damian gryski

2012 Plans: Dutch and French

2012-01-01T11:14:00.000+01:00

Like many blogs, I'm sure I'm not the only person posting laying out grand plans for 2012 and what they hope to achieve.

I was a little busy last year, but things have calmed down now and all the side-projects I was able to work in the fall, and especialy December, have showed me that I am now certainly able to find real chunks of time to do work.

So, plans:

Read Goedel, Escher, Bach in French
Complete Assimil "New Dutch with Ease"

Reddit is hosting a GEB seminar/read-along beginning in January. I'm going to do the do the readings both in English and French. The schedule for this is approximately one chapter per week so this should take 6 months or so to complete. If this goes well, my plan is to keep reading technical material in French.

I need to restart learning Dutch. My previous failures I think have been due mostly to motivation. "This time, it's different". Well, anyways, I've felt more strongly that I want to learn Dutch seeing as it looks like I'm not leaving Amsterdam anytime soon. So, that at least is a good start. I probably won't do exclusively Assimil, but I will try to get through the entire course.

Since I'm doing language stuff again, I'll start keeping this blog updated just to keep me honest. If nothing, it'll be a place to keep my notes for the French GEB read-through.

Happy New Year to my few remaining subscribers!

Critique de "The Polyglot Project"

2010-11-27T22:07:00.001+01:00

Voici une traduction de la note précédente. Je l'ai mis aussi sur Lang-8 si vous voulez faire des corrections. Merci!

En mai, Claude “syzygycc” Cartaginese a mis en ligne une vidéo et a sollicité des chapitres pour un livre. Il voulait rassembler les expériences et les méthodes d’apprentissages d’autant d'apprenants des langues que possible. Cinq mois plus tard, "The Polyglot Project" est sorti et disponible pour téléchargement gratuit. Claude a fini par rassembler 43 histoires stimulantes sur 524 pages. Les articles vont des petits mots de deux pages jusqu’à de longues entrées de Mike “Glossika” Campbell (50 pages) et David “Huliganov” James (100 pages), avec la plupart d'environ 10 pages. La police de grande taille fait augmenter le nombre de pages, mais rend le livre plus facile à lire sur un écran.

J’avais hâte de lire ce livre pas parce que je trouve les vies des autres intéressantes (je n’aime pas les biographies) mais parce que je voulais en tirer les points communs. Nous entendons jour après jour les mêmes histoires des blogueurs importants dans la communauté d’apprentissage des langues et je voulais savoir si ces thèmes se trouvent aussi dans la vraie vie. En lisant les articles, une chose s’est fait voir: les membres viennent de partout, en comparaison avec le stéréotype d’un utilisateur de Reddit, par exemple.

Quelles tendances ai-je aperçues? D’abord, tous les articles sont remplis d’enthousiasme pour les langues et l’apprentissage. J’ai vu souvent certains mots: le désir, la fascination, l’obsession, la passion, la curiosité. Un certain nombre d’étudiants dit que les langues ne leur intéressent pas, ou bien qu’ils avaient essayé d’apprendre une langue à l’école, mais qu'ils n’avaient pas réussit. Il leur a fallu un évènement clé pour mettre le feu aux poudres de leurs volontés. C’était peut-être une chanson, une rencontre accidentelle, un voyage à l’étranger. Dans presque tous les cas, leurs curiosités s’éveillent et ils se disent « Il faut absolument que j’apprenne cette langue». Je pense que personne ne dit «Je suis doué pour les langues»; c’est toujours «Je suis passionné par X». C’est cette volonté, cette passion qui garde les apprenants sur la bonne route. Apprendre une langue, ce n’est pas facile et il en compte bien beaucoup de travail. Il n’y a pas de balle en argent, comme on dit.

Mais, si vous êtes passionné, le travail n’est pas comme du travail, ou du moins le travail dur est plus agréable. Ce n’est pas du travail si c’est amusant. Ça vaut la peine de noter ici la vidéo de FluentCzech "Become a Polyglot in Minutes not Years" parce que la «chute» (qui est aussi répétée dans son article) s’y intègre parfaitement.

Si on me demandait, je dirais qu’être «doué» pour les langues, c’est juste être «hypermotivé». C’est la discipline de ne pas laisser tomber les études et la motivation pour continuer à travers les périodes frustrantes. C’est la passion pour le contenu, la culture, et les gens qui en vaut la peine. Je cite l’article de Stu Jay Raj, «Je ne veux pas apprendre une langue pour m’exprimer. Je l’apprends pour découvrir tout sur les gens qui la parlent.»

Il est intéressant aussi de comparer les histoires d’études sans motivation. Si on étudie juste assez pour réussir le cours, la motivation se diminue aussitôt qu’on a terminé l’examen. Mais ceux qui sont passionnés n’ont pas limité leurs études à l’école. Les gens qui n’étudient qu’à l’école ont tous échoué, systématiquement, à atteindre la maitrise de leur langue cible.

Ceci est en rapport avec un autre point que j’ai vu plusieurs fois: on n’a pas besoin de cours chers pour apprendre une langue. En fait, les gens qui les achètent se plaignent du fait que ces cours ne marchent pas. Il y en a qui ont réussi avec quelques Cds, un livre ou deux, un dictionnaire, et la radio, les forums, et les sites web disponibles gratuitement sur Internet.

Il y a aussi des messages des gens qui ont eu la chance d’être exposés à nombreuses langues comme enfant, et donc ont voulu devenir polyglottes. Cependant, ce n’est pas qu’ils ont eu des domestiques qui leur parlent tous dans une langue différente, mais que c’était en écoutant ces langues qu’ils sont devenus plus curieux. Cité une enfance internationale comme «la raison» telle ou telle personne est bilingue cache le fait que c’est quand même beaucoup de travail. Les langues ne s’apprennent pas plus facilement, mais le contact crée l’intérêt qui influence sa mode de vie. Cet intérêt peut exister à tous les âges, comme les récits des gens qui n’ont pas commencé à apprendre des langues que lorsqu’ils ont une vingtaine, une trentaine, ou bien plus tard!

Comment apprend-on alors? J’en ai tiré la suite:

Il faut du contenu intéressant et agréable à écouter.
Il faut être passionné par la culture cible.
Il faut être en contact constamment avec la langue.
Il faut être content de ne pas être parfait.
Il faut se faire plaisir avec le voyage.

J’ai aimé lire les rapports des blogueurs bien connus. Plusieurs ont répété les idées de leurs blogues ou vidéos, mais certains ont éclairé un peu leurs trajets personnels. Pour moi, deux rapports importants viennent de Mike «Glossika» Campbell et Stu Jay Raj. La volonté de Mike et l’excitation de Stu Jay se font voir sur la page. Ce sont des mots que je vais surement relire. J’ai beaucoup aimé l’article d’Anthony «FluentCzech» Lauder. J’entendais sa voix calme dans ma tête quand je le lisais. Ses vidéos sont un ilot de rationalité dans le monde parfois agressif et bruyant des bloggeurs et forums de langues en ligne. En fin de compte, si l’apprentissage des langues vous intéresse, je vous conseille de le lire. C’est un bon complément au Success with Foreign Languages: Seven who achieved it and what worked for them.

"The Polyglot Project" review

2010-11-13T16:16:00.005+01:00

Back in May, Claude “syzygycc” Cartaginese put out a video asking for submissions. He wanted to put together a book with entries from as many language learners as possible detailing how they learned their languages. Five months later, "The Polyglot Project" is finished and available as a free download. Claude managed to collect 43 inspirational submissions totaling 524 pages. The entries range from 2 pages in length to long sprawling entries from Mike “Glossika” Campbell (50 pages) and David “Huliganov” James (100 pages), with most entries just under 10 pages. The large font inflates the page counts slightly, although it does make reading the book on a computer screen more comfortable.

I was eager to read this book not because I’m particularly interested in other people’s lives (I generally don’t enjoy biographies) but because I wanted to find common threads running through the stories. We hear the same kinds of things day after day from the “big names” in the language blogging world, but I wanted to see if they were reflected in Real Life. Reading about other people's lives did make one thing stand out though: how varied the language community is compared with (for example) the stereotypical Reddit user.

