leosmith's recent posts

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.

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:

 

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.

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.

Nobody expects the Austronesian Alignment1!

These days I’ve seen a few panic posts stating that “You must master the Austronesian Alignment (AA) to properly speak Tagalog!” This would be a difficult task, because the AA is a structure found in dozens of languages, and varies from language to language. Don’t worry – it isn’t necessary to master the whole AA. You just need to learn how it’s applied to Tagalog. And that means you need to learn “Focus”, which is a much lesser task. But it’s still pretty surprising to learners, so let me try to explain it in an unusual way.

What is focus, and why is it important?

When you think about it, native English speakers don’t really consider what each sentence focuses on, or which word they are trying to draw the most attention to when they talk. Sure, they might stress one word or another, or it might be clear from context if they really think about it. But that’s the thing – they don’t need to think about it because the grammar doesn’t change. So it might surprise you to know that Tagalog speakers know exactly what the focus is of each sentence they speak. Ok, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. If you ask them “what’s the focus of that sentence?” they might just give you a blank stare. Then why am I so sure that they know? Because the grammar changes with focus, and they speak correctly, so in that way they are aware of the focus. In fact, they even know what English speakers are focusing on, because they can correctly translate an English sentence to Tagalog, and as I implied before, Tagalog grammar specifies focus. Of course, it’s second nature to them. So if a native English speaker wants to become a good Tagalog speaker, they also need to make it second nature.

How to internalize focus.

Now the question becomes, how does someone who doesn’t need to think about focus in their mother tongue change into someone who knows it innately when they speak Tagalog? First, let’s look at the steps a learner goes through to produce a sentence, from a focus point of view.

1)  Determine what the focus is.

2)  Create the sentence with the grammar associated with that focus.

Step 1) is not very straight forward, and usually not covered very well. What is really needed here is a set of clear rules for determining focus. I’m going to give you those rules, but for them to make sense, first we’ll talk a bit about step 2).

How grammar changes with focus.

Although not trivial, this step is pretty straightforward, and usually covered well. I’m going to define focus, but first let me share some terminology.

a)   There are three forms that words can take in Tagalog: ang, ng and sa. For example, the ang-form of Tagalog is ang Tagalog, the ng form is ng Tagalog and sa form is sa Tagalog.

b)  Taking the sentence Maria will teach Tagalog to Joe, Maria is the “Actor”, Tagalog is the “Object” and “Joe” is the “Indirect Object (IO)”. Actor, Object and IO can be thought of as linguistic roles of words.

Now we can define Focus. Here is a simplified way to think of it:

To make the sentence focus on a specific word, you 1) put that word in ang-form2, and 2) use a verb3 that matches the linguistic role of the word.

Ok, now the stage is set. Although Maria will teach Tagalog to Joe is just one sentence in English, there are three4 ways to say it in Tagalog, depending on the focus. If you want to make Maria the focus, well, Maria is an actor. So according to the definition above, we put Maria in ang-form and use an Actor Focus (AF) verb:

AF: Magtuturo si Maria ng Tagalog sa Joe. Because si Maria is the ang-form of Maria, and magtuturo is the5 AF verb for will teach.

Similarly, if you want to make Tagalog, which is an Object, the focus, we put it in ang form and use an Object Focus (OF) verb:

OF: Ituturo ni Maria ang Tagalog sa Joe. Because ang Tagalog is the ang-form of Tagalog, and ituturo is the OF verb for will teach.

Finally, if you want to make Joe, an IO, the focus, we put it in ang form and use an IO Focus (IOF6) verb:

IOF: Tuturuan ni Maria ng Tagalog si Joe. Because si Joe is the ang-form of Joe, and tuturuan is the IOF verb for will teach.

This about sums up Step 2) above. As I said, it’s not trivial, but learning how to put a word in ang-form, and memorizing the verbs, are straightforward tasks. Now we finally return to Step 1) above.

Rules for determining focus.

Let’s look at the sentences again. In English, we have:

Maria will teach Tagalog to Joe.

But in Tagalog we have three possibilities:

AF: Magtuturo si Maria ng Tagalog sa Joe.

OF: Ituturo ni Maria ang Tagalog sa Joe.

IOF: Tuturuan ni Maria ng Tagalog si Joe.

So the question is “which one do I use?” The simple answer is, “just use the one that focuses on the word you want to draw attention to”. But that’s not enough information for people whose native languages aren’t affected by AA. How do I know what I’m focusing on? Why do I have to focus on anything? Can’t I just use any one of these and say “yeah, that’s what I meant to focus on” if someone calls me out? To answer all such questions, just know that everything you say can be translated into Tagalog, it will have focus, and there is (almost) always just one right answer, depending on context and some other things. In other words, there is no easy way out; you must become aware of focus when you talk. So here are five rules to help develop a natural awareness of focus:

 

Rule 17 – Use emphasis. Try emphasizing a word in the sentence to see if one of them captures your nuance correctly. If emphasizing Maria captures your nuance, then form an AF sentence. If emphasizing Tagalog feels right, use an OF sentence. And if it’s Joe, IOF.

