tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-81161532024-03-05T00:01:51.934-08:00Greg's ReflectionsMy adventures in reading in a foreign language.Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.comBlogger26125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-91521923336436534922015-08-26T14:42:00.003-07:002015-08-27T13:11:42.592-07:00French View of the Sad Puppies<h2>
<a href="http://abonnes.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2015/08/24/science-fiction-un-groupe-conservateur-echoue-a-prendre-le-controle-des-hugo-awards_4734907_4408996.html?xtmc=hugo&xtcr=5" target="_blank">Les « Sad Puppies » n’auront pas les Hugo Awards, prix littéraires de science-fiction</a></h2>
Part of the fun of reading a foreign language is getting a very different perspective on issues. As a science-fiction fan, I've been curious what the Europeans would make of this year's "Sad Puppy" affair. Sure enough, I found an article about it in <a href="http://abonnes.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2015/08/24/science-fiction-un-groupe-conservateur-echoue-a-prendre-le-controle-des-hugo-awards_4734907_4408996.html?xtmc=hugo&xtcr=5" target="_blank">Le Monde</a>, the French "newspaper of record."<br />
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For anyone who's completely unfamiliar with the story, <a href="http://www.wired.com/2015/08/won-science-fictions-hugo-awards-matters/" target="_blank">Wired magazine has a lengthy account of the Sad Puppies affair</a>.<br />
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<div>
So what did <i>Le Monde </i>have to say about all this? Here's my attempt at a translation. As always, I'd appreciate any corrections.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<h3>
The Sad Puppies Won't Get Hugo Awards, Science-Fiction Literary Prizes</h3>
The "Sad Puppies" movement, a politically conservative group of science-fiction fans, has lost their bet.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
During the Hugo Awards, one of the most prestigious science-fiction literary prizes, the candidates supported by the group were left empty-handed, with no prizes. The prize for best novel, the most prestigious, was awarded to the Chinese author Liu Cixin for "The Three Body Problem." </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The Sad Puppies presented themselves as defenders of a conservative type of science fiction and of the general public. For three years, they accused left-wing writers and readers of practicing selection by political correctness, which, <i>de facto</i>, excluded conservative authors. At the very heart of the Sad Puppies, a second group, the "Rabid Puppies," sometimes given to overtly misogynist and racist speech, formed this year under the leadership of a handful of ultraconservative writers.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h4>
No Prizes in Five Categories</h4>
<div>
The Sad Puppies were accused of attempting a veritable hijack of the Hugo Awards ceremony, whose nominees and prize-winners are chosen by the vote of the public. During the nomination step, they had managed to place a very great number of their candidates in the different prize categories--in five categories only authors supported by the Sad Puppies were in competition.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Nevertheless, this stunt seems to have provoked a storm of opposition to the movement--participation in the final vote, which is subject to purchase of a ticket to one of the greatest science-fiction conventions in the world, greatly increased for the 2015 gathering. About 6,000 people participated in the final vote (almost a 60% increase over what was reported in 2014), and the result ended in a debacle for the Sad Puppies. None of the candidates featured on their list of "recommended votes" received a prize--in the five categories where only candidates supported by the group were in the running, the voters preferred to award no prize.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h4>
Comments</h4>
<div>
<i>Le Monde</i> generally gets a better quality of comment that most web sites, and since there's only one so far, I'll translate it too.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Azimov, 8/26/2015--17h53</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Obscurantism reveals itself in all climates. I understand these individuals perfectly; they are totally correct to distrust ideas that depart from the traditional frame of Earthlings. Have no doubt, these writings amount to the promotion of reconciliation with aliens and of transcendence without religious basis (if you doubt that, see the Hyperion Saga). Worse, there are even brilliant writers like Lois MacMaster Bujold (Vorkosigan saga) capable of very subtly defending feminist theories! Oh, bring on Farenheit 451!</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
<h3>
Final Thoughts</h3>
<div>
Well, the comment was hilarious. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I had half-expected the article to make a connection between the Puppies and the various far-right groups that are vexing Europe, but it never did. Perhaps it's only people in the US who think they see that connection.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I didn't find anything in Italian, but I did find a <a href="http://cultura.elpais.com/cultura/2015/08/24/actualidad/1440418637_718223.html" target="_blank">Spanish article about the Hugo Awards in </a><i><a href="http://cultura.elpais.com/cultura/2015/08/24/actualidad/1440418637_718223.html" target="_blank">El País</a>, </i>the big Spanish newspaper, but it focuses on the marvel that an American award went to a Chinese writer. It devotes only two-and-a-half paragraphs to Puppygate, much of it material translated from English-language sources.</div>
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Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-53318033634974829272015-07-19T13:48:00.014-07:002021-01-02T10:15:18.333-08:00Language LevelsWhat do you say when someone asks you "how well do you speak French?" (Or whatever language you have studied.) Or if they ask "are you fluent?" Sometimes you will hear people give very precise answers, such as "I'm a C1 reader but only a B2 speaker" or "Spanish is my L1" or even "I'm a heritage Spanish speaker." This post aims to give a straightforward explanation of all of these terms so you can figure out where you stand and describe it to others.<br />
<br />
The language-level system most people know about is called the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages#Common_reference_levels" target="_blank">Common European Framework of Reference</a> (CEFR). The CEFR is a very well-thought-out system for rating how well someone speaks a foreign language, but the published explanations are awfully complex and can be hard to get your head around. This post aims to simplify the explanations to make it easier for people to understand what language levels are all about. Like any simplification, it will leave some things out, but I think it will make a good starting point--better than starting by leafing through dozens of pages of dense rules, at least.<br />
<h2>
Native and Foreign Speakers</h2>
<h3>
L1 Speakers (Native Speakers)</h3>
A child is able to learn a language without actually trying to do so. Plop them into a new environment where most people speak a different language, and in a few months they'll be chatting like natives. An L1 language is one that was acquired in this fashion. The ability to do this starts to diminish at around age 10 or 12 and seems to be completely gone by age 18 or 20. This is called the "critical period." A "native speaker" is an L1 speaker.<br />
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Children who are immersed in a language during the critical period will essentially all rocket up to native proficiency, given time. As a result, there is no rating system for L1 speakers. For the purposes of foreign-language learning, all L1 speakers are the same (but see the section on heritage speakers below).<br />
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<h3>
L2 Speakers (Foreign Speakers)</h3>
An adult (anyone past the critical period) cannot learn a language "by osmosis," the way a child can. Adults need some organized study plan. A person who learns a language this way is say to be an L2 speaker of that language. (People who study multilingualism will talk about L3, L4, etc. but everyone else uses L2 for any language acquired through deliberate study.) An L2 speaker is a "foreign speaker."<br />
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L2 speakers make slow, steady progress, and many stop after a point, so it is very worthwhile to have a system to rate a given person's ability with a foreign language. In particular, businesses and universities need to be able to set requirements for language proficiency, and having a standard rating system helps them do that. Europe needs this more than most, and their CEFR is hugely influential.<br />
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L2 speakers never (or almost never) become good enough to regularly fool L1 speakers. No matter how long they live in complete immersion (decades even), and no matter how much study they put into it, they never become perfect L1 speakers. There is some debate as to whether this is truly impossible or merely very rare. Without getting into the argument, suffice it to say that if it is possible at all, it is so rare that people write papers debating the point. But even if perfection is impossible, excellence is not. Also, although only a child can learn an L1, age doesn't seem to matter much for learning an L2.<br />
