Language Learning

Doing 90 mins Japanese, 90 mins Spanish, 60 mins Irish. Also about 15 minutes of maths. Way more than I usually put into my languages, but the problem I'm facing is I end up enjoying my time so much when studying Japanese, I end up doing more, then the same with Spanish, then the same with Irish. Maths is still difficult to push myself into, but it's getting easier (I'm also trying to pavlov train myself into enjoying maths by treating myself everytime after (it's working)).

New Spanish book to indulge in too. I had one before but it was very basic and I misplaced it. But the new book is Complete Spanish, Step-By-Step. It's quite the thick book, and I'll be reading it from top to bottom, even if my Spanish is somewhat of an A2 level, I don't think a lot of the grammatical structures make too much sense, so it's another reason why I'm rereading A1 grammar points.

My Japanese is going very well, after finally getting rid of the backlog, I'm pushing forward and making okay work towards N4, I'm only less than a month away from completing the N5 chapter in MaruMori (I redid it twice since I couldn't read the text blurbs, they've since redid that entire section to make it easier, so I guess redoing it was completely worthless). The "te" conjugations so far have been a lot easier than I thought in the conjugation trainer. It seems to mostly be kute for i adjectives and de for na adjectives, or I just got really unlucky with my conjugation drills and got a really piss easy set of words. That being said I think it only drills one type of te until later, so that maybe it.

Indulging in Irish listening again, only can make out words, but only if I can read the English beforehand then end up paying extra attention to the sentence. Still overall, really basic Irish and need to get into it more. Spanish listening is way more in depth, I'm able to follow along with intermediate podcasts and get about 50-80% of it, what I seem to mostly be missing is the vocab. Then I'll be using Conjugato for the conjugation trainer for Spanish. But after I read a bit of the book first.

Focusing in on fewer subjects instead of a breath of subjects has made me feel a lot better and gives me far more enjoyment, so I'll stick with these 4 subjects now, and then maybe Draw or Blender for creative fun as well.

Really enjoying myself again. Not as prolific, but enjoying myself.

I tried the audio .mp3 files from my "Grammatik aktiv" book. And... I'm really not good at this. More weaknesses identified, more drilling needed. Etc. etc. Its seemingly the eternal struggle of language, practice something. Try something new, realize I'm bad at this new thing, practice some more.

Doing Grammatik aktiv once-per-day seems like a slog as it is, realizing that I've missed out on all the audio practice though... I've got 27 chapters here of audio I need to catch up on and actually do. Uggghhhh. Maybe I'll do 1 Grammatik aktiv per day still, but try to catch up with 2+ sections worth of audio (or more?) per day until I'm sync'd up.

Anki cards still tough as ever, despite being at only 80% FSRS retention and 10 cards/day (+5 words/day). In practice, I know I'm learning more words/day due to all my grammar practice + other sources of review. (Music song study, reading, etc. etc.). I'm back up to 10-seconds/card, which seems to be my natural / long-term pace at Anki. At least for "random-ish" words coming out of the 4000-word frequency list that my main Anki deck is part of.

All in all: I still know what I'm bad at, what I need to practice, and how to improve.

I am thinking of maybe writing up a "6 month review" of my language learning experience. I've attempted to write something for the last 3 weeks actually, but I've deleted my writing each time due to writers block. I'm not quite sure how to describe the whole experience or what perspective I should write about. I'm still a relative beginner in the great scheme of language, but that makes my experience valuable to other beginners who are feeling the slog for the first time.

Visiting Tijuana for a few weeks. I usually like to brush up on my Spanish before heading South. Didn't have time this go around. But I'm using anki and talking with the locals asking a lot of questions. I'm learning more than I expected. I'm a newb still but I'm taking the opportunity while I can.

Had a really good week doing my new grammar drills. Already feeling a shift in comprehension now that I'm starting this verb-first approach. If nothing else, I'm seeing the nuts and bolts of Japanese more, and the reasons why I'm getting the cues I'm getting that point towards specific understanding. Still definitely on track to start the new book in two weeks.

On a more negative side, N2 vocab is kicking my ass a bit. Starting to see my mature card retention rate tick down and I know exactly why: kanji kun'yomi. There are a lot more single-kanji verbs showing up than there used to be, and unfortunately, the readings for those kanji are all rote memorization. There are no shortcuts unless I stumble upon a mnemonic, and Zipf's Law means words at this level are going to be relatively rare encounters when reading. One of the biggest challenges of upper intermediate/advanced learning across languages, I'm sure.

I've been listening to "Du bist schön" for months. I finally decided to "study" it today so that I can understand it. (IE: Google translate, Wiktionary, etc. etc.)

...

Holy shit. I knew the words for mirror, beautiful, as well as Alligatoah makes it clear that this guy was talking to himself in the song. But the full understanding was lost until I studied now.

That's a lot of self deprecating humor all at once. With a huge amount of social commentary.

I can highly recommend as a German language exercise, though maybe it's a bit of a downer overall.

https://youtu.be/dlvStoOyEzE

I knew this was a sarcastic and "biting" song even without study. But wow.

Du bist schön, aber dafür kannst du nichts

Weder lesen, noch schreiben, noch was anderes

Du bist schön, aber dafür kannst du nichts

Du kannst nicht mal was dafür, dafür kannst du nichts