So, what trends did I notice? First, every article bubbles with enthusiasm for languages and learning. Certain words kept popping up: desire, fascination, obsession, passion, curiosity. A number of learners wrote that they had no interest in languages, or that they had tried studying languages in school but got nowhere, until some key event ignited their inner drive. Perhaps it was a song, a chance meeting, or a trip aboard. In almost every case, the curiosity awoke and something inside them said “I must learn this”. In fact, I don’t think anybody says “I’m talented at languages” ; the phrasing is always “I’m passionate about X”. It’s this drive, this passion, that keeps language learners going. Language learning isn’t easy and it is a lot of work. There is no silver bullet, as they say.

But if you have passion, the work doesn’t seem like work, or at least makes the hard work more enjoyable. It’s not work if it’s fun. I think it’s worth mentioning FluentCzech's "Become a Polyglot in Minutes not Years" video, since the “punchline” of that video (repeated in his entry in the project) ties in perfectly here.

If anything, I think language learning “talent” is simply “to be driven”. It’s to have the discipline to not give up, the motivation to keep pressing on through the frustration. It is the passion for the content, the culture, and the people that makes the hard work worthwhile. To quote Stu Jay Raj's submission: “I don’t like learning a language to express ‘myself’ in the language. I learn it so that I can learn about the people who use it”.

It’s also interesting to compare stories of learning without motivation. If you’re studying just enough to pass the course, the motivation trails off as soon as the test is written. But those who were driven by their passion didn’t confine their learning to school. The school-only learners consistently failed to reach fluency in their target language.

This ties in to something else that came up a couple times: You don’t need expensive courses to learn a language. In fact, most people who were buying expensive courses complained they didn’t work. People reached fluency with a couple of CDs, a book or two, a dictionary, and radio, forums, and websites available for free.

There are also a few stories from people who were exposed to many languages at a young age, and this exposure drew them to polyglottery. However, the common thread was not that people had servants who each spoke different languages to them, but rather that seeing and hearing these languages made them curious. Crediting an international childhood as “the reason” somebody speaks multiple languages hides the fact that it’s still hard work. The languages don’t necessarily come any easier, but early exposure sparks the interest that influences the rest of their lives. You can have that interest at any age, as evidenced by the stories of people who only started out learning languages in their 20s, 30s, or later!

How does one learn, then? The lessons I’ve taken away from this project are:

you must have content that is interesting and enjoyable to listen to
you must be passionate about your target culture
you must have constant exposure to the language
you must be happy being non-perfect
you must enjoy the journey

I also enjoyed reading the entries from some of the well-known bloggers. Many repeated ideas from their blogs or videos, although some expanded more on their personal history. Two entries that really stood out for me were Mike “Glossika” Campbell and Stu Jay Raj. Mike’s drive and Stu Jay’s excitement both come across very well on the page. These are two entries I will definitely reread. I also enjoyed Anthony “FluentCzech” Lauder’s entry, and I could hear his calming voice in my head as I read. His videos are a rational outpost of sanity in the sometimes aggressive, noisy land of online language forums and blogs.

All in all, if you’re interested in language learning I recommend reading this. It makes a good supplement to Success with Foreign Languages: Seven who achieved it and what worked for them.

Books on Translation

2010-11-07T17:03:00.000+01:00

I read a couple of books on translation this summer: Le Ton beau de Marot by Douglas Hofstadter and Dire presque la même chose by Umberto Eco. Although both book titles are French, Hofstadter's work is in English, and I read a French translation (from the Italian) of Eco's work.

Le Ton beau de Marot is a multitude (80+) translations of the same 28-line poem by Clément Marot, interleaved with musings on translation and meaning. Hofstadter's translation problem can be summed up as "What happens where you take something from over there and put it over here". What does something mean if meaning is tied to context and the context changes? How can we transmit meaning without transmitting the entire context? Where does this do to the problem of artificial intelligence and computer understanding? No translation is exact -- some aspect of the source text is lost because of the differences between the source context and the destination context. The job of the translator is to find the best mapping between the two, and to choose which aspects are important and which can be discarded or minimized. The eighty or so translations come to play as examples of choosing to honour (or not) different aspects of Marot's original poem.

I loved Le Ton beau de Marot. I think this book really benefits from the reader having an understanding of French, although it's not strictly required. Hofstadter speaks French fluently and his love of French comes across in the book. As a language learner, I also really enjoyed reading about his experiences learning and speaking foreign languages. Finally, the chapter discussing the process of translating Gödel, Escher, Bach into Chinese and French made me more excited to read the French version. The challenges here were also interesting, since some of GEB is autobiographical. Hofstadter had to negotiate with his translators to "forge" certain aspects of his life to capture the larger ideas he wanted to get across, while in other cases details of Americana and his life were given importance over a pun or other wordplay.

Eco's book, Dire presque la même chose has essentially two parts. The first half deals with his experiences translating and being translated; the second part is more academic and delves deeper into the theory of semiotics and how it relates to translation work. As Le Ton beau de Marot benefits from a knowledge of French, so I think would Dire presque la même chose benefit from a knowledge of (at least) Italian. Most of Eco's examples from the first half of the book are edge cases and shades of meaning either from or to Italian. I say "at least" Italian since there are plenty of example translations to and from German, English, French and Spanish as well.

I enjoyed Dire presque la même chose less. Eco is a very erudite writer, and so many of the examples from his works are similarly dense and obscure. I probably wouldn't have understood them even if they were in English. Discussions of shades of meaning between words in Italian and the word the Spanish translator chose is not that interesting for me as I don't speak either of those languages. The second half of the book I found a bit too beyond my level in terms of the semiotics discussed. Again, I'm not sure I would have enjoyed it had it been in English, although I would have been able to skim it faster.

One interesting thing I did get out of Dire presque la même chose was the fact that Eco wrote The Name of the Rose to be deliberately difficult to read. That makes me feel better about not understanding it.

Dutch audio courses: Pimsleur and Michel Thomas

2010-11-02T23:53:00.000+01:00

About a year ago I posted some thoughts on three weeks of Dutch that included comments on Pimsleur and Michel Thomas. As part of my renewed Dutch effort, I'm taking a second look at them. I'm about halfway through the courses, (13/30 for Pimsleur, 7/12 CDs for MT), averaging 2 MT lessons and 4 Pimsleur lessons per week.

Most of my complaints about these courses come from my experiences with the French versions back in Montreal. In both cases I was an intermediate student using these for review -- I had never actually used either of them for learning a language from scratch.

My previous study efforts had been with Assimil. I was doing fine with the passive wave, but was bogged down during the active wave. I had no motivation to shadow and couldn't keep on a schedule. My production skills stayed minimal. Because of this, I've decided that (for me, anyway), Assimil is a good source of content but insufficient for developing non-trivial speaking skills from scratch. (Again, my success with "New French with Ease" must be tempered with the amount of "background French" I had from my schooling, something I continue to underestimate.)

Pimsleur is disliked by many people, as evidenced by the long heated threads on HTLAL and even more recently Benny's recent review and comments. For once, I agree with most of his points. While I agree Pimsleur is too slow, too formal, and too English, I disagree with his claim it only teaches you to translate. For me, Pimsleur had a very specific role in my language learning. For all its faults, it got me to respond instinctively to small talk and in restaurants and shops. It worked for me for French, and I believe it's working again for Dutch.

The Pimsleur dialogs are still silly and sexist. Many of the dialogs sound like a lonely middle manager frantically trying to have an affair with a foreign colleague while on a business trip.

MT is a bit more complicated. The upside is the drills have a larger variety of sentence structures. The massive downside is the other students with their terrible pronunciation. They're always asking for confirmation from the instructor so their intonation is always a rising question tone. They make mistakes. Their pronunciation is not corrected, even consistent errors on simple sounds that exist in English. (Don't get me started on their butchering of the Dutch vowels...) An example: "alsjeblieft". The "sj" becomes a [ʃ], and the students can't hear it and the teacher doesn't correct them. The teacher doesn't explain any of the other Dutch consonants either, like the v/w/f mix. All in all I find them incredibly frustrating to listen to. In my opinion, the students should be replaced with a second native speaker. Finally, I dislike the stupid mnemonics and non-standard grammar terminology. I'm sure that some of these were designed to make the course more user friendly for first time language learners. However, I'm sure it alienates the subset of people who have the slightest clue as to what they're doing. (A much smaller market unfortunately.)

However, MT is not all negatives. I like the drills of slight changes to the example sentences to clearly show how the new pieces fit together. The gradually increasingly complex sentences do teach the grammar intuitively, something Assimil claims to do (but I think falls short).

