leosmith's recent posts

It’s only been a week, but I thought I’d post about something major that happened. Previously, I mentioned the gap between my current level and the reading/listening material that I’d planned on using. I also said that I fixed the gap for reading by using AI to make me some A2 material, but the gap for listening remained. So I asked  myself “why not add TTS to the A2 reading passages?” I tried a few tools, and quickly found out I’d need to pay for the best ones. But I was able to make some free samples, and have native speakers review them. The comments were universal – the text wasn’t bad, but the TTS was.

Then I made a decision to create “Cebuano A2 Conversations”. I prompt AI to make an A2 dialog about a given subject, then hand it over to a native voice actor team. They fix the major issues with the script first (again, they aren’t bad to begin with), then record the dialog. These are about 5 minutes long each, and I’m going to make 100 of them. It’s going really fast, and 43 are already completed. Gap plugged!

This has got me psyched about possible similar projects in other languages. I’d always considered creating really easy conversations to be a waste of time, considering the vast majority of learning material is easy, and it’s usually plentiful. But now I’m thinking that in languages that lack material, A2 conversations would be a really helpful resource.  But that’s off topic.

Today was my 25th day of study. Updating my components:

The 44 Sentences – I’m still doing them, and they go really fast, so I’ll stop soon.

Reading – I’ve improved a lot, thanks to the A2 conversations, and I typically have around 5% unknown words now. I’ll try the B2 (old) conversations again soon, to see if they are easy enough to tackle yet.

Listening – I just listen to playlists of groups of 10 X A2 conversations at a time, since there is really no other level-appropriate material to listen to atm. There are radio dramas and such recorded on YouTube, but I’m not ready for those yet. I’m definitely improving here, but the fact that I’m still having to make my teachers repeat themselves often tells me it’s not even worth giving anything else a try yet. Typically, conversation is the fastest way for me to improve my listening in the beginning. It will get me to intermediate in listening quicker than anything else, so I’m going to rely on it heavily this time too.

Grammar – I finished the text book. It’s not bad, but of course has some issues. A couple of really funny short comings:

1)  It describes how important it is to apply the stress to the correct vowel in words, but doesn’t show where the stress is in the dictionary in the index.

2)  It says many times how there is no concept of focus in English, but it’s extremely important in Cebuano, and tells you how to form a sentences once you know the focus, but doesn’t tell you how to figure out what the focus needs to be in the first place.

Like I said earlier, grammar is pretty easy for me since it’s similar to Tagalog, but the biggest hurdle I have left is getting really comfortable with the affixes. More on this later.

Vocabulary – my Anki reviews are still under control, but I decided to limit myself to 20 new items per day to keep it that way.

Conversation – today was my 13th conversation. The first 10 were 30 min, and last 3 were 60 min. So 8 hours of conversation total, and I’m enjoying the full hour classes. Today I felt I was A2 for the first time, but I won’t claim that level yet because I always do my best with today’s teacher. But the last three days feel really good because the class just before them, the last 30 min class, was with a teacher from somewhere in Mindanao, and I just struggled. I couldn’t understand her. When I made her write stuff down, it seemed she had different words for many things I’d already learned. I was so confused. Fortunately, I decided to ask my AI why her words were different, and the main thing it mentioned was that she was using a non-standard affix. She was using ga- instead of nag-, which was probably what got me so disoriented. For example, she said “Nganong gakat-on kag bisaya?” instead of “Nganong nagkat-on kag bisaya?” (Why are you studying Bisaya?) Anyway, I’m not going to repeat with her, and I decided to stop trying to find two more good teachers, stick with the five that I have, and switch to 60 min conversations. I haven’t regretted that decision yet, and I probably never will. Only 8 hours in and feeling close to A2 is actually quite acceptable imo.

Wow, it’s been a long time since my last post. As I hinted before, my whole philosophy about maintaining languages has changed. For the time being at least, I continue doing anki reviews for all languages, but only do other activities for whatever language is current.

For example, when I was in Thailand (Jan and Feb of 2026) I studied Lao. I used my “Lao writing system for Thai speakers” guide that I’d created previously, and eventually decided to switch from Isaan Lao to Vientiane Lao pronunciation wise too.

After Thailand, I went to Lao for three weeks (March 2026) and enjoyed Vientiane and Vang Viang. I created a guide for Vientiane Lao while I was there, and hung out with a very nice young lady who I met through Hellotalk. It turns out she wasn’t really interested in learning English, so we spoke Lao all the time.

The next stop was Cebu, Philippines, where I still am (April and May of 2026). Originally I’d planned on going to the polyglot gathering in the Czech Republic at the end of May, but due to world events I’ve decided to go directly home at that time. So I’m here in Cebu, learning Cebuano as planned.

…

Cebuano – Not my Last Language Ever

Why not? Because I’ve finally dropped my philosophy of keeping all my languages nicely maintained all the time. Now, other than anki reviews, I don’t maintain; I just learn my current language. So this means I can learn many more, and tbh, it’s more fun this way.

I’m in Cebu for 2 months (April and May). Why learn Cebuano? Because I really like the Philippines, and I travel here every year. I already speak Tagalog (Filipino), but most of my favorite places here are in the Visayan Islands, where Cebuano (Bisaya) rules. Locals here usually prefer English over Tagalog, so I barely use that language. In fact, in most of the Tagalog areas I travel to, locals prefer to speak English with me, or Taglish, which is about 50% English. That’s the unfortunate thing about Filipinos speaking English so well. And yes, Cebuanos speak good English too, but they seem to be more proud of their language, and I travel more in rural areas when I’m here, which I believe will give me many more speaking opportunities.

Here is my Learning plan:

1)      Memorized these 44 sentences

2) (a) Using my reading tool, start a reading component using easy AI generated dialogs and these passages that have both text and audio.

(b) Start a listening component by listening to these podcasts and the above passages.

(c) Start a grammar component using this book.

(d) Start a vocabulary review component using anki.

3)Start a conversation component with italki tutors, and continue the four components started in step 2).

My goal is to reach B1ish by the end of the two months.

…

Current status:
Today was my 18th day of study. I finished step 1), but continue to review the 44 sentences daily because it only takes a few minutes and I feel it still adds value. I did more than just memorize them. I made sure I knew every word individually and understood all the grammar. All sentences and words went into anki, and I asked AI/reddit many questions. Actually, reddit wasn’t much help. AI is much better for asking basic grammar and vocab questions about Cebuano (and other lesser studied languages, but that’s another topic). I dug pretty deep when I did this, so the good news is that I’ve got a good base in forming sentences now.

For 2)(a), reading Language Crush Cebuano Conversations was much harder than I’d hoped for, so I had AI make some “A2” material, and that’s helped a lot. I feel like I’m getting close to being able to switch back to the conversations now. Difficulty is primarily caused by unknown vocab (see below).

For 2)(b), listening has been a challenge because of the lack of resources. I finally turned to channels like this one to get comprehensible material in the beginning. Not ideal, but better than nothing. And even now, listening remains difficult due to a lack of comprehensible material. Even listening to the stuff I just read is a challenge. Everything I’ve got is native level, and I’m surprised by my lack of vocabulary. It turns out that vocabulary overlap with Tagalog is less than 50%, so I’ve got my work cut out for me. For this reason, Cebuano is much harder for me than Lao, which I learned from scratch to B1ish in about 2 months. I thought it would be similar in difficulty, but I will probably fail my challenge.

For 2)(c), grammar has gone pretty smoothly, since there is a lot of overlap with Tagalog, and during step 1) I figured out most of the main differences. I’m on lesson 81 of 100 in my textbook, just reading it for this pass through. I may go back and do the exercises, but happily I don’t think I need them. I could treat them as vocab building exercises I suppose.

For 2)(d), vocabulary is under control. Sometimes at this point I have to delete a lot of old material to keep from getting overwhelmed by new material, but so far so good.

For 3) conversation classes, today was my 6th 30 minute class. It should have been my 9th one in a row, but my 2nd, 3rd and 4th teachers never showed. Very strange. So I had one conversation, then three days off, then five conversations in a row. Yesterday was the first day where I felt I was A1. And today was a bit better. As soon as I find 7 dependable teachers, I’ll switch to 60 minute classes. I’m getting plenty of new items in 30min/day right now, so I’m not in a hurry to switch just yet. But one good reason not to wait too long is to get more listening practice. There is no more effective listening practice than the first few hours of conversation imo, because I’m so laser focused on understanding my partner.

