devilyoudont's recent posts

I speak Esperanto. It's a different situation, but technology has only helped it to start growing again. I hope that in a few years, we will be able to say that Duolingo has helped languages like Hawaiian and Navajo.

Phillip.Laplana wrote:

Remarkable! So it's perfectly natural to see two people trying to sign to each other... in frustration?
And does that mean that French Sign Language has more widespread use?

At least where I live, almost all signers use the same language, so there isn't much confusion.

French Sign language doesn't have particularly wide use-- the reason why so many sign languages can be traced back to old french sign language is because France had the world's first school for the deaf, and then other countries modeled their deaf education on France's school, hired deaf instructors from France to start schools in other countries.

Using the situation in the United States as an example (because I am more familiar with it), the language that developed in the United States almost immediately split off from old french sign language, becoming creolized with the native languages that the students already spoke. That language would eventually become ASL, or American Sign Language. 

Usage stats are difficult to know for sign languages. For example, the US census does not collect data about sign language, so it's not possible to say how many native speakers ASL has. It's a similar situation in many countries.

Phillip.Laplana wrote:

I have always wondered this about sign language: Does signing in one language use the same gestures or carry the same meaning as signing in another language? Is there such a thing? Or do the signs for "I like you very much" for example, mean the same in any spoken or written language?

Sign languages are just as varied as spoken languages, and they evolve and develop just as spoken languages do.

However, for historical reasons, a huge amount of sign languages are descended from Old French Sign Language. So, just as languages descended from Latin have a lot of similarities and share a lot of words, languages descended from Old French Sign Language also have a lot of similarities.

And one more thing to note: just because two countries both share a spoken language, they may not share a sign language. American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language (BSL) are completely different languages, and they don't even share very many words because ASL descended from Old French Sign Language and BSL did not.

Jess.PWinkler wrote:

I agree with you, it depends of your mother tongue. But I think that the most difficult languages are the ones with a complete different alphabet.

Honestly, the writing system is hugely challenging for me in Japanese, but it's not the most difficult aspect of the language.The reason Japanese is so much more difficult than Spanish, for me, is because Japanese shares far less vocabulary with English. And, of course, languages that use logographs are going to be the most difficult to learn to read in, but I somewhat doubt that a different alphabet creates that much difficulty for speakers of very similar languages, for example German and Yiddish. And then of course, there are learners who have no interest in learning to read, and languages that have no written form.

It all depends on what your native language is. What's hard for a native English speaker might be pretty easy for a native Japanese speaker.

I have different reasons for each language.

Japanese: I lived in Japan for two years and just totally fell in love with everything about the language. I even love kanji.

Esperanto: I really love the Esperanto community

Spanish: I live in a city where Spanish is spoken by about ten percent of the population

My city is very diverse, and sometimes I feel like I want to start learning Russian, Korean, and Chinese so I can read storefronts that have signs in those languages. I also live near a school for the deaf which makes me want to learn ASL lol. I guess we'll see what happens if I ever get Japanese and Spanish up to my level in Esperanto.

Japanese Log:

Watching:

Netflix (In Japanese)

-伊藤君AtoE episode 7

Youtube (In English)

Japanese Phonetics episode 18 + 20

Listening:

Podcasts

--News in Slow Japanese

--十分で聞けるオリジナル物語

--エッチな女子会

--朗読と歌

Music (2ish hrs)

SRS:

Reviewed 117 cards.

Struggles:

--I just wasn't feeling well on Sunday, and so did not do much of anything.

--Last week of the month, so overtime is taking over any and all of my free time in the evenings again. The struggle is real.

Successes:

--I'm finally hitting the section on japanese verb conjugations and pitch accent in the Japanese Phonetics series. In terms of words that do not conjugate, I feel things are largely a case of needing to memorize the pitch accent, and learning to hear certain pitch patterns. But words that conjugate are a particular struggle, as clearly they don't always follow the same pitch accent pattern of the dictionary form of the word (even my totally useless ears can hear that)

--Recognized a word 針仕事 in my extensive listening that I learned from intensive reading!