I'm also finding it interesting to be doing two beginners courses which essentially teach the same materials. The MT course uses almost exclusively "je". It mentions "u", but it mostly teaches the informal language. (It justifies this by saying that, as a non-native speaker, you will never offend somebody by using "je" instead of "u".) Pimsleur is at the other end of the scale with no mention of "je" and more formal constructs. For the Dutch speakers, compare "Zou U iets willen eaten” vs “wil je iets eaten”, and “Ik zou iets willen drinken” vs. “Ik wil graag iets drinken”. The other differing translation I find interesting is Pimsleur translates "not now" as "niet nu", while MT uses "nu niet". I haven't looked into this more.

I'm not finding either of these courses particularly difficult. I'm not making enough mistakes to make me want to repeat any of the lessons. I'd say this is probably due to my earlier Assimil and other Input Only studies. One of the "great" features of Input Only is that you don't realize you're learning. This is a downside too if you're looking for tangible benefits like a progress bar.

So, my two sentence review: Pimsleur for pronunciation, MT for grammar and structures. And both only as supplementary materials.

As for my non-audio-only courses, I'll probably go back to Assimil after I've finished these ones. I'll be able to look at the gramar and sentences in a new light and hopefully the speaking practice will let me absorb more of the shadowing (and I won't hate it as much.)

I've also given up on my flash cards again. A discussion I had with a friend I think pointed out why. For me, I learn by introducing things that I've book-learned in other (preferably real-world) environments. With sentences on flash cards, the context doesn't change. Even if I can read the sentence, I haven't gotten something that I can usefully apply elsewhere. The "same word in multiple contexts" is something that the Assimil dialogs do well.

Paris, and back on the Dutch wagon.

2010-10-10T23:28:00.001+02:00

We went to Paris at the start of September. We stayed in a B&B and spoke French with the hosts. I know I could have spoken more, and there were things I wasn't able to adequately articulate, but I know now that my French is sufficient that if I _needed_ to live entirely in French I could. This is a bit of a mental milestone for me -- accepting that I do in fact Speak French(tm).

Actually being in Paris was quite strange. It was oddly familiar, except of course that I had never been there before: I had only ever read/heard/seen stuff about it in my studies. Seeing locations from French In Action, knowing the names of streets and intersections and restaurants and neighbourhoods and metro lines and flea markets. (I suppose some of this matches with the experience of people who memorized all six seasons of "Sex and the City" and then head to NY.) We also of course hit some locations from Amélie, but that just felt like a touristy thing to do.

I also took advantage of the bookstores and picked up a number of French books: "Le Nom de la Rose" and "La Pendule de Foucault" both by Umberto Eco, "Le Cygne Noir" by Nassim Nicolas Taleb (to go with the copy of "Le Hasard Sauvage" I already had), and the French translation of Hofstadter's "Goedel, Escher, Bach". I've been enjoying Eco's "Dire Presque La Même Chose", but I'm progressing though it slowly mostly because I'm not making the time to read it in the evenings.

It's always nice to feel comfortable in a foreign place. I still feel bad speaking English in the markets in Amsterdam.

The other thing that happened was that I came back from Paris with more energy for speaking Dutch. I've slowly started studying again: I'm working through some audio courses and phrasebooks at the moment, trying to get my 'utility' dutch up and being able to speak what I know. I also picked up a couple more Dutch books so that should help me with looking for interesting content: I'm really feeling fed up with the material in the courses. I think I've lost my patience for "fake Dutch" much faster than with French: I stuck with stupid materials for French for _years_.

Looking forward with French, there's obviously a lot of work I need to do. Working in English in an environment with so many non-native speakers has made me (again) realise that I basically need to redo my entire math/cs undergrad in French. I've tried reading Wikipedia but I just can't get into it on my laptop. Maybe a tablet would be better, but I'm going to try to find a French CS textbook. More grammar work would probably help too -- maybe a CLE workbook or something. I wish I had taken notes on what I was unable to say when talking with the hosts at the B&B, because that would have at least given me a starting point on the vocab I'm missing (even if it's quite situation specific -- math/cs is probably more generally useful for me anyway..)

Utility Italian, Utility Dutch

2010-09-06T01:12:00.000+02:00

As I mentioned previously, when in Rome I did as the Romans did: I spoke Italian. Or rather, what little bits I had managed to pick up. My wife had gone through BBC's Italian travel course so she was a little more comfortable in her interactions with waiters and ice cream servers. Her take on the BBC's course was that she learned more useful Italian in the week or so she did the 6 lessons than in all the time she had spent with Assimil. Looking at the first few lessons of a number of courses, they all seem to have the same problem: small talk ("hello my name is..") isn't useful if you're a tourist or if you're living in the country. The waiter doesn't care what your name is, but he'd certainly want to know that you'd like a table in the shade and two iced-coffees please.

Goal-driven learning based on a set of common tourist (and other basic-living) tasks I think is the way to get started with a language if you're actually living where it's spoken. Only the FSI FAST courses seem to have this goal in mind. Oh, and phrasebooks. Leaving phrasebooks out of your study materials (like I had been doing -- oops) will leave you lapsing back into your common language in situations where you-as-an-expat are likely to use it the most: stores and restaurants.

I've also been having motivation problems with Dutch. At the start (january/march-ish) my studies were more forced labour. The intrinsic "Yes I want to do this" feeling wasn't there -- just the obligation that now that I was in Amsterdam I should speak Dutch. I expected to fall in love with the language as I learned more about it, as I had with French. That didn't happen. I was hoping I'd find materials in Dutch I wanted to read. That didn't happen either. I've had Dutch people tell me not to learn Dutch. Recommendations for good Dutch TV and movies are met with blank stares. "There isn't any. That's why we watch American shows instead." Most of the best-sellers are translations into Dutch.

So, do I reframe my goals to eliminate "dutch fluency" and replace it with "utility dutch"? Enough to get by in a restaurant and deal with bureaucracy, but not to bother with deciphering slang in movies and word play and humour and novels? My answer for the moment might be "yes". Hopefully with smaller goals that I _can_ be motivated to accomplish, I'll at least get somewhere. "Utility Dutch" I see as useful. Full fluency, for the moment, I do not.

The Polyglot meet up was fun and I'll probably go to more.

On Italian, and goals

2010-08-17T01:28:00.000+02:00

I'm back from my trip to Italy. As usual, I'll leave it to Allison to fill in the details of our trip and pretty pictures, and I'll talk about what I thought of the language situation.

As I had mentioned previously, my plan of studying Italian during July fell through due to Real Life. I did end up learning a couple of phrases (mostly restaurant, hotel and tourist related.) What I found interesting was that I probably used those little bits of Italian more than I speak Dutch living in Amsterdam. Now, there's a couple reasons for this. One, our interactions with Italians were fairly straightforward commercial interactions with simple scripts. Because we don't go out a lot in Amsterdam, most of our interactions with Dutch are government agencies and other bureaucracy. You need a much higher level of Dutch to be able to deal in those kinds of situations. Second, the fact that the average level of English in Italy is lower meant that the Italians tended to keep speaking Italian, or at least heavily accented poorly constructed English. In that situation, continuing in Italian (or trying to) felt "worth it".

Something I found in Montreal and continues to be true here: I find it incredibly difficult to speak somebody's native language to them when they are fluent in English. It feels fake, like a game. I used to have trouble speaking French to native English speakers, but the communication course I took (where we were all non-native speakers) for the most part cured me of that. For French anyway.

The other thing I found was interesting and certainly indicative of an immersion environment (and so _not_ applicable to either Montreal or Amsterdam) is being able to learn from your interactions when the other party keeps speaking English. For example, repeatedly buying ice cream, you can easily learn the words for "cone", "cup", "taste", "scoop", etc. All of these lead to longer interactions while purchasing sweet sweet refreshing frozen treats. The flip side of this, of course, is that if the server responds in English, you don't have any of this. No trying to speak Italian, and no learning. It's a different environment. To me, the server responding in English re-enforces the "why bother" attitude of language learning.

Rome was also _filled_ with tourists. Doesn't help that we were hanging around touristy places. I probably heard more French than Italian while I was in Rome. Also, Spanish (Mexican and European), Japanese, German, a number of Englishes (US, AUS, UK), and possibly Afrikaans and Greek. (Also some slavik language I couldn't identify.) Hearing a Quebec accent really made me homesick for Montreal, which was unexpected. The Greek I had to guess based on the writing on their guidebook and the fact that they had a 'th' sound. Afrikaans I guessed because I couldn't identify it as Dutch, even though I kept hearing bits and pieces that were very Dutch-like.

