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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5128 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes  Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 41 of 69 16 February 2014 at 7:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm in crazy Polish reading mode, it's a blast. I've read an entire 200-page book today, from cover to cover (the second book of the highly recommended Seria Niefortunnych Zdarzeń). Last April when I gingerly joined Mooby's Bisons team I wouldn't have dreamed of being able to pick up a book and read it for pleasure in a day after only 10 months. I just went back to my TAC 2013 blog to check out the first few posts on Polish: I started out with 6 pages per day and very spotty comprehension! Extensive reading is an amazing technique.
Anyway, just stopping by to drop a few stats: This year, I've been reading on average a bit more than 10'000 words per day. Total word count stands at 520'000 spread over 3900 pages at about 130 words per page (which is a good indicator of the fact that I'm reading books for kids… adult literature is more in the 250 words per page range). My reading speed today was 130 words per minute (or one page per minute). Assuming today's speed to be representative, I've been reading on average something like 1:20 hours per day. Compare that to my reading speed in Thai last April: 110 words per minute. - It's so much easier to read a Latin script with spaces between words, even though my Thai is clearly better. Edited by Bakunin on 16 February 2014 at 7:43pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4866 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 42 of 69 16 February 2014 at 8:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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Did you do anything else than extensive reading in Polish and if yes, what? And did you ever look up words in your reading, or not at all?
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| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5128 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 43 of 69 16 February 2014 at 8:41pm | IP Logged | ||
Yes, extensive listening (podcasts, mostly news, discussions on current events, etc.). No study, though; I bought a few books with exercises but haven't progressed beyond the first few pages. I created an Anki deck for the exercises and complementary corpus data, but it's in run-off mode. I also started intensive reading, but have long abandoned that idea - too much work, not enough fun*. I tend not to look words up but I try not to be dogmatic about it. Sometimes a particular word bothers me, and then I look it up. Sometimes I look up a word to confirm my understanding, which is a bit stupid, I guess, but happens. If you want a number, than on average I look up maybe three words per day, probably less. Difficult to say. Today, I looked up one word. My experience is that almost every word reveals itself sooner or later, so there's really no need to look anything up, it's such a time-sink. Don't forget that I studied Polish for three years 2000-2002. I didn't start from scratch this time. *But I do enjoy intensive reading in Thai; the difference is that I have a good reading software (FLTR) and an excellent one-click monolingual dictionary. Polish, a highly inflected language, doesn't lend itself to be read with FLTR. Edited by Bakunin on 16 February 2014 at 8:54pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5128 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 44 of 69 21 February 2014 at 10:43am | IP Logged | ||
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At the time of writing this, my Thai corpus has grown to almost 500'000 words. A corpus is basically a collection of written texts; corpora are mainly used by linguists to analyze how language is used. I've decided to build my own corpus because I was dissatisfied with the quality of Google's search functionality in Thai: often I would get irrelevant, obscure or wrongly spelt results. Google also tended to ignore some tone marks, which has, however, improved a lot in recent times.
The great thing about my corpus (and any self-built corpus) is that it exclusively contains texts curated by me. I've read every single text in my corpus with FLTR, fixed typos, made sure certain standards are adhered to (e.g., the placement of special characters like ๆ). Each text in my corpus is meaningful to me because I've selected to read the text based on my interests, needs or study program, have read it carefully and worked on it to some extent (e.g., have copied texts from the schoolbooks I work with, have accompanying audio for texts from thairecordings.com, have fixed typos, have discussed it with a tutor). Often, though not always, the example sentences from my corpus are much more useful to me than Google search results, in particular when I'm investigating the usage of words I already know well. I enjoy programming from time to time; I'm clearly a dilettante, but I do get easy things done. Programming a concordancer for my corpus was relatively easy, and for the output I could make use of a template I got from an expat in Chiang Mai who had commented on a blog post on a related topic I made somewhere else. My concordancer is relatively basic, but I've programmed the possibility to search for structures like 'X […] Y' which is difficult with Google (or I haven't figured it out yet). Here's the output for the not very frequent word โคลน (mud): 
Even though there are only 7 results, I can glean some useful information from it: - โคลน often comes together with ดิน (earth): ดินโคลน (mud) - โคลน can ถล่ม (fall down; landslide) - one can ลุยโคลน (wade through mud) - there's the word โคลนตม (sticky, viscous mud) Here's part of the output of the much more frequent construction นำ … มาใช้ (use …): 
I look at stuff like this usually when I want to get many examples or check whether a particular way to say things is correct. Here's the output for ไวไฟ: 
The above is a trivial example, but corpus search can sometimes help me to understand that one word has several different meanings: here, Wi-Fi [2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13] and flammable [1, 4, 11]. I also get the useful concordances วัตถุไวไฟ (flammable goods) and ติดตั้งไวไฟ (set up Wi-Fi). My corpus consists mainly of schoolbooks, spoken Thai and news articles: 
I use my corpus regularly, but not very often. Most of the time I just feed it (which is easy, I just need to copy the text file I've worked on with FLTR to a special folder and add some meta information). When I use it, however, it often proves to be a valuable source of language usage I couldn't easily get elsewhere. Edited by Bakunin on 21 February 2014 at 10:43am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5128 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 45 of 69 25 February 2014 at 8:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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Polish: Currently, I'm reading a really cool fantasy series: Pas Deltory by Australian writer Emily Rodda (Deltora Quest in English). It's a fast-paced adventure with tragedy and luck, magic, companionship and weird creatures. The books (7 in the Deltora Quest series, but there are more related books) have been published in more than 30 countries according to wikipedia. Highly recommended.