Do you speak Thai, and have interest in learning Lao? Here’s a free guide for you, with real native audio (no AI), that might help you. I made one of these previously, but it was modeled after Becker’s Isaan books. Recently I learned Vientiane Lao, and decided to create this guide, which I’m much more pleased with. One nice thing about Vientiane Lao is, even though it’s lacking in resources, it’s pronunciation is well established and documented, unlike Isaan dialects. This tool is specifically designed for Thai speakers who want to learn the Lao writing system, as well as Vientiane pronunciation. Enjoy!

(PS – the Vientiane dialect has 5 tones, not 6.)

Danail.Pavlov wrote:

Hello! It would be great if you could add the https://jyutdictionary.com/dictionary/ Cantonese dictionary as an option. Thank you!

Added.

Welcome Norman! What do you want to specialize in linguistics?

Yes, you can use it to track progress on my constructed language.

A couple weeks ago I made a list of 44 Cebuano/Bisaya sentences. With input from a lot of locals, guidance of a teacher from Cebu, and a native voice actor, I posted the sentences with audio here in a way that’s easy to drill. It's 100% free.

To get an idea of what I’m up to, have you seen any “shock” polyglot videos? The way that many of them convince people they are fluent in many languages is to memorize a few dozen key sentences in those languages, and memorize them very well. Of course they aren’t really fluent, but it occurred to me that it sure would be nice to be able to whip those sentences out with no effort when starting conversation practice with a teacher, and build from there. That would lessen the awkward phase of early conversation. And I also added quite a few “teacher” sentences, specifically designed to get me out of awkward situations, like “how do you say X?”, “can you please repeat that?”, “please talk slower”, etc.

Now these are my sentences, meaning they are tailored to me, so you may need to personalize some of them. But it’s a good way to get your foot in the door, so to speak, of the language. I plan to start learning Cebuano for two months starting at the end of March. I hope you find this resource useful!

Note: here are all the languages with conversations and their status. Links will take you to the Reading Tool:

Cantonese – 100 conversations (complete)

Cebuano - 100 (complete)

English (American) - 50 (stopped work)

English (South African) - 10 conversations (complete)

French - 101 conversations (complete)

German - 50 (stopped work)

Italian - 100 (complete)

Japanese - 100 (complete)

Lao - 100 (complete)

Mandarin - 100 conversations (complete)

Odia - 25 (complete)

Portuguese (Brazilian) - 100 (complete)

Quechua (Chanka) - 104 (complete)

Quechua (Collao) - 7 (complete)

Russian - 100 conversations (complete)

Spanish - 100 conversations (complete)

Swahili – 135 conversation (complete)

Tagalog – 110 conversations (complete)

Thai - 100 (complete)

You may have heard me say from time to time that if your highest priority is conversing in your L2, then conversation should be your most valued source for learning. I’m not saying it should be the only source, but pound per pound I believe it’s the best source.

To be fair, I think it does depend on what stage you’re in. Beginners may not have the skills required to do what I’m suggesting. Also, this stage goes by quickly and seems to be handled nicely by the wealth of beginner learning material out there. Advanced learners may already be very good communicators and everyday conversation might not tax them enough. In addition, they are much more likely to use native material to improve. The remainder is the period I’m talking about – the long intermediate slog. That’s when I suggest learners should really focus on conversation.

Here’s an example of what I’m recommending: taking notes during a conversation, writing down items your partner says that you don’t understand, writing down things you didn’t know how to say, and memorizing/reviewing these items before your next conversation. I’ve found this to be my single most effective exercise to improve my vocabulary and grammar in actual conversations. 

But what about reading and listening? It probably doesn’t surprise you that I recommend reading transcripts of and listening to actual conversations. I think it’s more effective for improving your conversation than reading and listening to non-conversation items (news, books, TV scripts, text messages, etc). Don’t get me wrong – there is a time and place for reading and listening to those things and they are very helpful. I’m not going to get into the other items here; read and listen to everything but let the core of your method be conversations if your main goal is to improve your conversation. 

The problem is – where do you get these conversations? You could have your personal conversations transcribed and recorded so that you could read and listen to them. That’s a good start, but it’s a pretty time-consuming task. Also, vocab/grammar would be limited compared to a conversation between two native speakers, so it may be better suited to the beginner period. And as I said above, the beginner period is handled pretty well with existing beginner materials.

That’s why we’ve created LC Conversations. These are conversations between two native speakers. We use a mixture of female-male, female-female and male-male for variety, but each conversation is between two native speakers and about six minutes long. We make 100 of these for each language selected, which gives you about 10 hours of reading and listening to actual conversations. I hope this will be enough to prepare the learner for real native material. To be clear, I’m not saying I expect the learner to understand native material completely after finishing LC conversations; my goal is that they will have the base needed to start to dig into native material designed by natives for natives. In theory, “learning” material should no longer be required.  

While creating these, I had a hard time trying to figure out whether they were intermediate or advanced. I settled on intermediate mainly because it’s pretty much impossible to get people to talk to each other normally while covering the things I want them to cover, not talk on top of each other, not use loanwords and speak clearly without some reduction in difficulty. The voice actors tend to create some sort of script to satisfy all of my requirements, even though I’ve asked them not to. I could probably work with teams more closely and intensively to get a more advance product, but that would be more expensive and time consuming, so they are what they are. Good intermediate conversations.

Now I should mention that one of the sweetest things about these conversations is that they’re located in our reading tool already to go. Put your cursor over a word and a definition will pop up; click it and it will change state and color and you can add new definitions. This makes reading much more accessible. As I hinted above, this reading/listening is meant to be just a component of your learning method. I recommend that if you’re going to be memorizing and reviewing vocabulary and grammar you should get them from your personal conversations. But that’s not to say you can’t do it with these conversations - you can go into your own vocabulary database in the reading tool, manicure it, export it to anki etc, if that’s what you want to do. But I personally prefer to let the mouseover definitions and shading do the work for me, read as seamlessly as possible without too many interruptions, and put my memorizing and reviewing efforts into my personal conversations. 

I’d like to announce that there is now a free iOS app for Tagalog Lite. Big thanks to member Justin Chang who approached us with a request to make this app for free, which we happily agreed to. 

For those who are not familiar, in Justin’s words, Tagalog Lite “is the single best resource I have found for learning beginner Tagalog. The way it is taught via mini grammar lessons with minimal vocab fits my learning style perfectly”. We hope that this new app will allow even more people to experience it.

Over the past few years I’ve heard several people mention that there are a lack of good free resources for teaching the Thai writing system. By a “good” resource, I mean one that’s designed for a beginner that teaches how to pronounce, recognize the letters they are hearing, read and write Thai text. I’ve always felt that learning the writing system, along with pronunciation, should be the first step in learning a language, and this is my version of a tool that allows that.

The course includes:

·       16 units which cover all major aspects of the Thai writing system and pronunciation, explained in a way that’s friendly to English speakers. This information has been checked by native speakers and advanced learners of Thai. I included everything I could think of, everything I could find in several other resources, and everything the checkers could add, so if I’m missing anything please let me know, but I think it’s safe to say that everything major is covered.

·       Lots of audio. The basis of any good pronunciation course is listening and repeating. Every time something new is introduced to you, you will be asked to do this. All recordings were made by native speakers, not AI.

·       Many images. They are used to show you how to draw each new item. Created from scratch by a native speaker.

·       Memorization Exercises. These include directions on how to memorize, and you can hide or show things in order to better utilize your active recall. There aren’t very many resources that actually tell you how to memorize something, and I find this quite lacking because it’s such an important aspect of learning. Also, I stress active recall because I find methods that rely on repetition alone to be less effective. Repetition and active recall are both very important.

·       General Exercises. These are primarily designed to test you on the information just covered, and secondarily to reinforce what you learned in previous units.

·       Reading Exercises. Although the General Exercises cover everything, longer reading exercises are included for better retention. They have audio, and are in a reading tool that lets you check the definition or pronunciation on the fly. Anything that has been covered up to end of the associated unit is fair game, but we never slip in stuff that hasn’t been covered yet. The text and audio recordings were created by native speakers. To be clear, these are not meant to be readings for comprehension; that would require lots of vocabulary and grammar which I am not including in this course because it would make the learning curve too steep. Beginners are meant to merely use them to reinforce the writing system and pronunciation.

I hope you find this helpful. Enjoy!

Bas.Ti wrote:

normally if I press on the button "Create a Passage" there appears "Passage Name", "Language", "Passage Text" and so on. But now nothing of this appears

I see now - ticket written.

Bas.Ti wrote:

I just wanted to create a new passage but somehow I can't, although it doesn't state directly that it's not possible or that I reached a limit of passages. I created dozens of passages, also whole novels. Is there any limit for the free version?

There is no limit. Can you describe what is happening with more detail? For example "I enter the text, hit "save and add another" but when I go back to look for it in the library I can't find it", or whatever is actually happening. 