In a couple instances I heard tourists speaking Italian to servers, but most of the international communication was done in English. It was fairly easy to tell which one of the group was more comfortable in English, since they would end up doing most of the talking to the waiter or whomever. I wonder if the people who are against tourists who come and speak English instead of learning the local language are less upset with non-native English speakers speaking English, and if their dislike is actually towards native speakers, and more specifically the bad stereotypical US and UK tourists?

So, that's it for the Italy. I still have a blog post to write about French and one about Dutch, but I still have a bit more thinking to do for them. There's a Polyglot Learn Language meetup tomorrow in Amsterdam so I'll probably write somem words about that too.

June / July update

2010-07-25T12:45:00.000+02:00

Well, Real Life interfered in a Big Way recently and my Dutch studies have dropped off. It's been a month since I did my flash cards or any Assimil and I just haven't been thinking about Dutch at all. Or French either for that matter. And for my upcoming trip to Italy I had planned to spend this month at least familiarizing myself with the language but that didn't get done either.

However, rather than feeling bad for myself I'm just going to move forward. Try to get back on Dutch (at least a bit), do a bit of French listening and cram a week or so of Italian.

It's no fun when plans fall through. When you lose momentum it's hard to pick yourself again. I'll just need to make sure I do a reasonable amount of studying and not start a new binge/burnout/guilt cycle.

French and Italian

2010-06-05T11:32:00.000+02:00

FRENCH
I've been spending all my time doing Dutch I've sort of been neglecting my French. I'm still reading French news sites but that's actually a small fraction of my input these days. The conversation exchanges are going well but I'm really hitting the limit of my French when trying to talk about technical topics I just don't have the words for. (Interestingly, the conversations on linguistics/language learning/accents have been fine, it's just the ones on computers/internet/privacy that have found me struggling for vocabulary. I guess I know what I need to work on.) The conversation course I did a year go got me over my fear of speaking but I still feel really stupid when I struggle over grammar. Not having a vocabulary word is "ok" somehow, but making a grammar mistake at this point really makes me feel "Gah, I should have known that."

Since moving to Amsterdam I've really been focussing on my Dutch. I've done some French input and some French output, but I don't feel like I'm improving. I really don't want to lose the momentum I had in Montreal.

I need to sit down and come up with a study plan for my French. I keep having vague thoughts of youtube videos or Cinch podcasts, but both of these are unlikely to actually happen. I more consistent level of French lang8 seems more likely and more doable. Also, reading more French would also no doubt help. I only have a single French podcast right now (Utopod), so it might not hurt to find more.

One of my constant problems for lang8 posts has always been what to write about. In order to solve both the reading and the writing, I might reread my French books (only 3 here in A'dam: Harry Potter, The Hobbit, and H2G2) and then write book reports and use what I'm reading as a source of discussion points.

I read an interesting academic paper that was talking about improving foreign language writing skills and it make the distinction between "writing for fluency" and "writing for accuracy." Part of the course consisted of "quickwrite" sessions, 5 minutes where students wrote without a dictionary, eraser, and instead focussed on fluency and flow of ideas. In addition there were weekly "accuracy journals' which were written carefully and strove for correct grammar/spelling etc. over speed. There were also "quickread" and "quickspeak" exercises. I had never seen that distinction before, and although it intellectually seems like a good idea I'm not sure how easy it will be for me to integrate this into my studies. Obviously training ones ability to 'skim' in the foreign language is good. However, iBut it's hard for me to get accuracy off the top of my list, especially for writing. That really is something I'm struggling with.

In order to increase my technical vocabulary, I've started to try to take my notes in work in French. We'll see how that goes.

I'm also thinking of re-doing the vocabulary course I tried last year but failed. I think my different view on flash cards is certainly a big point: I find myself wanting to create French cards with vocabulary items on them. If I did more reading and writing I'm sure I'd similarly have other things for cards.

... and ITALIAN
We have a short vacation to Italy planned, and I'm trying to figure out how much Italian to learn. My goal will basically be tourist-level Italian in about a month. I found another academic paper with a syllabus for "survival" level communication that I will use as my base. Even though I ditched TY for Dutch, I think it's Ok as a grammar supplement to phrase book. However, since TY recording have too much English, that's where Assimil Italian will come in. (Bonus: use Assimil Italian with a French base!)

I'm giving myself July to learn my 200 vocabulary units and basic restaurant speaking. I need to give myself well-defined, realistic short term goals to prevent myself from totally geeking out.

current activities and future plans

2010-05-29T02:53:00.000+02:00

Grammar is going well. I read through Dover's "Essential Dutch Grammar", a thin 100-page volume. It's just detailed enough with being overwhelming, and manages to have example sentences and decent explanations.

I keep looking at TY Dutch, even though I've decided I don't like it. My 100%-completion mindset wants me to learn everything in this "simpler" course before moving on to the more advanced "Spoken World Dutch". I'm just have go to cold turkey and hide it somewhere in my apartment so I stop pulling it off my shelf. Or give it to someone.

I've done a teeny bit of speaking recently. Not particularly happy with my performance but (making excuses...) I think this is to be expected. I haven't started the active wave of Assimil -- I've only been reading and listening. I'm waiting to get through all 83 lessons before moving on to the active phase of speaking and shadowing. At this point my plan is to move on to using Spoken World for the academic side of things while I practice the Assimil dialogs. I also need to fit in where my audio books and other dialog sets go in all of this.

I've asked a couple Dutch questions on Sharedtalk. That's going slightly better than expected, but 1) they're not real conversations 2) google translate is probably doing most of the heavy lifting.

I'm trying to get all the Assimil translated sentences from the exercises and review notes into Anki. Once that's done that should bring my total number of cards up to about 2000. Still undecided about single-language cards and production. AJATT and Antimoon both suggest only having your target language on the cards: the answers should be definitions or grammar points written in your L2. I'm also uncertain about production: languages aren't 1-1. So, the best I could do would be to give the translation I know is on the other side of the card. Memorized: yes; learned and internalized: not sure. I'll also need to start doing the cards en->nl, but that needs more thinking.

I didn't get "enough" lang8 posts done this month. I'll write one or two more this weekend.

My wife has started learning Dutch with Assimil. It will be interesting to watch her progress and hear her thoughts. Everybody else I know that has used those courses is a language geek, so it's not exactly a randomized test sample.

As I read over my study plans I keep hearing Benny's voice in my head. Not sure what to do about that though.

Two weeks of flash cards

2010-05-21T01:37:00.000+02:00

Two weeks of flash cards, every day. I have 712 cards and have done 1723 reps.

I don't like the passive nature of flash cards. After running through 90 cards in 20 minutes, even having understood everything on the cards, I don't actually feel any farther along. There isn't the same sense of progress one gets with grammar study ("finishing the grammar exercises in chapter 4") or an actual course ("finished another week of Assimil"). I'm just reading the sentences and clicking 'next'. Afterwards, I find myself thinking "What did I actually just learn?" I'm memorizing content, but not in a way I feel will help me produce it.

With Assimil, I can run through the dialog in my head and feel that I've learned something. I know the meanings, understood the grammar, listened to the recordings, and could produce those sentences if needed. The flash cards, not so much.

That's why I find myself drawn to active grammar study as well as my desire to produce. If I can't produce it, I haven't learned it. Passive recognition of the language is not sufficient. There is simply not enough thinking involved.

An example. Lets say my brain translates the words and produces the sequence: "later I had monkey a banana eating watched." My brain assembles (and yours probably did too) into the English sentence "Afterwards I watched the monkey eating a banana." But being able to recognize the words and understand the sentence doesn't put me any closer to being able to produce it. Flash cards are just rote memorization, but the second the prompt is gone (the sentence in the screen) so is the knowledge.

This is probably my math background talking again, but for me is does not logically follow that "successful flash card run == learning." There are simply too many variables in play, too many other things that could happen that could cause the English sentence to pop into my head when I look at the Dutch one. Maybe I'm just guessing the meaning from keywords in the sentence? "Something something banana something something something watched." Ah, that must be the sentence about watching the monkey eating the banana. There are others, but this is a proof by contradiction so one is sufficient.

