything from the speech of the politicians, I mean, phonetically and linguistically, because when I listen to such speechs even in my native language my brain automatically sets the mode 'this is gibberish and won't make sense, it isn't even meant to make sense anyway' on. Finally reached the chapter about the third group of Georgian verbs. It's the topic I still have trouble with, especially when it comes to using it in speech. Hope this time I understand how it works! When reading/listening a text that isn't hard in terms of vocabulary, one should take the chance to pay an extra attention in the dialogue. Even though the vocbaulary is limited, the formulation not necessarily isn't, and it may seem authentically Chinese. For example, the verb serial construction: 他还是多穿了一件衣服，然后拿着钱包跑出去 了。 Tā háishì duō chuānle yī jiàn yīfú, ránhòu názhe qiánbāo pǎo chūqùle. He still wore another piece of cloth, then took the purse and ran out. We can see that "wore another piece of cloth" is expressed with the adverb 多, and that for describing the fact that he first took the purse and then left running, Chinese uses the continuous/progressive 着 and then a verb serial 跑出去 = run exit go. It's really hard to get used to that. I'm getting used in receptive skills but productive skills is totally another issue. First day in the new routine and the time was barely enough to finished schedule and post-schedule activities. Good Estonian reading again. That's how I start and finish the day. No time for output or any other tasks, though. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 355 of 364 18 December 2015 at 9:12pm | IP Logged |
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It's clear to me why it's working better with Estonian than with my other languages. I'm using the method that worked early for French (I reached reading level for French before enrolling directly at an A2 course): reading intensively. If I don't read intensively and try to figure the text I don't think I will magically understand an opaque language after relaxed parallel reading. So with Estonian I did things right from the beginning, and now I'm seeing the results.
Got hold of the book "Un altro giro di giostra". Always following Garyb recommendations for Italian. Will start it after I finish Fabio Volo's one, or even in-between, since non-fiction has a righter cognate rate and I don't feel pressured to look everything up when I understand the idea. So, I can read this one extensively instead. Funny how I never stick to a language at a time but I usually stick to one series at a time, maximum 2 (apart from the many ones I watch as part of my language learning, for sure). A Russian started chatting to me in the language and he asked simple questions, which allowed me to form some essential islands: where I live, whether I'm married, my hobbies etc. Now it's clear which is the main function of the Georgian Plusquamperfect: the past perfect subjunctive: "If you had written the letter". Actually this function used to belong to the perfect subjunctive but it's a dying tense, used only in toasts. I have one idea why I didn't understand much the usage of the Perfect and the Plusquamperfect in my earlier studies: the lack of contrastive exercises, to know when to use the Plusquamperfect and the Perfect. FInally started listening-reading Pilegrimsreisen. The font is small and the text is long, so sometimes I have to focus on meaning-only instead of language as well (same issue I have with Eckhart Tolle's books, but not so much). I am trying to only listen for a while now and then, but even so, I have to make a conscious effort to associate sound and fact, otherwise I'm just training phonetics and not listening comprehension. The speed is not that low, sometimes it vaguely reminds me of conversational speed. Finished the Goethe-Verlag tests for "advanced Estonian". Now I'm done with all my languages (there is no Georgian). That means one less activity to do. I'll get back to it when I reach an intermediate level in a new language (they have Greek, Indonesian, BCMS). These exercises really help activate vocabulary. Today time was barely enough to finish all the tasks. In fact I listened to only 1 chapter from Glossika. No problem, since I chatted in Italian, Russian and Chinese (the nationalities I usually talk to at Speaky). I have two textbooks that take me a lot of time, the Estonian one without translations and the Georgian grammar in German which I read 20 pages from daily plus some exercises. When they're over in some 2 weeks of study I'll probably be less busy. I write "weeks of study" because holidays are coming and in fact I'm probably just going to study on Monday and Tuesday, and not even fully, and then only in January. I hope I'm going to have time to write both TAC and Super Challenge evaluations as well as my plans for 2016 (the latter will also appear on a new log). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 356 of 364 21 December 2015 at 9:17pm | IP Logged |
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It was an unproductive weekend. The end of my goals for the SC made me much less excited about the idea of watching series during the weekend. I must admit the SC did work as a motivating factor. But then I watched my first 'film' in Italian. It's the first film from the Season 5 of Futurama, Il colpo grosso di Bender. It made me both happy and sad. Happy because I could follow the episode pretty much fine, despite not being familiarized with the lines, gags and voices of the characters in Italian (I had been watching it in German). Sad because after spending 4 years on French, Norwegian, Georgian, Mandarin, German and Russian, I'm nowhere close to reaching this level of comprehension in any of these. I even get worse with time if I don't push it to a higher level, as was the case with French. This is just depressing, it makes me think that no matter what I do, I'll never reach a level of comprehension close to that of a similar language (Italian and Spanish to Portuguese). This is when I understand why some people only stick to 'easy' languages, even renowned polyglots, and once again I wonder why I'm doing what I'm doing, with so little concrete result. Either I think I'm doing everything wrong, or just being too lazy to go out of the comfort zone.