Vítor.Ferreira wrote:

Glosbe.com, also thank you

Both are now added.

Vítor.Ferreira wrote:

Hi !
Is it possible to add an external dictionary instead of the one in default ( in polish) ?
the current translation is really not acurate

Please give a link to the dictionary you want to add.

Ah, ok. This is a known issue. You can either wait and try again later, or use the work-around:

Use one of the many free online tools to download the subtitles (for example, this one), edit your passage, and replace the error message text with the text from the downloader. Save.

Bas.Ti wrote:

Hi, how can I see which youtube video works? I tried a video that worked but another video from the same channel didn´t work.

Please post a link to the video that's not working.

Fixed - thanks for your patience. 

Yes. Your issue is a bit different, but we suspect it's all related. In work.

Sorry about this - we are working it.

Hi everyone, I just published this free tool/guide for learning the Lao writing system and pronunciation. It’s designed for people who already speak Thai.  Although the writing system is the same, pronunciation wise it’s built around a 5-tone Isaan dialect of Lao rather than 6-tone Vientiane Lao. Enjoy!

bbyj wrote:

Thank you, this is the best language learning tool on the internet

Thanks for the kind words!

Ah, ok. Yeah, I confirm editing pinyin is broken on the app. Ticket written.

Ok we discussed this. It's actually come up before. It's an expensive addition with not much demand, so we've elected not to do it. Sorry about that.

Lukas wrote:

And I saw Tureng on the list for Turkish dictionaries but it doesn't appear when I click the dictionairy button.

Oh, I see now - it's a Turkish/English dictionary, so if you have "Translations in" set to German, it won't work.

Loie wrote:

Hi! Can you add sozdik.kz for kazakh?

Added.

This is for the reading tool. It pulls word definitions from Google Translate, but it will also have the option of giving you definitions from your favorite dictionaries. So if you have suggestions of dictionaries to add, please list them here.

Incomplete list:

Amharic 

https://dictionary.abyssinica.com/ https://glosbe.com/am/enCantonese

http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/scripts/parse_chinese.php

Cebuano

http://www.bohol.ph/wced.php

Dutch

https://glosbe.com/nl/en

English

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary

French

http://www.wordreference.com/fren

https://www.linguee.com/english-french

https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionnaire:Page_d%E2%80%99accueil

German

https://dict.leo.org/german-english

https://en.pons.com/

https://tureng.com/en/german-english/

https://www.linguee.com/english-german

https://www.dict.cc/

Hebrew

https://www.morfix.co.il/en/

Hindi

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english-hindi 

https://en.bab.la/ 

http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/caturvedi/ 

http://hindi-english.org/ 

https://www.shabdkosh.com/ 

Hungarian

https://topszotar.hu/magyarangol/ 

Indonesian

https://www.kamus.net/

Italian

https://context.reverso.net/translation/italian-english

https://www.wordreference.com/iten

Japanese

https://jisho.org

http://www.edrdg.org/cgi-bin/wwwjdic/wwwjdic

Korean

http://dic.daum.net/index.do?dic=eng

https://ko.dict.naver.com/

Kazakh

https://sozdik.kz/

Mandarin

https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary

https://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/chinese-dictionary.php

Nahuatl

https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org

https://gdn.iib.unam.mx

Portuguese

https://dicionario.priberam.org/

https://www.dicio.com.br/

https://www.linguee.com/english-portuguese

https://www.infopedia.pt/dicionarios/lingua-portuguesa

Spanish

http://www.thai-language.com/dict

http://www.spanishdict.com/dictionary

http://dle.rae.es/

http://www.wordreference.com/

https://es.thefreedictionary.com/

http://context.reverso.net/translation/spanish-english/

Russian

http://www.wordreference.com/ruen

https://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/слово

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/слово

https://context.reverso.net/translation/russian-english/

https://de.langenscheidt.com/russisch-deutsch/слово

https://dict.leo.org/russisch-deutsch/слово

https://de.pons.com/%C3%BCbersetzung/russisch-deutsch/слово

Swahili

https://africanlanguages.com/swahili/

https://en.bab.la/dictionary/swahili-english/siku

https://glosbe.com/sw/en

Scottish Gaelic

https://learngaelic.net/dictionary/index.jsp

Tagalog

https://www.filipinolessons.com/dictionary

Thai

http://www.thai-language.com/dict

https://www.thai2english.com/

https://www.clickthai-online.de/wbtde/woerterbuch.php

Turkish

https://tureng.com/en/turkish-english/

Vietnamese

https://glosbe.com/vi/en

Zulu

https://isizulu.net/

It's working for me on the app - are you just talking about toggling the pinyin on/off in the reading settings? If so, what version of android are you running? That's about the only thing I can think of off the top of my head.

Lukas wrote:

Could you please add verbix for Turkish verb conjugation?

Hi Lukas. This is a verb conjugation tool, not a dictionary, so I don't see how to make this work unfortunately.

wrote:

And I saw Tureng on the list for Turkish dictionaries but it doesn't appear when I click the dictionairy button. Was it removed again?

I see it on chrome desktop - what browser/platform are you using?

Ok, we'll discuss this in our next meeting.

There are now only 4 items on desktop and 2 items on the app that free accounts don’t have access to:

Join and Split (Mandarin, Japanese, Cantonese, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese only)

Copy Passage

Full page TTS (desktop only)

Export (desktop only)

 

 

About a week after the Portuguese vs Italian exercise, I decided that it was time to start video recording all my conversations with teachers, because I want to show to the world that I’m not making up my level. Why record all of them? Because I get nervous, and typically speak at complete CEFR level below my usual level when recording, sometimes even lower. I figured that if I always had the camera going in the background, I’d finally just forget about it and get comfortable again. So I started doing this, and I was under-performing as expected, but the videos were very low quality too. My voice wasn’t loud enough and there was an echo. I bought a mic, which I thought would fix the problem, but it didn’t. I used some special recording software, but still no change.

About this time, some of the teachers who I requested to make video recordings with declined, and I even had one call me a pervert. To be clear, when I request a lesson, I also ask if it’s ok to record and post the video on youtube. I’m not trying to do it secretly, and I’m not even waiting until the class starts to ask. The teacher who called me a pervert deleted that message shortly after, but I’d already seen it in the notification. Maybe she noticed that I have over 3k lessons on italki, and realized that I probably wasn’t a pervert.

My leveling down, problems with video quality, rejections from teachers and some negative comments on my language related posts on social media combined to give me a bad attitude about language learning. I was sick of it. Now, I’ve built my life around language learning, and this has happened before (last time was about a year ago), so I was sure it was temporary, but I decided to quit everything except my daily anki reviews for the time being.  

I’ve been off for over a week now, and I feel much better. I’m ready to start my new language learning project, and I’m trying to decide what to do.

The Portuguese vs Italian exercise worked; by the end of it, I was B1 in both languages, and put them both on maintenance. For the record, here are the spurts I did since returning to the states in May:

PT 23 hrs conversation (in 2 months)

IT 7 hrs conversation (in 14 days)

PT 6 hrs conversation (in 13 days)

IT 4 hrs conversation (in 5 days)...finally some progress; hoping to get it down to 3 hrs next

PT 2 hrs conversation (in 2 days)...from here on out, I'll do every other day

IT 1hr conversation (in 1 day)

PT 1hr conversation (in 1 day)

IT 1hr conversation (in 1 day)

Etc. for about 1 more week.

Loie wrote:

Hi! Can you add sozdik.kz for kazakh?

Just to confirm - you want Russian translations of Kazakh, right?

palace3416.3416 wrote:

Would it be possible to see the Wiktionary entry for each word? Perhaps that could be an embedded window. I am learning Vietnamese and Wiktionary is consistently the best resource for defintions, translation, examples and etymology.

Done.

palace3416.3416 wrote:

Would it be possible to see the Wiktionary entry for each word? Perhaps that could be an embedded window. I am learning Vietnamese and Wiktionary is consistently the best resource for defintions, translation, examples and etymology.

Sorry - we missed this one. I wrote a ticket to add Wictionary to Vietnamese dictionaries. Hopefully we'll get to it within a week.

leosmith wrote:

Ok, we’ve discussed this.

wrote:

When using the arrow keys to move between words, I want to skip over words marked as

In work.

wrote:

A hotkey to open up your default dictionary when a word is selected.

In work.

wrote:

Ability to add Wiktionary lookup alongside other dictionaries.

Can you explain further? And what dictionaries?

wrote:

Fix strange default translations.

There’s no way for us to do this globally, but you can get rid of them from your own session by using “delete”.

wrote:

Ability to filter passages by whether I have marked them as read or not.