That being said, I'm still going to keep doing the flash cards. If nothing else, it's a way to get me to study sentences from my various input sources and look back at them occasionally.

One thing I have never taken advantage of with flash cards before is the different types of cards. When I briefly did flash cards for French last january, I found it was too easy to make bad flash cards. So, I'm a bit cautious of trying other types. My cards at the moment are Dutch->English sentence cards.

Another area of potential flash-card improvement is moving towards single-language cards, something both AJATT and Antimoon suggest. I don't know if converting all of my cards would be an effective use of my time, or if it only pays off later once your entire deck is done. Katz says he switched when he was somewhere between 500-1000 cards, which is about where I am.

I similarly haven't decided about using monolingual dictionaries. There are arguments both ways but I think I fall on the "bilingual-dictionary" side, at least for the moment.

Reading and Input sources

2010-05-19T00:40:00.000+02:00

I finished "Le Ton Beau de Marot", so I'll probably post some thoughts on translation in the next few days. I must again heartily recommend it for anyone interested in translation, languages, poetry, or artificial intelligence. It _really_ made me want to read the French translation of GEB. I've also been sucked into trying to write my own translation of Marot's poem (but no guarantee when/if it will see the light of day.)

Next on my "to read" list is the English GEB, so that I can dive into the French one once I get my hands on it. Not particularly language related, but I want to be able to dive into the French one as soon as I get my hands on it. The translation books are still on my list, just not at the top.

For Dutch input, the Tintin are about my level. I can read them, but there are still lots of words I'm missing. Half a Tintin (30 pages) takes me 30-40 minutes.

I've added some Dutch news sites (tweakers.net, vk.nl) to my iGoogle page so lets see if that ends up helping.

As for Dutch audio, I have only advanced audio with transcripts, or children's audiobooks without. I don't think I'm quite up to HP/Hobbit/H2G2 yet so probably just keep listening to Assimil for now. Might take a look at some of the recordings on Rhinospike.

I've now done two weeks with Anki. I'll have a summary post later in the week with how sentence-based flash cards are meshing with my desire for grammar and production. (Hint: not very well.)

I'm think still on track to finish Assimil by mid-June.

Edited response to "Words, words and more words.", plus more unedited ramblings

2010-05-15T11:23:00.000+02:00

Steve Kaufmann had a post on how language learning is vocabulary acquisition and mentioned a comment I had posted to his blog helping out another reader with her French.

As usual, I posted a fairly stream-of-consciousness, rambling response, as opposed to the tightly edited literary masterpieces that normally grace the pages of this blog.

Here's an tighter version of the interesting parts of that comment:

I stayed on learner-level materials so long (as opposed to moving to native-level ones) because I was driven by the goal of understanding _everything_ before moving on. "Understanding", for me, was the test: "Could I have produced this sentence?" If not, I kept studying it. Simple recognition of meaning wasn't sufficient. Like my beliefs on grammar study, this stemmed from my math/cs background. I was quite uncomfortable with input I couldn't successfully "decode" 100%. So, I stuck with learning materials longer than necessary. They allowed me to completely understand what I was hearing: the structures, the grammar, the vocab, and the pronunciation. Being that comfortable with the materials made my little brain happy. But yes, it was boring. And sometimes excruciatingly so. Much of my time with French was also spent trying different approaches to figure out which ones worked. I probably wasted too much time on ones that didn't but that I felt should.

The other thing that was holding me back from native audio input was the Quebec accent. All the course materials I had access to were for Standard French. It took me a while before I could understand the QC accent, and almost all of that came from an increased knowledge of Frech grammar and vocabulary to the point where I could figure out "Ah, _that's_ what they must have said" The lack of transcripts for what I wanted to listen to really prevented my advancement in understanding QC French since I couldn't match what I heard with what it meant.

And now back to your irregularly scheduled mumblings.

I found an English<->French conversation partner. We're doing 30m in French, followed by 30m in English the next day. The first two exchanges went well, so I'm hoping we can keep it up.

I had a really hard time finding language exchange partners in Montreal. First, there seemed to be very few Quebecois on the language exchange sites. Second, the 6h time difference between Montreal-Paris made scheduling exchanges hard. And as for random speakers, you end up with the same superficial conversations: Where are you from, how did you learn, where do you go to school, etc. I think also many language sites (and books) underestimate the difficulty of finding a language partner. At least this is true for guys. I've heard from my female language learning friends that finding people to talk with was perhaps _too_ easy. The challenge there was finding non-creepy ones.

Input and daily plans going forward

2010-05-09T11:44:00.000+02:00

I'm going to move away from the TY and Spoken World and back towards the input-only Assimil and Linguaphone methods. There just isn't enough content in the TY and I actively dislike the content of Spoken World Dutch.

My plan for the next month or so, then, is more immersion and not worry too much about the details. This is going to be hard for me. I know I've written about this before, but I have a serious case of cognitive dissonance between how I actually learn languages (Assimil, dialogs, and shadowing) and how I *think* I should learn them. My brain wants to believe that, based on previous experience with all the technical subjects I studied at school, if just given enough details I can _learn_ the material. And that's why I keep returning to wanting to study grammar and vocab lists. Every time I start doing mostly input, I end up thinking that it would be easier to do active vocab and grammar study.

I find it hard to just let the language "flow over me." With so much of my life spent looking at details (math proofs and computer programs), it's hard to step back. At work (and at school previously) missing details meant you failed the course or your program crashed. Basically, the two worst things in those environments. It the shift between "look at the trees" and "ignore the trees, see the forest".

So, my plan. For the next month, I'm going to do one Assimil per day, as instructed. I'm going to try to read and/or listen to extra non-Assimil content for at least 30 minutes. I'm going to do my anki reps (sentence based). And, in order to satisfy my active-studying grammar-loving self, I'm going to try to do 2-3 Lang8 posts per week. All of these are being tracked on Joe's Goals to keep me honest.

So, recent accomplishments. I listened to a 45 minute Dutch radio play with a transcript that I was able to get the gist of. I had two short Dutch conversations on Sharedtalk, albeit with much help from Google Translate. (Incredible! The Dutch room wasn't empty!) I read "Het Geheim van de Eenhorn" (The Secret of the Unicorn) without looking up too too many words.

The flash cards are actually going well. I'm importing 50 sentences a day from one of my sentence packs, and trying to add sentences from "King Ottokar's Scepter". It's been almost a week and I'm not hating them. So far so good. Once I've finished the Tintin, I'm going to add the thousand or so sentences from the exercises in Assimil (not the dialogs.) After that, dunno.

More news as events happen.

Memory requirements

2010-05-06T00:59:00.001+02:00

Steve Kaufmann recorded a video on the importance of memory when learning foreign languages. His take is basically that language learning isn't about memorization. I posted a bit of a rambling comment wanted to revisit my ideas.

I think that memorization is important at the start to give you a basis for actual language use and to allow production sooner. Steve's point of view makes sense if you don't care about production early on or mind listening to audio you don't understand.

The input-only hypothesis says that the required grammar structures and vocabulary will be learned from repeated, real-world exposure. Production should be delayed until the student is "ready" to produce.

Steve is being an armchair quarterback. From the safety of his living room, it's easy to say that 8 months of listening to audio books in Portuguese before trying to speak is a good idea. If he were living in Portugal, his need to communicate would be much stronger and real-life would not afford him the luxury of an input-only timespan.

To get to even A1 of the CEFRL, you need an active core vocabulary of 500 words plus the associate grammar rules so you can put sentences together. Even with flash cards and adding 20 words per day, you're still looking at about a month doing nothing but memorizing.

Like many skills, before reading and writing your target language become natural, they have to be done carefully, step-by-step, by the non-automatic part of your brain. You need to actively remember the gender of nouns, and which conjugation goes with which subject pronoun, the order of words in the sentence, and even the spelling of common words. For me, the need to memorize my core vocabulary and the associated grammar is the Great Wall of China standing between myself and basic fluency.

The need to memorize lots of vocabulary is a requirement for input as well. I'm reading Tintin comics, and it's slow-going. Yes, I can look at the pictures. Yes, I know the story. But there are too many unknowns in the content to be able to extract meaning from them. They are not yet comprehensible input, but with the help of a dictionary and flash cards, the second time they will be.

