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Iversen’s Multiconfused Log (see p.1!)

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Iversen
Super Polyglot
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Denmark
berejst.dk
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Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan
Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian
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 Message 3625 of 3959
30 May 2014 at 12:10am | IP Logged 
In response to some questions posed by another member of the polydog forum (aimed at "those who don't like either Anki or wordlists" I wrote the following rant, which also says something about my current Serbian project:

"I spend more time on intensive studies than on extensive reading these days. One problem is that when I find a book or really long text about a suitable theme on the internet, or when I read magazines in the local languages bought during my travels, I tend to get through them so fast that they don't really can't oust my short intensive texts from the prime position as time gobblers. Luckily I listen to things in different languages on TV and on my computer, and this helps to bring about some balance in the time expenditure - but so far I haven't got TV in a number of crucial languages like Russian and Greek (and I'm still waiting for my Serbian TV channel).

During all my intensive activities I collect words for wordlists, and in defiance of eminent names like Prof Arguelles and Luca I also do wordlists based directly on dictionaries - and I like it! The thing is that once you are past the beginners stadium OR you are studying a language close to one you already know there will be an immense amount of purely linguistic associations available to you, and for me those are just as real as words in sentences said by somebody in a film. Or you may have a vague feeling that you have seen certain words before - and you probably have if you have been battling with a language for some time. Linguistic associations are also a kind of context, but probably not to the same degree for everybody. For me it is pure bliss to discover that the Serbians say "бламирати се" just as we do here in Denmark ('blamere sig' = make a fool of yourself), and I don't think I have actually to do it to remember this specific word.

However I don't like Anki (because I think my general reading serves me enough surprises), so with this lame excuse I should like to answer the questions of Peregrinus:

1) Do you already possess the vocabulary necessary to comfortably read a general interest newspaper (i.e. 98%+ coverage for English)?
I have just read an article about Plaka in Athens in Greek without even reaching for my dictionary, and Greek is one of my weak languages. There will always be words which you might want to learn more about (or check that you have understood correctly), but lack of vocabulary is not one of my problems.

2) If not, how do you plan to acquire that vocabulary, assuming you are interested in reading a newspaper in addition to other passive or active activities in a L2?
I may learn specialized vocabulary from technical literature or even newspapers during extensive reading activities, but the bulk of my vocabulary in recent times has come through intensive studies, including wordlists. However there is a philosophical problem here: if I read a book about the construction of medieval wind instruments, I may learn a lot of new words, but only if I do an effort to remember them. But isn't that also intensive study, although under the cover of studying instrument making?

3) How long, as in how many hours per day for how many months/years do you think it will take to acquire that vocabulary?
If I should count vocabulary from the zero point to now, I can't use languages I have known for ages, but only those I have staretd recently. And with Serbian, which I started learning in February I have been shocked by the overlap with Russian , Polish and even Danish so even though I haven't done a vocabulary count for Serbian yet I'm fairly sure the number is up somewhere in the thousands already. But the absolute numbers are less interesting than the percentage of words in a midsize dictionary - though my Italian <--> Serbian dictionary is at the short end of the scale with its paltry 2 x 10.000 words. Just for fun and with no scientific expectations I have just counted known/unknown words on a page I have been through with a wordlist and another which I haven't reached yet: 20 known and 8 unknown on the first page, and 11 vs. 17 on the second, i.e. respectively 70% and 40%. So it seems - based on this very limited tidbid of evidence - it does seem possible that doing wordlists isn't a total waste of time.

4) How much time per day on average do you spend on extensive/intensive reading and listening?
Well, most evenings and some shorter periods during the day (I work a lot with spreadsheets, and you go berserk if you don't do something else in between - and I do languages in those pauses). Many travels also have a linguistic aspect."

The kind of statistics mentioned in section three could actually be quite interesting. I have two Serbian dictionaries (both fairly small) and yesterday evening and today I have done А and Б, so when I reach the midpoint (hopefully before my expedition to Berlin next month) it might be revelatory to see the real difference between the part fo the part of the Serbian language I have pushed through the wordlist machine and the part which hasn't been worked through there - with the reservation that I never use all the words on any page, and I also do other things with Serbian alongside the wordlists. If I feel really energetic I could also do a test on the wordlist words after I have returned from Germany to see how much is left then. Well, my first concern is of course to get as far as possibible with the азбука (<-- word for the Cyrillic alphabet).

And apart from that I have of course studied two pages about Plaka in Greek, as mentioned in the quote above.

Edited by Iversen on 30 May 2014 at 12:24am

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Iversen
Super Polyglot
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Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6788 days ago

9078 posts - 16473 votes 
Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan
Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian
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 Message 3626 of 3959
31 May 2014 at 10:54am | IP Logged 
I have now done the experiment I mentioned above.

As I have written elsewhere I am trying to learn some Serbian, and I'm making solid progress especially at the passive level (even though I still haven't got my Serbian TV channel, which I ordered in April!). I have been doing the usual copies, retranslations and extensive readings, and I have done word lists with the unknown words I ran into. Wednesday evening and Thursday I started out doing wordlists directly from my two dictionaries (both relatively small), and I got through the first two letters of the Cyrillic alphabet. Friday I made a simple repetition simply by copying the Serbian words and adding a translation whenever the meaning of a word was in any way unclear. Then it struck me that I had an one-time opportunity to measure the short-term effect of this most nerdy exercise. I took three pages from the 'read' part of the alphabet and three from the still-not-read, and then I calculated the number of known or guessable words. In the part I had studied I knew 60% of the words and could guess a further 18%. In the rest of the dictionary the numbers were reversed: I knew 18% (inclusive 'international' words) and could guess a further 19%, so 63% were still unknown. Now working directly from a dictionary isn't the first thing you should do so I have waited 3 months to start doing it, but it seems that it is worth doing for the whole azbuka right now.