Investigating.

Thanks for your patience - we finished most of these. 

To activate the arrow keys, hit the esc key first (to get the cursor out of the definition box) and they should work as you described.

Same thing to activate "p", which makes the dictionaries pop up.

Wictionary has been added to Italian dictionaries.

The filter has been added - it's the book icon in library and my passages.

Yes, if you are using the same login credentials, they should be synched. 

Warning – don’t learn really similar languages at the same time, unless you’ve been at least a solid intermediate for several years in one of them when you start the other. I know everyone is different and all that, and maybe you’ll be ok even if you ignore my warning, but check out what happened to me (some of this is a recap from earlier posts).

In the summer of 2021 I was getting stir crazy from staying at home due to the pandemic. I was ready to travel, and noticed that Brazil, a place that I’d always wanted to visit, was actually completely open to tourists. Of course, I had to learn Portuguese first and try to use the language when I was there, haha. So I quickly learned enough to be fairly comfortable. It only took 3 months, because I have a strong background in Spanish. In fact, Portuguese was the easiest language I’d learned up to that point, by far. There was actually very little interference with Spanish, which was a nice surprise. Sure, I spoke some Portunhol in the beginning, but it faded away fairly quickly. Anyway, I went to Rio for a month and had a blast.

Some of you may know that I travel around half the year, and Rio was just the beginning of my annual trip, so I travelled for a few more months, my point being that I wasn’t able to use the language much for quite a while. When I got back to the states, I put Portuguese on my normal maintenance schedule, which means I reviewed it about once every 10 days. It had declined a bit, but was still a passable B1 or so. I wound up learning German in 2023 to a strong intermediate level. It interfered a bit with Russian in the beginning, but never with Portuguese. So that’s a good example of two languages not interfering because they are too different, even though they are only 2 years apart. I put German on my maintenance schedule.

In 2024 I added Italian, and that’s where my problems started. It pretty much killed my Portuguese. For those who don’t know, Brazilian Portuguese and Italian are extremely similar. Although I considered my Portuguese level to be a weak B1 before starting Italian, when I tried to speak it, I either had to use Italian words, or I had to sit there and think about it for a long time, use google translate, ask the teacher, etc, to avoid using Italian. From the very get go, I’d dropped down to an A2 in Portuguese, and shortly after that, A1ish. I was crushed and ashamed, and after about a month made the decision to drop Portuguese completely.

That decision actually made me feel a lot better, because I could once again speak all my languages comfortably. Italian was also quite easy for me, because of my background, but I learned it for a solid 6 months and reached a higher level than I’d ever been in Portuguese. After those 6 months, I went on my annual trip, did a German spurt and a Lao spurt and returned home. To make sure that my Italian stayed put, I did another spurt. But after a month, it was apparent that it was in really good shape, so I made the leap and decided to try to get my Portuguese back.

Less than a week into my Portuguese spurt, my Italian was in shambles. Again, I was crushed. But this time I dropped it immediately. I learned Portuguese for only one month, and it’s now the best it’s ever been, I’d say closing in on B2.

So here is my plan. Rather than trying to take it all the way to a high level, I want to concentrate on separating these two languages once and for all. My reason for that is making sure my Italian was in much better shape didn’t stop it from getting destroyed by Portuguese, so I don’t expect the reverse to work. To separate them, starting tomorrow I’m back on Italian again. I won’t even try to maintain my Portuguese. As soon as I feel Italian is recovered, I’ll switch to Portuguese, again not maintaining Italian. And I’ll continue this pattern, thinking that the spurts will become shorter and shorter over time, eventually reducing to one day, and then I’ll converse with teachers that speak both languages and try to do half Italian/half Portuguese classes. After that, I’ll finally attempt to put them both on maintenance and move onto my next project.

I still have 3 month left in the states; hopefully that’s enough time to get this done!

crush wrote:

Leo, these are fantastic, thank you for making these resources available to everyone!

The pleasure is mine. I'm glad you posted here, because I forgot to mention Isaan. And I'll be starting Cebuano in a week or so I think.

Hey all, I'm happy to announce that Crush, the same member who generously donated Quechua, is now in the process of adding some Odia passages. His target is 25 passages. If you've never seen this script before, I encourage you to check it out; it's complex and beautiful. (The link is on the list in the first post)

palace3416.3416 wrote:

is there is a hotkey that I can press?

There is no hotkey.

wrote:

I guess the number would reduce over time if these new words are identified as such in future texts? Are words that I join also marked as such for other users?

1) If you join two words, then they will be joined in all passages that you load in the future. 2) Nobody else will see these joins; they are user specific.

wrote:

will there be any upgrades in the future?

There are no plans for any.

I'll ask the tech team to consider your changes. Maybe there is another parser they can use or something, but I can't promise anything.

palace3416.3416 wrote:

How does the join tool work?

Like this. I just realized that it's your first week, so you are on a premium trial and can try it out.

There's a join and split tool that works for Vietnamese (it doesn't work for all languages), but it's a premium feature.

Yes, you can set the translation language to the L2, but typically it just repeats the word since we don't use monolingual dictionaries. You can add definitions though if you want.

palace3416.3416 wrote:

Would it be possible to see the Wiktionary entry for each word? Perhaps that could be an embedded window. I am learning Vietnamese and Wiktionary is consistently the best resource for defintions, translation, examples and etymology.

In work - see post above

Sorry about that - we thought we had fixed it. I have forwarded this info to the tech team. 

Time for an update. After returning from Thailand last month, my plan was to hit Italian hard again, learning the subjunctive on the way. I wanted to make sure the language was firmly in my brain, so that when I finally decided to hit Portuguese again, there would be no risk of forgetting Italian like I forgot Portuguese previously. However, about a month into the spurt, I realized that my Italian was already at a steady B2, and I started to question my strategy. I was thinking of two things.

First, even though I’d put a lot of time into it early on, my Korean was finally slipping into the A2 realm. This was very worrying, since it was such a hard language. Of my difficult languages (Japanese, Mandarin, Thai and Russian), Korean was the one I’d studies the least number of hours and the least number of years, by far. I needed to take some kind of action soon.

Second, the fact the my Italian had suffered so little damage in the 6 month break had made me confident that I could recover Portuguese now if I chose to. I wanted to spend a few months doing it, because (besides Isaan) it’s my least studied language by far. At this point, I had 5 months left before my next trip, which was enough time to pull it off.

Finally, I decided to study Portuguese half the time, and alternate between Korean and Italian for the other half. I’m maintaining my other languages in morning review sessions as always. My schedule is a ten-day cycle that looks something like this:

Some notes:

The Italian days are meant to ensure that I don’t forget it. I will substitute Portuguese for one of them if I feel my Italian is still strong. The morning sessions include 30 min conversation classes, and I don’t curate items to feed into anki after the classes. The afternoon Portuguese classes are 60 min; Korean and Italian are 30 min. I curate items for anki after all afternoon classes. I believe that 5 months of this schedule will be enough to recover and Portuguese and lift it to B2ish, while keeping Italian at roughly the same level. I also think that this will raise my Korean back to where it should be, so that it’s easy to maintain. After putting out these fires, I’ll resume my plan of greatly improving my Japanese reading, and then doing a long spurt in Korean. This current Band-Aid step should get me safely to the spurt. Here is my plan for the next 2.5 years:

2025 May – Oct: Portuguese/Italian/Korean

2025 Nov: Practice Portuguese, Spanish and maybe Italian and German in Southern Brazil and Argentina

2025 Dec:  Practice Swahili in Tanzania, and maybe Portuguese in Mazambique.

2026 Jan – Feb: Practice Thai and Isaan in Thailand

2026 March – April: Learn Cebuano in the Philippines

2026 May – Oct: Improve Japanese Reading

2026 Nov – 2027 Apr: Practice and Maintain while travelling, giving priority to Korean

2027 May - Oct: Korean Spurt

10 day update on the new routine:

I'm already noticing the difference with Korean. Essentially what I'm doing is doubling the frequency, which I've done before with only moderate impact. But doing it in conjunction with the anki work is a new thing; it's more time consuming, but appears to be effective.

My Portuguese is coming back too. After a week of study and conversation classes, I feel low A2ish, and the main issue is speed. Plus and minuses with my teachers so far. Plus - they have all been very patient. Minus - all but one have had weak internet connections, meaning audio issues.

Thanks - I forwarded that to the tech team.

Ok, we’ve discussed this.

wrote:

When using the arrow keys to move between words, I want to skip over words marked as

In work.

wrote:

A hotkey to open up your default dictionary when a word is selected.