At the reading front I'm finding the Estonian lessons easier each day, even when they get longer and consisting mostly of texts. It's intensive reading that's paying off. Finished the suplemement "Russian in One's Palms" from Ilya Frank's method. Now it's time for some grammar. Actually the remaning textbooks I want to study are either slang or grammar. Once they are over I will probably start a new language. So, I'm going to study 'Intermediate Russian a grammar and workbook'. I will leave 'Modern Russian Grammar: a practical guide' as a final resource since it is not just grammar but rather focuses on competencies. Unfortunately I don't have the workbook and even the kindle edition is awfully expensive. German films, especially the newest ones, have too little dialogue, and thus are not that efficient as language-learning tools. Time was just enough to read one page in Estonian. No German Glossika today. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 357 of 364 22 December 2015 at 8:55pm | IP Logged |
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This is the last day of work and probably the last day of full study in 2015. I won't write evaluations now, will probably do so after Christmas or in January then, no rush.
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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 358 of 364 23 December 2015 at 7:31pm | IP Logged |
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I missed the post about O Diário de um Mago on the new site... I love it :)
Where did you get the German audiobook? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 359 of 364 26 December 2015 at 9:03pm | IP Logged |
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I usually get them from my main Russian source.
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| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 360 of 364 27 December 2015 at 12:22am | IP Logged |
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(Reposting from the Super Challenge discussion thread, as much of my struggle this year has to do with re-evaluating the role of the SC in my routine. Sorry for the sequence of posts, but they are all specific)
Evaluating the Super Challenge is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks of the difficult year of 2015. I have mixed feelings about the way the SC went along for me, and 2015 was mostly about finding the right way (the quest continues in 2016, even though I'm not continuing the SC). First, the languages I've signed up: French full challenge Norwegian half challenge Mandarin half challenge Georgian half challenge German half challenge Russian half challenge Now my stats: 
Quantitatively, I've reached all my goals for the SC, and beyond: - I reached over 10000 pages in French, which would apply for an original challenge, or over 200 books in the 2014-2015 rules - I reached a full films challenge for Mandarin My total stats were (not likely to change much from December 26th to 31st): 27185 pages, roughly 543 books 796:06:37 hours, roughly 530 films So far, so good in the quantitative aspect. Qualitatively, though. 2015 was the year I realized that I was wrong about making the SC my main learning moment. SC is about extensive reading/listening. I not only was listening and reading extensively, I was doing so unfocusedly. As a result, I noticed I progressed very little in my target languages. This is the main reason, the other one being the fact I was a shaky A2 in nearly all of them. Even in the stronger one, like French, I don't think I went that far. I was probably at a C1 level when I started and remained so. That said, the SC was useful for me to find out what NOT to do. Before the SC, I had been reading mostly intensively and this is what led me to reach fluency in French. I was also combining different listening strategies: subtitles in L2, in L1, no subtitles, dubbed, native video. With the SC the focus was so much in quality, and in the bad, careless way, that I interrupted what I had been doing of good in my studies and replaced it with that careless reading/listening. I thought that, alone, with no conscious effort to pay attention and understand and make it into comprehensible input would lead me into my goals, and I was desperately wrong. I went from what was close to a traditional grammar-translation approach to a native-material one but without graded comprehensible input. A disaster. As a result, I spent most of 2015 trying to correct what I was doing wrong, but as the pressure for numbers kept on I didn't always have the time or the mood to do the required intensive tools to get back on track with my languages, especially the opaque ones. I dealt with this partially through reviewing textbooks (Georgian) and working on new ones (Mandarin and Russian), but even when doing textbooks I sometimes would 'study' a textbook extensively, moving on without paying much attention to the content of the lesson, especially the vocabulary. Moving on to the next resource when you have hundreds of textbooks is no big deal for Russian or Mandarin, but a main ingredient of failure for Georgian. What's more, not paying enough attention, not studying at least a bit is troubling in either situation. What I learned from the SC: no kidding about comprehensible input. Keep having it. Don't expect you'll learn massively from massive non-comprehensible input. Volume is important when you have to understand a tricky grammar topic and you remember having read this construction quite often; also when you read a declension rule and the 'right' way already feels natural as you have encountered it so often in the thousands of pages you've rea. But this is too much of a luxury given that there is so much you still have to learn intensively. Especially in my case: I don't use SRS, so if I expect to learn a word just through meeting it often enough, it helps to make sure I understand and reflect upon the context it is being used, especially the most important ones. And this is my mistake: I went for the SC before doing my homework. I don't know about others, but if I could start over I'd do most of my learning intensively (both with textbooks and native materials) and I'd slowly add extensive input, or rather i'd wait until I could take it, which hasn't happened for any of my languages but French and Norwegian, and this situation had much likely happened before the SC, when I still made most of my learning intensively. Actually, this is what I'm doing with Estonian: I added native materials almost intensively while still making good use of textbooks; I'm going to review grammar after having had access to this input; and I'm focusing on quality over quantity: 1 page of native material is probably 4 times a typical textbook lesson and so is enough for me to make my way into extensive readings later. I should also learn to get rid of my crutches, or at least perform part of my learning without them. Much of my bilingual/L-R reading in German happened without enough attention to language, to vocabulary, grammar, word order, phonology, to associating meaning and sound, as I was reading important stuff in terms of content. So, in order not to lose content, I'd just have a glance at the German and then another one at the English and then reflect upon the content for a while. The material had a much diminished impact on language learning that way. What I should have done: tried to understand the sentence in German first, consciously, and only then resorting to the translation. The same goes for most of my Georgian and Russian reading. Congratulations to the participants and good luck for all those who are going to try the next one. The Super Challenge taught me a lot about myself as a learner and allowed me to have access to some of the most fun books and videos I've ever enjoyed. I'm sure I have learned a lot from it. Now I need to fine tune my learning process and even though it doesn't match with the SC, I'm still sure it is a valuable source of motivation and team spirit. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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