 

Rule 27 – Use questions. If the point of your sentence is to ask “Who will teach Tagalog to Joe?”, then the answer is Maria, and the sentence should be AF. If it’s to ask “What will Maria teach Joe?”, then the answer is Tagalog, and it’s OF. If it’s “Who will Maria Teach Tagalog?”, then it’s Joe, and it’s IOF.

 

Rule 3 – If the object is definite, the sentence is OF. In a nutshell, the  difference between the linguistic terms "definite" and "indefinite" are like the difference between "the" and "a". Here are some examples of things that make objects definite.

The/this/that/those/these.

OF: Ibinigay ni Maria ang sasakyan kay Joe. = Maria gave Joe the car.

Possessives: my, your, his, her, etc.

OF: Ibinigay ni Maria ang sasakyan ko kay Joe. = Maria gave Joe my car.

Proper nouns.

OF: Niyakap ni Joe si Maria. = Joe hugged Maria.

Personal pronouns.

OF: Niyakap ni Joe siya. = Joe hugged her.

 

Rule 4 - If the object is indefinite, the sentence is probably AF. This is because AF and OF are by far the most common of the 11 focuses. They account for about 90% of focus usage. If the object is indefinite, the sentence isn’t OF, so guessing AF will give you good odds.

A/an/some makes words indefinite.

AF: Nagbigay si Maria ng sasakyan kay Joe. = Maria gave Joe a car.

 

Rule 5 – If there is only one complement (Actor, Object or OF), that’s probably the focus.

AF: Mag-aaral ako. = I will study. The actor is the only complement.

OF: Kinakain ang manok. = Chicken is eaten. The object is the only complement.

Those are the main rules. I hope they will help you select the correct focus and become more fluent in Tagalog.

 

1.     Much like the Spanish Inquisition, nobody expects the Austronesian Alignment. Nobody.

2.     It’s actually more complicated than this. Rather than just “put the word in ang-form”, it’s more like “apply the appropriate form-pattern to the sentence” which always includes making the focus word ang-form. It’s worth it to memorize the three most common patterns, which make up over 90% of colloquial usages:

Form Pattern

Form

actor

object

X

AF

ang

ng

sa

OF

ng

ang

sa

DF6

ng

ng

ang

3.     Different focuses use different verbs. They are different verbs with a common root. They are not conjugations of the same verb.

4.     There are actually more than three.

5.     Know that rather than the AF verb, it’s more like the appropriate AF verb, because it’s possible to have more than one AF verb for a given root, and the same goes for the other focuses.

6.     Nobody actually calls it the IOF. The third complement in a sentence can be called several different things. In this case, it’s a Directional complement, and the focus is called DF.

7.     To be fair, the first two rules are often covered in learning materials. It’s the last three that usually aren’t.

Hi Helena, we don't know who created this passage, but as a work-around you could ask chatgpt to fix the text for you.

Danail.Pavlov wrote:

it goes back to the very top/beginning of it

It now remembers the scroll position when you do this.

wrote:

if I highlight a word/piece of text from the translation as a bookmark if you wish - it's gone after the right part of the screen switches from vocabulary to translation text

Sorry, but we couldn't fix this.

I opened Language Crush Vietnamese Videos with 5 videos today.

Ok - I removed it.

Interesting technique - I wondered when extracting hard subs would finally become "trivial". Depending on your definition of trivial, that day may be here already. Incidentally, I think you can first imbed the video into a passage by using the youtube tool here, then replace the bad/missing subtitles with the ones you are creating, if having the video embedded is important to you.

Edit - I take that back. I see he's completely disabled subtitles, which foils our tool.

Aixen wrote:

Hello, can you add this dictionary https://korean.dict.naver.com/koendict/#/main to the korean dictionaries?

Added

Danail.Pavlov wrote:

Sorry, I meant the hover-over function.

Ok, I wrote a ticket to make this a setting which can be turned off. 

We don't want to change it to be based on a single dictionary by design. As it works now, if you don't select(check mark) a specific definition, the hover-over defaults to the most popular one. A lot of people create their own definitions, sometimes copied from other dictionaries, so forcing it to display a single dictionary would defeat the whole purpose for designing it like this.

Danail.Pavlov wrote:

disabling the pop up dict.

Do you mean disable the hover-over pop-up, or disable the pop-up even when you click on a word?

The pop-up doesn't change to the default dictionary. 

Danail.Pavlov wrote:

Would it be possible to include https://cantonese.org/ as a dictionary for Cantonese?

Added. Still considering the other issue.

Thanks - I completely understand now. Ticket written.

Danail.Pavlov wrote:

Im suggesting either a better Cantonese dictionary, or the option to disable it altogether

I'll forward this suggestion. 