In work.

wrote:

Ability to add Wiktionary lookup alongside other dictionaries.

Can you explain further? And what dictionaries?

wrote:

Fix strange default translations.

There’s no way for us to do this globally, but you can get rid of them from your own session by using “delete”.

wrote:

Ability to filter passages by whether I have marked them as read or not.

Investigating.

 

 

 

 

 

I speak Thai at an upper intermediate level, and in two months I learned to speak Isaan at a lower intermediate level from scratch. I basically:

1)  Memorized 50 sentences by heart.

2)  Took a daily conversation class.

3)  Watched these videos and read their subtitles daily.

You can read about the details and get the 50 starter sentences I used here (all free of course). I wanted to make a few comments about it in this post though.

First, the 50 sentences - I wrote out what I thought were perfectly natural Thai sentences, but posted them in a couple places to get input just to make sure. From the comments, I incorporated a lot of changes. I’ve been visiting Thailand annually for over 20 years and speak the language quickly and comfortably, so it was a bit humbling to see all the changes. Then I had them translated to Isaan, and posted them again but with audio. It turns out the Isaan speaker I hired to do it didn’t do a very good job. Late in my two months of study I revised them myself, and had one of my teachers back check. I hired a specialist to record the audio this time, and she did a great job. I’m pretty happy with the end result, and hope they will help others.

Regarding the conversation classes, I took about 30 hours worth, mostly on italki. It’s a bit hard to find Isaan teachers there because italki doesn’t list the language, and few teachers mention it in their profiles. But for pure conversation classes I can recommend Preaw, Sirilak, Kimmi and Riam. She’s not on italki any more, but Momm is another great choice. I used a lot of teachers, and even mixed in a few from Laos. I recommend Lao teachers Nuttana and Dalivahn. I used about 20 teachers in all, and most were good; those are just my favorites.

Some of you may know that I started a YouTube channel to get some videos made for this endeavor. I wanted interesting/relevant content with accurate subtitles that I could both read and listen too. My goal was to make 100, and so far we’ve published 61. Regarding the subtitles, I went back and forth on it, but I’m now a firm believer in leaving the cognates spelled as they are normally spelled in Thai, and using these four tone conversion rules:

Pronounce ข้าว as ข่าว

Pronounce ว่าย as วาย

Pronounce น้ำ as น่ำ

Pronounce มื้อ as มื่อ

The first rule means “pronounce ANY high consonant, long vowel, live syllable with a falling tone as a low tone”. In other words, these are just representative syllable types, and can be switched out. For example, ห้อง is pronounced ห่อง, ว่า is pronounced วา, etc.

Of course, these won’t work for every person in every dialect, but they are widespread and these are the four that I find to be the most prominent by far.

In closing, next time someone tells you to “Just learn Lao” because Isaan lacks resources, please link to this post.

Animefangirl wrote:

Would be much better to have to song instead of the AI reading of the lyrics, IMO.

I assume this person just posted some text. The system will auto-generate a TTS recording in this case now.

Jinx wrote:

leosmith wrote:

Jinx wrote:

Spaces are missing at two spots: "Bedarfgrößer" and "Schamzu" should each be two separate words, "Bedarf größer" and "Scham zu".

Hi Jinx. I fixed it, but it's not one of ours. Keep in mind that you always have the option of making a copy and editing it on your own.

Thanks Leo! Whoops, I thought comments on passages went to the users who added them – I was trying to give that person a helpful tip. I didn't realize mods would get a notification – sorry about that! :)

Oh, no problem. I should have ignored it, haha.

Paul.Acres.5 wrote:

New user here. I can play the audio file from the course or lesson I have created. However if I add the audio to the playlist (either using the button) or manually I cannot see or play the audio from the playlist page. I’m using iPhone and iPad if it makes a difference. Is this just an issue for me or am I doing something wrong? Thanks.

Hi Paul, we can't recreate this. Can you post a link to a passage for which this doesn't work?

Jinx wrote:

Spaces are missing at two spots: "Bedarfgrößer" and "Schamzu" should each be two separate words, "Bedarf größer" and "Scham zu".

Hi Jinx. I fixed it, but it's not one of ours. Keep in mind that you always have the option of making a copy and editing it on your own.

My learning spurt came to an end today, so here is a summary. In 2 months I went from zero to around B1. I spent about 200 hours, more if you count random conversations with locals. 29 hours of that was conversation classes with online teachers (ten 30min classes and twenty-four 60min classes). Hour 30 was supposed to be today, but my teacher cancelled last minute.

In this time I also had native speakers create 50 ten minute videos, with accurate soft subtitles, free for the world to use on youtube. The remaining are in work, and I won't stop until there are 100.

As mentioned before, I'm going to maintain this language. I think it will hold its own over the next six to nine months that I won't be in Thailand. But even if it doesn't, I now have all the resources and a solid method to fall back on when I'm actually back in Thailand. For these reasons, I think it would be difficult not to continue to improve over the years.

I now have two full days in Thailand with no scheduled classes of any kind. Time to take a mini vacation from my vacation.

Here’s what happened. I was talking to Kikenyoy yesterday afternoon, and we both agreed that if I didn’t get out of my room more often in my last week here I might have some regrets. So last night around 8 o’clock I went on a bar tour. I was looking for a place that wasn’t too loud and had someone attractive to talk to. The first place was pretty good. I found a cute hostess from Udon (an Isaan province) and she really wanted to speak Isaan with me. I bought her a couple of drinks, but after about 30 min she told me she had a date later on, and I decided to take my leave. Right across the street there was young lady in a bikini who twisted my arm into buying her a drink. She told me she was from Burriram (also in Isaan) and I agreed. But after I bought the drink, she claimed she didn’t speak Isaan and she was serious. I don’t remember her reason, but I spoke Thai with her and left after she finished. Again, across the street, I saw someone who looked friendly and she turned out to be from Ubon (you guessed it, Isaan). And this was funny – she wanted me to stop speaking Isaan, so every Isaan word I said she yelled out the Thai word, and every non-cognate Thai word she said I yelled out the Isaan word we were laughing and having a good time, but it got old eventually and I left. On the way back to my condo, two persuasive individuals pulled me into a club where there certainly wasn’t any pole dancing going on. I kept them drinking, because they were both chatting me up in Isaan. Eventually I said goodbye, got home and crashed.

Today I took a 60 min lesson from a new teacher, from Maha Sarakam. It’s the same province as one of my favorite other Isaan teachers, and I’d clearly levelled up. I don’t know what had gotten into me, but my brain was definitely running on all eight cylinders (or is it four?). Then I remembered the previous night, and it struck me: Wow! I’m intermediate! After 32 lessons (27hrs total), I now feel comfortable using that label.

Sorry about that. This is fixed temporarily, but it's a known issue we are working on.

Ok, we were able to add most of these.

First a quick update. I’m at 23 hrs of conversation (28 lessons) and still a strong A2 imo. I’ve now had 5 different Lao teachers, 4 of which were from Vientiane. They aren’t really more difficult to talk to than Isaan speakers now, and the nice thing is they code switch with Thai much less. I’ve learned a few more “pure” Lao words, which I make zero effort to memorize, haha. But they are still pretty rare. I got a strange complaint from my Lao teacher today. She said Thai speakers that take classes from her can read Lao, so she was a bit flustered that I wanted her to use Thai script. She made it sound like it’s pretty easy, and now I feel a bit guilty for not learning it. I’m sticking to my guns though, because I feel reading Lao script would take away time from reading/writing the way most Isaan speakers read/write.

I’ve been reading my homegrown subtitles consistently, and that’s helping me improve. It’s also prompted me to take a deeper look at the 5 tone conversion rules I mentioned in a previous post, and jumping right to the conclusion, here is my revised tone conversion table:

How did I get there? Glad you asked. Hearing quite a few native speakers say มา, instead of the expected ม้า, made me decide to do a survey of one video from each of the represented provinces on my channel. There are five. I wanted to confirm that the conversions I was using were correct. I also decided to note any surprising tones produced. This is in no way exhaustive; I only listened to a few minutes of each speaker. Nor is it scientific; just my single point best effort to recognize tones. But here is the data:

So 4 of my 5 rules seemed to be confirmed. I wrote out all the มา results because there was a lot of variation, and in the end decided that มา is as common as ม้า, so I’m going to treat it like it’s unchanging and stop intentionally converting it to a high tone. Cat’s tones were all over the place, and I wonder if it’s because she was practically whispering in the only video she made for us. I’ve decided not to consider her results. The “misc” observations are interesting. I think they just reflect the way that word is pronounced, either by that specific person or in that specific province. But I don’t feel like any of them merit a new, universal Isaan tone conversion rule because I didn’t find a convincing pattern. A minor point, but the other thing I decided to change in the table was using ข้าว instead of ขี้ as the model word for the first rule, because ข้าว means “rice” or “food” and is one of the most obvious clues to which language you are using. That and the fact that ขี้ means “poop” in isolation.

