„C'est une épineuse entreprise, et plus qu'il ne semble, de suivre une allure si vagabonde que celle de nôtre esprit; de pénétrer les profondeurs opaques de ses replis internes; de choisir et arrêter tant de menus de ses agitations.“
Michel de Montaigne
New Year's resolution. Learn a new language and improve on what I already know. New language? Spanish or Japanese. Improve French and German. Brush up on Italian. This journal will track my personal language learning odyssey and record some musings on language learning and languages in general. Here I have also tried to log some language activities, progress reports and personal notes in the unlikely event someone actually reads them and finds them useful.
I should mention that "learning" a new language depending on the language and the timeframe in my vocabulary simply means establishing a solid foundation in the language, bringing it to a useable level and adding it permanently to the list of languages that I can enjoy.
A short intro:
Initially I wrote that I "intend to refine my language learning methods, develop new ones and learn as much as possible. I'd like to brush up and improve on what I already know..." I edited the title of my previous log to remove any reference to studying. I am not really studying anything. I might learn something along the way but I'm not studying anything.
My languages:
Italian - I acquired Italian thanks to Italian TV channels. My acquisition was rather odd as I was able to follow my favorite programs only in summer.
It dawned on me that I could understand the language after my father challenged me about wasting my time watching something I didn't understand. I certainly wasn't trying to learn anything. My main interest at the time were cartoons but I watched all sorts of content. I don't remember trying to figure things out in the beginning but I certainly paid attention to the characters and the storyline. I loved it. Somewhere I wrote that I examined a non-exhaustive list of Japanese cartoons aired in Italy at the time and that I recognized around 150 titles including Ikkyu San (Il piccolo bonzo), the Time Bokan series (Yattaman), Lo strano mondo di Minù (Mrs. Pepper Pot), Pinocchio, Candy Candy, Lady Georgie, Maison Ikkoku, Urusei Yatsura (Lamù, la ragazza dello spazio), Sam il ragazzo del West (Kōya no Shōnen Isamu), Ugo il re del judo, and Mademoiselle Anne (Haikara-san ga Tōru). The combined running time of these shows is over 3,000 hours. I didn't finish all these series but I also saw numerous commercials, reruns and other shows.
I remember having to run like crazy because this show ended less than 10 minutes before my scheduled math lessons. I also remember wanting to buy boxing gloves after watching "Forza Sugar" (Ganbare Genki).
I went straight for the pretty sounds and images. I did not "try" to learn Italian but I learned it well. After major abuse it's still with me and it will likely stay with me for life. The TV approach also worked well for me as a teenager. I understood that I could learn this way and I wasn't afraid to just listen.I suspect that people trying to learn or acquire a language will keep asking "how long?" and "are we there yet?" My main regret was that the show was over or that I wouldn't be able to watch it until next summer. "Language learning" meant having to study Mauger.
In 2016 I declared that I wanted to "learn some Spanish" but for the most part I was "wasting my time" watching TV. However, this time I was purposefully exposing myself to Spanish. I was also very conscious of my previous language acquisition. However I was still able to get lost in the content. I have looked up only a handful of words.
All this got me to explore SLA problems like the role of consciousness in second language learning. And then there's Krashen. I suspect he's popular on account of his neat, easy-to-digest theories.
On Oct. 13, 2016 Krashen posted/updated his post about "compelling" comprehensible input. He wrote: "Compelling: so interesting you are not aware of the language, sense of time diminishes, sense of self diminishes..."
That's pretty much how it felt watching all those shows in Italian. The "I" in i+1 was infinitesimally small for me. Hey, a pun. What I meant to say is that Italian is not in the same language group as my mother tongue and that I could only rely on visual clues and some cognates. By the time I had the opportunity to study the language formally my language skills were already firmly rooted. Unfortunately I had few opportunities to use Italian actively. As of 2018 my Italian is in a sort of atrophied state but it has still served me as a solid base for my foray into Spanish and Portuguese.
French - I learned what I know of French through very conventional means as a kid (red & blue Mauger, school, some TV). I occasionally read poetry in French. In the nineties I did a fair amount of writing in French. My French feels a lot stronger than it should based on the number of hours I invested in this language. I never had any problem following TV shows. I can only credit Mauger and/or Italian for this.
German - I acquired German the same way as Italian. I was a teenager and free-to-air TV channels were predominantly German. I can easily follow TV shows and audiobooks. In 2009? my Dialang score was: listening comprehension C2, vocabulary 820. I don't feel like guesstimating the number of hours I spent on German-language media.
Russian - I first started playing around with this language in 2007. I used one 40-hour audiobook and a couple of movies to get accustomed to Russian. I maybe spent 100 hours in total on Russian between 2007 and 2017. In 2017 I spent 300 hours on Russian (TV, mostly).
Spanish - 500 hours of Spanish-language TV programming in 2016 and 150 hours so far in 2017. I also listened to several audiobooks in Spanish. The best thing I did for my Spanish was to simply watch a bunch of cartoons. A course such as Michel Thomas Spanish will not cover any of the finer differences between Spanish and Italian but will instead concentrate on basic areas where there are obvious similarities.
Portuguese - 350 hours of TV watching in the second half of 2016 and some 150 hrs in 2017. I also listened to audiobooks. I was exposed almost exclusively to Br. Portuguese.
Japanese - October 25, 2018: I can now pick out random sentences from the audio portion of a graded Japanese reader. I studied Japanese briefly in 2007. I also played with it in 2018. I initially did the mud crawl under low barbed wire and I died half way through Pimsleur I. I also learned a couple of hundred kanji. Only I didn't learn them. I respawned years later to find that listening through a few bilingual phrasebooks (including stuff meant for native Japanese speakers) plus a bit of Vocabulearn I learned in 2007 was enough to place me into Pimsleur III or IV. At this stage I find Peppa Pig very helpful. If you're into courses, I like the NHK course and the video course called Let's learn Japanese basic (see the resources link). I have yet to go through either of these two courses but they definitely left a good impression.
Polish happened in 2018. I spent around 300 hours on Polish audiobooks. As of January 2019 I can comfortably follow S King audiobooks.
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