Resuming until it hurts

This was written on 10/5/09 but somehow I never published it.

Oh poor little language learning blog! I've neglected you again as I had my German studies. It's understandable, since I started grad school in September and have lately figured out how to reincorporate the pastimes of my last life into this new crazy one.

I feel good about my German studies at the moment. I wasn't sure how to reprioritize it until I spoke to a couple different students in my program who speak German from extended stays there. Well that was enough to rally me back to the Küchentisch, that big wooden surface in my kitchen, and sit down with the book over breakfast. Somewhat startlingly, I keep returning to German after these little motivators. I seem good at recognizing a good opportunity when it hits me upside the face.

On a related note I had a party Saturday night for about 40 people and made my room the coat room. One of the students that showed up commented on my Hebrew alphabet chart, and wanted to know if I knew the language. After explaining my brief foray that was interrupted by German, he offered to teach me should I ever be interested. This was less of an opportunity than it might seem, since I don't really see the point in being taught until I get myself through all the FSI courses. Too many times I've painfully witnessed beginning language lessons. Much like teaching your girlfriend a little guitar, it typically doesn't lead anywhere. It's not that teaching a beginner is worthless, it's that the beginner needs to prove to themselves that they are really interested by putting in some solid hours alone before seeking out a teacher. I must have played guitar for four years before I sought out instruction. I went into Spanish cold turkey in university and it was quite painful for the duration. I'll never do that again, unless my company ships me off to live in Rangun for a year on short notice.

So here I am, feeling back in the language driver's seat. I'm continuing to apply the same techniques and finishing off the first FSI course in German. I've started listening to an all German music radio station (painful) and I'm going to try to learn to sing some basic songs, such as Eidelweiss and Hopp Hopp Hopp, Pferdchen Lauf Galopp, which is an old folk song that my grandfather used to sing to me on his knee (how cute is that?)

I'm not going to write anything tonight in German, but I'll do so in my next post and it will be awesome.

The importance of word origins

I've been reading a book about building vocabulary in English, whose title I'll post here as soon as it's back in my hand. The book's primary methodology is learning word root and prefixes of Latin and Greek to help remember and parse new vocabulary. (They also mention some other techniques like using word context and mnemonic devices.) Learning word origins is similarly applicable when learning the vocabulary of a foreign language. Unfortunately, very unfortunately, translation dictionaries don't give you the origins of words when you translate them. This is even true of the online dictionaries that should have unlimited space and be able to link to the origin of each word from its true dictionary definition. I've been scouring the wonderweb with search terms like "German word origins" but nothing really comes up. I'm sure that a full German dictionary such as Das Deutsche Wörterbuch has word origins, but I can't read well enough to make any sense of it yet. Luckily for me my target language shares many common roots with English, so often I can look up the English origin of the word. For example stattfinden means to take place. I looked up statt by itself and found that it means instead of. That led me to look up stead in English, which means the place or roll that someone or something should have or fill. I only use stead when I say "in his stead" instead of "in his place," as you probably do as well to sound clever. Anyhow, I can think of stattfinden as meaning to find in the place of which leads me to to take place. I know this is pretty basic stuff but applied to more complicated words this technique is invaluable. Of course I'm taking advantage of the common Germanic root which in Old English is stede which means place. Also the Oxford dictionary says that it comes from an Indo-European root shared by the verb to stand. Neato.

I'm slowing progressing throught the first twelve units of the FSI German course. I'm now right in the middle of unit 10, which is disappointing since I've been at it for 9 months or so. But lack of discipline and life's turmoil always slows me down. I hope in time that I can learn to value an hour of language study each day as much as a shower or cup of coffee in the morning. The key to the habit is as always motivation. I need to imagine that I will soon be attending urban planning conferences in the German speaking world and this will lovely Germanic to chit chat with afterward over beer and spätzle. I start a graduate program in urban planning in two weeks. I have no idea if that will permit me any time for language study. Vielleicht.

And a season passes

I took a break from German so that I could prepare for my trip to Spain and France, practicing those languages. Italy was hopeless. Anyhow, I'm jumping back on dem wagon now and am gonna go at it again and see what happens.

Invasion of the Jews?