There is one aspect more: it is sometimes affirmed that words you learn without a context (or rather: without the canonical kind of social or narrative context, as there certainly is a linguistic context for the words in a dictionary) disappear faster than words you have learn in a social setting or from literature. After 2½ day I can't yet check the longterm effect of doing wordlists from a dictionary (or two) in Serbian, but I have a couple of short term indications: for once I did my first repetition round (yesterday afternoon) simply by copying the Serbian words, except that I added translations to 18% of the 365 words on the list because I had forgotten the meaning or felt it was shaky. But later in the evening I covered the translations and checked all the words again, and now only 7 among the dubious words were absolutely incomprehensible. I'll probably put these words on a list later (in the best goldlist style) and then I think the the matter is dealt with. The relevant thing then is how many of the 365 words I forget within a couple of weeks or a month or so. But I would almost certainly have forgotten some words whatever the method I had used to learn them. The difference is that I can quantify the loss as long as I take care not to throw the pages with the first 365 words away. You can't judge how many words you lose if you just have picked them up from extensive reading and didn't bother to write them down.

And no, knowing a lot of words is not the same thing as being able to speak a language. We are speaking passive vocabulary here.

This morning I have been doing 1½ Serbian letters more, and I have been watching Spanish and Italian television.

SP: En TVE española he visto un programa para personas con discapacidad auditiva, donde los participantes se refirieron a temas come por ejemplo cursos de idiomas para niños, una aplicación que se podía traducir desde y hacia el braille y un festival de música para sordos - el que me recuerda de una serie sobre una percusionista femenina sorda que vi en la televisión danesa hace mucho tiempo. Y por supuesto había subtítulos y un montón de lenguaje de signos -, pero hay una cosa a la cual yo no puedo reconciliarme en relación al lenguaje de signos: ¿por qué está siempre acompañado por estas muecas exageradas? Luego siguió un programa sobre las recientes elecciones al Parlamento Europeo, y vi mucho de esto aunque se hicieron un montón de afirmaciones dudosas. Pero cuando llegamos a la mesa redonda inevitable, no pude soportarlo más y cambié a Rai uno en Italiano.

IT: Su Raiuno ci è stato la Linea Verde Orrizzonte, che generalmente si rivela un pochissimo meno abominevole e superfluo degli altri programme di questo canale. Questa volta abbiamo visitato la Sardegna, ed alcune sezioni sono infatti state tollerabile, ma ho avuto abbastanza quando si è mostrato una clip di un pastore e le sue pecore con una cantante disgustosa come accompagnamento. Avrei preferito sentire la pecora belante.

In contrast I get more and more happy about my Croatian channel (HRT1). I have just switched to its Saturday morning program, which is showing people in small boats in a harbour somewhere. And guess: there is no background music! The one thing I don't understand is why a country with such a cultured and delectable channel has got the most noise polluted busses in Europe?

EDIT: OK, maybe they couldn't support so much praise. Right now they have changed location to a market with ugly noise. But at least it is authentic noise from the location, not something added by an evil tonedeaf employee.

Edited by Iversen on 02 June 2014 at 1:24pm

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drygramul
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Italy
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 Message 3627 of 3959
31 May 2014 at 11:40am | IP Logged 
IT: Su Raiuno ci è stato la Linea Verde Orrizzonte, che ogniqualvolte si rivela un pochissimo meno abominevole e superfluo degli altri programme di questo canale. Questa volta abbiamo visitato la Sardegna, ed alcune sezioni sono infatti state tollerabile, ma ho avuto abbastanza quando si è mostrato una clip di un pastore e le sue pecore con una cantatatrice disgustosa come accompagnamento. Avrei preferito sentire la pecora belante.

You can't use ogniqualvolta this way. Ogniqualvolta is always followed by a temporal sentence. It's like tutte le volte che, ogni volta che. For instance in this case:
ogniqualvolta è trasmessa, ogniqualvolta va in onda.
Moreover it's quite outdated and doesn't sound very fluid. Here ogni volta it's correct, easier and more natural.

Cantatrice is outdated too >> cantante

I hope you don't mind if I pointed out some mistakes, but I found these ones pretty curious (I guess you found them in some old books). It still needs some refinement in grammar, but otherwise it's quite understandable.

Convengo che i canali Italiani facciano pena. Non guardo la tv Italiana da circa 12 anni ormai.

Edited by drygramul on 31 May 2014 at 11:42am

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Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6788 days ago

9078 posts - 16473 votes 
Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan
Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian
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 Message 3628 of 3959
31 May 2014 at 12:11pm | IP Logged 
It is definitely correct that some of my Italian vocabulary comes from outdated sources, like the word "cantatrice". It exists, but according to Google mostly in French due to the title of a play by Ionesco. Another reason I should have chosen another word like 'cantante' is that 'cantatrice' seems mostly to be used about opera divas, and the music that spoilt that pastoral scene ("scena agreste"? *) was definitely not in that league.

As for 'ogniqualvolta' I have replaced it with 'generalmente', which doesn't have the same meaning, but which is closer to my assessment of the program in question.

* sorry, but I can't resist using outdated language ogniqualvolta che si presenta una opportunità


Edited by Iversen on 31 May 2014 at 12:24pm

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drygramul

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