<br />
For an excellent discussion on the difference between how children and adults learn foreign languages, read Chapter 2, "Is There a Best Age For Learning a Second Language," from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Topics-Second-Language-Acquisition-Textbooks-ebook/dp/B00JG0RL1Q" target="_blank">Key Topics in Second Language Acquisition</a> (Cook and Singleton, Multilingual Matters, 2014).<br />
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<h2>
What To Measure</h2>
<div>
Learning a language actually requires mastering four different skills</div>
<div>
<ol>
<li>Reading.</li>
<li>Writing.</li>
<li>Conversation.</li>
<li>Passive listening.</li>
</ol>
<div>
To see how different these are, note that it's possible to be an excellent reader who is almost unable to hold a conversation or to be great at conversation but functionally illiterate. The formal tests that people take to measure language competence generally rate these four abilities separately, even when they give a final, composite grade. In my chart below, I'm going to mix them together to some extent, but keep in mind that you do need to develop them separately. That said, it is also true that improvement in one ability generally benefits the others to some degree.</div>
</div>
<h2>
Levels of Speakers</h2>
<h3>
Summary</h3>
<div>
The chart below summarizes what I just described plus it includes all the CEFR levels. Again, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages#Common_reference_levels" target="_blank">a reasonably complete description of the CEFR</a> can be found on Wikipedia.</div>
<br />
<table border="1" style="border-collapse: collapse; text-align: center;">
<tbody style="text-align: left;">
<tr><th colspan="2" style="word-break:keep-all;"><div style="text-align: center;">
Zero</div>
</th><td>No knowledge of the language at all.</td></tr>
<tr><th rowspan="7" style="word-break:keep-all;">L2</th><th><div style="text-align: center;">
A0</div>
</th><td>Smattering of the language. Knows a few words and phrases. Can recognize the written form and identify what language it is.</td></tr>
<tr><th><div style="text-align: center;">
A1</div>
</th><td>Phrasebook speaker. Uses a few templates to create sentences. Can read some signs. Understands responses if they're what he/she was expecting.</td></tr>
<tr><th><div style="text-align: center;">
A2</div>
</th><td>Creates original sentences, but doesn't know the whole grammar yet. Can express a lot, but often frustrated by concepts he/she has no way how to express.</td></tr>
<tr><th><div style="text-align: center;">
B1</div>
</th><td>Knows essentially the whole grammar (excluding some of the fine points) but has to think hard to use it. Able to eventually say just about anything, but the process can be painful. Can read almost anything, given enough time, a good reference grammar, and unlimited use of a dictionary. Movies are hopeless without subtitles.</td></tr>
<tr><th><div style="text-align: center;">
B2</div>
</th><td>Fluent, but with errors and omissions. Can hold real conversations with non-English speakers but often struggles to get around gaps in vocabulary. Often corrects own errors. Reads newspapers with ease. Still depends heavily on dictionary to read novels. Can understand most of a movie in standard dialect.</td></tr>
<tr><th><div style="text-align: center;">
C1</div>
</th><td>Fluent, fully conversational, but very obviously not native. Grammar errors don't impede conversation, but minor ones still turn up with some frequency. Reads anything short of literature with minimal dictionary use. Can watch movies without too much difficulty.</td></tr>
<tr><th><div style="text-align: center;">
C2</div>
</th><td>Fluent to the point where the residual errors in accent and grammar don't matter. The person does not fool native speakers, due to the nature of the occasional errors, but they are no worse than the errors some native speakers make. Reads/watches anything.</td></tr>
<tr><th rowspan="2" style="word-break:keep-all;">L1</th><th style="word-break:keep-all;">Heritage</th><td>Exposed to the language as a child, but acquired a different L1. Has strong listening ability, but speaking ability ranges from zero to limited (See more below.)</td></tr>
<tr><th><div style="text-align: center;">
Native</div>
</th><td>Learned as a child and uses it regularly now. </td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<br />
<h3>
A-Levels: Basic User</h3>
The A-levels are about beginning to learn the language but not knowing all the grammar. An A-level speaker typically doesn't know all the verb tenses, or the declensions of adjectives, or other key bits of grammar.<br />
<br />
You can think of the A-levels as being useful to tourists. With A2 ability, you can impress the heck out of your zero-level companions.<br />
<br />
A0 isn't an official level in the CEFR, but it is very commonly used by people to indicate that they have either begun to study a language (so they're not <i>really</i> at zero) or that they have forgotten so much of it that they don't believe they could even pass the A1 exam anymore.<br />
<br />
<h3>
B-Levels: Independent User</h3>
The B-levels are about knowing the whole of the grammar but having limited ability to use it. The B1 speaker has to think to apply the rules, and as a result, speaks in a halting fashion. The B2 speaker can apply the rules without thinking, but is limited by vocabulary.<br/>
<br />
As far as conversation goes, a few weeks of immersion is probably the only way to move from B1 to B2. It's as though the pressure of <i>having</i> to apply all those rules forces the brain to learn them so deeply that you don't have to think about them anymore. Immersion has some benefits for any student, but the biggest bang for the buck, by far, is for the B1 student who comes back a B2.<br />
<br />
There's a rule of thumb that says you should not try to live or work abroad on your own if you are less than B1.<br />
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B2 is sometimes called <i>the threshold of fluency.</i> Zero-level speakers listening to a B2-level speaker will usually describe that person as "fluent" because they hear smooth, continuous speech.<br/>
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<h3>
C-Levels: Proficient User</h3>
The C-levels are about <i>mastery</i>. Speakers at those levels differ from B2 speakers primarily in vocabulary. A B2 speaker can hold a great conversation and abruptly run into a wall when he/she simply doesn't have the words to describe something. That should never happen to a C-level speaker. B-level speakers know essentially the entire grammar, but C-level speakers have mastered the fine points too.<br />
<br />
European universities generally won't admit you if you can't pass the C1 test for their language. (Otherwise you won't be able to follow lectures.) Companies don't want to hire anyone under B2, or at least B1.<br />
<br />
Study moves you from A0 to B1. Immersion moves you from B1 to B2. Only time moves you from B2 to C2. It takes many years of daily use of the language to reach C2, and there are no short cuts.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Heritage Speakers</h3>
<div>
When a child grows up in an environment where his/her parents speak an L1 that is different from the L1 of the community, the child usually grows up speaking both languages. However, the child normally speaks the local language natively but speaks the L1 of the parents in a more limited way. These are called <i>heritage speakers.</i><br />
<br />
To illustrate the idea of a heritage language speaker, consider the example of a person whose parents spoke Japanese but who grew up in California. This person will almost always grow up to be a standard L1 speaker of English, but he/she will usually acquire some level of Japanese. We would say the person speaks "heritage" Japanese. This usually covers three rather different levels of ability:</div>
<div>
<ol>
<li>The child understands Japanese, but never attempts to speak it. This is typical when the child was born in the US and the parents never spoke Japanese to him/her. (The child learned it simply from listening to the parents talk to each other.)</li>
<li>The child uses Japanese words but English syntax to make sentences. This seems to happen when the child was born in the US, and the parents didn't arrange any sort of training in Japanese, although they did use Japanese with the child.</li>
<li>The child speaks Japanese with simplified syntax. That is, they speak but don't use the entire grammar. This is more likely when the child was born in Japan and grew up speaking Japanese before moving to the US at a young age and then continued to use Japanese at home, while acquiring L1 English at school.</li>
</ol>
<div>
Of course, if the person was already too old to learn L1 English, then he/she will be an L2 English speaker and an L1 Japanese speaker. This may end up being a strange dialect of Japanese if no effort is made to study it formally.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
It is very, very rare for anyone to be a perfect L1 speaker of two different languages. One loophole is that for two closely-related languages (e.g. Spanish and Portuguese) it may be possible for even an adult learner to acquire essentially L1 proficiency. Unfortunately, there is no significant language that close to English.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
<div>