Hi Danail, sorry about that. Is there any way you could make a short video of these issues? I want to make sure I understand so I can forward it to the tech team.

Ha.H wrote:

Could you add https://ordnet.dk/ for the Danish language? Thank you

Sorry, but monolingual dictionaries don't work in our reading tool.

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

Cantonese – 100 conversations (complete)

Cebuano - 28 (stopped work)

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)

Mandarin - 100 conversations (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 LT 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 LT 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. 

Right. I just didn't want someone to read your post and think that we are looking into keeping stats for reading time.

Just so there are not misconceptions, words, not minutes.

Ok, thanks. I'll forward the request.

Ha.H wrote:

I saw a thread about the function to count how many words you have read that day.

Please give a link to this thread.

I'll forward your request to the technical team, but unless it's extremely easy to implement, it probably won't happen.

I remember discussing that too, but couldn't find history for that request. Anyway, the short answer is that the functionality doesn't exist, and we don't have any plans to add it. 

What may have happened is you selected "default". If so, go to the hamburger menu (3 bars uper rh corner)>reading settings>clear default dictionary selection.

I fixed it, even though it's not ours.

I opened Language Crush Tagalog Videos with 5 videos today.

I’ve decided to start creating YouTube videos for large languages that are lacking in resources. The topics will be grammar, vocabulary, and cultural insights in the “pure” target language. They will have accurate subtitles in the L2, not just auto-generated.

My primary goal here is to provide learners with comprehensible input in both reading and listening. Picking up a little grammar, vocabulary, and culture along the way is sort of a bonus. We’re not trying to systematically teach grammar, for example. But personally, I find those topics to be quite interesting, especially in the beginning, which piques my attention and makes the input more digestible.

It wasn’t until I started learning Italian that I became sold on this type of comprehensible input. I noticed the channel Learning Italian with Lucrezia, a channel with lots of 100% Italian videos which I was watching to improve my listening, also had accurate soft subtitles. This made them possible to read with my reading tool, so I did, and noticed quick improvement. Then I searched for similar channels and found three right off the bat. I was hooked. I began to wonder – why don’t all languages have these? I sure could use something like this for Swahili.

 

There are very few Swahili learning channels in YouTube, and they all use English heavily. In addition, although it’s not too hard to find made-for-native Swahili videos, almost all of them have one of the following problems: no subtitles, inaccurate subtitles, lots of English code switching.

After about a month of preparation, I opened the channel Language Crush Swahili Videos today. I dropped three videos, and the plan is to drop two 10 minute videos per week from here on. Check it out – I’m interested in your opinions.

Sorry about that. I've elevated it, but still can't give you an accurate completion date.

Big milestone – B1! Ok, it’s not official, I didn’t take a test or anything, but this is what happened. The day after my last post I had easily the best conversation so far. My teacher was fantastic (the first “3” I’ve had in a while), which made a big difference. At the end of the class she was talking about how great my level was after only three months. So I asked, and she said B2. Definitely an exaggeration, but that made me think hard about it, and I knew that I was no longer A2. The next three days in a row, despite not having the best teachers (all 2’s), I still felt B1-ish. And one other teacher told me I was B1. So I changed my level in italki and such. Here are my hours of conversation:

A1 - 10 hrs

A2 – 20 hrs

B1 – 42 hrs

I’m now hoping to reach B2 at around 80 hours. I’ve been studying exactly 3 months, and I have 3 months left at home (I travel 6 months per year, starting in early November). So you might think that I’m cutting it close; 42 hours in the first 3 months, leaving 38 hours in the second 3 months. But actually I didn’t converse in the first month, so if I continue at my current rate I could reach my goal around the first of October, despite what I wrote in my last post.

I’m on my 60th of 67 lessons in my Textbook now. I skipped 2 or 3 more lessons because they were really bad. This textbook is one of the best I’ve used in any language, but there have been several lessons now that were way below the level of the majority. The only thing I can think of is maybe they were written by some associate professor. There are two authors, but they each claim responsibility for about half the chapters. There are only 6 or 7 bad ones, so I’m thinking someone “helped” one of them. Why are they bad? Poorly explained grammar points, more vague exercises (having many possible answers) than usual, and a higher bar for vocabulary. Not fun. But tomorrow I begin the only “Big Six” tense that I haven’t learned –il condizionale (8 lessons total). 

Speaking of grammar, one of the things I’ve done differently this time is to tell my tutors to go easy on corrections, rather than tell them not to correct me. Some do what I ask, but most don’t. Today’s tutor was particularly brutal. She stopped me two or three times before I broke down and told her “If you’re going to correct me, just do it quickly with no further explanation. I study grammar on my own, and I know every mistake you point out. If I don’t understand something, I’ll ask you about it.” The very next correction she stopped me and gave me an explanation, and this time in English! Sigh. If I had hair I’d be pulling it out. But she realized what she had done, giggled an apology, and it went better after that. And what I said is true – I knew what I did wrong as soon as she pointed it out in every case, and often before, literally as the words are coming out of my mouth. I refuse to slow down during a real conversation though, because that’s worse than having bad grammar. The errors decrease with practice ime, as long as I keep studying grammar and the other facets of the language outside of conversation.

