Saim's log 2019-2020

[Osias]

Gràcies!

[Saim]

Gràcies!

De res, gràcies a tu per la recomanació. Et seguiré a tu també quan torni a obrir l'aplicació.

Últimament estic intentant utilitzar menys Facebook i m'agrada llegir articles i comentaris curts als matins just després de despertar-me o sigui que aquesta aplicació potser serà una millor opció, de moment m'ho estic passant bé, a veure si dura.

[Saim]

Russian

I'd like to push this language closer to where my French and Hungarian are, i.e. to a higher level of aural comprehension. For now I'm going to mostly focus on reading and listening and making flashcards, not bothering to write or speak much.

Summary: Some reading, some listening, lots of flaschards

Actually I think I'll focus on German instead and get back to Russian once my German's a bit better. I was kind of in between making German or Russian my next focus, and I think I'm feeling German more now. I was kind of looking forward to watching "Trotsky" but there are a couple of other Netflix shows in German as well so that'll have to wait.

Other than all that, I've been jumping around between Mandarin, Arabic, Basque and Turkish a lot but I think I might slow down some of the other ones to push Turkish forward a bit. I'd like to spend some more time watching Turkish series although I'm not sure how to make time for it given the amount of Serbian I want to listen to. Maybe I can watch a season of something in Turkish or Russian for every two seasons of a Serbian series.

I haven't really found time for Turkish between all the Urdu and Mandarin, it's probably too much for now. I'll get back to it some time next year.

I'm pretty happy with my progress in Serbian and Hungarian so far and I don't seem to be forgetting much French.

I'm going to try out langcorrect.com for output, it seems like a nice spiritual successor to lang-8 (which is pretty much dead as the owner has switched over to "Hello Native", which I find pretty useless). Hopefully there are some French and Hungarian natives over there.

[księżycowy]

I'm going to try out langcorrect.com for output, it seems like a nice spiritual successor to lang-8 (which is pretty much dead as the owner has switched over to "Hello Native", which I find pretty useless). Hopefully there are some French and Hungarian natives over there.

Yeah, I think I'm gonna start trying to do that as well. Lang-8 was pretty good, and I think it was a stupid decision to stop taking in new users.

I'm just hoping there are enough Japanese and Chinese users on there to be a helpful tool.

[Saim]

I've been enjoying LangCorrect. My texts got corrected pretty fast.

Here is what I wrote in French: https://langcorrect.com/journal/post/534/
and here's Hungarian: https://langcorrect.com/journal/post/536/

I'm going to keep doing this on a regularly basis. I'll basically be translating short texts from Catalan to French and Serbian to Hungarian, although I won't rule out writing something myself if an idea comes to me.

Yeah, I think I'm gonna start trying to do that as well. Lang-8 was pretty good, and I think it was a stupid decision to stop taking in new users.

That's funny, I literally just signed in to talk about LangCorrect again. I recommend it, try out it.

I'm just hoping there are enough Japanese and Chinese users on there to be a helpful tool.

I saw lots of Japanese people there practicing English (so I imagine there are some Japanese people doing corrections as well), and I got Hungarian and French corrections within a day, so I think you'll be good there.

[księżycowy]

Glad to hear it, Saim! I'll be giving it a try then!

[Car]

I saw it on reddit, decided to sign up after your post, but I just don't know what to write about. That also stopped me from writing on italki. Quite ironic considering I'm sure it's usage that would help my French and Spanish the most.

[księżycowy]

That's frequently my problem.

Writer's block.

[Saim]

I saw it on reddit, decided to sign up after your post, but I just don't know what to write about. That also stopped me from writing on italki. Quite ironic considering I'm sure it's usage that would help my French and Spanish the most.

That's frequently my problem.

Writer's block.

Yeah, that’s why I’ve only been doing translation exercises. I personally enjoy translation a lot but I can inderstand that that could be tiring in its own way.

Maybe try looking up some writing prompts? I saw some pn r/languagelearning and r/russian which could serve as inspiration.

[Synalepha]

If you like translation, I'd suggest Squaring the Circle by Gheorghe Săsărman (the original is in Romanian, the English translation is by Ursula K. Le Guin and the Spanish one by Mariano Martín Rodriguez, not sure if it's available in other languages too).

Basically it's a collection of short stories which are in fact descriptions of several invented cities. The language is not too difficult, the stories are really short (2-3 pages) so you get a sense of satisfaction from finishing them quickly and it's just an interesting book overall. Lately, I myself have been having fun translating it from English to Ladin.

[Car]

While I do find translations interesting and did well in my Business Translation class for French at uni, I don't really know if that's what I want to do. Somehow, I have the impression I'm not good at that, despite the experience at uni. Thanks for the recommendations.

[Luís]

I'm going to try out langcorrect.com for output, it seems like a nice spiritual successor to lang-8 (which is pretty much dead as the owner has switched over to "Hello Native", which I find pretty useless). Hopefully there are some French and Hungarian natives over there.