It is presently unknown whether a heritage speaker can, in general, improve his/her language ability to meet the expectations of a standard L1 speaker.<br />
<br />
To learn more about heritage speakers, read <a href="http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:3382973" target="_blank">Heritage languages: In the 'wild' and in the classroom</a> by Polinsky, Maria, and Olga Kagan. 2007. Language and Linguistics Compass 1(5): 368-395.</div>
<h2>
What is Fluency?</h2>
<div>
A lot of people seem to think that fluency means you are an L1 speaker of the language. Since that's (essentially) impossible to achieve if you didn't grow up speaking that language, that's way too strict to be useful.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In general, <i>fluent</i> means that the language <i>flows</i>. That is, the speaker doesn't constantly have to stop to think about how to construct each sentence. A fluent speaker may make lots of grammar errors, may have to use a lot of hand gestures, and may have an awful accent, but when he/she speaks, the words flow, and the listeners understand. The person is able to start a sentence without having to think out how the sentence is going to end; for the fluent speaker, speech is something that just happens--like walking.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
By that definition, B2 is the threshold of fluency. One might argue that B2 speakers have "intervals of fluency" whereas C-level speakers are fluent all the time. Regardless, if you reach level B2 and call yourself fluent, not too many will argue with you about it.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
<h2>
Rating Yourself</h2>
<div>
You ought to be able to look at the chart above and get a fair idea of where you are. If in doubt, pick the lower estimate. If you want to be more precise, look through <a href="http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/education/elp/elp-reg/Source/assessement_grid/assessment_grid_english.pdf" target="_blank">the Council of Europe's self-assessment test</a>. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
If you actually have a real need to get a formal language rating, you should look online for any of the commercial sites that do formal testing in your target language. Those can be expensive, though, so before you do that, make sure that the certificate you're paying for is actually accepted by whatever organization you plan to submit it to!</div>
<br />
Finally, people are notorious for overestimating their language ability. When someone says that he/she is a C1 speaker, odds are good that B2 would be more accurate. If you have a real need to hire someone with specific language ability, insist that they provide a test result from a respectable organization.</div>
<div>
</div>
Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-8910441438013252732015-07-12T14:37:00.000-07:002015-07-20T10:54:47.610-07:00La Sombra del Viento: A fun read for advanced readers.I really enjoyed <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sombra-Viento-Carlos-Ruiz-Zaf%C3%B3n-ebook/dp/B005KDDUVS" style="font-size: large;" target="_blank">La Sombra del Viento</a><span style="font-size: medium;"> (El cementerio de los libros olvidados nº 1, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, 2009), but it's not a book for an intermediate reader. A B2 reader aspiring to become a C1 reader could attempt it (and probably should consider it seriously), but a weaker reader will be overwhelmed.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sombra-Viento-Carlos-Ruiz-Zaf%C3%B3n-ebook/dp/B005KDDUVS" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiAFEqpoa4CJpxHoHOe8ZGUdfayyEHz7o-KbNWBfdkfBOpt-wGF2PEZDO_Ry2R_ta8B3mXj1Hc9o1MpG7Dvm6OmzSF4vLgUrei9BgduWWqJmZlrDVletJxFGh5e67HdP-jS9n7/s640/sombra+del+viento.jpg" width="424" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
<br />
<h3>
<span style="font-size: medium;">What the book is not</span></h3>
<span style="font-size: medium;">Right off the bat, let me say that nothing magical or supernatural happens in this book. Some of the reviews (even the professional ones) leave that impression, but there are no ghosts here except the ones in people's minds, and there are no angels or demons except the human kind. Those, however, are plentiful.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;">This is not a Young Adult novel. Yes, the protagonist is only 10 years old when we first meet him, and he's only 19 for the rest of it, but this is literature, and it's targeted at an adult reader. It's a thrilling story, but the book is not a thriller.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
<br />
<h3>
<span style="font-size: medium;">What it's about: A spoiler-free outline</span></h3>
<div>
<span style="font-size: medium;">In post-WWII Spain, during the time of Franco, Daniel Sempre, the young son of a bookstore owner, comes across a captivating novel titled "The Shadow of the Wind" (</span><i style="font-size: large;">La sombra del viento</i><span style="font-size: medium;">) by a Julian Carax. He loves it so much, he wants to find more books by the same author, but despite the book being relatively-recently published, he has trouble finding out anything about it or its author. Both he and his works appear to have vanished with hardly a trace.</span></div>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: medium;">Initially just from curiosity, Daniel tries to investigate the mystery. He finds some clues, and he meets some resistance. </span><span style="font-size: medium;">He makes unexpected friends and enemies, he falls in love, he travels all over Barcelona, he crosses paths with the local police and even tangles with Franco's dreaded secret police. </span><span style="font-size: medium;">The more he learns, the more he realizes that something truly monstrous happened back before the war, and the more he wants to know exactly what that was. But, whatever it was, it hasn't finished happening, and he finds himself in the heart of it.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: medium;">The book never gets dull, and the tension builds right up to the climax. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
<br />
<h3>
<span style="font-size: medium;">Why it's difficult</span></h3>
<span style="font-size: medium;">The degree of difficulty is almost entirely due to the vocabulary, which is extremely large. There are a few words I couldn't find at all, and I suspect those were borrowed from Catalan, but the enormous vocabulary of ordinary Spanish words is the real challenge. With a Kindle and a dictionary, it's not impossible, but, as I said above, if you're not already a fairly strong reader, you're likely to be doing so much of it that it'll spoil the fun. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;">If you do attempt it, I strongly recommend following a policy of trying to use the built-in monolingual dictionary and only resorting to a bilingual dictionary if that fails. If you're strong enough to read this book, you should be strong enough to use the monolingual, but, more important, a lot of this vocabulary just isn't going to be listed in any of the bilinguals currently available on Kindle. In a pinch, you can open the monolingual dictionary as a book and use the bilingual dictionary to help you read the definitions.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
<br />
<h3>
<span style="font-size: medium;">How I read the book</span></h3>
<span style="font-size: medium;">I tried something a little different this time. Beyond just reading it on the Kindle, I highlighted all the words I had to look up and, for the first 10% of the book, I created flash cards for each such word. I used Anki's basic template, not <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/10/using-anki-flashcards-for-vocabulary.html" target="_blank">the fancy two-way template I usually use</a>, because I wanted to minimize the effort. That is, I only studied how to translate Spanish words into English--not the other way around. I persisted with this for the first 10% of the book.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;">It was way too much work. Yes, it did help speed up my reading, since, like most authors, Zafon tends to have some favorite words and expressions that are otherwise uncommon. But the effort was so great that it detracted from the fun of reading, so I gave it up at about the 10% point.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;">Part of the problem was that the list of words grew too fast. Anki generally only wants you to learn 20 new words per day at most, but I needed over 100. That turned out to be agonizing. Another problem was that the chore of simply creating the words was unpleasant, owing to the fact that the Kindle app on Windows wouldn't let me copy/paste text, so I had to retype everything.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;">I still think this would be a great approach, but Amazon would have to help. First, for each word, it would be nice if Amazon could tell me how many more times I can expect to see it in the book. Words that don't occur again, I could skip. Second, it should help me generate the cards in the first place.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;">Kindle users are probably aware that Amazon does in fact have a "Vocabulary Builder" feature that purports to do just that, but, unfortunately, it doesn't really work. First, it doesn't create cards for root words--only for word forms. So instead of one card for <i>colgar</i> you'll end up with separate cards for <i>colga, colgó, </i>etc. Second, instead of a simple definition, it shows you the original sentence you read it in, which makes the review too easy. Third, it cannot handle phrases at all. There's no way to make <i>dar con</i> a single card. Fourth, there is some sort of memory leak in the software, and the more cards you create, the slower your Kindle becomes, until it reboots itself. Unfortunately, if you turn the feature on, it creates a card for every word you look up--including ones where you say "Oh yes, I knew that" as well as ones you only looked up to verify that you really understood them.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: medium;">(I'll write a post sometime with a list of things I think Amazon could do to assist students of foreign languages in general.)</span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