I understand 99% of what my tutors say. It frustrates me when they underestimate my comprehension. I need to tell some to speak faster, and stop repeating and typing out words they think I don’t understand. This is just weird – I swear I’m not displaying my puzzled face to anyone. Maybe it’s because I still don’t speak well, or that I had A2 in my profile for so long. But that being said, I misunderstood something today in a pretty funny way. She said “ti capita di avere.... ?” and I was like “What? Can you repeat that?” and after she did, I said “Can you write that?” Then I said “The English translation makes no sense. You are saying ‘do you understand to have…’ And she laughed and said “No. It’s not capire (to understand); it’s capitare (to happen)!” I said oops, and we continued. But in my defense I don’t even know that verb passively, and it sounds a lot like capire. :lol:

Per.Sune wrote:

Tagalog.com used to be a supported dictionary but it is no longer? Why is that?

They changed some things which made it impossible for us to access their site.

I hit 40 hours of conversation today. This is double the number at which I declared A2, so I thought there might be a chance that today would be B1 day, but I don’t think I’m there yet. I feel close though – maybe at the 50 hour mark, which was my original low-end prediction. I’ve had 2 or 3 teachers tell me I’m B1 without any prodding, not that I’m keeping track. I had one say I was B2; maybe looking for more bookings?

But I also had one very negative, seemingly depressed teacher tell me I wasn’t A2, but I wasn’t B1 either. I think she meant I was on the way to B1, but when I see it written down it makes me think – A1??? That teacher was strange. 100% twenty-questions teaching style, never cracked a smile or said anything positive. I tried to turn it into a conversation once, asking if she could swim, and she said “yes, at the Olympic level” and quickly tried to change the subject. But I asked her about it again, and she explained that her swim instructor was trying to get her to qualify for the Olympics but she didn’t make it for some reason. Maybe that’s why she’s so depressed. She also said italki is her only job.

I’m on lesson 52 of 67 in my textbook. It will be nice to finally finish it. I’ll probably go through it again, and then try to focus on the daily grammar point in my conversations. I going to make more of an effort to push grammar into my speech than I’ve done in the past.

I study Italian 9 out of every 10 days, and I also review one my other languages every day. I wrote this in another post:

I've been learning Italian for 2 months. I speak 11 other foreign languages, and 9 of them have not been impacted in the slightest during this period. My two newest languages, German 1 year and Portuguese 3 years, have been impacted. I review these languages once every 10 days. German, which is pretty different from Italian, was not impacted too severely. In fact, the impact seems to have worn off already. Portuguese on the other hand, which is very similar to Italian, was devastated. My low B2 sunk to a low A2, as I struggled to pull out Portuguese words instead of Italian word in my Portuguese conversation classes. However, the worst seems to be over, and I'm speeding up recovery by cutting the time between reviews in half. I feel I'm approaching B1 again and improving quickly.

This is still the case today, as I approach three months; my German feels stable at B1, and even though I cut the period for Portuguese in half, conversations feel A2. Experience tells me things will improve as my Italian gets better, but I have no doubts about needing to do another Portuguese spurt. German too. B1 is not good enough.

My daily routine hasn’t changed much, but some times have decreased.

1) 30-45 min Anki reviews.

2) 30 min read passages that have audio out loud, then listen to the audio while following along silently with the text.

3) 60 min conversation class. Curate a list of words/sentences for the next day's Anki reviews.

(60 min listen to audio stripped from easy youtube vlogs if I walk.)

(30 min watch Netflix series during lunch.)

4) 30 min textbook.

(30 min watch Netflix/YouTube videos.)

Items in parentheses optional.

I’m hoping the 50 hour mark = around B1 and 100 hour mark = around B2. That would get me to around B2 in September. Since Portuguese is on an accelerated schedule, I hope it will be in good enough condition to leave it on maintenance while I brutally attack Japanese reading. I’d love to finish the Japanese spurt during my 6 months of travels. Then I’ll go after Portuguese and German before doing what I hope is my final long spurt in Korean. I want to have all 12 of my foreign languages beaten into B2+ condition before I turn 70. Then I’ll just review one language per day and enjoy them.

rinske.Visser wrote:

Hi all,
I've been using this site for about 3 weeks now and find it very convenient to practice texts that are several levels above my current reading abilities. Recently, I've been wanting to try out the listening function as well, but every time I try importing from youtube, instead of separating the sentences into words, every sentence is displayed as a separate word, which makes using the dictionary function rather difficult.
I don't know if I'm missing some steps, or this is an error in the program. Does someone know a solution for this? I usually use Chinese - other, since the Chinese - mandarin language selection doesn't detect traditional subtitles. I don't know if that is relevant.
Thanks,
Rinske

Hi Rinske,

I think we've got all the issues fixed now. Thanks for your patience!