--エッチな女子会 covers topics that I do not really have any vocabulary of in Japanese (or Spanish and Esperanto for that matter) and this week was probably the first time I followed the majority of the discussion  

I started looking at some stuff by Paul Nation and Alexander Arguelles based on some posts made by reineke on LLORG. So, what they said has made me want to give extensive reading a shot, particularly for Japanese, and especially because the words I generate flashcards from while doing intensive reading largely have not been super useful to me. In a video for a polyglot conference, Arguelles explained that the goal should be picking a text where 1 in 50 words is unknown. I realized that these texts do exist for me in Japanese, but I tend to avoid them, having previously believed they would not be helpful for me. So, for example, many articles posted on NHK News Easy are 98% comprehensible to me, but I previously avoided those articles, in order to select articles that would yield previously unknown words, even if those words were things like "探査機" (space probe).

So, I ordered a book from aoitori bunko (kodansha's imprint for children). I don't have a strong idea of if this book will be much below or much above my level, but it's intended for Japanese 2nd graders (小学校2年生). It's called 宇宙人のしゅくだい. Being a little below my level is probably not a bad thing, as there's a high probability of an unknown word actually being known, and I just haven't successfully learned to read it's kanji yet. The book with have furigana of course. And if it's above my level, I can always get a graded reader after this. I just want to try to avoid that if possible, as Japanese graded readers are really expensive, and importing from Japan already made this seven hundred yen book cost close to thirty dollars. Maybe at some point I need to take a trip to NYC and load up on books at Kinokuniya.

In the meantime, I decided not to do my Japanese flashcards that I had been generating from intensive reading for the time being. I didn't delete the deck or anything, but I am just gonna take a break from it for right now. I also got a frequency list anki deck that notes pitch accent. Obviously, I'm not gonna learn pitch accent from extensive reading, and I'm still not very good at hearing certain patterns. I plan to just do 10 new cards for the three days a week I do Japanese so that it doesn't get out of control, even tho I'm obviously gonna know tons of the early words in the deck.

Spanish Log:

Listening:

Podcasts (5hr 41min)

--Spanishpodcast.net

--Cienciaes.com

--LingQ

Struggles:

--I basically lived at my job, so I didn't do anything but listening.

Successes:

--Holy crap I listened to a lot

--Finished the LingQ Spanish Podcast!!

--Spanishpodcast.net is incredibly wonderful. The guy talks really clearly and slowly, but it's also 100% in Spanish. A lot of episodes are about explaining idioms, which is really great because he explains the literal meaning word by word and then explains the idiomatic meaning and then gives usage examples.

Esperanto:

Reading: (16 pages)

Vaka seĝo (from Virino ĉe la landlimo)

Listening: (39min)

Podcasts:

--Aminda Radio Esperanto

--Kern Punkto

Struggles:

--I didn't chat with any friends again. I feel guilty about it, so I somewhat started avoiding people because I feel bad that I'm never around. Gotta get over it and just start talking to people again

-There was one word in Vaka seĝo which I was not able to deduce from context. Kajero... all I was able to understand was that it was an object that you can hold in your hand that everyone in schools seems to have in large quantity. I couldn't resist, and looked it up. Turns out it's a notebook or a workbook.

Successes:

--So, based on it's first page, I had a comprehension rate of 97.3% for Vaka seĝo. Not bad. Indeed, I did not have to use a dictionary to understand the main points of the story, and there were words I didn't know which I was able to deduce from context.

I did less than usual, but I also did a poor job logging what I did this week.

Japanese Log:

Reading:

NHK Easy

--滋賀県で毒を持つセアカゴケグモが３００匹見つかる

Watching:

Youtube (In English)

Japanese Phonetics episode 17

Listening:

Podcasts

--Forgot to log. Probably listened to around two to three hours of the usual suspects.

Music (1hr)

SRS:

Made 8 cards.

Reviewed 92 cards.

Struggles:

-Just have a lot going on right now that's preventing me from putting as much time into languages as I would like. Trying to do volunteering, a lot of stuff going on with family, and the everpresent danger of work taking over my entire life. Maybe not surprisingly, I'm also trying to deal with a lack of energy.

Successes:

-Still having a blast listening to the Matsumoto Ronica folklore podcast. I think this has probably added more to giongo and gitago vocabulary than anything else I've done lol. I've almost finished with the archive, and it doesn't seem like they are updating with new material any longer, so I'm kind of torn between wanting to relisten again, or move on to the podcast brilliantyears previously recommended. I think I might move on, but then return again in a year or a little more. Some of the episodes are duplicated in the archive I've been going thru, so I have already listened to some of them twice. It will probably be a couple weeks before I've listened to them all.