I tread lightly when speaking of a new German Jewish conflict, but it has occurred in my own linguistic jousting arena. As I've made evident previously, I'm attempting to learn German in an environment virtually free of German. I don't have any enthusiastic conversation partners around me, just one that likes to awkwardly make fun of my accent. Note to people with friends trying to learn a language you already know: don't make fun of or criticize their accent when they're beginners. Accents can always be corrected later and often will be when the speaker gets more comfortable with speaking and has the mental capacity to pay attention to it. I remember a relative of mine once correcting my Spanish accent every time I spoke, and I now have a respectable ability to mimic the sound and cadence of native speakers, no thanks to her. I think it's great to correct a consistent pronunciation error--my French teacher told me I was saying beau cu, which sounds identical to beau cul, nice ass, rather than my intended beaucoup (many)--but the main way to improve accent is through exposure. Anyway, getting back to the jousting, at times a language like Hebrew will attempt to annex the time slot I have dedicated to learning German. I have little immediate motivation for learning German and I might hang out with some Israelis, go to an Israeli concert, or simple sit through a temple service and suddenly feel forlorn because I can't understand the proceedings.

I think I only have room to work on one new language at a time, but I'm not positive that's true. This week I keep popping open the FSI Hebrew course to see if I can try out a lesson. Then I feel unfaithful to my German, which I've been nurturing for six months and don't want to ween until it's comfortably walking on it's own furry little circus bear paws. And yet, Hebrew isn't anything like German, except for my lack of familiarity with it. Does being a beginner at German mean my brain can't allocate more new language neurons? I don't know, but I think it's worth finding out. Why should I spend a year being monogamous when I can play the field a little and maybe find a more fitting relationship? Am I more likely to need one more than the other? Ok, enough bad reproductive analogies. Maybe Hebrew will shove out of port before I catch something permanent. Ok, seriously, stop.

ich schreibe deutsch

Heute will ich etwas deutsch schreiben. Ich glaube, ich kann jetzt etwas zehr schlicht schreiben. Ich kenne nicht die Vergangenheit so schreibe ich von der Zukunft. Ich denke oft an den Sommer. Ich will irgendwohin reisen, aber wo und wozu? Ich glaube, ich muss ein Programm finden, vielleicht etwas Sprachlich, Freiwillig, Umwelt, oder allen.

Voila, my first paragraph of German. There are numerous difficulties encountered when writing in a foreign language. The first and most evident is a lack of vocabulary, which leads me to choosing the wrong words from the dictionary. The next problem is running into grammatical constructs that I forget or haven't learned. In the last sentence for example, I can't remember what happens when you use a noun as an adjective. I thought you put it in the neuter form, but that doesn't make sense. I think that rules applies to changing an adjective to a noun. So for Sprachlich, which means the noun linguistics, I don't know what form to use when making it into the adjective linguistic. Similarly I don't know what to do with with allen, for all of them, at the end of the paragraph. I'm assuming that it should take the modifierless accusative plural adjective form, but I'm not sure. The third problem is idioms. I imagine my phrases are semantically correctly, but it's likely that a native speaker would employ idiomatic phrases in their stead or at least arrange the words differently. When I write I try to dedicate time to looking up my phrases in Google to see if the structure matches the real world. For example, "Ich glaube, ich kann etwas" matches 394 results in Google, which, given the length of the phrase, means it's probably legitimate. I'd naturally require more results of a two or three word phrase, depending on the popularity of the words. I bet looking up a lot of vocabulary and searching in Google doesn't sound like very enjoyable writing activity. But like all things related to studying foreign language, it's a little more like working on part of a puzzle, or perhaps learning a musical instrument, then the equivalent processes in your native language. The musical instrument example is especially apt because there are constant rewards along the way, whether it mumbling phrases to yourself, or understanding a bit more of what your native-speaking friends are saying. My goal of learning to learn languages is not make it fun and breezy (though it often is.) My intention is to make it an intense, stimulating, and adictive activity that keeps you coming back for more, even if it's punishing at times. That's how I master most things in life, from music to sports to writing software, and I expect the same effort in my language acquisition. Sorry for sounding weighty. It really is 90% fun and 10% discipline.

On a related note, I spent the last two evening deeply immersed in a Hebrew speaking environment. On Friday night I attended the Berkeley Hillel "pre" Shabbat where the musician Idan Raichel was the guest of honor and hung out with a group of 40 of us and answered questions and sang songs with us. The next night I got a ticket to his sold-out show. Both nights I was surrounded by Israelis and American Jews with solid Hebrew skills. Much of the concert was also sung in Hebrew. I can barely pick out two words of Hebrew, despite a brief affair with the language via the first Pimsleur Series a couple years ago. Intense immersion naturally makes me long to learn the language. I can probably spend some time on it while learning German. It's not like I'll confuse them. But I may be treading the line of become a language finatic if I'm trying to learn to new languages at once while maintaining a job and a reasonably well-balanced life! We'll see. I always recall that Barry Farber, who wrote How to Learn any Language (and whom I'm happy to see is still alive but sad to see is a conservative talk-radio host (what a waste,)) said that he regrets that he thought at one point he had learned enough languages and took a break, before eventually resuming and getting up to 25. But I doubt he would recommend two new languages at once.