Ok, I got curious about transforming Thai tones to Isaan, and decided to go ahead and make a table. Here is the result, and it’s good news: (edit - the correct table is 2 posts down)

Memorize these five transformations, and you’re good. Class ข and ค signify high and low class respectively. To explain the table in a bookish way, looking at the first row, “change a Thai high class consonant live syllable with a long vowel and a rising tone to a low tone”. But of course it’s much easier to memorize “change ขี้ to ขี่”, with the understanding that they represent all similar syllables.

The reason I called this good news is that remembering only 5 rules, or a total of 10 syllables, isn’t very difficult, and motivates me to become diligent about applying them in conversation. And it’s a great reduction from the full list of 20. Yes, this is a simplification that I made, and I will explain my logic for doing this. Here is the full list, which is supported by SLT (Speak Like a Thai volume 5) and my personal experience:

Green (7) are syllables that stay the same, blue (5) are important enough to memorize, white (8) aren’t. My reason for dropping the white ones? There are four dead syllables with short vowels, and their tones tend to be swallowed up in normal speech. And the other four are switching between mid and low tones, which are not different enough for me to be concerned about. Of course, the most technically correct thing to do is memorize all the white ones too, but I think for most of us the five blue ones is the most realistic solution.

Paul.Acres.5 wrote:

New user here. I can play the audio file from the course or lesson I have created. However if I add the audio to the playlist (either using the button) or manually I cannot see or play the audio from the playlist page. I’m using iPhone and iPad if it makes a difference. Is this just an issue for me or am I doing something wrong? Thanks.

Hi Paul. This is a known issue; the ticket is in work.

Having clear rules for converting Thai tones to Isaan tones has really helped me in conversations. I’m not saying that I get everything right instantly, but having that solid base to fall back on reduces my tone confusion. I hit 18 hours of conversation today, and the last 3 classes were great. Today I had my first “Lao” class, meaning the Teacher was from Laos and doesn’t profess to speak Isaan. She calls herself C2 in Thai, and she agreed to write any notes I requested using Thai script rather than Lao. She struggled a bit, but with todays tech I was easily able to fix the text after class. Even though the class was 60 min long, there were only 2 words that were “pure” Lao, one of which was a twisted cognate: swimming pool in Lao สระลอยน้ำ (pool float water); in Thai สระว่ายน้ำ (pool swim water). ลอย means “float” in Thai too, but nobody says สระลอยน้ำ in Thai or Isaan, hence the “twisted” cognate.

Regarding Lao script, I think many centuries ago they hired the same Scribe who invented Thai script, but they were short on cash, so they got him really, really drunk first. What’s this based on? เข้าใจ vs ເຂົ້າໃຈ. Understand (I hope Lao people have a good sense of humor)? I won’t be learning the script anytime soon, but I think I’ll start using LO for a language code, since Isaan doesn’t have one. And I appear to communicate in the Laos based Lao dialects as well as the Thai based ones (strong A2), so why not? 

I got asked a question along the lines of “Are you going to just learn one dialect so you can only speak with those speakers?” The answer is, I’m going to speak Isaan by speaking Thai, incorporating the 10-20% of the words that aren’t cognates, and using the 5 tone conversion rules that I listed in my previous post on all words that come out of my mouth. I’m not going to laser focus on a specific dialect. I won’t sound exactly like any single dialect, but my guess I’ll be closest to SI (standard Isaan, Khon Kaen dialect). I’ll be understood by all Lao dialect speakers, but some dialects will be easier for me to understand than others. Here is a list of the major Lao dialects:

On the list, Central, Eastern, Southern and Western Isaan seem to be pretty easy to understand. Same with Southern Lao. I struggle a bit with Northern Isaan though; they seem to use additional tones, and I have to ask them to repeat more often. They are also more picky about how I talk, correcting my tones occasionally. The other 5 dialects, I don’t know yet. But even in the case of Northern, it’s not that hard to understand, so I don’t think I’m getting into a situation where I’m going to be limited.

Two posts ago I mentioned that we needed to switch to method b) subtitles in my YouTube channel. That’s turned out to be a very good move. The reading tool is recognizing cognates much better now. Unknown words per video are now about half what they were with method a); we went from 200+ to 100+ on the average. Reading just got easier. I read half a subtitle file today, whereas before I was only reading about 1/5 per day. The funny thing is, I’m mostly improving my Thai. New words are almost always cognates. I have to remind myself that I never really was a great Thai reader. Here is a post I made three years ago:

wrote:

According to the stats in the reading tool, here are my approximate average percentages of unknown unique words after I finish reading a passage:

Spanish 5%

French 5%

Portuguese 7%

Tagalog 10%

Swahili 15%

Russian 15%

Thai 15%

Korean 15%

Japanese 25%

Mandarin 35%

Keep in mind that these stats would look much better if they were for non-unique words. That is because a few hundred very common words, which I already know, make up a majority of the words in a passage, and are repeated many times.

Since then, I’ve fixed my Mandarin reading, and knocked it down to about 10%. I have plans to do the same with Japanese next year. But Korean and Thai are nothing to be proud of. So thinking that I’m just going to be able to rip through Isaan reading like I’m ripping through conversation is wishful. It’s probably going to take 2 hrs per day for 3 months, or something like that, to fix Thai/Isaan reading permanently. It’s definitely not happening during this spurt. 

But I still plan to maintain this language like all my other languages when I return home and end my spurt. I should be B1 by then, and want to try to stick it in my normal line up and combine it with Thai. That should be interesting.

So the questions was how to proceed without resources. I wanted to do what I always do: have daily conversation classes, and during class write down everything I wanted to say but couldn’t, as well as everything the teacher said but I couldn’t understand. After class, I would curate a list of unknown words and phrases, memorize it, put it in Anki, and start doing reps the next day before class. This method gives me great results. The problem was I was essentially A0. Normally I do one to three months of beginner stuff before starting conversations, but there was no beginner stuff that was appropriate for that step. So I decided I needed to memorize 50 sentences before starting conversation. These were of the type “Can you repeat that?” “Please write that down” “How do you say X in Isaan” “I’m from Seattle” etc. I did this for both German and Italian, and it really helped, so I gambled that these sentences, along with my firm grasp of Thai, would be enough to start 100% conversation classes.

When I tried to create the 50 sentences though, I was once again reminded how problematic the lack of resources was. No Google Translate, no online dictionary and no TTS. So I placed an ad on Upwork to have someone translate and make recordings for the sentences. No bites. But I got lucky, and found an italki Thai teacher from Isaan who was willing to translate/record them. So she did it, and I was super happy, and even put them here so others could use them. Then I asked her to make recordings of a simple list of syllables, in both Thai and Isaan. I designed these to be sort of like minimal pair drills, but to compare the tones of the two languages. She quickly agreed, but her recordings were quite inconsistent. I pointed this out, and wasted a lot of both of our time and energy exchanging notes with her trying to explain the problem.

Me: If I play the recordings for five different syllables with high tones in a row (ก๊า, ดู๊, โจ๊, ดี๊, ไป๊), I expect to hear the same tone in all of them. I don’t when I listen to yours.

Her: We don’t have some of those words in Isaan, so I had to pronounce them differently.

Me: They aren’t words, they are just fake syllables I’m using to compare tones.

Her: No response.

Etc.

I should have demanded some money back, but it took me almost an hour to pay her previously (had to do a physical deposit into her bank account), and I just decided I wasn’t going to make her do that for the relatively small amount of money. But I had the sentences, and that was enough!

So I thought. But I posted a link to the sentences on Reddit, asking people what they thought, and after a bunch of pretty polite comments, and minor criticisms of the text (I told her to use method a), came a not-so-polite post about the sentences being a mixture of Thai and Isaan, amongst other things which I won’t bother getting into. But he was right about the weak Isaan. My beautifully manicured, specially crafted Isaan sentences had lots of obvious Thai words where Isaan belonged, especially pronouns. Pronouns are the most blatant differences between the two languages, even though they are both pro-drop. My defense is that I hadn’t started studying anything when I checked her translations, but by the time he pointed it out, the errors were glaring even to me.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I’d already memorized the sentences by then, and began conversations while trying to remember to swap out the Thai words on the fly. It worked. I had my eighth 30 minute conversation today, and I’m A2ish. More to come…

First, I’ll give you an update on my studies. My level is still A2, but improving at a decent pace. I’ve done 18 online 100% Isaan conversation classes. The first 10 were 30 min, and now I do 60 min classes, so I have 13 hours total under my belt. Actually I don’t wear a belt, but who’s watching? My original goal was to hit 30 hours before I left, but even though I’m trying to do a class per day, time is a bit tight. I need 17 hours in about 25 days, but after subtracting the travel days, cleaning days and Chinese days, I’ll only make it if I take every single opportunity I have. 25 hours total is more realistic.