<br />
<h3>
<span style="font-size: medium;">Upshot</span></h3>
<div>
<span style="font-size: medium;">Despite the challenge of reading it, I really loved this book. I'm powerfully tempted to read the other books in the series.</span></div>
<br />
Feel free to review the list of <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/p/books.html" target="">foreign novels I recommend reading</a> as well as <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/p/references.html">reference books I use for learning how to read foreign languages</a>.<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span>
Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-44561634953400142732015-03-03T13:31:00.001-08:002015-03-10T06:32:01.633-07:00Summary of Devices for Reading Foreign NovelsIf you're an intermediate student of a foreign language and you want to try to read a novel in that language, you need an e-reader that lets you press on a word and instantly get a definition without having to leave the page you're reading. It also needs to let you easily switch back and forth between two dictionaries:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>a bilingual dictionary that lets see the definition in English. (To my knowledge, there are no good free bilingual dictionaries. This will be an extra cost--usually under $10.) </li>
<li>a monolingual dictionary that gives you the definition in the same language as the book you're reading. (These typically come for free.)</li>
</ul>
<div>
The reason you need both is that the monolingual dictionary by itself is too difficult for an intermediate student to use, but the bilingual dictionary is limited in size and won't have the most difficult words in it. Over time, you'll move to using the monolingual dictionary more and more--especially if the device lets you use the bilingual to look up unknown words that appear in the monolingual's definitions. When you don't need the bilingual anymore, you won't be an intermediate anymore either.</div>
<br />
At this point, I know of only four devices that are able to support multiple dictionaries in this way. I'll discuss their pros and cons and then mention some other devices that are known <i>not</i> to work.<br />
<h2>
Kindle E-Readers and Apps</h2>
<div>
I have already written at length about <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/how-to-read-foreign-novel-on-kindle.html" target="">how to read a foreign novel on a Kindle e-reader</a>. All three of the current models seem to be running the exact same software as far as foreign-language support is concerned. Whenever you download a foreign-language book, Amazon automatically downloads the appropriate monolingual dictionary for free.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h3>
Basic Kindle</h3>
This is the cheapest Kindle that will do the job. It doesn't have the built-in light the other Kindles have, it's heavier than the Voyage, and it has lower screen resolution, but it's half the price of a Paperwhite and only a third the price of a Voyage. Otherwise, they all have about the same features. If price matters, this is the Kindle to get. Caveat: this is a model I haven't ever used personally.<br />
<br />
I see that Amazon is offering <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00I15SB16/" target="_blank">Kindles on sale for National Reading Month</a>. I don't get a kickback, but I know that many people have wanted to try <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/how-to-read-foreign-novel-on-kindle.html" target="_blank">reading a foreign novel with a Kindle</a> but been unable to do so. At $59 ($20 off the regular price), this is probably the cheapest anyone can get into the game.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Kindle Paperwhite</h3>
The light is nice, and the improved resolution is helpful for reading languages with lots of accent marks. (E.g. French.) It's actually very slightly heavier than the Basic Kindle for some reason. It's $119, and I've usually thought of this one as the best value (I used one for a long time and loved it), but, during the sale this month at least, the Basic Kindle seems like the better deal. Caveat: some people like the light so much that they consider it a must-have. (I wonder how they ever managed with paper books.)<br />
<br />
<h3>
Kindle Voyage</h3>
<div>
If $200 doesn't seem like a lot, and you want the best, this is the one to get. I was pleased with the weight reduction when I switched from a Paperwhite, and I appreciated the resolution improvement too--especially for reading the accent marks on French letters. Even the little page-turn strips on the side are nice, once you get used to them.</div>
<br />
Here are Amazon's specifications for all three devices:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfNPKgykBtbBDARo_-3S17kEoMOGR86NL0kGZm4A3azL40u_8E_EdJPMAM7taIsCPC_hovuc5Uw2Wa4_Lpu_GvIPDAnQ1RlCTU_16Zlw4sZKq6jQQL1I4-5a3VzcysZ1CubTei/s1600/Summary+of+Devices+1+-+Kindle+Comparison+Chart.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfNPKgykBtbBDARo_-3S17kEoMOGR86NL0kGZm4A3azL40u_8E_EdJPMAM7taIsCPC_hovuc5Uw2Wa4_Lpu_GvIPDAnQ1RlCTU_16Zlw4sZKq6jQQL1I4-5a3VzcysZ1CubTei/s1600/Summary+of+Devices+1+-+Kindle+Comparison+Chart.png" height="436" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<h3>
Kindle App on iOS</h3>
<div>
Apple's iPad and iPhone host a Kindle app that appears to have all of the foreign-dictionary support that the Amazon e-readers have. If you already have an iPhone or iPad, that would obviously be the cheapest alternative--hands down.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://learnoutlive.com/add-german-english-dictionary-to-kindle-on-your-ipad-or-iphone-ios/" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjql4PTVkVtYrpu-UGG_XGYnJ9P_81WJfBxrPNse-_b_dEj4NBW9-sgKs1i17gnvgRacR96HNLLLNLHoSimgBq6l3yeNg-sf3ifGfclZfd4xyghPBnT0_oNpCBWvaEgclrsfvvP/s1600/kindle-ios-select-primary-dictionary.png" height="400" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From <a href="http://learnoutlive.com/add-german-english-dictionary-to-kindle-on-your-ipad-or-iphone-ios/" target="_blank">How To Add a German-English Dictionary To Kindle on Your iPad or iPhone (iOS)</a> by André Klein</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span id="goog_449961671"></span><span id="goog_449961672"></span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/"></a><br /></div>
<br /></div>
The screen shot from André Klein's web site clearly shows that you can press on a word, read the definition, decide that you want to see that in a different dictionary, and select one without closing the dialog.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Older Kindles</h3>
The Paperwhite I and the Kindle Touch also support multiple dictionaries, although not as conveniently. My original post on how to read a foreign novel on a Kindle describes the extra hoops you had to jump through to make those work.<br />
<br />
Prior to the Kindle Touch, Amazon's devices didn't have touch-sensitive screens. However, a determined reader could move the cursor next to a target word and get a definition anyway. Readers have told me that the same instructions for installing a bilingual dictionary which worked for the Touch will also work for the older Kindles.<br />
<br />
<h2>
Other Devices</h2>
<div>
At present, I know of no other devices that have multidictionary support. I would be very happy to get information from more people who use a variety of devices. In particular, I can't figure out whether it does or does not work on a <a href="https://www.kobo.com/devices#ereaders" target="_blank">Kobo e-reader</a>. The documentation suggests that you can install and remove dictionaries, but it doesn't say how you change the default dictionary for a given book.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Here are a few that are known to <i>not</i> work.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h3>
Kindle Fire and Fire Phone</h3>
I have no clue why Amazon doesn't make the e-reader on the Kindle Fire work the same as the ones on the dedicated e-Readers, but, as of this writing, you can only chose one of Amazon's free monolingual dictionaries. You can download a bilingual dictionary, but only to read as a book<br />
<br />
<h3>
Kindle App on Windows 8.1 (Metro version) and on the Windows Phone</h3>
It doesn't let you change the dictionary at all. If you open a Spanish book it still tries to use an English dictionary. One wonders why it isn't easier for Amazon to just have a single code base for all their apps and devices.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Nook</h3>
You can't change the dictionary on a Nook without rooting the device, which I don't recommend. If you want to read Spanish books, you'd have to buy a Spanish Nook. Supposedly the Nook apps all work the same way.<br />
