Judith's language learning blog

Go, also known as Igo, Weiqi (围棋） or Baduk, is one of the most ancient board games known to man. It was invented in China more than 2500 years ago. Recommended by Confucius himself, this game has been a standard part of preparation for a nobleman’s or warrior’s career. Spreading to Korea and Japan between the 5th and 7th century AD, Go became also one of the arts the Samurai trained. Asians believe that the Go board can not just represent the strategies and tactics of battle but also that it is a representation of life itself.

What I love most about Go is its surreal elegance. The rules are as simple as you could wish for, hardly more difficult than those of Tic Tac Toe, yet the game they create is so profound that you could (and some do) study it full-time a whole life long.

At every point, you have a choice between more than a hundred legal moves. This makes the game a natural target for AI research, since brute-force calculation is not an option. Humans however see slow, clunky moves, fast, swift and maybe even too reckless moves, ugly moves and moves of a zen-like beauty.

Go is a game I cherish, even if I can’t give it as much time as it deserves. If you would like to learn this beautiful ancient game, try the Interactive Way to Go or check out one of my lectures tomorrow: for Americans or for Europeans.

Finally, here are some of my favourite quotes about Go:

“Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double entry accounting.”
– from Shibumi , bestseller by Trevanian

“While the Baroque rules of chess could only have been created by humans, the rules of go are so elegant, organic, and rigorously logical that if intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe, they almost certainly play Go.
– Edward Lasker, chess grandmaster

“That play of black upon white, white upon black, has the intent and takes the form of creative art. It has in it a flow of the spirit and a harmony of music. Everything is lost when suddenly a false note is struck, or one party in a duet suddenly launches forth on an eccentric flight of his own. A masterpiece of a game can be ruined by insensitivity to the feelings of an adversary.”
– Yasunari Kawabata, The Master of Go

After 11 days and oversleeping a couple times, I was feeling worse rather than better. My boyfriend got worried and convinced me to get a good night’s rest and forget about this experiment for the time being. Since I now have lots of work piled up that I couldn’t do while tired, I finally followed his advice. Well, I tried. Apparently, my body right now totally doesn’t like sleep. If at all, I sleep some time between 5am and 9am, but only intermittedly. I still managed to feel fine and get a lot of work done yesterday, but today I’ve felt sluggish all day again. I will play it by ear, sleep when I can and wait for my body to decide when it wants to sleep.

I am still adhering the schedule, though I overslept once again. These days I am feeling approximately as tired as on a Monday morning when I have to set up an alarm to get into work early. So I can do work and study, but I’m still looking forward to feeling better.

I am spending most of my time now watching the “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” on Youtube in Mandarin Chinese with subtitles in simplified Chinese and in English. LordMaChou176 cut up and uploaded the entire TV series!
I find that I am recognizing more and more Chinese because of this activity, which is vaguely reminiscant of Listening-Reading. Often I stop the video, read the characters and find that I recognize most of them, even if I didn’t recognize the words as they were said. A problem is also that some of the characters speak in dialect or use other words than written, but not too often, so it’s still a good exercise. I am up to episode 20 now, though I’ve watched some key scenes beforehand (that’s how I got sucked into it).

I also religiously do my Anki several times a day for my Chinese. I am not too good at memorizing because of the brain being somewhat foggy, but I do know 1754 unique Hanzi now and am about to enter in some fresh characters. So it looks like I learned 254 characters since writing my Attack Plan 18 days ago, an average of 14 a day… if I can keep up that speed, I could learn 1890 more characters until the end of the year. However, keeping up the speed is not going to happen, because I will be on a 4-week vacation in the USA in September/October and I don’t see myself doing much studying around Christmas and New Year’s either. I will keep aiming for a grand total of 3000 characters known by the end of the year.

I also took some Greek classes on Myngle, from the package I still had. However, now my Greek teacher is on holiday and my package is about to expire with two lessons not taken – sometimes I want to curse Myngle for not giving students a reasonable amount of time in which to take those package lessons; leading to a lot of prepaid lessons simply expiring. On the other hand, it probably also succeeds in motivating some people to take some extra lessons just before the package expires; if they and their teachers can fit it into their schedule.

Okay, so I read other logs and apparently it’s common to feel low on energy for the first couple days after being able to REM sleep. The body needs to catch up on sleep. For this purpose, some advocate having additional naps in the middle between two scheduled ones, when tired. I have been doing that to some extend and am gradually starting to feel better. Today for example the fog receded from my brain enough to allow me to study Chinese characters on Anki. Also, yesterday I automatically woke up after 20 minutes of an impromptu additional nap, and that’s encouraging, too.

On the down side, I seriously overslept this morning. After going to bed for my 4am nap, I only woke up at 8:30am!. I blame my alarm clock, because I switched to a different one to prevent my boyfriend from getting sleep-deprived as I do this, and that alarm clock is apparently default set not to operate on Sundays, only work days. So it never went off and I slept all that time. Since normally I would have taken another nap from 8am to 8:30am, I decided not to do anything special but just to go ahead with my naps as before and hope for the best. Just now I was suitably tired for my 12pm nap and woke up from deep sleep before the alarm even went off.

Friday August 14th, 2009

BREAKTHROUGH! I had a dream in today’s 8am nap and then again (a different dream) in the 4pm nap! This means that my body has adapted and is ready to grant me some REM time even if I don’t sleep 90 minutes or more in one go. Its refusal to do so during the initial days is the main reason for being sleep-deprived. Now I am hoping for a swift recovery as I get more and more of the kind of sleep that I need.