Thanks. I didn't know this existed, but I guess I'll give it a try now. I've completely given up on lang-8, there's not many people active there anymore.

That's frequently my problem.

Writer's block.

Yeah, me too. I never really know what to write about.

[Saim]

If you like translation, I'd suggest Squaring the Circle by Gheorghe Săsărman (the original is in Romanian, the English translation is by Ursula K. Le Guin and the Spanish one by Mariano Martín Rodriguez, not sure if it's available in other languages too).

Basically it's a collection of short stories which are in fact descriptions of several invented cities. The language is not too difficult, the stories are really short (2-3 pages) so you get a sense of satisfaction from finishing them quickly and it's just an interesting book overall. Lately, I myself have been having fun translating it from English to Ladin.

Interesting, thanks for the recommendation! I've dabbled in Romanian before and have wanted to get serious about it for a while so I might check out the original when I feel like putting some more work into it, although I still have a way to go in German and Russian so that might take a while.

[vijayjohn]

Maybe try looking up some writing prompts? I saw some pn r/languagelearning and r/russian which could serve as inspiration.

R/russian used to have weekly writing challenges where they would give you a prompt and you had to write a response to it.

[Saim]

SRS?

I've started reconsidering my usage of Anki. Over the past couple of weeks I've added basically no cards, only doing revision (except for my Mandarin cards, which I wasn't doing and which I've just archived).

I think that at earlier levels of language learning, up until to basic fluency (or similar levels of comprehension if the language in question is closely related to ones you are very advanced in), using too much SRS actually slows you down because the fact that if you add too many cards you get buried in reviews prevents you from casting a wider net and spending lots of time looking up words. Of course you'll forget lots of them but you end up looking up more which I think more than makes up for it at beginner/intermediate stages, at least if you do it every day. Sentence-based SRS is great for internalising grammar patterns and fixing issues with reading speed but I don't think it's necessarily the fastest way to pick up the initial base of vocabulary you need to push you past basic fluency.

For the past couple of weeks I've been making Quizlet decks for Mandarin, Urdu and German. I've been adding pretty much all the new words in dictionary definitions of words I find in texts or videos (i.e. I look up a word I found in a natural context, add the English translation to a Quizlet deck, and then add any new words in the monolingual definition to the same Quizlet deck along with translations; in my German decks I put Serbian translations rather than English ones), or from example sentences on LINE or Wiktionary in the Mandarin decks. I only use the deck for one day (or maybe the next day), after which I move on. I find I remember enough words to justify this, it's more important to move on and keep looking things up than to endlessly review the same stuff.

I think I'll limit my Anki use to Serbian, maybe with a bit of Hungarian and Urdu or some of the Romance languages I can already understand fairly well (so not Romanian, which I'll probably start studying using the Quizlet-based method once I get around to it).

Serbian

I'm happy with my progress. My pitch accent perception is quite good and I'm much better at expressing myself than a year ago. This week I started reading a light novel in Cyrillic and was kind of frustrated by my reading speed, so I think I'll make all of my Anki cards in Cyrillic from now on. The only thing is that srpskijezik.com doesn't allow you to cut-and-paste so I'm not sure how to get the pitch marks into my cards, I guess I'll just have to use hrvatski jezični portal and have any pitch information in Latin. I don't even known how to get all the pitch marks to show in the Latin script, I just copy and paste them from the dictionary all the time.

I’ve also added Политика to my RSS feed (before I only had B92 and Peščanik) and liked them on Facebook to practice reading Cyrillic.

Urdu

The other day I read an opinion piece in Urdu in a single sitting (around two and a half hours) for the first time. I spent a lot of time looking up the words in Urdu dictionary definitions, and by the end of it had over 60 words in my Quizlet deck for that day. I've also been slowly reading a fairly simple travelogue about a Pakistani man who moves to the US (ہاۓ امریکہ باۓ امریکہ by ریحان اظہر); it's been fun understanding so much, although I'm looking forward to eventually moving onto more "substantial" works.

I've been listening to a lot of rap in Punjabi and Hindi-Urdu, and it's been fun understanding so well lyrics that a couple of years ago would've been impenetrable. One newer artist I've been listening to a lot is Ahmer (well, I discovered the album today, but I've listened to it several times over already), who I heartily recommend: https://soundcloud.com/azadirecords/set ... b-by-ahmer (it's some of the most "saaf" Urdu I've heard in rap, and I can't remember any other South Asian rap music with this sort of message and political consciousness along with this level of real musical and lyrical quality).

[Antea]

SRS?

Serbian

I'm happy with my progress. My pitch accent perception is quite good and I'm much better at expressing myself than a year ago. This week I started reading a light novel in Cyrillic and was kind of frustrated by my reading speed, so I think I'll make all of my Anki cards in Cyrillic from now on.