Unfortunately, it's also easy to memorize the wrong way. Poorly made flash cards can teach you definitions and make you better at solving crossword puzzles, but no better at speaking or writing. AJATT and Antimoon's sentence-based learning methods are the way to go, I think.

Back to Steve's claim about memorizing. He favours instead "repeated exposure until the material has been absorbed", which sounds a lot like memorization to be. And he's also recently been going on about how wonderful his flash cards on his iPod touch are. Again, memorization.

At the other end of the memory scale, there are Laoshu5d05000's "Language Bootcamp", Pimsleur, and Michel Thomas. These courses get people producing output quickly, even if it's in small chunks. They're also an application of the testing effect that basically says if you're try to recall material, you learn it faster.

Finally, for many people, production _is_ the end goal, the "proof" that their work is paying off. (Reading just doesn't cut it, especially with so many European language families being so large and sharing vocabulary. Interlingua, an international auxiliary language, is even based around this fact.) Much could be written about our instant-gratification society (and Karate Kid training montages) but I think that many people would give up before reaching the amount of input required for "natural assimilation" of a language. Sitting down and studying grammar and vocab addresses this problem.

Memorization is a necessary evil in language learning. You can go about it in a number of ways, and flash cards probably make it easier, but in the end there's just a lot of arbitrary sounds and symbols that have to be stuffed into your brain.

Flash cards and note-taking

2010-05-03T21:23:00.000+02:00

Two current issues with my Dutch: flash cards and note-taking, which are basically related.

1) I'm not taking notes. The fact that I'm not used to taking notes for my schooling is only partially related here. I also want a way to collect the information I'm being exposed to as I jump around to the different courses.

2) Reviewing. I'm not effectively reviewing the material I cover.

I didn't really take notes in school, or at least not to the extent that they were worth reviewing. It was probably the act of taking notes that helped me. But of course, most of my courses were math and CS courses, and the notes I took for those are not the sort of notes I need to take for languages. Most of the notes were copying proofs off the board, and I don't want to just write out the textbooks.

The other thing I feel I'm missing is active studying. Even though I'm reading (and listening), my _recall_ and production aren't being tested. It becomes very easy to skim and your brain dulls to the material if you don't have to do anything with it.

Finally, I'm getting impatient with my Dutch. I have the GCSE Dutch wordlist I want to learn. I have two sentence packs with 1600 Dutch sentences. I have all the Assimil phrases and dialogs and exercises. I'm feeling frustrated that they're not coming as fast as I'd like.

So, I need to be actively creating content, even if it's just ripped from my courses or native materials. I need to review things. I need to memorize a large list of items.

It sounds like I'm convincing myself I need flash cards.

Now, the previous two times I've tried flash cards, they didn't really work for me. I've been trying to understand why. I've seen a couple more videos recently talking about how wonderful flash cards are and blah blah blah.

I think the biggest issue was that for the most part, I wasn't creating the flash cards myself. I was using other people's card sets, and massive ones at that. Second, I didn't have any previous exposure to the material. So, I was learning it the first time I saw the card. The huge numbers of cards that were basically unknown to me created a very oppressive feeling when starting Anki. The numbers were demotivating.

This time, I hope it will be different. I'm going to create all my cards myself. This means no massive imports of unknown items. I'll still keep my sentence packs for "later", but I think the smaller number of cards at the beginning will make it not so overwhelming.

I think the Anki downloads are probably overall a bad thing. They're too tempting and, at least for me, have no relevance to my studies. I don't "own" the cards or their content, so I feel no emotional attachment to learning them. I'm sure AJATT has written something like that.

As for which SRS to use. I'm going to stick with anki. I wouldn't have minded a Web2.0 solution (and there are many), but for now I want a known quantity. I don't want my excuse to be that the interface sucked. I also trust anki's scheduling algorithm. I think a lot of the other ones have probably put most of their effort into splashy javascript goodness instead of making the product itself "better" for studying. There is an online version of anki, though, and AJATT has Surusu that's probably worth taking a look at.

Steve Kaufmann and Grammar

2010-05-01T14:42:00.001+02:00

Steve Kaufmann has been having a little anti-grammar diatribe on his blog. So far, there are two blog posts, two podcasts, and a video post. I thought I'd take this opportunity to explain why I fall into the pro-grammar camp. I commented as such on his blog, and a number of people agreed with me. Steve himself was surprised at the number of people taking the pro-grammar stance.

Basically, reading a grammar gives me the details I need when they're non-obvious or sufficiently rare to make extracting them from input impractical. It also allows me to start producing content sooner (i.e, with less input). This is useful for when when I haven't absorbed and internalized the structures because the learning materials don't present the constructs I want to use in sufficient quantities to be able to extract the rules I need. Perhaps its my computer/math background, but I find it useful to be able to abstract away the patterns into rules, and then use those rules to create new patterns. Having the grammar makes that step faster for me.

I find grammar rules like the mnemonic link-words you use when memorizing vocabulary. At first, they're required and the mental lookup takes a while. But after a while, the lookup becomes faster and eventually drops away: you're just left with the rule.

I also find grammar rules to be useful clarifications. In one of the podcasts, Steve quotes some particularly ugly rules from a Portuguese (I think) grammar book. I agree -- statements like that are useful only to linguists actually studying the Portuguese language and not that helpful for someone learning Portuguese. However, from the clarification side, I know I've had a particularly ugly French grammar rule that mentioned that this other case I was having trouble with was included in this rule. There we go: I already knew the rule, and the grammar let me collapse these two cases that were actually the same back into a single mental rule.

A grammar, like a phrase book, puts me on the path to independent production sooner than if I had input alone. It also lets me read more effectively because instead of just glossing over sentences and getting the gist of them, I can actually analyze them for what they're saying and notice the rules I've learned being put into practice. Unless I'm reading carefully like this, I'll just end up skimming and saying "yeah, I kind of understand what they're saying because I know this word here, and this word over hear looks a bit like this, and I think this might be the past tense and here's an auxiliary verb at the start." Knowing the grammar lets me view these kinds of sentences as clearer examples of what I've just learned, and then I can put that knowledge into practice sooner.

Phrasebooks, recent purchases, lang-8 and French

2010-05-01T14:34:00.000+02:00

Our boxes finally arrived from Montreal. From a language learning perspective, this means I now have my EN<->NL pocket dictionary, my Dutch phrasebook, my Dutch grammar, and the Dutch books I bought when I was here in September.

I'm really glad the phrasebook has arrived, actually. While I like Assimil's dialogs, they sometimes fail on giving you they structures and vocab you need _now_ to be able to handle the basics in a new language. (French in Action is really bad for this: it teaches you how to shoot-down a pick-up artist before you learn how to order in a restaurant. However, if the expectation is that you'll complete the course before moving to France, the exact order doesn't matter. Having a phrasebook solves the problem of not being able to communicate until you've completed the course.) When I was learning French, I had a French phrasebook that I carried around for ages and pretty much memorized. Hopefully the Dutch phrasebook will be as effective.

Picked up H2G2 in Dutch, and a Tintin (Kuifje).

Did another lang-8 post, this one on our outing on Queen's Day. A brief description of the days activities is about all I can do in Dutch -- that's already at my limit. In French, I needed to find a topic that interested me because the language was much less of a barrier.

Speaking of French, I've been feeling my French getting worse. Comprehension is still great, but just my production. I might either see if I can find a somebody in Amsterdam who wants to do French<->English conversation exchange or possibly start doing lang-8 posts again.

Sociolinguistics again

2010-04-19T19:13:00.000+02:00

I picked up an intro to sociolinguistics ("Sociolinguistics" by Peter Trudgill) a while ago, but I decided it was a bit too fluffy for me. It was basically 200 pages of "Everything affects the way we speak", with some examples.

Something that did surprise me, actually, while reading Trudgill's book was my opposition to one of the points he kept coming back to : all dialects are equally good, valid, and worth preserving. This is clearly the logical extension of my position that I dislike prescriptive grammarians and prefer descriptive grammarians. Perhaps there's just some middle line that I just haven't found yet. Or maybe I've become a language snob without noticing? Maybe I should just accept the fact that for the moment I hold two contradictory world views. Oh well.

Anyway, I headed back to the used bookstore and found another sociolinguistics textbook, this one slightly more rigorous. It was actually the second volume of a two-volume set. The first book was "The Sociolinguistics of Society" and was aimed more at the society end of things, while the second book, "The Sociolinguistics of Language", dealt with more of the linguistics end. I haven't really read much of it yet, but from what I have read it has the more academic approach I'm used to and expect from my books.