I've booked a flight to Ankara on a whim, it's a case of acute wanderlust. I've always wanted to know Turkish, it's spoken by many people where I come from and where I live. It's also a great culture with delicious food, beautiful landscapes, an exciting history. I really hope this bout of wanderlust will pass, I wouldn't know where to find the time :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5128 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 46 of 69 03 March 2014 at 9:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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Just a short update. I've yielded to temptation and decided to have a go at Turkish. My log dedicated to Turkish can be found here.
Polish: I've finished book five of the Pas Deltory series already; there are only two books left. I'm so not looking forward to finishing this series… the story is full of suspense, a real cliffhanger. I often can't stop reading… a really cool experience :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5128 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 47 of 69 08 March 2014 at 8:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thai: I don't write much about Thai these days, maybe because I have a pretty stable daily routine. Basically, I work with schoolbooks, listen to VoA's 30 minute podcast and whatever SBS publishes, read something (currently news articles), and do Anki reviews (mostly spelling and cloze deletion cards). Then I chat, call friends, write the occasional email, and talk to Thais whenever I have the opportunity. Thai is on auto-pilot, receiving a steady 60-90 minutes of input each day.
One thing I've been noticing recently is that I seem to develop my own characteristic handwriting. In the beginning, my writing looked like that of a pre-schooler. I had to focus on all the details, didn't have a good sense for proportions, etc. Later my handwriting became more and more automatic, but still looked like that of a child. Now I seem to write faster, sloppier, I use shortcuts, connect letters. I don't have to think about shapes and proportions anymore. Maybe I'm fooling myself, but I have the impression my handwriting is growing up. I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that I write every day as part of my Anki routine, albeit only a few minutes. Polish: I've just finished the seventh book of the Pas Deltory series, bringing the count up to three this month. Those seven books were really good fun and full of suspense. Unfortunately, there's an eighth book which I must have overlooked in the bookstore, concluding the adventure. I'll buy it next time I'm in Poland. Emily Rodda has written many more books in English, so there is hope that others will be as well or have already been translated. I've got many more cool books lined up for the next few months. There's a whole series of 17 shortish books of the 'Three Investigators', the first three Harry Potters - which I've never read in any language so far - and three voluminous Baśniobór (Fablehaven) books, a fantasy series for a young audience which I hope will be similarly engaging as Pas Deltory. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5128 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 48 of 69 16 March 2014 at 11:03am | IP Logged | ||
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Thai: I've finished the schoolbook on 'Society, religion and culture' this morning. Fate (or rather the random generator on my iPhone) has selected 'Science' as the next subject to study. The topics covered are reproduction (in people and different animals; heredity; survival and extinction of species); environment and resources; materials; force, movement and gravity; power and electricity; water; air and temperature; and day, night and moon cycles. This looks pretty interesting, and there will be, as always, plenty of new words and turns of phrase to discover.
I'm glad fate hasn't selected 'History' or 'Buddhism' this time. History was presented in such a boring way in grades 1 and 2 that I really don't know whether I want to put up with it again. And Buddhism is full of weird and complicated words and concepts I rarely encounter in daily life. Polish: I've finished two more books, Bracia Lwie Serce by Astrid Lindgren (The Brothers Lionheart, Die Brüder Löwenherz), and the first of the Przygody Trzech Detektywów series (Three Investigators, Die Drei ???). The Brothers Lionheart was a really good book. Sure, it is written for kids, but the story is engaging and quite a page-turner, and also addresses death and suicide. The Three Investigators is a cool series about three teenage detectives in Southern California. I loved it as a child but I can't remember much of the individual stories. Language-wise it's a notch up from what I've been reading lately, or maybe that's just because it is set in the present and not in some kind of phantasy medieval word full of magic. Did I mention that I succumbed to wanderlust earlier this month? :) It's exciting to learn a new language, but I'm also glad that my Polish is sufficiently advanced now and robust that I can read for pleasure and consume Polish podcasts not as a form of study but as part of my life - I keep abreast of the latest developments, especially those unfolding in Ukraine, mostly through podcasts published in Polish, my daily dose of US, dare I say, propaganda in Thai (VoA reflects the views of the US government and is not independent), and a few select French podcasts. According to my stats, I'm only about 15% down in pages read in Polish compared to last month's average even though I'm spending quite some time on Turkish. But in contrast to last year I have no fixed targets for any of those languages and won't have any qualms hopping on my bike or going traveling in spring and summer at the expense of language-related activities. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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