I think that reading a novel is always difficult because they use a special literature vocabulary, and a more complicated way to express things. I also tried to read a novel in Russian, and I had to drop it because of the vocabulary they employed. But when I read articles in Russian on internet, I find that I can understand them, and I don’t get so tired.

[Saim]

I think that reading a novel is always difficult because they use a special literature vocabulary, and a more complicated way to express things. I also tried to read a novel in Russian, and I had to drop it because of the vocabulary they employed. But when I read articles in Russian on internet, I find that I can understand them, and I don’t get so tired.

Oh yeah, of course, that’s a major difficulty with reading novels in general. I’m quite advanced in Serbian though and I’ve already read a couple of novels, and this one is actually relatively simple (there are new words of course, but not so many compared to some other books I’ve read). The reason I’m not reading it as quickly as I’d like has to do with the fact that it’s the first Serbian book I’ve read in Cyrillic, everything else has been in Latin.

If I was reading at this speed in Hungarian or Russian I would be fine with it, it’s just that I know that I can read faster but I’m not used to Cyrillic.

[vijayjohn]

I've started reconsidering my usage of Anki.

Ah-HAH!

The only thing is that srpskijezik.com doesn't allow you to cut-and-paste so I'm not sure how to get the pitch marks into my cards, I guess I'll just have to use hrvatski jezični portal and have any pitch information in Latin. I don't even known how to get all the pitch marks to show in the Latin script, I just copy and paste them from the dictionary all the time.

Maybe you could try using Wiktionary. They have the pitch marks available in both Latin and Cyrillic.

I’m quite advanced in Serbian though and I’ve already read a couple of novels, and this one is actually relatively simple (there are new words of course, but not so many compared to some other books I’ve read). The reason I’m not reading it as quickly as I’d like has to do with the fact that it’s the first Serbian book I’ve read in Cyrillic, everything else has been in Latin.

Did I tell you once that I read two novels in Malayalam simultaneously over more than a year? This sort of thing was why I did that (not that I'm recommending that approach...).

So what happened was that the first novel I read was pretty easy (it was about a normal kid's life) but was also set in a part of Kerala that's pretty far to the north of where my parents are from, so there's some regional variation in that book that even my dad wasn't very familiar with.

Then I started reading the novel that was adapted into probably the most famous Malayalam movie there is. This one is set much closer to my parents' hometown. I had an extra advantage with this particular novel because I'd already seen the movie and knew the story because the movie is pretty faithful to the original. Yet most of the dialogue is in a variety of Malayalam that's even less familiar to me than the one in my first novel because it's specific to the fishing community.

I was kind of tired of always having to read dialogue in unfamiliar varieties of Malayalam, so I went up to my dad and asked him whether we have any novels set in our own community for a change, and he gave me one written by a famous author who also happened to be a family friend of some kind. Sure enough, the language was a lot easier for me to deal with, but this time, the story was much less interesting, so I decided to alternate between both novels.

And then my dad went to India, brought back a novel he'd told me about reading when he was growing up, and told me to drop everything and read that. So I did, and it took me less than two weeks IIRC.

[Saim]

Ah-HAH!

But it’s so I can make even more flashcards.

Maybe you could try using Wiktionary. They have the pitch marks available in both Latin and Cyrillic.

It doesn’t necessarily have all the words that I want and it doesn’t give pitch marks for the conjugations of verbs (knowing just the infinitive isn’t so helpful).

The good news though is that I can copy and paste from srpskijezik.com on mobile, it just didn’t work on the computer for some reason.

Did I tell you once that I read two novels in Malayalam simultaneously over more than a year? This sort of thing was why I did that (not that I'm recommending that approach...).

I don’t think there’s much wrong with reading two novels at once. The only possible downside is the psychological aspect of wanting to “finish” a book.

And then my dad went to India, brought back a novel he'd told me about reading when he was growing up, and told me to drop everything and read that. So I did, and it took me less than two weeks IIRC.

Was it fun to read as well or just easier?

[Synalepha]

I think that reading a novel is always difficult because they use a special literature vocabulary, and a more complicated way to express things. I also tried to read a novel in Russian, and I had to drop it because of the vocabulary they employed. But when I read articles in Russian on internet, I find that I can understand them, and I don’t get so tired.

Oh yeah, of course, that’s a major difficulty with reading novels in general. I’m quite advanced in Serbian though and I’ve already read a couple of novels, and this one is actually relatively simple (there are new words of course, but not so many compared to some other books I’ve read). The reason I’m not reading it as quickly as I’d like has to do with the fact that it’s the first Serbian book I’ve read in Cyrillic, everything else has been in Latin.

If I was reading at this speed in Hungarian or Russian I would be fine with it, it’s just that I know that I can read faster but I’m not used to Cyrillic.

I think there can be exceptions though. For example I believe literary English can be easier than colloquial English for Romance speakers, because many high-register words come from Latin whereas low-register ones from Germanic.