<br />
<h2>
Summary</h2>
If you want to read a novel in a foreign language, you either need to run the Kindle app on an iPad/iPhone or else buy one of the three Kindle e-readers. If anyone can send me screen shots showing that some other device or app also works, I'll be very happy to include that info.Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-18108615153347053792015-03-02T15:35:00.000-08:002015-03-10T06:32:17.480-07:00Italian Verb PatternsIt's a chore memorizing how to conjugate all 45 forms of Italian verbs--even the regular ones, and when you factor in the irregular ones, it looks hopeless. However, there are patterns, and following those patterns makes the whole thing easier to deal with.<br />
<br />
The most important tip is <b>don't try to learn everything at once!</b><br />
<br />
In the tables below, I will offer rules capable of generating all the forms of all Italian verbs, but you really don't want to try to memorize all of this. Not at once, anyway. Instead, look over it and pick the bits that matter to you at the moment. When you find a new verb, look at how it fits into the pattern. Use that to help you memorize it.<br />
<br />
Just as you don't try to learn 5,000 new words all at once, try to absorb these rules a little bit at a time. Otherwise it really will be too overwhelming.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Regular Verbs</h3>
<h4>
Non-Finite Verbs</h4>
<div>
There are three Italian verb forms that don't have a tense: the infinitive, the past participle, and the gerund. A traditional way to represent this would be to use example verbs, one for each of the three conjugation families:<br />
<br />
<table border="1" style="border-collapse: collapse; text-align: center;">
<thead>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>Speak</th>
<th>Fear</th>
<th>Sleep</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody style="text-align: left;">
<tr>
<th>Infinitive</th><td>parl<b>a</b>re</td><td>tem<b>e</b>re</td><td>dorm<b>i</b>re</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Past Participle</th><td>parl<b>a</b>to</td><td>tem<b>u</b>to</td><td>dorm<b>i</b>to</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Gerund</th><td>parl<b>a</b>ndo</td><td>tem<b>e</b>ndo</td><td>dorm<b>e</b>ndo</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<br />
But this obscures much of what is common between them. In the table, I have made the "theme vowels" bold to illustrate that the <i>endings</i> (the part to the right of the theme vowel) are the same for all three conjugations, even though the <i>stems</i> (the part to the left of the theme vowel) are different.<br />
<br />
A much better (and far more compact) way to represent the same information is to omit the stems, collect the theme vowels together, and thus make the endings stand out.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<table border="1" style="border-collapse: collapse; text-align: center;">
<thead>
<tr>
<th>IT Verb Endings</th>
<th>Non-Finite</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody style="text-align: left;">
<tr>
<th>Infinitive</th><td>[aei]re</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Past Part.</th><td>[aui]to</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Gerund</th><td>[aee]ndo</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<br />
The three letters in brackets show the theme vowel needed by each of the three conjugations. Make sure you see how this little table represents the information in the larger one above it before we move on to apply the same idea to finite verbs. (Verbs that do have a tense.)<br />
<br />
<h4>
Finite Verbs</h4>
Italian has seven "simple" (as opposed to compound) verb tenses: the present indicative, the present subjunctive, the imperfect indicative, the imperfect subjunctive, the future, the conditional, and the <i>passato remoto</i>. Verb tables in books go on for many pages. Using the notation we used for the non-finite verbs, we can make the most compact table of Italian verb conjugations you will ever see:<br />
<br />
<br />
<table border="1" style="border-collapse: collapse; text-align: center;">
<thead>
<tr>
<th colspan="2" rowspan="2">I<br />
T</th>
<th colspan="2">Present</th>
<th colspan="2">Imperfect</th>
<th colspan="2">Fut/Cond</th>
<th colspan="2">P. Remoto</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Ind</th><th>Subj</th><th>Ind</th><th>Subj</th><th>Fut</th><th>Cond</th><th>Reg</th><th>Irr</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody style="text-align: left;">
<tr>
<th rowspan="3">Sg</th><th>1</th><td>-o</td><td>[iaa]</td><td>[aei]vo</td><td>[aei]ssi</td><td>[eei-]rò</td><td>[eei-]rei</td>
<td>[aei]i</td><td>-i</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>2</th><td>-i</td><td>[iaa]</td><td>[aei]vi</td><td>[aei]ssi</td><td>[eei-]rai</td><td>[eei-]resti</td>
<td colspan="2">[aei]sti</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>3</th><td>[aee]</td><td>[iaa]</td><td>[aei]va</td><td>[aei]sse</td><td>[eei-]rà</td><td>[eei-]rebbe</td>
<td>[òéì]</td><td>-e</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th rowspan="3">Pl</th><th>1</th><td>-iamo</td><td>-iamo</td><td>[aei]vamo</td><td>[aei]ssimo</td><td>[eei-]remo</td><td>[eei-]remmo</td><td colspan="2">[aei]mmo</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>2</th><td>[aei]te</td><td>-iate</td><td>[aei]vate</td><td>[aei]ste</td><td>[eei-]rete</td><td>[eei-]reste</td>
<td colspan="2">[aei]ste</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>3</th><td>[aoo]no</td><td>[iaa]no</td><td>[aei]vano</td><td>[aei]ssero</td><td>[eei-]ranno</td><td>[eei-]rebbero</td>
<td>[aei]rono</td><td>-ero
</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<br />
A dash in place of square brackets means that there is no theme vowel. A dash in the fourth position reflects the fact that irregular verbs in the future and conditional tenses omit the vowel entirely. More about that below when we discuss irregular verbs.<br />
<br />
<div>
The three odd forms marked "Irr" under the Passato Remoto are an artifact of the fact that Vulgar Latin had four conjugation families, not just three, but two of them were folded together into today's -ere verbs. As a result, a large number of -ere verbs have different endings in the first person-singular, the third-person singular, and the third-person plural of the <i>passato remoto</i>. Again, we'll discuss this more when we talk about irregular verbs.</div>
<br />
Play with this table for a bit and make sure you know how to generate verb forms with it. Compare it with the verb conjugators in <a href="http://www.wordreference.com/conj/ItVerbs.aspx" target="_blank">WordReference</a> or <a href="http://conjit.cactus2000.de/showverb.en.php" target="_blank">Cactus 2000</a> if you need to. In this very compact form, all sorts of patterns are now clearly visible. Patterns make memorization easier, of course. I'll point out a few, but you should study it yourself and find the ones that help you learn.<br />
<ul>
<li>All first-person plural forms end with -mo</li>
<li>All second-person plural forms end with -te</li>
<li>All third-person plural forms end with -no or -ro</li>
<li>Theme vowels are the same for all imperfect forms</li>
<li>Theme vowels are the same across all future and conditional forms</li>
<li>Despite the name, the Imperfect tenses are the most perfect ones.</li>
</ul>
<div>
<h4>
Omitted Forms</h4>
</div>
<div>
You might think that's enough verb forms already, but the astute observer will note that I've omitted a few categories:</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>The so-called "present participle" Verbs that are turned into adjectives e.g. <i>parlante</i>. You form it by changing the gerund ending from <i>-do</i> to <i>-te</i>. Trouble is, it doesn't function as a verb, not all verbs have them, and the meanings are often wildly different. (E.g. <i>dirigente</i> means "manager"). These are probably best learned as separate vocabulary items as you come to them.</li>
<li>The imperative forms. The command forms in Italian are just existing present-tense or infinitive forms used for a slightly different purpose. </li>
<li>All of the compound forms. E.g. <i>Lui ha parlato</i>. I have already written about the <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/italian-perfect-tenses.html" target="_blank">Italian Perfect Tenses</a>. They're important to get right, of course, but as with the imperatives, the issue isn't with learning how to construct the forms--it's with learning what to do with them after that.</li>
</ul>
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
<h4>
Summary</h4>
<div>
You can think of these tables as little machines that take a verb stem and create all the forms of that verb. These same tables with work for all but the most irregular verbs, as I'll explain in the next section.<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
<h3>
Irregular Verbs</h3>
<h4>
Verbs with multiple stems</h4>
<div>
With the regular verbs, we spoke of the verb stem. The tables above let you generate endings for verb stems. With irregular verbs, we're going to speak of multiple stems. For a regular verb, you only have to learn one stem, but for an irregular verb, you need to know more than that. The more stems you need to learn, the more irregular the verb is. For irregular verbs, then, we need a table to generate stems. Since these still use the same endings as regular verbs, between the two sets of tables we can conjugate everything except the super-irregular verbs.<br />