Alvin.Parmar wrote:

add a dictionary for Ancient Greek?https://logeion.uchicago.edu/ is good because it also parses the grammatical forms.

Added.

I've never tried Cantonese, so I don't know the answer.  

Yay, I finally received my paper textbook from Amazon – first paper book purchase of any kind in many years! I still use the pdf to study with, but I wanted to do the right thing and purchase this excellent book (no kindle version available). I haven’t been making as much progress with it as I’d hoped for, because I’ve only been doing about 30 min/day. I’m on lesson 33 of 67, and that’s after skipping 5 lessons on the future tense (I’ll learn the future in the future). I looked through the table of contents and confirmed that the six basic tenses I posted about earlier are covered, plus two additional tenses.

 

I just hit 20 hours of conversation, and I’ve decided to start considering myself to be around A2. Two of my last three teachers, without any prompting, have told me I’m at “a good intermediate level”. I don’t kid myself – I know I’m not B1 yet. But I’m confident that I’m no longer A1, which is nice because some teachers refuse to teach students below A2. Italian italki tutors aren’t as picky as German ones though; there are more Germans that wouldn’t teach below B1 than Italians that won’t teach below A2. Not sure why, but I suspect it’s based on demand.

I had an intense teacher today. Harsh corrections, even though I asked her to keep it to a minimum. I complained, and she eased off a bit. Then we got stuck on a question she asked. I said something like “I review all of my languages” and she asked “why do you say ‘my’ languages?” I asked if it was wrong, because I actually had a German teacher who said it was a bit unnatural. However she said it was correct, but she wanted to know what I meant by “my” languages. We went back and forth a couple times:

Is it wrong?

No?

Why are you asking me if it’s not wrong?

Because I don’t know what you mean.

Is it wrong?

Etc., etc.

Finally, she elaborated that by saying “my” languages, I’m implying that I’ve already studied them. And I said of course I have; I’d thought that was obvious, but I guess it wasn’t. Maybe she heard my long list of languages and assumed it was a wish list or something. Then she listed her languages, three European plus Chinese, and I said “Really – did you live in China?” She said no, she’d learned it at Uni, and I was thinking to myself “yeah, right” because I’ve heard that before. Then she said she wanted to speak a little Chinese with me. I told her I didn’t want to get confused, but she could ask me again at the end of the hour. When we finally did speak it, I was pleasantly surprised at how good she was, especially her pronunciation (she pronounced United States (mei3guo2) as mei2guo2, but that was the only obvious error). She was surprised with my level too (we are both around B2 imo), and finally looked at the levels listed on my profile and was like “wow”. So the conversation ended on a positive note.

Sorry about that - ticket written.

Today I broke the 10 hours of conversation barrier. My first 5 lessons were 30 min each, and today was my 8th one hour lesson, so I have a total of 10.5 hours. I rate my teachers in my own little spreadsheet, because I use a lot of them and I’d hate to lose track of the ones I like the most. I use a 3 star system. 3 stars = repeat, 2 stars = maybe, 1 star = never again. I’m finding Italian teachers to be above average for my purposes, compared to other languages. Seven 3s, five 2s and only one 1(she’s an over-corrector who has done a lot of travelling and doesn’t like developing countries).

I consider the first 10 hours to be an important milestone, because it’s the hardest period of language learning for me, and I just want to get through it. It’s such an awkward feeling sometimes. All that struggling, and long pauses. But Italian wasn’t that bad, and needless to say, I’m much better now than I was in the first lesson. After my 11th lesson, I felt like I’d leveled up, but I held off on declaring myself A1-ish until today. I feel like my true level is actually A2-ish, but I need to catch up with my conversation. I’m guessing another 20 hours or so to get there.

Textbook wise, I decided to make a switch to the nicer Una Grammatica Italiana per Tutti. It’s a great book. My only complaint is that it has some vague exercises, meaning there can be more than one answer, but only about 10% of the time, so not a show stopper. My previous choice had more issues in addition to vague exercises: it was a bit hard to look at, used more vocabulary, had more mistakes, and even introduced some grammar points in the exercises. Still a relatively good text though, which tells you something about the quality of textbooks in general. Anyway, I’m on Lesson 19 of 67 in the new textbook. It’s going to be more time consuming than I thought – probably about 1 hour per lesson. That’s the biggest change to my daily routine, which is now:

1) 30-45 min Anki reviews.

2) 30-60 min read passages that have audio out loud, then listen to the audio while following along silently with the text.

3) 60 min conversation class. Curate a list of words/sentences for the next day's Anki reviews.

(60 min listen to audio stripped from easy youtube vlogs if I walk.)

(30 min watch Netflix series during lunch.)

4) 60 min textbook.