My daily routine is Anki reps, writing five lines of Anki answers in my notebook, a tiny bit of reading and listening, the class, curating the list of new items after class, memorizing them and loading them into Anki. I should be doing a lot more reading and listening, and I’ll talk about that in a minute, but there is no need for grammar study. Thai grammar is very easy, and Isaan grammar is almost exactly the same.

Before I get to the main reason for this post, I just wanted to mention something really cool that happened today. There is a YouTube Thai teacher who also makes a lot of Isaan teaching videos. The videos are all English, except for the new Isaan phrases she teaches. This is pretty typical of Isaan teaching videos, and the same goes for YT teachers teaching native Thai speakers Isaan by overusing the Thai language. These videos are nice to have, but they are of limited use imo for the following reasons. 1) They are mostly in English/Thai 2) If I want to say sentence X, how does watching these videos lead to that? No clear path. That being said, the videos are fun for beginners, and they are very popular judging from the number of likes. But I want comprehensible input. I want videos where people are talking normally about everyday situations, and I want accurate subtitles. Anyway, I saw how nicely produced this teacher’s videos were, and thought “Why not just offer to pay her for comprehensible input videos per my description?” So I contacted her via email, offered to pay her a per video price which, based on my experience, is a fair rate, for up to 100 videos. I’d have her post them on her own website and reap any benefit off of them that she possibly could, as long as I get to keep copies and have a forever license to use them. Win-win, I thought. No answer.

So I decided to get freelancers from Upwork and a few other places to make videos for me, and put them in my own channel, since I’ve done this successfully for three other languages. I have about 25 ten minute videos so far. I’m trying to finish all 100 by the end of May. It’s going well, but it’s not without its challenges.

Anyway, I was on italki the other day, looking for more Isaan teachers (it’s not a language there, so I message Thai teachers), when I saw the same famous YouTuber. She’s expensive, but I figured “why not?” I booked a lesson, and that lesson was 10 hours ago. Before the lesson, I toyed with the idea of telling her who I was, and asking her why she never responded, showing her the Channel, etc. But in the end, I chickened out and decided to just try to have a good conversation. I was a bit nervous before the lesson, but for some reason not at all during it. It was the best conversation I’ve had so far. I was smooth, and I caught her code switching to Thai as often as she caught me. It was fun, but just price alone keeps me from wanting to do it again. I’ve got several good conversation teachers now who code switch less.

So meandering back to the main reason for this post – subtitles. Ouch. First, I think we all know that FB auto-subs aren’t great. FB leaves out punctuation, sometimes even words and sentences, and often has messed up timing (a word or sentence appearing long before or after it is spoken). It’s even worse for lesser known languages like Thai, and Isaan isn’t Thai so you can imagine the magnitude of discrepancies.  

It became apparent right from the start that the people making the videos were incapable of fixing the subtitles. So I hired a dedicated subtitle editor. First time ever. She did a good job of fixing all the issues listed above, plus another issue specific to switching Thai to Isaan, changing a handful of consonants. For example, เรา (raao) in Thai is spelled/pronounced เฮา (haao) in Isaan. So that was all fine and dandy, but now let’s talk about tones.

Remember:
a)    Isaan speakers normally say it like this กิ่นเข่าแล่วบอ (low, low, falling, mid tones)

b)    But write it like this กินข้าวแล้วบ่อ (mid, falling, high, low tones)

As I said in an earlier post, I wanted materials that used method a). So my instructions to my subtitle editor were to do it that way. And she asked if I wanted to ignore the variations in the “accents” of the various video creators, and always use the same tone for a given word, or if I wanted her to spell it as she heard it. I told her to spell it as she heard it. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Subtitles that match each speaker exactly. Bad choice.

Even though she fixed all the other issues very nicely, her tones were all over the place. And by that I mean, she was not making them consistently match the speaker. Nor was she using consistent standardized tones. So there was that issue, and when redditors confirmed my fears, I tried to figure out what to do. It took me a long time to test and recruit this person, and I didn’t want to go through that again. So I basically just told her what the problem was, and to try to do a better job. To make a long story short, that failed too, but it didn’t matter.

I’d been reading this one passage in my reading tool, the subtitles for a single video, for five days, when it suddenly occurred to me that my slow progress was due to the parsing being absolutely terrible, and the reason the parsing was bad was Google usually doesn’t recognize Isaan cognates as the same word in Thai. In other words, it needs me to use method b).

This sucks on many levels, but to be honest, having tones (poorly) written as the speaker produced them was not helping me get a clear grasp on the tones anyway. They kept on changing, so I couldn’t get used to them. Standardizing them would be better, but that wouldn’t work with my reading tool. If I don’t want big clumps of unparsed words, I need b).

So I gave my subtitle editor new instructions. She worked so incredibly slow, the switch isn’t going to be as bad as it could have been. It turns out one of my video creators can actually fix subtitles too, and she understood right away what I was after, so there is hope. Things are looking up.

When I read, I’m just going to have to learn the theoretical transformations for converting Thai to Isaan tones. There’s no escaping it now. I’ll probably create a table showing what these rules are, and prioritizing the most drastic changes. More on tones later; there is a lot to unwrap.

Wow, it’s been 6 months since my last post here! A lot has happened. I was in the Philippines for 2 months, then came here to Thailand for the remaining 4 months of my annual 6 month trip. During the Philippines, and the first 2 months of Thailand, I did a pretty intensive German spurt, as planned. It was successful, although I still don’t feel comfortable calling myself B2. And after a total of 4 months, I got tired of the spurt and decided to try something different. I asked myself:

To learn Isaan or not?

I’m in Thailand now. I’ve been coming here annually for 22 years, staying an average of three months at a time, which means I’ve spent over five years of my life here. I learned the basics of Thai before my second trip here, and now I speak the language quite well (B2ish). I reached this level over 10 years ago, and haven’t tried to improve anymore. If you speak Thai, you can communicate with everyone here. There are some minor languages, or dialects, too. Minor language speakers speak them amongst themselves, but in addition tend to speak native or near native Thai. And of course, English is not that uncommon. Given this info, and the fact that Thai was so hard for me to learn, it’s always been hard to justify learning Isaan.

Thailand can be divided into four major regions—the north, northeast (also known as Isaan), center, and south (southern peninsula). Pattaya, where I normally stay, is in the center, but there are so many native Isaan speakers here, I’m tempted to learn at least a little of it. For example, when I go into a bar or restaurant here and talk to a hostess, chances are very high that she’s Isaan. I have two more months left here, and just finished a four month spurt in German because I didn’t feel like extending it to six months. So I figured, “Only two months left? No time to lose!!!”

But Isaan is hard for reasons I’m not used to – lack of resources and lack of a standard writing system. Lack of resources you probably understand, but the lack of a standard writing system requires some explanation. First, a bit of history. The Lao kingdoms were under Siamese control when Siam (Thailand) was forced to cede territories east of the Mekong River to French Indochina in the Franco-Siamese War of 1893. That split the Lao people into two groups, what would become Isaan and Lao. From that point on, the languages began to diverge. Isaan is a dialect of Lao, but it is not the same as Standard Lao. I bring this up because I often hear the suggestion “Just learn Lao, and then you’ll speak perfect Isaan”. No. Even though there is no standard script for Isaan, they use Thai script when they write, not Lao. There are many Isaan words that come from Thai and don’t exist in Lao, and many words in Lao that don’t exist in Isaan. Oh yeah, and the tones are different. There are 5+ dialects of Isaan, and a lot of tone variation. There are several different dialects of Lao too. It’s a lack of standardization nightmare.

Going deeper into the tone issue. Standard Thai (ST) has five tones, and some dialects of Isaan have five tones, including the Khon Kaen dialect, which some think of as Standard Isaan (SI). ST and SI both have mid, low, high, falling and rising tones. Although these tones have the same names, they have slightly different contours. For example, the ST high tone starts a bit above the middle then rises, and the SI high tone is just a high flat tone. So that’s one thing to keep in mind when you are reading Isaan using Thai script; if it signals a high tone, you just use the SI hi tone rather than ST. Simple enough to remember, right?