The first dreams

I woke up in a hot sweat, unable to find meaning in the gibberish from which I had been startled from slumber. One thing was certain though, the tongue bore a striking resemblance to my hour-long study session over chicken pot pie and blueberry cobbler (I had two frozen pie crusts to enlist in dinner duty.) I spoke or perhaps heard an oneiric German, and thus I had crossed a threshold of language immersion. I wouldn't say it was warranted, but sitting down with the book and mp3s for the second time this week resonated the subconscious in a way that my previous study had not. It reminds me of my single week in France when my travel buddy was startled to hear me muttering perfect French in my sleep. He couldn't speak a word of it, so I doubt the "perfect" part of the claim.

There definitely have been other subtle breakthroughs from last night's pastry-fueled practicing. Today I found myself putting simple grammatical constructs together while I worked, namely the one "it is to/for me adjective", such as Der hempt ist mir zu auffällig (The shirt is too bright-colored for me.) I think this grammatical construct resonates with me because it's very noticable in French. As Camus' L'Étranger was fond of saying: Ça m'était égal (It was all the same to me.)

By the way, I know that bright-colored is a pretty useless word to learn, but I remembered it using a ridiculous mnemonic device, which is worth touching on. When I had to learn auffällig it made me think of falling leeks. The phrase I wrote on my flashcard was "Ow! fell leeks on my head as walked through the market during the tornado weaing my bright loud leisure suit" This is a sentence that rates ten on the memorable level but doesn't do much of a job of relating auffällig to the definition: bright, loud. The sentence is too long for me to really remember, as crazy as it is. But I could recall the idea of falling leeks and wearing a bright-colored suit in a market. I didn't remember the Ow! part, so initially I recalled fallig instead of auffällig. But now that I've written this paragraph I'm sure I'll retain the useless adjective acurately. Funny how mnemonics work.

I am finishing unit 8 of 12 in the first FSI German course. The second course goes up to a 24th lesson. I'm really looking forward to learning all the tenses and practicing the informal conjugations, none of which I've been taught yet. The tense part makes sense--there's tons of grammar and basic vocabulary to cover without worrying about tenses. I do wish they brought the informal conjugations in earlier, but that's a diplomat's course for you.

The utterance, to blurt, to catch

When I used one of the FSI courses in the past they made reference to utterances, which struck me as obfuscated 1950s linguistic jargon. But the word struck a chord with me as the fundamental piece of the language acquisition puzzle that almost every course ignores. Now, utterance is defined in Oxford as "An uninterrupted chain of spoken or written language" in the linguistic sense. That's not quite the meaning that I associate with it. To me it purveys more the idea of a nugget of strung-together words that we need to be able blurt out or comprehend in our target language. It could be an idium (he's beside himself (with anger)), common phrase (gotta get the phone), or one important word surrounded by lesser ones (do you have your car with you?) The last one happened to me in Montreal when I checked into my hotel. I was following the conversation fine until the concierge blurted that one out. It's intersting because all I needed to understand was voiture to know how to answer (bien sûr que non, elles sont pour les cons!) Obviously I know the word voiture and a few thousand other French words but when I get in a conversation it's so easy to miss whole sentences because I missed the key word.

What does one do to practice saying and understanding thousands of utterances? Movies and music methinks. Getting target-language subtitles and lyrics are imperative for getting anything out of audible media. I listen to the same albums for years in my target language without understanding them, and I've watched hundreds of French movies and still don't have a clue without reading English subtitles. Imagine if I sat down with the French and wrote down the most important utterances on a flash card with the recorded audio. I could learn to use the utterance, learn to recognize it, and finally start understanding my tired out old tunes. I'm going to give this a try now with a song in French by Louise Attaque and my trusty iPhone Flash My Brain application:

Here's the first bit of Qu'est-ce qui nous tente? by Louise Attaque. I followed up to this line where I found a useful utterance:

Qu'est-ce qui nous tente ?
Qu'est-ce qui nous donne ces envies?
Qu'est-ce qui nous enchante,
qu'est-ce qui nous réveille la nuit?
Souvent souvent c'est les certitudes,
de temps en temps c'est la solitude
Très peu pour moi les habitudes
sinon J'vais passer pour un con.