Current input sources

2010-04-18T13:45:00.000+02:00

The file where I keep notes for my blog has been filling up with random thoughts so I figured I better write them down before they become too out of date. This post will basically be a list of my current input sources for French and Dutch.

For news, I've basically stopped reading HuffPo, and moved to 20minutes.fr, LeMonde.fr, France24.fr for news instead. I added a new iGoogle tab with French tech news: TechCrunch/ReadWriteWeb/Mashable/Gizmodo all have French versions. I also have a Slate.fr news feed there, but I wouldn't mind finding another news magazine that has more in-depth stories instead of just headlines and sound bites. However, speaking of headlines and soundbites, I really wouldn't mind a French Metafilter, Reddit, and/or Digg. The Yahoo Buzz front page is pretty terrible, but I maybe once you get out of TV/Celeb and into the other categories it gets better.

I listened to more of "Le Nom del a Rose". I think I've decided it's boring. It just might be a question of vocab, and that if I were reading it it might be easier. I probably won't listen to more of it, but I really need to find another French audiobook just to have for listening. It's too pad Utopod only releases episodes once a month.

On the Dutch side of things, I've found a number of Dutch video sites, including educational TV. ETV.nl has a number of educational series including and a few "learn dutch" ones. The current problem I think is that I'm no longer beginner, but don't yet have enough to watch any of the even low-intermediate ones. There are also a number which teach Dutch culture, all aimed at recent immigrants. I just wish I had transcripts. Watching these TV courses, I realize again how _fantastic_ "French In Action" was. 52 half-hour episodes. Wow. These ones seem to be in the range of only ten 5 or 10 minute episodes.

I've been sticking with Assimil, and that's going fine. Still not producing any Dutch, but I promised tricours that I'd write a lang8 post yesterday. I've picked up a couple more "simple" Dutch books:"Tao Van Poeh" and "De Ronde Van Gallia". Neither have audio though.

Trip to Brussels

2010-04-02T01:42:00.001+02:00

TL;DR: I went to Belgium and spoke French but I'll start studying Dutch again soon.

We went to Belgium last weekend. It was pretty fun. Since this blog is supposed to be about languages, I'm not going to talk about the city itself. However, Brussels is bilingual French/Dutch, and I had a number of language-related experiences and some other thoughts I wanted to get down.

First, Brussels is a bilingual city. Stuff for 'locals' is written in both languages, with the odd smattering of English because it's cool. The stuff for tourists, on the other hand, seemed to be equally in English / French / Dutch / German. Restaurant menus were either in both languages or all 4, depending on how touristy the place was. The staff at the touristy places probably had a good amount of those 4 languages too. The train conductor on the way back announced all the stops in all 4 languages. In the elevator at the Atomium, there staffer rattled off a little spiel about the speed and height and such in 4 languages the was timed perfectly to finish when the elevator arrived at the top. Coming from Canada where official things and packaging are bilingual it was nice to see it here too, although strange for it to not be EN/FR as I'm used to.

Obviously, in a town filled with tourists it's not surprising to hear lots of different languages. I'm still a bit used to Canada where the vast majority of visitors are other Canadians or Americans, where even in tourist destinations the language you hear around you is English. In Brussels, it was French, and Dutch, and English, and German, and Spanish. We sat next to a couple in a restaurant who were talking in Italian and ordered in French. It's seems so natural, and totally unlike North America's sea of English.

We spoke French to everybody. Hotel, Restaurants, chocolate shops. I stumbled once in a restaurant when my brain totally blanked on a word, but I found it and continued fine. It was nice to speak French and feel competent at a foreign language.

Speaking French in Brussels felt different than speaking it in Montreal. In Montreal, it always felt a little forced and there was always the possibility that the other person would switch to English at the first mistake. It's rare, then, that I speak French to somebody and _don't_ have English as a fall back (since again most of the francophones I know speak English better than I speak French). Feeling that _I'm_ the one making the stretch I found speaking French with anglophones particularly difficult, although the course I took last spring 'cured' me of that.

There were two strange linguistic experiences, though. The first, at the BD museum (very cool, btw) the guy at the admissions desk basically kept speaking English to us even though we were speaking French to him and kept offering us binders with translations of the exhibits. Maybe I should give him the benefit of the doubt and ordering two adult tickets wasn't enough for me to appear comfortable in French. The other weird thing was on the metro system trying to get to the Atomium. We asked a guy for directions, and he responded in French, and then gave us the same directions again in English. That there was at least a bit more conversation that he should have been able to pick up on, but again maybe he's just used to English speakers nodding and saying "oui" and not actually understanding.

One last amusing French anecdote to report. We were sitting in a cafe and the table next to us (speaking French) there was one person talking about how hungry he was and how what he should do is do as the Quebecois do and have a poutine, and then described it to his companions. I couldn't pass up that opportunity, so I had to say something. Interjecting something into that conversion, though, I stumbled again and felt _really_ nervous as I sputtered out my "sorry for overhearing but .." Same weird performance anxiety.

Finally, it was nice to be able to buy some French books. Not a lot of French books here in Amsterdam. I almost bought the French translation of "Godel, Escher, Bach" but decided I should at least get through the English one first. (Not wanting to spend €55 helped too.) I did find a translation of Umberto Eco's "Experiences in Translation" book I was talking about previously. Turns out the book was originally published in Italian rendering all of my hemming-and-hawing pretty much moot. (According to the introduction, the basic ideas were first presented in English in two lecture series, but that the _book_ was written in Italian.)

Anyways, that's it for the the language stuff. Next blog update will be about my studies. I goofed off and didn't do any Dutch during March. April I'm starting again with my studies.

Random thoughts for February/March.

2010-03-22T20:46:00.000+01:00

I've haven't been studying too much recently. I managed to get to the end of the second Assimil CD near the end of February and haven't progressed much further. I was hoping to keep up the base of 1 Assimil CD per month, but that's not going to happen. However, at least I'm interested in doing language learning again. It's hard when you're not motivated. Breaks in Dutch feel bigger than those I know I did when I was learning French -- probaby because my Dutch is at a much lower level, forgetting a small number of things makes a larger impact.

The Sharedtalk Dutch room is always empty. I'm sure I could find somebody to talk to, but then I also remember how hard it was to find a French conversation partner. My level is also so beginner that I'm more at a lurk stage rather than participate stage.

My short commute has become even shorter with the purchase of a bike. I'll need to find a new time to study. I haven't figured out how to put it into my daily routine. It never ends up being a priority for me. This is something I need to figure out and won't bother just rambling on the Internet about.

Tried the first level of Livemocha Dutch. Didn't particularly like it.

Maybe I should go back to trying to write Lang8 posts?

We went to a Dutch market on the weekend and spoke some Dutch. Mostly small stuff -- buying bread and cheese and cookies. I felt somewhat comfortable doing this, even though I very quickly get outside of my understanding when the responses come.

I've actually been doing a lot of French. Watching TV from back home -- "Les Invincibles." The QC version is much better than the FR remake that just started airing on ARTE. I'll probably keep watching the remake, but I'm very happy to rewatching the QC version because it's an excellent show.

We have a trip to Brussels planned in the near future so it will be nice to speak French then.

I still haven't sorted out my news feeds. The French news sites tend to be about France, or Quebec. Neither of which I live in any more. I'm still reading way too many English news sites (tech ones, mostly) that I haven't found replacements for.

Watching the language learning youtube videos brought up my crazy idea of starting my own language videos just for practice. This is unlikely to happen.

Another thing I could blame for my lack of motivation is the fact that I'm no longer an active member of HTLAL or the #learnanylanguage IRC channel. Since I'm not always thinking about language learning, I think about other things instead. I'm not saying I want to rejoin those (they did suck a lot of time), but I need to find another source of inspiration.

My copy of "The Hobbit" and HP in Dutch are still too advanced. I need to finish TY/LivingLanguage/Assimil before I can move on to a "real" book I think.

I think that's it for today. Hopefully the rest of March and April will be more productive. We'll see.

Thoughts on Translation(s)

2010-01-24T18:43:00.000+01:00

This post is not so much about my learning Dutch, but more about thoughts on translation and translations of books.