But here’s the funny part.   “Have you eaten yet?” in English is กินข้าวหรือยัง in Thai

a)    Isaan speakers normally say it like this กิ่นเข่าแล่วบอ (low, low, falling, mid tones)

b)    But write it like this กินข้าวแล้วบ่อ (mid, falling, high, low tones)

If they write it like b), how do they know to pronounce it like a)? It turns out that they use Lao tone rules to read Thai script. So when the words are cognates, which is the case 80-90% of the time, they just leave the script as it’s written in Thai, but pronounce the tones differently because they are using Lao tone rules. They do this with consonants too, but let’s not go there yet. So initially I thought I should learn the Lao tone rules in order to correctly pronounce text when I read Isaan. Although this sounds complicated, it gets worse. I know of two sources that explain how to make Isaan tones out of Thai text. They contradict each other, and they contradict what I’m hearing in real life. So I’m not in a hurry to learn those rules.

As I said before, there is no SI writing system. I think a mixture of a) and b) is most common, which makes it really hard for a learner to figure out which tone is used. So even though most native Isaan speakers prefer to see Thai cognates spelled the same as Thai, per b) above, I prefer learning material spelled per a). There aren’t very many materials like this, so I started a YouTube Channel and I’ve pledged to make 100 videos. More later.

Sorry about that - ticket written.

Animefangirl wrote:

I don't know what I was expecting from the title "visitors," but presents for aliens certainly wasn't it!

 

Ha.H wrote:

I am just checking out now how can I do it.

The first time you read it, hit the "studied" button. The second time, hit the "studied passage again" button.

bbyj wrote:

I like the newer studied passage again button, but I am curious - does it grant any points/stats? I don't think I see that it does.

Is it working for you now?

If you want pauses, you can make a copy of the passage, edit, paste the text to either chatgpt or perplexity, ask it to add punctuation without changing any words, then past the result back into passage.

No periods, no pauses.

All three are nationalities or ethnic groups (not proper nouns) and therefore shouldn't be capitalized. 

Proper nouns such as names of people, places, and organizations are capitalized, but not adjectives, nationalities, or languages.

Languages are not supposed to be capitalized in Swahili, but you'll see it often.

We discussed this, and we're going to pass because it would be expensive to implement and would only work on new items.

Not currently, but I'll ask if this is a feature we can add.

Penelope.Miller wrote:

After using this for a while, the only feature I feel is missing is the ability for the left and right keys to jump to the next highlighted word (whether unknown or learning), while skipping over any words marked as known or set to ignore. Other than that, it's already really great! Thanks.

After you select a word, click a whitespace, then the right and left arrow keys should do this.

No problem - glad it's working!

Danail.Pavlov wrote:

This time Im trying with this video

There are no subtitles for that video.

Animefangirl wrote:

It's much better, apart from the constant repetition of "MBST". That's supposed to represent some kind of punctuation, I think?

I think it's ok now - can you confirm?

ok, we'll discuss this

bbyj wrote:

I like the newer studied passage again button, but I am curious - does it grant any points/stats? I don't think I see that it does.

Sorry about that. I moved your post to this thread where the feature was requested; it's a known issue and we're still working the ticket.

Hi Danail, sorry about that. Can you give me a couple links to try out? I got this one to work immediately.

That must be "bracket" or something. I'll see if we can get it to ignore that.

Animefangirl wrote:

That would be great, thanks.

I think we fixed it!

Wow - that's quite a routine. Congrats on your streak! 

HolaIsabel wrote:

Hello :)
I wanted to use my referral link again to share the platform with some friends but they get an image that seems like an error, I don't know what it should look like so I wanted to ask if there was a problem, I share the screenshots of what I get (number 2 is if you scroll)
My link: https://languagecrush.com/r/3xYW1

Hi Isabel - is it working now?

Animefangirl wrote:

What's with this audio, not even a pause for a full stop or a comma?

That's auto-generated. It's a fairly new feature for passages that have no audio files. I'll write a ticket to see if we can give it pauses and such.

Sorry about that. I'm not sure what's going on, so I wrote a ticket.

HolaIsabel wrote:

What do you think about changing regions leo? have you done it?

I think it's fine; you've got to follow your passion. I haven't done it though. Tbh, my Portuguese (Brazilian) disappeared when I started learning Italian. I plan to re-learn it in the near future. But even at my highest level, near B2, I couldn't understand European Portuguese. I'm surprised at how different they are.

Are you going to learn both Brazilian and European Portuguese?

Welcome back HolaIsabel! That's quite a story.

Danail.Pavlov wrote:

Ive been having the same problem for a few days now - I get the following error when trying to import a video from YT:

It should be fixed now.

Thanks - ticket written.

Sorry about that. Can you give us a link to a video that's not importing for you?

Intad.Kado wrote:

Is there any possibility for Arabic?

First, please note that this project is being extended via our video project. But we don't have any immediate plans to add Arabic, because it's hard to cover. We'd have to do standard, plus several dialects to do it right. In addition, there may already be Standard Arabic YouTube channels that do what we would do - teach the languages using pure Arabic with accurate subtitles, so we wouldn't want to compete with them in that situation.

I finished up my 100 hours of conversation spurt in Italian. I’m happy with the results. I feel like I’m roughly B2, but I never learned the subjunctive so I assume I’d fail a B2 test. I’ll eventually come back to Italian, to learn the subjunctive and further hone my skills. I feel the spurt was long enough so that Italian won’t disappear on me, like Portuguese.

Speaking of Portuguese, I finally got tired of having A2 conversations in it, so I dropped it completely. Italian put the nails in the coffin. This is the first time I’ve dropped a language in over 10 years. German, which is newer, survived the same abuse that killed Portuguese, and I assume this was due to it being different enough from Italian.

My German has weakened noticeably though, so what I plan to do next is another German spurt. My first spurt went for six months over a seven-month period (I skipped a month in there). I compare this with my solid six-month spurt in Italian, which is an easier language for me, and am not surprised that my German level is noticeably lower. This time I want to go until I feel B2ish. I’m going to have at least four months during my travels where I’ll be able to hit it hard, and possibly as many as six months.

After that, if my Italian still feels strong, it will be time to do a multi-month spurt in Portuguese. I really want to hit it out of the ballpark this time. At that point, I’ll have stabilized all my European languages, and it will be time to fill two big holes in my other languages. First will be a Japanese reading spurt. I’ve never been a great Japanese reader, but I think if I follow the method I used for Mandarin, I’ll be able to improve significantly in 500 hours or less. Then comes Korean, and this will be a long one. I think a multi-month spurt in conversation, followed by a lot of listening practing.

From here on out, even for Asian languages, I’ll be following some lessons learned from my last three European languages believe it or not. I learned Thai and Japanese, one right after the other, early on in my language learning journey. This gave me a lot of insights into which learning techniques worked well and which didn’t. After that, I became eager to point out weak techniques to people who only learned European languages, in a sincere desire to help people. Unfortunately, I failed to consider the advantages that learning “simpler” languages had for trying out new techniques. My attitude was that I wouldn’t learn anything groundbreaking from them, because every technique works with easy languages. But after three in a row (Portuguese, German and Italian) I can honestly say I’ve improved my learning method considerably. For example:

1)  I make a concerted effort to speak colloquially now; much more so than previously. To be clear, I don’t necessarily mean “slangy”. I mean that I want to talk like natives really talk. This point drives some of the other points below. It was easy to experiment with this for easy languages, prove to myself it could be done and that I preferred the results over what I was doing before.

2)  I add audio to all my flashcards now, and fail myself when my pronunciation is off. It’s another colloquial thing – I want to sound more like a native. This tech has been around for a long time, but working on easier languages made me feel more free to experiment with it.  

3)  I build pronunciation tools when I start a new language. Similar to point 2.

4)  The ratio of Youtube videos to other listening activities has increased significantly. With easy languages, I was able to feel things becoming more comprehensible. With hard languages, the changes are less detectible and I never really considered that these videos could be more helpful than other sources. Plus, there are a lot more suitable videos available for easy (more studied in this case) languages.  

5)  For reading, I’m gradually switching all my languages over to reading primarily subtitles. I find them to be more colloquial, interesting and often more comprehensible. Now, I like to read, and if I was just learning one language, I’d read a lot of pop fiction too, but I don’t have the time to do that with 12 languages, and it’s not my primary objective either. Learning easy languages makes me more open to doing all the “fun” stuff, and subtitles are fun for me. Plus I get to use my reading tool.  

There’s more, but I think I’ve made my point. I want to keep all my languages colloquial and up to date.

fyi - we are discussing this

Danail.Pavlov wrote:

I just noticed that there is the option to disable the popover dictionary! Thank you very much for implementing this!

Sorry - I forgot to mention it.