(30 min watch Netflix/YouTube videos.)

It amounts to about 3 hrs of full concentration study, with up to an additional 2 hrs of partial attention listening/watching (in parentheses above)

 

I haven't observed it myself, but I've heard it before.

I hit another milestone, and it’s a big one – did my first conversation on italki! It went well; much better than my first German (my last language) one. I decided to do 30 min lessons for a week or so, then increase it to 60 minutes. I got 25 anki notes in that 30 min, so I’m glad it wasn’t any longer. One nice thing about Italian is that, for me, the vocabulary is familiar enough so that drilling whole sentences is sufficient. I rarely feel the need to break out single words. Anyway, I didn’t embarrass myself too bad. I only used google a few times, and I understood most of what the teacher said.

My grammar was pretty good too, and that old theory about only needing 6 of the 21 “tenses” for the majority of colloquial speech seems to be holding up. The short list I was given by a helpful native was:

Presente semplice (mangio, bevo, ecc...)

Passato prossimo (Ho mangiato, ho bevuto)

Stare + gerundio (sto mangiando, sto bevendo)

Imperativo (mangia! bevi!)

Condizionale presente (mangerei, berrei)

Imperfetto (mangiavo, bevevo)

I used the first 3 frequently. I don’t know, but didn’t need, the 3rd and 4th. I don’t know but needed the 6th, so I studied it right after the class.

About a week ago I was in somewhat of a panic over grammar. I had finished creating all my conversation-primer sentences, which turned out to be 40, and wanted to start TY. Well, TY Italian is crap – one of the worst textbooks I’ve ever used. It covered very little, had way too much English, too much formal register, lot’s of mistakes, etc. So I did some serious searching for textbooks/grammars. I read a ton of reviews on Amazon and Reddit, then checked out any free samples I could get my hands on. I eliminated all of the English based ones. There was one that sounded good, recommended by Lucrezia; GP. Grammatica pratica della lingua italiana. Livello A1-C1: Grammatica - for English Speakers. But I couldn’t take a look at it, and there is no e-book version. Other than that, the best English based one I could find was Italian made Simple. The content was really good, although quite heavy (too much vocab imo). But it’s really dense; they split the page vertically and write in two columns. There is no e-book, but I was looking at a pdf, and it moves really slowly. The other thing is that it’s from 1960. The runner up was Complete Italian Step-by-Step. Fully functional e-book, so I thought I’d struck gold, but it turns out they took an older version, chopped it up and made it into an e-book. It’s basically a very dry grammar with some exercises inserted in strategic places. It’s probably ok to function as a grammar, but I find it difficult to work through those types of text books. I checked out 5 or 6 more of the most popular English based books, but won’t bother to list them here.

Now if you’re looking for a good, free, English based Italian text book, and don’t mind that most of it’s exercises are based on audio and video (also free), then you might want to check out WellesleyX: Italian Language and Culture: Beginner (2023-2024). But I don’t want to be juggling audio and video in my text books. I get enough audio and video elsewhere; I just want good, digestible grammar.

The reason I eliminated all the English based books is that I discovered I can handle monolingual ones, and they are much better overall. I can do this because I completed Language Transfer and have done a fair amount of reading already. So I’d recommend this to others that are in the same boat. The first ones I checked out are the ones they always recommend on Reddit. Nuovissimo Progetto Italiano and Nuovo Espresso are both designed for classroom, are heavily dependent on audio/video, and don’t have normal e-books. Nuovo Espresso claims to have an e-book, but I’ve heard that it is only accessible on their site, and only for 1 month. Anyway, I want a self-study text book that doesn’t have audio/video, so I checked out some more of Lucrezia’s suggestions.

I was able to check out Parla e Scrivi, Grammatica pratica della lingua italiana and Nuova Grammatica Pratica Della Lingua Italiana. Nuova Grammatica Pratica Della Lingua Italiana looked good, but there was no e-book and the pdf I was looking at was really slow. So I had to choose between the other two, which were pretty much exactly what I was looking for. No official e-books, but the pdfs I checked out moved fast enough. I selected Parla e Scrivi, maybe because it was the first one Lucrezia recommended.

The only other thing I wanted to mention here was that my reading has improved a lot. I can now tolerate reading any subtitles I want to import from Youtube. By that I mean, I know enough of the vocabulary so it doesn’t burn me out to read it. Keep in mind that I’m using a reading tool, which gives me a great advantage. But this has made it possible to read a lot more variety; a lot more stuff that interests me. Another thing that really helps is that I can put sloppy auto-generated subs into Chat GPT and make them much more readable by adding punctuation and capitalization without changing any words.

In closing, here is my current daily routine:
1) Anki reviews.

2) 30 min conversation class (soon to increase to 60)

3) Watch Netflix series during breakfast

4) Review my 40 conversation-starter sentences (this will be dropped before the end of the month)

5) Read passages that have audio for 60 min out loud, then listen to the audio while following along silently with the text.