Spanish Log:

Reading:

mundo primaria

--Started reading La leyenda del maíz

Listening:

Music (probably around 2 hours)

Podcasts (3hr 30min)

--Duolingo Spanish

--Cienciaes.com

--LingQ

SRS:

Made 12 cards.

Reviewed 156 cards.

Struggles:

--Again my evenings were pretty busy, so I mostly just was able to do the listening component while at work.

Successes:

--Understood a full phrase in Rioplatense Spanish that was not ¿Cómo estás? (Ok it was the answer to Cómo estás lol). Paraphrasing, it was that when the speaker's friend feels bad, he also feels bad.

--Also started being able to pick out a discourse marker, understood the literal meaning of it, but still understood that it was being used as a discourse marker in Rioplatense Spanish. The word in question was "entendés" which is the voseo 2nd person form of entender (to understand). Very glad I was able to pick this up because I have never looked at how voseo conjugations are formed! My educated guess is that this is equivalent to when we say "you know" all the time in English.

--I had a randomly high amount of comprehension for one of the Cienciaes.com episodes this week. In some ways, it's easier to understand things about science, because all the words come out of the same latin roots. It was a nice little confidence boost.

--Coming to the end of the LingQ podcast just as I start to make some breakthrus with Rioplatense spanish, which is what the majority of the later episodes have been in lol. I'm wondering which podcast I will pick up next. Most likely go with one of Jaleel's suggestions from his log.

Esperanto:

Reading: (13 pages)

Ĉe l'akvo de forgeso (from Virino ĉe la landlimo)

Listening: (23min)

Podcasts:

--Pola Retradio en Esperanto

Struggles:

--I wasn't able to hang out and chat with any of my friends online this week due to being so busy :(

Successes:

--Finally getting back into doing some listening in Esperanto

--I am not a person who really understands poetry in my native language, but was able to understand this short play written in verse fairly well.

Michelle.Batan wrote:

It should be first floor right? ground floor, then 1st floor. Am I correct?Can someone please enlightened me. lol

This varies regionally. Where I live, the ground floor and the first floor are the same thing, but in other places, it is as you say :)

Netflix is truly weird when it comes to this stuff. I think it has to do with licensing.

For me, the most successful way so far to know that something will have original language audio AND subtitles is to look specifically for Netflix originals produced in my target languages. For whatever reason, these ones seem to keep all options available to me (so far)

Spanish Log:

Reading:

Guía Infantil

--El conejo de la luna

--El tigre y la vaca

Listening:

Podcasts (2hr 59min)

--Ciencia.es

--Spanish LingQ

--Duolingo Spanish

SRS:

Made 59 cards.

Reviewed 103 cards.

Struggles:

--I just could not motivate myself to do cards this week for whatever reason. In the end, I still ended up reviewing a number of cards, but every card was kind of a struggle.

Successes:

--I saw that there was a story about seeing a rabbit in the moon, and I immediately wanted to read it. Japanese people also see a rabbit when they look up at the moon. This story was a breeze for me to read, which was kind of a nice change of pace. I also had a sudden realization that I had actually been told this story when I was a child, but in the telling I heard, Quetzalcóatl was replaced with Jesus Christ, and the moon replaced with Heaven. Weird!

--I feel like I am starting to understand longer chains of words in works that are by natives for natives. Still not full sentences, but progress!

Esperanto:

I had a baby shower to go to this weekend, so I didn't do much for Esperanto. I chatted with friends pretty much. I also made an Esperanto community in World of Warcraft. I hope someone will join and we can play together while using Esperanto, but no one has joined yet. It seems the other faction may have more Esperantists lol

I use Netflix a lot to try to watch material in my target languages. It can be hard for me to locate material in my target languages, especially because I mainly am uninterested in anime TV shows, but I do enjoy all kinds of animated films.

Previously, I have been trying to locate shows on Netflix based on searching for audio in my target languages

https://www.netflix.com/browse/audio

But, this pulls up a lot of things that are dubbed into my target languages. I find dubs to be somewhat undesirable because I know how unnatural dubs sometimes are in my native language, and I have every reason to think the quality of dubs will be worse in other languages.

By using the secret codes, I can find material that was produced in my target languages originally.