While doing some browsing online, I saw the word 'craiefiti' listed as the French translation of 'warchalking' -- the practice of drawing chalk marks on the sidewalk to indicate to people in search of an open wireless network that one is near and the settings required to use it and such. At the time, I thought it was a pretty neat word, but a short time later realized that 'craiefiti' actually loses one important property in translation: it's history and "feel". 'Warchalking' links back to 'wardriving' (the process of driving around looking for open wifi networks), which itself comes from 'wardialing' (the process of dialing all the phone numbers in a given prefix looking for a modem). The word 'wardialing' was coined in reference to the 1983 hacker movie "WarGames". For me, these words spawn thoughts of open access to information, sharing, maybe something a little shady or "grey hat", illicit access, and maybe a little cyberpunk.

The French word 'craiefiti' has none of that. In fact, there's not even a reference to Wifi, or computers, or anything. 'Craiefiti', to me, is just a compound word of chalk ("craie") and graffiti, and could easily refer to any sort of chalk art, wanted or not. "Chalk graffiti" could mean hobo symbols, tags, random swear words, slogan, or even murals. But the French word has no links anything that the English word conjures up.

Walking home from the gorcery store, I came up with "wifiti", which at least is "wifi" + "graffiti", and in my mind at least, links the neologism with its meaning a little more. Now, I'm not a native French speaker, so perhaps 'craiefiti' sounds better than 'wifiti', and maybe there are other aspects of 'craiefiti' that I'm not aware of that make it a better translation. But then again maybe not.

Maybe it doesn't matter that the French have a different word for 'warchalking' with difference mental links. The English word was coined by a guy in London, but it's not necessarily an English concept. Does the word in all languages have to relate back to the thoughts of the person who first came up with it? I'm obviously beyond the state in langauge learning where you think that all languages have a 1=1 translation for any given concept, but for something so precise and so new, something in me really does want the French word to "mean" the same thing as the English one. (This of course all relates to translations of Jabberwocky, of which there are many, but I'm not going to get into that either..) Maybe all of my ideas about what warchalking "feels" like are enbodied in the French word "craiefiti" simply because of what it "means" to them, and it doesn't need history. It's meaning, and all the history, stand alone.

The reason I've been thinking about translation is because one of the books I packed to come with me to Amsterdam was Hofstadter's "Le Ton Beau de Marot". It's a book that talks about translation through the process of translating a short French poem into English 50-60 times, and what each one has as an advantage over the other translations. In Hofstadter's way, he also delves into meaning, symbols, artificial intelligence, and the processes of cognition. I skimmed part of this book while in Toronto and I can't wait for it to arrive.

However, this post isn't about Hofstadter, and it's only marginally about warchalking. It's actually about the Italian semiotician Umberto Eco. Eco also wrote a book talking about symbols and language and translation called "Experiences in Translation". Eco writes hard to translate books, much like Hofstadter, and this book (among other things) talks about issues he's met with during the translations of his works. Unlike Eco's novels, this work was originally written in English. There exists a French translation. So, which version do I read?

If the book were originally in Italian, I'd read the French translation in a heart beat. But somehow I'm torn knowing that the French one is not what he wrote, and that it would in fact be easier for me to read the original. I've read French translations of English books, but never without having read the original. Most of that reading I regarded as 'studying' anyways, instead of pleasure reading. In fact, my reading list also has on it Hofstadter's "Goedel, Escher, Bach", followed by it's French translation.

The problem for me is that I'm scared of missing something important when reading in French. Reading is no longer just a study exercise for me (in which case the content could be almost anything, I just chose something to hold my attention), but as the end in itself. I don't want to miss something important that Eco, of Hofstadter, or whoever, is saying, or some subtle joke or pun or snippet of information or idea or whatever because I can't understand the language. If I'm reading Eco, it's not because I'm studying French, but because I want to read his thoughts on translation.

AJATT just had a post on always making the choice to use your target language, if available. I'm still very hesitant to do that for my pleasure reading, though, and that's probably going to hold me back. My use of French has dropped of considerably since moving to Amsterdam. Duh. Hopefully a trip or two to Paris will help :) Actually, probably having a routine and not feeling in such a state of flux will probably help.

Maybe my thoughts on translation will change after reading "Le Ton Beau de Marot", or maybe they'll just become more more hard-line and I'll never want to read anything in translation again.

A couple more speaking attempts

2010-01-20T23:59:00.000+01:00

My list of notes for things to blog about has been growing, so I may as well flesh them out and get a blog post up.

I've spoken Dutch a couple more times, once buying "De Hobbit" (including asking a clerk where it was), and putting more money on the OV Chipcards. I know I had said after watching Laoshu505000's videos that I wanted to start production early, but I think I'm changing my mind about that. I'll probably continue to parrot out set phrases for some daily tasks, but I'm not going to engage in any real conversation until I'm much more comfortable at the listening stages.

Speaking of listening, I'm up to lesson 35 of Assimil's first wave. I'm starting to be able to get fewer of the individual words (Lesson 26 was a pain), but I can still gloss the meaning. I think I just need to study them more rather than only reading the text 2 or 3 times. Hopefully they will be easier when I need them during the second phase.

Going through Assimil this time seems harder, and it's probably because of all the latent French I had squirreled away. I'm also having trouble differentiating between the many separable verbs: opFOOing, verFOOnen, and such. It's a sign I need to listen to the dialogs more, but also that I need to go back and read what the word is in the first place so I really know what I'm listening for. To bring this back for French, I think I was familiar enough with the language that just hearing the word once or twice was sufficient for me to be able to pick it out correctly from the dialog: less of the sentence structure was totally brand new, so the pieces I needed to listen for were easier to hear.

There are a couple of French developers at work, and I've spoken with him a couple of times. One of the co-founders of my company speaks 14 languages or something, and I had a nice language geek chat. (He was the one who sent me the email in Dutch on my first day.)

I spent my entire commute today listening to "De Hobbit". I'm still missing much to much of the Dutch for it to make any real sense. I had tried doing some LR a bit earlier, but the same problem: even though I know the story quite well, there's just too much new stuff there for me and it's just a tidal wave of gibberish. I'll try again AA (After Assimil :)

Now that I've tried to use Living Language for basics, I noticed a problem with the dialogs. I had noticed it before with French but never though anything of it because of my level at the time. Living Language has the problem that there dialogs very frequently fall into the category of "thin plot around a list of vocabulary." In "French Beyond the Basics", for example, one of the dialogs is a tour guide describing a tour in The Louvre: "First to the antiquities: Oriental, Greek, Egyptian, Etruscan, and Roman. ... Then to the collection of European, African, Asian, Oceanic, and American. ... As you'll see, there are classic and modern paintings: guache, watercolor, oils, as well as etching and engravings." That dialog is particularly bad and I've only given a sample of the some of the more egregious errors, but that book is actually filled with them. In a CD Shop ("What kind of music do you like?"), renting a car ("All our vehicles are equipped with.."), a camera repair shop ("I need "). At least with the intermediate/advanced French lessons I could just skip over them because there wasn't any important vocabulary. The Dutch "Spoken World" course has similarly obnoxious dialogs but tied into important grammar points and I'm supposed to be listening to them because I don't know enough to ignore them yet.

I'm not doing anymore Linguaphone lessons at the moment but I _do_ mean to get back to it. I did enjoy the all-Dutch-all-the-time feel of the dialogs, even the performance was a bit melodramatic.

I watched Laoshu's videos on his FLR system. It's a bit like how MT primes you to make longer complex sentences by getting some of the important conjunctions early on. And I like the idea of prepping yourself with answers to questions native speakers ask learners. I'm still not sure about production so soon without a massive level of exposure, or coming up with your own exercises when you have no native speaker to "check your work" as it were. Although I know understand what he meant by "making your own exerciess" for the TY courses: just make up 10-20 sentences describing made up facts about the participants in the dialogs using grammar and vocab points from the lesson.

Finally, I found some Dutch radio plays with transcripts. The page seems to be a bit slower than some of the audiobooks I have, and they're shorter (30m each). I'll probably start trying to work on one of those in my Copious Free Time to augment the Assimil/TY/LL dialogs I'm listening to back and forth.

In a couple of days we'll probably be in our new apartment which means I'll no longer have the 1 hour commute there and back. I suppose that's good, but I'll need to find another way to get my shadowing in. We're moving right next to a park, so I suppose I can "walk swifly" in a nice outdoor space.

I have another posts of unfinished ideas talking about translation. Not sure when that'll be done yet though.