6) 30-60 min textbook

7) Listen to pod101 if I walk. Watch Netflix/YouTube 30-60 min.

I am finally back home from my 6 month annual trip, and it feels good. In my last post, I talked about reviewing one language per day over the course of my 1 month in Tanzania and 2 months in the Philippines. But I only did it for 2 weeks in Tanzania, and 2 weeks in the Philippines. The rest of the time, I just did my Anki cards in the morning (about 30 min). This was due to poor internet, and me wanting a break. I feel nicely rested now, and ready to start Italian.

Here is my rough plan for Italian:

1st month

Alphabet/pronunciation

Pimsleur

Italianpod 101 (background noise only)

 

2nd - 6th months

Conversation

Read and Listen

Language Transfer Italian/Teach Yourself Italian

Watch videos/series

 

Actually, I have already started. I study/review pronunciation daily using the tool I made here. I’m on Pimsleur lesson 4, and I play italianpod101 when I walk. 

I watch some Italian Netflix too. For example, Lidia Poët, a sexy female lawyer in the days before females were allowed to do such work, who does her own detective work too. I don’t understand well without subtitles, but that’s to be expected at this point.

I’ll probably start Language Transfer early, just so I have grammar a better grammar base before beginning conversation.

This is, in theory, my last language, so it’s an exciting time!

I’ve reached a bit of a milestone in Italian, so I though I’d post about it. Regarding the old list, I finished the Alphabet/pronunciation step, and continue to listen to Italianpod 101 when I do my walks, every other day. Even though it was supposed to be in the second month, I started watching videos/series already. My comprehension isn’t great, but that’s normal at this stage. I also started reading/listening. It was a rough start, but now I’m up to about 30 min/day, and it’s surprisingly smooth. More on that later.

And surprisingly enough, I got interested in grammar and finished Language Transfer already. It was only an introductory course; 45 lessons, or about 7 hours total audio. I did 5 lessons per day, so it took 9 days. It was somewhat challenging, but very well put together, so I got a lot out of it. I would listen to a lesson, answer as well as I could, and write down the things that I wanted to review later in Anki. I got most answers right, but still want to review a lot of stuff in Anki. What a superb free resource; it makes me consider creating something similar. Being an introductory course, it lacks some important stuff – like the imperative. But it’s a great start. My next step, grammar wise, will be Teach Yourself.

All this time I’ve been doing Pimsleur, but today I decided to stop for the same reason I stopped Pimsleur German. The language they use is too formal and not colloquial. They use the formal form of you (lei) 100% of the time, for example. Of course, they will eventually get to the informal (tu). But I, along with most people, will use the informal almost all the time, so I want to start with it. I’d prefer starting with tu 100% of the time, then add in lei later. I’d even accept 50/50, but 100% lei is ridiculous.

Pimsleur is great for pronunciation, chunking, and preparing one to speak, but I think I’ve gotten enough out of it. No need to learn a bunch of stuff that I will not use. I wouldn’t be wasting my time, but it wouldn’t be the best use of it either. So what will I do instead? Build islands. This is a concept explained in How to Improve your Foreign Language Immediately. Basically, I’ll write and memorize little monologues for many separate topics.

The more such monologues the speaker knows, the more such “island” are available when the need arises, the easier it is for him/her to speak/swim. In essence, even a native speaker has a number of such islands. These are the speeches in which the speaker sounds more effective and articulate than usual. These are stories which, as the result of much repetition, are more polished and impressive. These are formulas for expressing certain positions or conceptions about which the speaker has thought and spoken often. These are the speaker’s speeches, lectures, “opening lines”, and remnants from earlier training. The use of such islands helps the native speaker to express him/herself more precisely and eloquently. If islands can be so helpful to native speakers, what can we conclude about foreign speakers? For the foreign speaker, an island is salvation: it provides a chance for improving communication contact, it affords a desirable break, it attracts the attention of the native speaker. I would say that the confidence of the foreigner in speaking is directly dependent upon the number of islands he/she has in his/her command. It is not possible to overstate the communicative value or importance of islands for speech.

Actually, I’ll start out by memorizing single sentences. I’ll make a list of sentence I think I’ll use often, memorize them, and review them daily until they are automatic. I’m not going to put these in Anki – I’ll benefit by the context of leaving them in list form and reviewing them all every day. I’ll post them so native speakers can correct them. I think audio would be helpful, so I may post them as a tool on my website, since I can add audio to them there. Eventually I’ll grow these single sentences into longer monologues, or islands. It may have to wait until I start conversation though; I haven’t decided yet.

This is the new routine I’ll start tomorrow, some of which is continuation of what I’ve already been doing:

1)    Anki reviews.

2)    Write out 10 sentences that I will need for my conversation classes per day, memorize them, review the old ones. These range from really simple stuff (How do you say X in Italian, etc.) to more personalized stuff (I don’t like to dive, but I like to snorkel, etc.).