Today however I have been feeling tired and out of sorts throughout the day. Not the zombie kind of tired like yesterday, but I also haven’t had any more lucid spells during which I could work or study. The naps leave me almost as tired as I am when starting them, when otherwise most of them would be refreshing. From what I understood, I don’t have another breakthrough target, what’s left to do is simply to let the Überman schedule become an ingrained habit, so I’m a bit worried about this strange state.

Good news and bad news on Thursday August 13th.

These days I have been experimenting with Polyphasic Sleep, a life hack where you take multiple 20-minute naps during the day but don’t need to sleep long at night. Here’s my log, pretty unedited and really mostly for my own sake: Read more

I was just answering Rebecka’s comment on my Modern Greek milestone and I found that my answer turned into a lengthy argument about why I like taking private classes and how I use my tutor. So I decided to write a new blog post about it instead, so that others could read it as well.

Right now I’m supplementing both my Greek and Chinese studies with 1-on-1 lessons on Myngle. I find them very useful in helping me advance quickly (the opposite of what I experienced in group lessons).

I typically take a lesson when I have a concrete need or goal. For example, the other day I was reading a learners’ grammar on the Greek tense system and found that I didn’t really understand the difference between θα γράφω and θα γράψω, or generally tenses based on the stems -γράφ-, -γράψ- and γράφει. The grammar had some examples, but each sample sentence was about a different topic and I couldn’t infer much about the crux of the matter. So I scheduled a lesson and asked Rania to think of sample sentences where the same idea (writing a letter) will appear in different tenses due to slight changes of context. For a native speaker, it’s not really hard to do if you ask specifically “What is a context in which I’d have to say ‘θα γράφω μια γράμμα’?”. Having these sample sentences with minimal variance really helped me understand why the changes occur, plus I have now entered the sentences into my Anki and test myself on them regularly (English to Greek).

Of course the lessons are never just about questions I have, we also practise conversation or listening comprehension or whatever else I feel is my weakest area at the moment. I do need a tutor for conversation at this point, rather than an unsuspecting native speaker, because once I’m talking about a subject, I refuse to give up on expressing something I wanted to express. I do try to rephrase sentences, but, if that does not help, I will ask for every single word I’m missing and then try to build the sentence. Unlike a lot of language learners, I do not keep silent or change topics if an idea is clearly beyond my level to express. Whether I’m having the discussion in Greek or in my mother tongue, I do not allow my limited vocabulary and grammar to hinder me from expressing the same ideas. Right now that typically requires angelic patience from whomever I’m talking to, so I prefer not to talk too much in Greek with friends. However, I believe it’s the fastest way for me to improve, because I’m learning words and structures that are 150% relevant and useful to me. What’s more, I can then discuss the same topic in Greek decently well with anybody else, no matter if it’s music, Berlin, what’s happening in our lives, the economy crisis or anything else I have talked about with Rania.

I just had another Greek lesson via Myngle and the topic was a text with lots of positive and negative imperatives. I thought that the explanations my teacher was giving didn’t appear to be very difficult language, so on a hunch I asked her to use Greek as much as possible in this lesson and only switch back to English if I appeared not to understand something.

You know what? It worked great. I actually understood 85% of the words, even though she wasn’t talking particularly slowly, and I understood 100% of the meaning. Some of it is probably because my forage into Greek verbs, which I’ve been practising on Anki, essential words for this context like χρησιμοποιώ (to use). But also I have the feeling that something just clicked and I’m a lot faster at both understanding and using Greek words now.

Okay, so here’s what I plan to do in order to improve my languages in what’s left of 2009. I meant to do a lot more until now, but work and graduating and life interfered, you know the story. I still haven’t graduated, but I believe that it’s time for a new resolution.

1. Chinese – Learn 1500 characters for a total of 3000, improve conversational ability, be able to read “The Little Prince” looking up less than 10 words per chapter.

This will be my main target. During the IJK I studied nearly 250 brand new characters in just 7 days and I have 1603 characters right now in my Anki (Hanzi statistics keeps track of them for me, great plugin!). However, I will need to spend more time on about 100 of these cards, so I’ll count it as ‘knowing’ 1500 characters right now. In January 2009 I only knew 833 characters!

In terms of conversational ability, I can get by in China, but I couldn’t talk about what’s going on in my life without first looking up one word per sentence or so. I’m working on this with my Myngle teacher Aileen.

Apart from my special easy reader “San Ren Xing”, the easiest Chinese reading I have available to me is “The Little Prince”. It has been getting a lot easier lately with all the characters I studied, but there is still a fair amount of words I need to look up, including words consisting of characters I already know, or characters I forgot. Wenlin makes it easy, but my goal shall be to have to look up less than 10 words per chapter by the end of the year.

2. French and Italian – Read two novels each

Reading in a foreign language other than English still takes me a LOT of time, so I want to practise that. Right now I have started on two novels: “Ségou” and “Il giro del mondo en 80 pizze”. I started on a different Italian book before but it was too hard. I will not set goals for active usage because I will have to finish two essays and one thesis in French in the near future anyway, for my degree. I will try to find a tandem partner for Italian though, because my Italian is so rusty.

3. Modern Greek – Finish reading “The Little Prince”, practise talking, increase Anki deck to >1500 facts

Right now I have only read four chapters of “The Little Prince” in Greek and my Anki deck contains 443 facts. My vocabulary is bigger than that, but here I don’t have the possibility of indicating words I know to get a better count. However, I will probably add all new words and phrases to Anki, so that progress shall be visible.

4. Spanish, Swahili, possibly Arabic, Indonesian or Maori – will chip away

I can’t say more than that I will continue to give these a bit of my time. For Spanish I currently attend an Edufire conversational class twice a week, for Swahili I’m slowly going through Assimil Swahili and I’m considering taking up the others again.

Everybody, please wish me luck and keep me faithful to this plan!