Here is an article at Mashable explaining what the secret categories are: https://mashable.com/article/netflix-search-codes/#uyaD2Hr.rmqC

Basically the URL is:

http://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/###

And ### = the code number

The list at Mashable is not exhaustive. For example: I was able to find Japanese Movies & TV 100385 by clicking around Japanese Movies.

There are some cases where Netflix only has an English dub available for a work originally in one of my target languages.

I took the liberty of going thru the list at Mashable and pulling out any categories that might be useful for language learners.

African Movies: 3761

Anime: 7424

Anime Action: 2653

Anime Comedies: 9302

Anime Dramas: 452

Anime Fantasy: 11146

Anime Features: 3063

Anime Horror: 10695

Anime Sci-Fi: 2729

Anime Series: 6721

Asian Action Movies: 77232

British Movies: 10757

British TV Shows: 52117

Chinese Movies: 3960

Dutch Movies: 10606

Eastern European Movies: 5254

Foreign Action & Adventure: 11828

Foreign Comedies: 4426

Foreign Documentaries: 5161

Foreign Dramas: 2150

Foreign Gay & Lesbian Movies: 8243

Foreign Horror Movies: 8654

Foreign Movies: 7462

Foreign Sci-Fi & Fantasy: 6485

Foreign Thrillers: 10306

French Movies: 58807

German Movies: 58886

Greek Movies: 61115

Indian Movies: 10463

Irish Movies: 58750

Italian Movies: 8221

Japanese Movies: 10398

Korean Movies: 5685

Korean TV Shows: 67879

Latin American Movies: 1613

Latin Music: 10741

Middle Eastern Movies: 5875

Romantic Foreign Movies: 7153

Russian: 11567

Scandinavian Movies: 9292

Southeast Asian Movies: 9196

Spanish Movies: 58741

World Music Concerts: 2856

Japanese Log:

Reading:

NHK Easy

--アメリカ　警察から逃げていた女をたくさんの牛が追う

--ＮＡＳＡの探査機が今まででいちばん近くから太陽を調べる

--東京　相撲の文化や力士の生活を紹介するイベント

Watching:

Netflix (Japanese with Japanese Subtitles)

--伊藤くんAtoE Episode 5 (23min)

Youtube (In English)

Japanese Phonetics 13 - 16

Listening:

Podcasts(2hrs 27min)

--朗読男女５分で聞けるオリジナル物語

--エッチな女子会

--昔話の朗読と歌

-- News in Slow Japanese

SRS:

Made 30 cards.

Reviewed 330 cards.

Struggles:

--At some point I got frustrated failing cards due to pitch accent, and I just didn't grade myself on pitch accent the rest of the day.

Successes:

--I had a reasonably high understanding of News in Slow Japanese this week. If it's about food or some other trivial topic, even a food I never ate before, I can usually follow along pretty well lol.

--Still reading thru one of the folktales which has been giving me trouble (なまけ者と貧乏神). It feels like this is getting easier tho.

Spanish Log:

Reading:

Muy Interesante Junior

--10 cosas que no sabías de la carne de caballo

Listening:

Podcasts (1hr 13min)

--Ciencia.es

--Spanish LingQ

--Duolingo Spanish

SRS:

Made 23 cards.

Reviewed 146 cards.

Struggles:

-I got my dog spayed this week. Going to the vet and then caring for her ate up a bit of my spanish time. And then being tired ate up the rest.

-I'm really struggling to understand any Rioplatenese Spanish. One of the podcasts I listen to (Spanish LingQ) features Rioplatenese Spanish quite often, and what little comprehension I have just plunges off a cliff. For whatever reason, this hasn't been a problem so far for understanding dialects that maintain distinción. Probably because I was in speech therapy for years so I'm very used to hearing people say th instead of s, even tho that wasn't my specific speech problem.

Successes:

This week was tough but I at least did something.

Esperanto:

I made an executive decision to use time that I would have spent on Esperanto this week on Spanish instead.

For Japanese people typically use edict based dictionaries such as https://jisho.org/

I would love to know what dictionaries Spanish learners prefer.

Japanese Log

Reading:

NHK Easy

--「熱中症にならないように」梅干しの注文が増える 

--オーストラリアの島で餌が足りなくてたくさんのコアラが死ぬ

--メタボ健診」を受けた人は５１パーセントだけ

Watching:

Youtube (In English) (about 20 Minutes)

Japanese Phonetics episodes 10, 11, + 12

Listening:

Podcasts(3hrs 25min)

--昔話の朗読と歌

--エッチな女子会

SRS:

Made 18 cards.