3)    Read passages that have audio for 60 min out loud, then listen to the audio while following along silently with the text. Put 20 words per day from the reading into Anki, and start reviewing them the next day. I’ve been using Learn Italian with Lucrezia for this, since it’s comprehensible and has real subtitles in YouTube (not auto-generated).

After 5 days or so, I’ll probably have enough sentences, so number 2 above will become Teach Yourself. A week or two after that, the sentences will probably be really solid, so it will be time to start conversation. I’m thinking that will be around June 1, exactly 1 month after starting. That’s early – I messed up by starting too early with German, but I don’t think that’s going to be an issue with Italian; I seem to be making pretty fast progress.

Ok, we'll put that suggestion on the backlog. Locking this topic.

fyi - it's back to where it was before. Since there will be far fewer breaks now, the sentence break issue will be less common. So we'll save budget for now and delay this possible improvement.

There's a ticket on this already - we were trying to fix the slowness some users were experiencing.

bbyj wrote:

Can we have any decision on when it gets broken/vs not or in what part it gets broken up? Or at least at the end of a sentence? Just curious on your thoughts.

I didn't know about the end of the sentence issue. Size wise, I think it's a bit short now. It's based on amount of text. I'd like it to allow at least as much text as the longest "LC Conversation" passages. They are 6-min conversations, but probably speak faster than most videos, so I’m guessing it would be roughly equivalent to a 10 min video. What do you think?

Gug.27 wrote:

Your android app is really good too, thanks for your hard work.

Thanks!

bbyj wrote:

I think this got fixed now

Thanks!

BrianLearnsGreek.Birch wrote:

X doesn't make a word ignored.

Is this a shortcut suggestion?

wrote:

Arrow keys don't move to the next word.

Arrow keys on the phone? They change page.

wrote:

I can't play a sentence with audio. I don't see a TTS option (004 Greek language passage).

Works for me. TTS is under the 3 dots (reading preferences).

wrote:

Highlighting a word blocks the page buttons on the bottom on a small screen (good that it doesn't on a big screen).

We tried the pop-up definition in several locations, and everyone preferred this one. Just touch a blank area to clear it.

wrote:

Please add shortcuts for navigation based on a modifier key (shift etc.) and another key.

On the phone?

wrote:

I'd want to import books. Is this possible?

Yes. Convert them to text first, and make them private (if they are not public domain). The app will break them up into multiple passages if there is too much text.

BrianLearnsGreek.Birch wrote:

Known, ignore and next page (stop hiding the controls).

What do you mean by hiding the controls? Can you provide a screenshot?

wrote:

A shortcut for "next highlighted" word would help.

Known words are skipped now by the right and left arrow keys. Is that what you mean?

wrote:

I can't see dark green highlighted text on some screens so changing it would help.

It's ok for me - can you provide a screenshot?

wrote:

Working better on android would be great.

Can you be more specific?

wrote:

There are some half-shortcuts.

What do you mean?

wrote:

SOMETIMES right and enter goes to the next page. Not when a word is highlighted. Please make it always work (ideally using control right or page down).

Is this on android?

Gug.27 wrote:

I agree this would be very useful to be able to zoom through texts using the keyboard only working on my unknown and learning words. I can't wait for this update to get implemented, it will be amazing!

Hi Gug - this should be working now. Can you confirm?

Ok, I added this to your other list, and we will discuss them. 

BrianLearnsGreek.Birch wrote:

You updated the app but didn't add these. That's worrying.

Note how old this thread is. The other change was out before you posted, but delayed in a migration issue. We solved the migration issue. Please be patient; we haven't discussed your requests yet, and it takes time to release stuff.

BrianLearnsGreek.Birch wrote:

No. Stop it. sdfdasfasdfadsfdsf asdfdsfdsfdsf

Please use the quote button and elaborate so that we know who you are opposing and why. 

ok, we'll discuss it

ok - thanks for the info!

Jori wrote:

Hi there, I've experienced the same bug
In my case, if I create a French passage with the text "Brandon avait péri à l’âge de vingt ans", it switches péri (to die) to prié (to pray)
This can be a game changer in terms of the story events, hope the devs kill Brandon once and for all (joke)

We can't get to the bottom of this. Do you see this very often?

The ticket is in work.

They do seem to talk a bit slower in this passage. Total words 900s for this one, 1200s for the previous. Hmm...

Hi All - it should be fixed now.

There is a known issue involving passages with audio. We're sorry about that. We have a ticket in work, and will post here when it's fixed.

abdozokani wrote:

The best dictionary for swedish
https://lexin.nada.kth.se/lexin/

Done!

Elbourn wrote:

Could you add dict.cc for Norwegian to German (https://deno.dict.cc), please?

Done!

leosmith wrote:

Joseph.Adams wrote:

The Playlist on the Android App is not working for me.

Sorry about that. Ticket written.

We think this is fixed - can you please confirm?