Judith's language learning blog

I just realized that I never posted my summary of 2011… sorry for that.
This is a personal report, no language-learning wisdom I’m afraid.

I just spent some thought on what my goals for 2012 should be, and how I want to go about them. Here’s what I came up with, also noting my current level:

Mandarin Chinese
Currently, I can read a modern Chinese book if the style isn’t too literary and I’d understand what’s going on, but it’s not enjoyable for me. I can also have a 45-minute conversation in Chinese, but I’m often missing words, I stumble over words and make too many mistakes. By the end of 2012, I want to be able to do both in a more enjoyable manner.
Method:
* Reading “Confessions of a Shopaholic” in Chinese-English parallel and entering colloquial expressions from there into Anki
* Listening-Reading “Mr Ma and Son”, which I have already read but for which I now found an audiobook
* Reading or Listening-Reading the modern Chinese novels which I brought back from the USA
* Reading the Chinese-only novels I found in Berlin
* Watching episodes from the new Romance of the Three Kingdoms TV series and from 家有儿女
* Mastering the song 中国话 by S.H.E, which is fast and full of tongue twisters
* Hopefully lots of talking!

Finnish
Due to a challenge I couldn’t resist, I will spend 45 hours on Finnish in February, despite it being nowhere on my hit list. Right now, I have zero knowledge of Finnish and it will be interesting to see where I’ll be at the end of the month… and where the others will be.
Method: mostly Assimil in conjunction with Anki, occasionally talking to a tutor for confirmation, possibly looking over other courses, children’s books or videos in order to keep up interest.

French
I can read any piece of French literature, including really old stuff, and my listening comprehension is also really good, but I feel that my active usage of French is lagging behind. I would also really love to exchange my German accent for a Québécois one. So my goal is to develop a good accent in 2012 and to reach a mistake quotient of less than 1/100 words. I shall also keep reading French classics.
Method:
* Talking to any Québécois who doesn’t run away fast enough
* Writing texts on lang-8 where they can be corrected
* Learning to imitate at least one recording of fast Québécois French
* Reading at least one French book per month

Indonesian & Korean
These were actually next on my list of languages to learn (I only know the Korean alphabet, and did a few lessons of Indonesian some years ago), but for now they’re taking a back seat to Finnish and Japanese. We shall see if there’s time, maybe in the second half of the year. For Indonesian I wanted to try out a translation-based course I have, and for Korean I just got Assimil Korean as a Christmas present.

Italian / Dutch / Spanish
I can read all of these with ease and make myself understood in conversations, but it’s more a case of make-believe than actual ability at this point (my Italian is full of Spanish and vice versa). I’d like to find time to work on one of these languages in particular and acquire real fluency in it. For that, I first have to find a language partner though.

Modern Greek
I’m happy with my ability to read Greek novels, but my speaking ability used to be better. Hopefully I shall have the chance to re-activate it at some point in 2012.

Japanese
I know zero Japanese at the moment, and I would love to be able to understand enough spoken Japanese in order to follow along in “Hikaru no Go” without the subtitles. Apart from that, it would be awesome to be able to watch Japanese Go lectures or Go TV. I am not interested in learning the written language because it would probably interfere with my knowledge of Chinese characters, which were difficult enough to acquire.
Method:
* Studying a quick course called “Le japonais tout de suite”
* Memorizing 600 of the most useful words
* Watching anime
* Whatever else I can come up with

Swahili
To my greatest regret, I stopped studying Swahili after completing 100 lessons of Assimil’s passive wave and 50 lessons of the active wave. In 2012, I intend to complete the rest of the active wave, assess my abilities then for the purpose of the experiment, and then start wildly using any materials I can get my hands on. My goal is to be able to comfortable read my collection of Swahili poems as well as understand Swahili audio news.
Method:
* Completing Assimil
* Scanning “Essential Swahili” and other courses I have lying around
* Creating & using Listening-Reading materials on the basis of Deutsche Welle’s “Learning By Ear”
* Reading the “Little Prince”, some children’s books and my advanced reader in Swahili
* Listening to news broadcasts

In November, I managed to read a record amount of 10 books and got half-way through another before I had to put it down yawning; it was no good and I shall not finish reading it. See which books I read, in what order and how I rated them at this site – clicking on the little “view” link on that page will reveal some things I had to say about each book.

Note that the order of reading differs from the trip plan, for several reasons:
1. I tend to read two books at the same time (one fiction and one non-fiction, or one in a harder language and one in an easier language, so that I have something to turn to at any time)
2. I started to read “Mr Ma & Son” early, but finished it among the last, because it’s almost 600 pages and in Chinese!
3. I temporarily skipped a few books because they didn’t make good companions on my journey. This could be due to size, due to having them electronically only, or because I was afraid the DHS might cause trouble if I showed up with a book on president Allende for example, considering the CIA staged the coup.

I will still read every book on the list though, now that I’m back in Berlin. That’s 14 books remaining and one month of time. Wish me luck!