"otherwise I'm going to pass for an idiot (or something more offensive)"

Seems like a good line to me. I've certainly never used this in colloquial conversation, nor would anyone but a fluent or very immersed speaker. But I should be able to summon up this line and use it when appriopriate. Obviously I don't need to imitate it completely, J'vais passer pour could be used with all kinds of things I imagine (according to google: un con, une grosse putte!, un abruti, une folle, etc., which are all pretty negative and variably offensive.)

But how do I learn to use this with a flash card? It's already evident to me what it means, so I don't need a translation. What I need is a speaking excercise where I'm somehow encouraged to use it. I think the FSI variation drills are a good model. It seems I need to record my own FSI course:

Sinon je vais passer pour un con
une grosse putte! ...............................Sinon je vais passer pour une grosse putte!
un abruti.............................................Sinon je vais passer pour un abruti.
une folle..............................................Sinon je vais passer pour une folle.
un analphabète...................................Sinon je vais passer pour un analphabète.

Awesome! I learn the utterance and reinfornce a bunch of other good vocabulary that I may or may not have known, but are obviously common since they show up at the top of the google search. So en resumé, no rather than a standard flashcard translation I need a mini FSI lesson for each phrase. I just put the phrase on the front of the card and recorded everything above (with a pause where the dots are so that I can put the phrase together when I practice.) On the back of the card I listed the left hand phrases (in case I don't understand one when I do the drill.)

Now obviously this is a lot of work, but think about all that I'm learning for my 5 minutes of effort. 1) I learned what a line of a song meant, so that I can catch it when I listen in the future. 2) I've learned the utterance and several popular variations of it. 3) I've learned the vocabulary of the variations.

Really learning a language well is not easy, but it can be a lot more fun and effective with simple techniques like that above. Now we'll see how willing I am to make more of these flash cards!

Notes on FSI

I have struggled to study German more than once a week for the last few weeks. Fortunately I was able to put in a solid 3 hours or so today. I gleaned some useful insights about studying using the FSI program. I doubt this is how students in the FSI school were instructed to use the course, but for self study I think this technique works wells.

The following sections occur sequentially in each lesson. I believe the other language courses are similar.

Dialog for Listening
Listen to the dialog to get acquainted with the new vocabulary.
Go through the dialog line by line and make flash cards for all new words and phrases. I have separated by flashcard stacks (using Flash My Brain on my iphone) into three different stacks:
1) Commons - all the basic adverbs, adjectives, prepositions etc, such as opposite (adv), small (adj), and beside (prep.) I'm omitting less essential words like green and stylish and reserving for the Nouns, etc stack
2) Verbs - all verbs. I skip obscure ones, but they never come up in my lessons anyway.
3) Nouns, etc - all useful nouns and less essential adjectives and adverbs. If a base with multiple usages has been presented, such as America and American, it makes sense to put them on the same card. I omit nouns that aren't useful or dated, e.g. the smoking table, the person-to-person call, and the phone book (I'm determined to never use a phonebook again.)

Notes on Pronunciation
I don't make much use of this section unless it teaches sounds that I believe are giving me difficulty.

Grammar
I read this carefully to ensure that I have complete comprehension. The following substitution drills are so much based on this grammar section that it behooves you to grasp everything.

Substitution Drills
Work through the substitution drills to learn the new grammar and vocabulary.
* At each drill stop the audio if any grammatical constructs don't make sense right off the bat. Figure out the grammar and restart.
* After each drill note any vocabulary that you don't know yet. Go to your flashcards, look up the word, and create a mnemonic device (words, pictures, or both.) This is a great time to create the mnemonic device because it is in the context of speaking the word. It also keeps you from making mnemonic devices for new vocabulary that you learned instantly. For instance, I learned that Teppich means carpet or rug while I was going through the dialog just because it sounds funny, thus I don't need any help remembering it.
* You may want to go through the substitution drills twice (in two different sittings) depending on the complexity of the new grammar.

Variation/Translation Drills
These drills offer sentences in English that focus on a certain grammatical theme and vary the sentences in each drill for practice. I always stop the audio after each sentence is spoken in English and then try to translate as quickly as I can. In other languages I would do this without pausing and without the book, but it's too hard for me with my current level of German. Like the last section, I write down mnemonic devices on my flash cards for new vocabulary that didn't show up in the previous section.

Vocabulary Drills
These are like the previous section but they are themed around a vocabulary word or construct, usually a verb or verb phrase. Approach them as described for the previous section.

I'll probably edit this post as I come up with new ideas for learning words