Reviewed 408 cards

Struggles:

-Episode 11 of the Japanese Phonetics course was a test. If I had taken this in school I would have gotten a 60% on this test. So, there's a lot of room for improvement to say the least. Worst of all, I feel like the questions I got right were only the easiest ones on the test. If anything was tricky at all, I failed the question. However, for the majority of incorrect answers, I did things like mark a heiban word as atamadaka or vice versa (so, hearing where the change is, but interpreting it as the exact opposite pattern) or I marked the downstep on the syllable before it actually occurs... so I am hoping these problems can be corrected fairly quickly. I will try taking the test again maybe after a month (I need to give myself enough time to forget all the answers lol) and see if I improved at all.

-It's taking me longer to review cards because I started marking it wrong if I get the pitch accent wrong.

Successes:

-One of the podcasts I listen to did an episode retelling the Tanabata story. This is probably one of my favorite Japanese stories, along with Taketori Monogatari, so I was glad to hear it again. This version was slightly different than the other version I studied thru reading, but because I had read that other version, my comprehension of that podcast was higher than usual.

-I also realized that there is a recurring character in folktales that I had no previous knowledge of before I started reading Japanese folktales in Japanese. His name is Kitchomu-san. I really enjoy trickster characters, so I'm happy that I will see this character recurring as I continue to muddle thru folktales.

edz.conde wrote:

Since I have a fulltime work with two young daughters, I can't do more than that. Haha. But I hope I'll do better next time. :blush:

I'm very lucky because I can listen to podcasts and such while I'm at work. 

Take it one day at a time. Even a little bit every day will add up.

So, I keep a log over on language-learners.org but I decided to also mirror my log over here I study Japanese Sunday to Tuesday, Spanish Wednesday to Friday, and Esperanto on Saturdays. I usually update two or three times a week, noting what I did for each language over the course of the week.

What gets measured gets done!

Spanish Log:

Reading:

El huevo de chocolate

--Las princesas delicadas

Wikipedia

--History of the Spanish Language

Watching:

Netflix (with Spanish audio and Spanish subtitles)

--Juana Inés

Listening:

Podcasts (3hrs 13mins)

--Cienciaes.com

--SpanishLingQ

--Duolingo Spanish

SRS:

Reviewed 148 cards.

Made 26 cards.

Struggles:

Still recovering from end of the month overtime... it seemed like I didn't have energy to do anything this week.

Successes:

I went back and reread Caperucita. I feel like the flashcards generated from this story have really upped my comprehension of the total story.

I read about the history of the spanish language. It is my hope that by understanding sound changes that occurred in spanish, I might recognize cognates between Esperanto and Spanish more easily. Plori and Llorar is one such pair I realized from reading this. 

Esperanto:

Reading:

From Virino ĉe la landlimo

--Iluzio (16 pages)

Listening:

Podcasts (32 mins)

--Kern punkt

--Pola retradio en Esperanto

Writing:

Just chatting with friends again.

Struggles:

I was hoping to do some work on translating a bot to Esperanto or on adding more ice breaker questions in Esperanto to that bot, but I just didn't have energy for that.

Successes:

I enjoyed Iluzio a lot more than I enjoyed the previous short play. Maybe not a surprise because Iluzio isn't a tragedy. There were a few parts where I did laugh a little bit, and I felt like the ending really paid off, which is not something I usually think about such a short work. Also, I was feeling lazy, and didn't look up any literary words I didn't know, but this didn't impede my understanding of the play.

Thank you all for the warm welcome.

Ibrahim.Mohammed wrote:

So anything particularly that interests you at the moment?

At the moment, I am trying to get a better grasp on Japanese pitch accent.

I have a pet lizard and a pet dog I just drew him on my head in that picture. His name is Rhodan.

Hello! My name is Lily. 

I've always been fascinated by languages. My native language is English. I am currently studying: Esperanto, Japanese, and Spanish. I am high intermediate/advanced in Esperanto, low intermediate in Japanese, and a beginner in Spanish. 

Outside of languages, my main interests are: activism, drawing, reading, playing video games. I would like to learn to play a musical instrument at some point in my life, but I haven't made meaningful progress on that goal yet, lol.

Anyway, I hope we all get along and learn languages together.