The 9th of November is a really important date for Germany. Three historic events happened on this date:

The downside of living in Berlin is that there are way too many awesome bookstores here. There is one that is a particular danger to me: the Café Tasso. All books cost 1 EUR there, and since the money from sales goes to charity, lots of people donate awesome books to this place; books that are still worth much more than 1 EUR. The Café Tasso even have a large section of books in foreign languages, so I never leave without buying some. However, I don’t usually read much – in the latest Tadoku month I only read 748 pages. Now I have an ever-increasing pile of unread books.

I want to make a big dent in this pile in the next two months. My idea is an “around the world” theme. I picked 25 books representing 25 countries and all continents, and I will read all of them before January 1st. These books are written in 10 different languages, and I avoided German & English for the most part, so this will also be a linguistic challenge. Languages represented, in rough order of frequency: French, Esperanto, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, Latin, Greek, German, English.

Journey plan:

Join me!

This is a great chance to discover foreign cultures and authors who are less known in the English-speaking world. Have a look at the books I will be reading, maybe something interests you as well, or maybe you also have unread books that you can use for your personal round-the-world trip. The details of my journey, following the path on the map:

Egypt: Christian Jacq – Ramsès, fils de la lumière (Ramses, the son of light). This bestselling novel about Ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II is written by an Egyptologist, meaning that it’s classes better than some wanna-be historian’s image of Egypt.
Turkey: Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt – Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran. Another French best-selling book about the Middle East.
Greece: Από πού έρχεστε; A bilingual Greek-German reader about Greece.
Italy: Dino Buzzati – Lascia o Raddoppia; bilingual Italian-German
Sweden: Merit Müller – Mara en de kleur van het geluk. This is originally a Swedish book, but I have it in Dutch.
Netherlands: Arthur Japin – De grote wereld
UK: Lao She – Mr. Ma & Son, a Sojourn in London; A bilingual Chinese-English novel that sounds funny.
Canada: Michel Tremblay – Les Belles-Soeurs. I am looking forward to the liberal use of Joual (Canadian French dialect) in this drama.
USA: Gustaaf Peek – Ik was Amerika. The story of a Dutch POW who was shipped to America. A chapter of history that I hadn’t heard of.
Mexico: J.M.G. Le Clézio – Le rêve mexicain (The Mexican Dream). Essays on the Aztecs, the role of Cortes, Montezuma etc. and how the Western world might look today if the Aztec culture had been allowed to survive.
Colombia: Patricia Lara S. – Las Mujeres en la Guerra. Women telling about their role in the Colombian conflict.
Peru: Mario Vargas Llosa – Der Geschichtenerzähler. This book was selected as this year’s Free Book to be given out all across Berlin, that’s why I will read it in German rather than the original Spanish (El Hablador), maybe re-reading it in Spanish later. It’s about a man who goes to live with the Native Americans in the Peruvian jungle and learn their stories.
Chile: Joan E. Garcés – Allende y la experiencia chilena.
Suriname and the Dutch Antilles: Dylan van Eijkeren – Witboi. Another topic I never heard of before: about the relations between the Netherlands and their former colonies, and what’s really going on over there.
Tunisia: Apuleius – Apologia. Apuleius was a Roman writer, but he was also a Berber(indigenous North African), a very interesting person. The Apologia is said to be one of the funniest Latin texts to survive.
(Various African countries): An anthology of notable works by French-speaking black Africans, “Conteurs francophones noirs”.
Chad: André Gide – Le Retour du Chad. André Gide is a well-known name in French literature, and I have read far too little about Africa.
Congo: André Gide – Voyage au Congo. Ditto.
Australia: Trevor Steele – Flugi kun kakatuoj. An original Esperanto novel about an Aborigene tribe and the arrival of Europeans.
Japan: Kenzaburo Oe – Insegnaci a superare la nostra pazzia. As I’m not studying Japanese yet, I don’t feel bad for reading the great Kenzaburo Oe in Italian.
Ancient China: Shan Sa – Impératrice. I love Chinese-born French author Shan Sa for her novel “La Joueuse de Go”, which was horribly mistranslated in “The Girl Who Played Go”. Read this in French or don’t read it at all. Meanwhile, I’ll try another one of her novels.
Modern China: Annie Wang – From Mainland to Mainstream. Despite the title, this book is all in Chinese and I hope I will be up for it.
Afghanistan: Oriana Fallaci – Inciallah. Oriana Fallaci is an Italian reporter and this book, which I had started on before and found beyond my level, is a really interesting read. She illuminates not just the current situation in Afghanistan but also the historic causes, the Syrian-Lebanese conflict etc., all in the course of a long novel. I’m dying to read this; hopefully I’m not throwing the book down in frustration again.
Russia: Mikaelo Bronŝtejn – Oni ne pafas en Jamburg. An Esperanto novel about the legendary youth movement in the 70s in Soviet Russia.
Siberia/Russia: Julio Baghy – Viktimoj. A classic of Esperanto literature, about life in a Siberian gulag, written by someone who has been there and who is counted among the greatest of Esperanto-speaking poets.