<br />
To see how this works, take a verb like <i>rimanere</i> (to remain). I have made the irregular stems <b>bold</b>.<br />
<br />
<table border="1" style="border-collapse: collapse; text-align: center;"><thead>
<tr><th><br /></th><th>Remain</th></tr>
</thead><tbody style="text-align: left;">
<tr><th>Infinitive</th><td>rimanere</td></tr>
<tr><th>Past Part.</th><td><b>rimas</b>to</td></tr>
<tr><th>Pres. Part.</th><td>rimanendo</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table border="1" style="border-collapse: collapse; text-align: center;"><thead>
<tr><th colspan="2" rowspan="2"><br /></th><th colspan="2">Present</th><th colspan="2">Imperfect</th><th colspan="2">Fut/Cond</th><th colspan="2">P. Remoto</th></tr>
<tr><th>Ind</th><th>Subj</th><th>Ind</th><th>Subj</th><th>Fut</th><th>Cond</th><th>Reg</th><th>Irr</th></tr>
</thead><tbody style="text-align: left;">
<tr><th rowspan="3">Sg</th><th>1</th><td><b>rimang</b>o</td><td><b>rimang</b>a</td><td colspan="2" rowspan="6"><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
R</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
E</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
G</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
U</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
L</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
A</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
R</div>
</td><td><b>rimar</b>rò</td><td><b>rimar</b>rei</td><td><br /></td><td><b>rimas</b>i</td></tr>
<tr><th>2</th><td>rimani</td><td><b>rimang</b>a</td><td><b>rimar</b>rai</td><td><b>rimar</b>resti</td><td colspan="2">rimanesti</td></tr>
<tr><th>3</th><td>rimane</td><td><b>rimang</b>a</td><td><b>rimar</b>rà</td><td><b>rimar</b>rebbe</td><td><br /></td><td><b>rimas</b>e</td></tr>
<tr><th rowspan="3">Pl</th><th>1</th><td>rimaniamo</td><td>rimaniamo</td><td><b>rimar</b>remo</td><td><b>rimar</b>remmo</td><td colspan="2">rimanemmo</td></tr>
<tr><th>2</th><td>rimaniate</td><td>rimaniate</td><td><b>rimar</b>rete</td><td><b>rimar</b>reste</td><td colspan="2">rimaneste</td></tr>
<tr><th>3</th><td><b>rimang</b>ono</td><td><b>rimang</b>ano</td><td><b>rimar</b>ranno</td><td><b>rimar</b>rebbero</td><td><br /></td><td><b>rimas</b>ero<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Notice how the present tenses all share the same irregular stem? And the future and conditional tenses share a single (albeit different) irregular stem? And the <i>passato remoto</i> seems to be derived from the past participle?<br />
<br />
To conjugate <i>rimanere</i>, then, you need to know the infinitive, the past participle, the first-person present indicative, and the future/conditional tense. That's just four forms to generate 45--not a bad deal.<br />
<br />
In the worst case, you'll need to know eight stems (again, not counting super-irregular verbs), but in many cases two or three will do.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Distribution of stems</h4>
These charts show how irregular stems tend to be distributed:<br />
<br />
<table border="1" style="border-collapse: collapse; text-align: center;"><thead>
<tr><th>IT Verb Stems</th><th>Non-Finite</th></tr>
</thead><tbody style="text-align: left;">
<tr><th>Infinitive</th><td>INF</td></tr>
<tr><th>Past Part.</th><td>PP</td></tr>
<tr><th>Pres. Part.</th><td>IMP</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table border="1" style="border-collapse: collapse; text-align: center;">
<thead>
<tr>
<th colspan="2" rowspan="2">Italian<br />
Verb Stems</th>
<th colspan="2">Present</th>
<th colspan="2">Imperfect</th>
<th colspan="2">Fut/Cond</th>
<th colspan="2">P. Remoto</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Ind</th><th>Subj</th><th>Ind</th><th>Subj</th><th>Fut</th><th>Cond</th><th>Reg</th><th>Irr</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody style="text-align: center;">
<tr>
<th rowspan="3">Singular</th><th>1</th>
<td style="border-right-style: hidden;"><br /></td><td rowspan="3">1SG</td><td colspan="2" rowspan="6">IMP</td><td colspan="2" rowspan="6">FUT</td>
<td style="border-bottom-style: hidden;"><br /></td><td>REM</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>2</th><td rowspan="2">3SG</td><td colspan="2">IMP</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>3</th><td style="border-bottom-style: hidden; border-top-style: hidden;"><br /></td><td>REM</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th rowspan="3">Plural</th><th>1</th>
<td style="border-right-style: hidden;"><br /></td><td rowspan="2">1PL</td><td colspan="2" rowspan="2">IMP</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>2</th><td>IMP</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>3</th><td colspan="2">1SG</td><td style="border-top-style: hidden;"><br /></td><td>REM</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<br />
Here's what the abbreviations mean:<br />
<dl>
<dt style="clear: left; float: left; text-align: left; width: 36px;">INF</dt>
<dd style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 45px; padding: 0px 0px 0.1em;">Infinitive stem</dd>
<dt style="clear: left; float: left; text-align: left; width: 36px;">PP</dt>
<dd style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 45px; padding: 0px 0px 0.1em;">Past Participle stem</dd>
<dt style="clear: left; float: left; text-align: left; width: 36px;">1SG</dt>
<dd style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 45px; padding: 0px 0px 0.1em;">First-person singular stem</dd>
<dt style="clear: left; float: left; text-align: left; width: 36px;">3SG</dt>
<dd style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 45px; padding: 0px 0px 0.1em;">Third-person singular stem</dd>
<dt style="clear: left; float: left; text-align: left; width: 36px;">1PL</dt>
<dd style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 45px; padding: 0px 0px 0.1em;">First-person plural stem</dd>
<dt style="clear: left; float: left; text-align: left; width: 36px;">IMP</dt>
<dd style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 45px; padding: 0px 0px 0.1em;">Imperfect stem</dd>
<dt style="clear: left; float: left; text-align: left; width: 36px;">FUT</dt>
<dd style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 45px; padding: 0px 0px 0.1em;">Future/Conditional stem</dd>
<dt style="clear: left; float: left; text-align: left; width: 40px;">REM</dt>
<dd style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 45px; padding: 0px 0px 0.1em;"><i>Passato Remoto</i> stem</dd>
</dl>
Now look back at <i>rimanere</i>. See how the 1SG stem <i>rimang-</i> gets used six times in the present tense and the FUT stem <i>rimar-</i> gets used twelve times in the future/conditional? This is a pattern you'll see over and over.<br />
<br />
These eight stems are all heavily used forms. Half of the stems come from the present indicative. A single stem covers both imperfect tenses. A single stem covers the future and the conditional.<br />
<br />
Even the <i>passato remoto</i> forms are heavily used by narrators in novels. A third-person narrator uses the two third-person forms, while a first-person narrator uses those as well as the first-person singular. (I suppose a first-person narrator could also use the first-person plural, but that's actually rather rare in most books.)<br />
<br />
And you don't usually need to learn all eight anyway.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Relations between stems</h4>
For a perfectly regular verb, the other seven stems are the same as the infinitive stem, of course. Even for an irregular verb there are often connections between the stems that let you avoid learning all eight of them in most cases.<br />
<br />
The imperfect stem is extremely important because when it differs from the infinitive stem, it drags several others along with it. All of the present-tense stems usually follow the imperfect over the infinitive.<br />
<br />
The three irregular forms of the <i>passato remoto</i> tend to follow the past participle, although it would be more accurate to say they're "inspired" by it. A common transformation is for the letter 't' to become 's'. For example, the past participle of <i>leggere</i> (to read) is <i>letto</i> and the <i>passato remoto</i> for "I read" is <i>lessi</i>.<br />
<br />
Here's a summary of how the different stems influence each other:<br />
<br />
INF: IMP, FUT, PP<br />
IMP: 1SG, 3SG, 1PL<br />
PP: REM<br />
<br />
<h4>
Irregular infinitives</h4>
It seems very strange to think that an infinitive could ever be irregular, but that's the best way to think of verbs like <i>trarre</i>, which seems to be missing an <i>e</i> from the stem, and <i>bere</i>, which has a different stem from <i>all</i> of it's inflected forms.<br />
<br />
For the verbs with missing vowels, we'll select the stems as if the vowels were there all along. So we'll treat <i>trarre</i> as if it were <i>trarere</i>. It has an infinitive stem of <i>trar-</i> and an imperfect stem of <i>tra-</i>. It generates the future tenses with a null theme vowel and all the rest with a theme of <i>e</i>.<br />
<br />
In the case of <i>bere</i>, the infinitive stem isn't used for anything but the infinitive itself. The imperfect stem, <i>bev-</i>, is used everywhere else except the future/conditional (<i>berr-</i>) and the <i>passato remoto</i> (<i>bevv-</i>).<br />
<br />
<h4>
What is not a stem</h4>
<div>
Sometimes a stem changes spelling in order to preserve the sound. So <i>mangiare</i> drops the <i>i</i> whenever it doesn't need it to get a soft 'g' sound. e.g. "I will eat" is <i>io mangerò</i> not *<i>io mangiero</i>. This sort of orthographic change I don't count as creating a different stem, since the pronunciation is regular.</div>
<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
<h3>
Super-Irregular Verbs</h3>
</div>
<div>
There are only ten super-irregular verbs: <i>andare, avere, dare, dovere, essere, fare, potere, sapere, stare, </i>and<i> volere</i>. What makes them super-irregular is that they break the rule that the 1SG form gets used for the third-person plural. E.g. <i>andare </i>has <i>io vado</i> but <i>loro vanno</i> (not *<i>loro vadano</i>). These same verbs often break the rule that the second and third-person singular have the same stem. So <i>lui va </i>but <i>tu vai</i> (not *<i>tu vi</i>).<br />
<br />
They follow some patterns of their own, and they're probably best learned all at once. Most of them are not irregular outside the present tense and the past participle. But there are exceptions.</div>
<div>
<h4>
Present Tense, Subjunctive</h4>
<div>
Four verbs generate the entire present subjunctive from the first-person plural, largely because they have super-short first-person singular forms. These are <i>avere, dare, sapere, </i>and<i> stare.</i> </div>
<h4>
Imperfect</h4>
<div>
For almost all verbs, the imperfect indicative and the imperfect subjunctive share the same stem. The only exceptions are <i>dare, essere, </i>and<i> stare. </i> <i>Essere</i> even uses a different set of endings in the imperfect indicative. Except for <i>essere</i>, the regular half of the <i>passato remoto</i> follows the imperfect subjunctive while the present tenses follow the imperfect indicative.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Gerund</h4>
<div>
This <i>always</i> uses the imperfect indicative stem, with the sole exception of <i>essere</i>, which is <i>essendo</i>. <i>Essere</i> is the ultimate super-irregular verb.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h3>
Families of Verbs</h3>
<div>
According to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reference-Grammar-Italian-Routledge-Grammars-ebook/dp/B00IOPW1TQ" style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #888888; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, "Palatino Linotype", Palatino, serif; font-size: 15.39px; line-height: 21.55px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">A Reference Grammar of Modern Italian, Second Edition</a><span style="background-color: #fff9ee; color: #222222; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: 15.39px; line-height: 21.55px;"> (Maiden and Robustelli, 2007, pp. 240-242 Table 14A),</span> if you learn how to conjugate every verb in a particular list of forty, that's enough to conjugate every verb in Italian. The reason for that is that sets of verbs that end the same way are conjugated the same way. For example, if you can conjugate <i>correre</i> then you can conjugate <i>occorrere, concorrere, </i>and <i>soccorrere</i>.<br />
<br />
I've asked the publisher for permission to reproduce that table--if only to show how finite the problem really is. Even so, rather than try to memorize such a table, it's probably better just to try to get a feel for it over time. Verbs that "sound the same" get conjugated the same way too. After all, despite all the rules you might learn, you eventually need to get to the point where you do this by instinct.<br />
<br />
So, yes, there <i>is</i> a lot to learn, but if you do it gradually, there are all sort of patterns that will help you out. Like much of the rest of the language, over time it will become second nature.</div>
</div>
</div>
Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-30347327768279425062015-02-18T16:51:00.002-08:002015-02-20T12:40:48.371-08:00How to Memorize German CasesGerman presents a bewildering combination of attributes: masculine, feminine, neuter, plural, nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, which combine in complicated ways across nouns, pronouns, determiners, and adjectives. Remembering how they all go together seems almost impossible. To make this easier, I've taken a shot at identifying the underlying patterns to make it easier to memorize all of this.<br />
<br />
To speak well, you must reach the point where you generate the correct forms without thinking about it, but it helps a lot to have some rules to follow in the meantime. A useful tip is <i>don't try to learn all the rules at once</i>. Instead, as you find things that confuse you, refer back to the tables and memorize a bit more of them. For example, if you already know about masculine, feminine, and neuter, and you have just discovered that there is an accusative case in addition to the nominative one, then look at the tables below but ignore the dative and genitive rows for now.<br />
<br />
<h3>
What Do All These Things Even Mean?</h3>
<div>
Obviously if you don't even know what "nominative" or "accusative" mean in the first place, these explanations will do you very little good. I'll give a quick explanation in terms of English. I'm only going to explain the main uses of case, so don't be surprised when you learn there are others.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I'm going to assume that you already know the difference between singular and plural, and that you have already figured out that German has three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In English, only personal pronouns (I, me, you, he, him, etc.) have case. Case is what makes "he" different from "him" and "she" different from "her." You would never say "*Him called she," and that's because the <i>subject</i> of the sentence has to be in the <i>nominative case</i> and the <i>direct object</i> has to be in the <i>accusative case</i>. The subject is whatever performed the action of the verb. If the verb is "called" then "he" did the calling, so <i>he</i> is in the nominative case. The direct object is the thing directly affected by the verb. "She" is nominative case, so we need the accusative form, <i>her</i>. "He called her" is the grammar English requires, so if you speak English, you already know a little bit about case--you just didn't realize it.<br />
<br />
Indirect objects in English also get the accusative case. You say "He gave her the letter" not "*He gave she the letter." The letter is the thing that got given, so it's the direct object. The woman is only indirectly affected, so "her" is the indirect object.<br />
<br />
The other place you can get case is from a preposition. If you're talking about a horse, you could say "the saddle is on him" but not "*the saddle is on he". English prepositions always take the accusative case--just like direct and indirect objects do.<br />
<br />
From this, it's kind of obvious that English only has two cases: Nominative and accusative. It's also obvious that they only apply to pronouns. In German, not only do the personal pronouns have case, so do the adjectives and (to a limited extent) the nouns as well. Also, in addition to the nominative and accusative cases, German also has a <i>dative</i> <i>case</i> for indirect objects and a <i>genitive case</i> to indicate possession. Finally, different prepositions require different cases.<br />
<br />
That's all stuff you learn as part of learning German. There's a nice, lengthy <a href="http://german.about.com/library/blcase_sum.htm" target="_blank">description of what German case is all about</a> on the About.com site, if you want more details.<br />
<br />
Beyond this point, I'm going to assume you know all about what this stuff is for and that your main goal is how to memorize all of it.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h3>
The Basic Pattern</h3>
<div>
<h4>
The Der Words</h4>
</div>
<div>
People talk a lot about the "der words," which are the words like <i>der, dieser</i>, <i>jeder</i>, <i>welcher</i> etc. They are what linguists call <i>determiners</i>, which you can think of as a special kind of adjective that comes at the start of a noun phrase. (The determiner comes first, then all the adjectives, and the noun comes last--just like in English.) You usually hit them right off the bat because "the" is such an important word.<br />
<br />
They all follow this pattern:<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
<table border="1" style="text-align: center;">
<thead>
<tr>
<th rowspan="2">Der Words</th><th colspan="3">Singular</th><th rowspan="2">Plural</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Masculine</th><th>Neuter</th><th>Feminine</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Nominative</th><td>-er</td><td rowspan="2">-es</td><td rowspan="2">-e</td><td rowspan="2">-e</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Accusative</th><td>-en</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Dative</th><td colspan="2">-em</td><td rowspan="2">-er</td><td>-en</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Genitive</th><td colspan="2">-es</td><td>-er</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<i>Almost everything else in the world of German case will follow some variation on this pattern.</i> In a very real sense, this table is 90% of what you need to memorize, so learn it and learn it well. My strategy was to try to write this chart from memory every morning before starting my German lessons. It only takes a few seconds, and it's well worth it.<br />
<br />
Ironically, <i>der</i> itself is slightly irregular. Neuter Nominative/Accusative is <i>das</i> not <i>des</i>, and Feminine/Plural is <i>die</i> not <i>de</i>. Since these are some of the most common words in the language, memorizing them isn't a big deal. Most of the other der words follow the table above perfectly, but you'll need to learn exceptions as you come to them.<br />