Reading all these books before the end of the year will be a tough challenge, especially as I still have to work and I will be traveling a lot within that time span (our annual trip to the USA and Christmas visits to family). However, I am also looking forward immensely to reading every book on this list, and to buying more books.

Post your recommendations, tips and comments below.

If you love foreign languages as much as I do, your mouth is probably watering at the idea of picking up a new alphabet without much effort. I know some people who’d do it just for the fun of it, or for bragging rights… yes, I like to hang out with crazy language lovers.

Anyway, there are also practical reasons you might want to know another alphabet. Especially if you’re living in the country, you need it for everything, from reading street signs and maps to figuring out where to ring at an apartment building.

Teaching foreign scripts has been my particular fascination, because traditional textbooks consistently do it wrong (or, more commonly, don’t do it at all). My first experiment in that area was the creation of a Greek alphabet course at Wikibooks. Next, a site to learn the Korean script – I still get several e-mails with feedback or support requests every day from that one, but no income. Earlier this year, I quickly threw together a course for the Ukrainian Cyrillic alphabet (in Esperanto) for those who attended the Internacia Junulara Kongreso in Kyiv. That one was received really well – knowing Cyrillic is a lifesaver in the Ukraine!

So I started working on book about an alphabet that gives a lot of students trouble: the Arabic one. This is an all-new course with lots of words for practice, unrelated to my failed 2008 attempt at RWP Arabic. I learned a lot since, both about writing this kind of course and about the Arabic language.

You can read a preview of the book and buy it from Lulu. There’s a paperback and a DRM-free ebook version. Please have a look and let me know if you like it.

A personal blog post – and what happens if you set your goals too low.

Okay, so it has been way too long since I updated. I spent several weeks battling a nasty flu, and then scrambling to get some Dutch studying in, in order not to make a fool of myself at the Leuven language festival. On the down side, because of that flu I only managed 70 hours. On the bright side, Dutch is so freaking easy for a German speaker that even putting in 70 hours was enough to be able to have any everyday conversation in Dutch, to understand 95% of Dutch books or Dutch TV news and 90% of Dutch soap operas or movies. The language festival finally did go well, feedback for my lecture was good, I attended lectures on Sinhala, Tshiluba and Czech and I had some nice conversations in Dutch with people on the side. I also took the chance to buy Dutch, French and Chinese books.

After the festival, I got sucked into the new 三国 TV Series, which is loosely based on the “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”. It’s not a romance at all, it’s about history and chivalry, and it’s considered one of the “four great classics” of Chinese literature. Considering how much literature has come from China, making it into eternal memory as one of the uncontested top 4 has to count for something, so I recommend anyone to have a look. Either way I’ve been watching a lot of Chinese video with Chinese subtitles and it’s helping. About a week ago, while hosting a Couchsurfer from France (yay French practise!), I first noticed a Chinese voice in my head. That is, whenever I was mentally phrasing something, the Chinese translation would pop into my head without any effort of mine. Before, I always had to translate and carefully plan anything I wanted to say in Chinese. This is a major milestone!

I believe I may have overdosed on vocabulary study for Chinese. Following my success bringing my character level up to 3000 in a single year, I’ve been religiously using Anki for Chinese, and I’ve taken weekly classes online with a private teacher. During class, we spent half an hour working with the Boya Chinese textbook and half an hour in free conversation. I do not think that I’m presently getting enough exposure though, especially when it comes to things modern people might say (as opposed to phrases that can only be used by time travellers, which I’m learning from 三国).

This is why I’ve decided to participate in the “Read More or Die” aka Tadoku challenge this April. It’s very simple: read as much text in your target language(s) as possible for one month and try to outdo the other participants in number of pages read. You can participate even if you know that you won’t place near the top; this is just a way to utilize your competitive streak for motivation. Time is running out to register – if you think you can out-read me, sign up quickly!

My stats from January 1st until March 31st:
49 hours of French
109 hours of Mandarin
2 1/2 hours of Greek (hope to remedy that)
8 hours of Swahili (need to work on that too)
70 hours of Dutch
1/2 an hour each on Italian and Arabic

Good news: I’ve already almost reached half of last year’s time spent on Mandarin and 1/3 of last year’s time spent on French. Very happy with that. Bad news: I really wanted to spend more time on Dutch and on my maintenance languages.

In April, I will focus on reading Chinese, Dutch and Greek. I may start dabbling in Spanish, because Spanish is next on my list of beginner languages to learn. I also absolutely have to squeeze in at least one month of Listening-Reading for Russian before July because I’ll be going to the IJK in Kiev and I want to see how far Listening-Reading can get me.

A personal blog post – no language-learning wisdom, just a report of what I did and where I stand now.

So I did 30 days of vegetarianism and 30 days of intensive Arabic study. The results are far from impressive.