<br />
Here are some simple observations on the table above that may make it easier to memorize:<br />
<ul>
<li>There are no genders in the plural--only in the singular.</li>
<li>The accusative only exists as a separate case for the masculine singular.</li>
<li>There are effectively only two cases for the feminine.</li>
<li>In the dative and genitive, there are effectively only two genders.</li>
</ul>
<div>
The nominative and accusative of the feminine are the same as for the plural, but I don't suggest making a big deal out of that because it fails when we get to weak forms of adjectives.<br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<h4>
The Ein words</h4>
These are also determiners. <i>Ein, kein, mein, dein</i>, etc. are all ein words. They follow almost exactly the same pattern as the der words except that two of the masculine and neuter forms lose their endings entirely.<br />
<br />
<div>
<table border="1" style="text-align: center;">
<thead>
<tr>
<th rowspan="2">Ein Words</th><th colspan="3">Singular</th><th rowspan="2">Plural</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Masculine</th><th>Neuter</th><th>Feminine</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Nominative</th><td>-</td><td rowspan="2">-</td><td rowspan="2">-e</td><td rowspan="2">-e</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Accusative</th><td>-en</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Dative</th><td colspan="2">-em</td><td rowspan="2">-er</td><td>-en</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Genitive</th><td colspan="2">-es</td><td>-er</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
<div>
<br />
Pay attention to those two empty slots: we're going to say that those are places where the determiner is "weak." That is, we'll say that <i>einen</i>, <i>einem, eines, eine, </i>and <i>einer</i> are "strong" but <i>ein</i> is "weak." This will matter when we talk about adjectives later.</div>
<br />
<h3>
Personal Pronouns</h3>
<div>
These are the words like he, she, it, me, etc. I'm going to do two very unorthodox things here: first, I'm going to treat the third-person personal pronouns separately from the rest. Second, I'm going to replace the genitive with the possessive. I'm a linguist, and I know that's wrong in linguistic terms, but for the purpose of memorization, I think it helps a lot. You'll see why.</div>
<div>
<h4>
Third-person personal pronouns</h4>
I think one place a lot of textbooks go wrong is that they try to treat all the personal pronouns at once. This is a big mistake because it crams the different kinds of third-person pronouns into two cells and completely obscures the fact that they follow almost the same pattern as the der words.<br />
<br />
<div>
<table border="1" style="text-align: center;"><thead>
<tr><th rowspan="2">Personal<br />
Pronouns</th><th colspan="3">3rd Person<br />
Singular</th><th rowspan="2">3rd<br />
Plural</th></tr>
<tr><th>Masculine</th><th>Neuter</th><th>Feminine</th></tr>
</thead><tbody>
<tr><th>Nominative</th><td>er</td><td rowspan="2">es</td><td rowspan="2">sie</td><td rowspan="2">sie</td></tr>
<tr><th>Accusative</th><td>ihn</td></tr>
<tr><th>Dative</th><td colspan="2">ihm</td><td rowspan="2">ihr</td><td>ihnen</td></tr>
<tr><th>Possessive</th><td colspan="2">sein</td><td>ihr</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<br />
I have replaced the genitive case with the possessive here because the real genitive personal pronouns are almost obsolete. <b>This is another chart worth producing from memory every morning for a while.</b><br />
<br />
The words on the possessives row mean "his," "her," and "their." Unlike the other words in the table, they get further modified based on the gender, number, and case of the thing being possessed, and they follow the pattern of the ein words above. So "his cat" (in the nominative) is <i>seine Katze</i>; the possessor (masculine) determines which pronoun and the object (feminine) determines the ending.<br />
<br />
If you really do need the genitive pronouns for some reason, just add -er to the words on the bottom row. That gives you <i>seiner</i> and <i>ihrer</i>.<br />
<br />
<h4>
First and Second-Person Personal Pronouns</h4>
<div>
The first and second-person pronouns follow a completely different pattern. They have to. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<table border="1" style="text-align: center;"><thead>
<tr><th rowspan="2">Personal<br />
Pronouns</th><th colspan="2">Singular</th><th colspan="2">Plural</th></tr>
<tr><th>1st Person</th><th>2nd Person</th><th>1st Person</th><th>2nd Person</th></tr>
</thead><tbody>
<tr><th>Nominative</th><td>ich</td><td>du</td><td>wir</td><td>ihr</td></tr>
<tr><th>Accusative</th><td>mich</td><td>dich</td><td rowspan="2">uns</td><td rowspan="2">euch</td></tr>
<tr><th>Dative</th><td>mir</td><td>dir</td></tr>
<tr><th>Possessive</th><td>mein</td><td>dein</td><td>unser</td><td>euer</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
They don't fit the pattern, of course, because they have no gender. You learn them quite early when you study German, and the fact that they follow such a different pattern from everything else doubtless causes lots of confusion. It helps to know they're their own thing.<br />
<br />
As with the third-person pronouns, each of the words on the possessive row generates a whole set of ein words. <b>This is another chart worth trying to write from memory every morning.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
Again, if you really need the genitive personal pronouns for some reason, add -er to the words that don't already end in -er. That gives you <i>meiner, deiner, unser, </i>and <i>euer</i>. </div>
</div>
<div>
<b><br /></b></div>
<h3>
Adjectives</h3>
<h4>
Strong forms of adjectives</h4>
An adjective is "strong" when it has a <i>weak</i> ein word in front of it or when it doesn't have any determiner at all. For example, "I like red apples." (Remember that a weak ein word is one that doesn't have any ending on it.)<br />
<br />
<div>
<table border="1" style="text-align: center;">
<thead>
<tr>
<th rowspan="2">Strong Form<br />
Adjectives</th><th colspan="3">Singular</th><th rowspan="2">Plural</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Masculine</th><th>Neuter</th><th>Feminine</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Nominative</th><td>-er</td><td rowspan="2">-es</td><td rowspan="2">-e</td><td rowspan="2">-e</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Accusative</th><td>-en</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Dative</th><td colspan="2">-em</td><td rowspan="2">-er</td><td>-en</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Genitive</th><td colspan="2"><b>-en</b></td><td>-er</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<br />
Notice that these are exactly like the der words <i>except</i> for the Masculine/Neuter Genitive (in bold). I'm told that even native Germans sometimes make the mistake of using -es instead of -en for these.<br />
<br />
The way to think of this is that the information in the der-word table has to be conveyed somehow, and if the determiner is weak or absent, then the adjective has to do it. (As long as the leader is strong, everyone else can be weak.)<br />
<br />
<div>
<h4>
Weak forms of adjectives</h4>
When an adjective has a der word or a strong ein word in front of it, it takes a much simpler set of endings.<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
<table border="1" style="text-align: center;">
<thead>
<tr>
<th rowspan="2">Weak Form<br />
Adjectives</th><th colspan="3">Singular</th><th rowspan="2">Plural</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Masculine</th><th>Neuter</th><th>Feminine</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Nominative</th><td>-e</td><td colspan="2" rowspan="2">-e</td><td rowspan="4">-en</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Accusative</th><td>-en</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Dative</th><td colspan="3" rowspan="2">-en</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Genitive</th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
<div>
<br />
If it weren't for the masculine accusative, this would be <i>really</i> simple. <b>This is the last chart worth trying to write from memory every morning.</b><br />
<br />
Some books talk about a "mixed" form, and they have a separate table to show what happens to adjectives when they follow one of the ein words. That saves remembering that some ein words are weak (but you have to learn that anyway) at the expense of having to memorize yet another table. (I took this idea from <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/p/references.html#hammer" target="_blank">Hammer's German Grammar and Usage</a>, Chapter 6.2 "The Use of the Strong and Weak Declensions.") There are other weak determiners, with their own patterns. (For example <i>etwas</i> takes no endings at all.) Hammer's rule of "use the strong adjective ending when the determiner has no ending and use the weak ending when the determiner has a der-word ending" works very well for those too.<br />
<br />
So what happens if you have two or more adjectives in a row? They all take their form from the determiner, not from each other.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Summary</h3>
<div>
Everything keys off the der words. Learn those well. They aren't a perfect guide, but they're awfully good. Learn the exceptions as you come to them.<br />
<br />
Good luck!</div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-20011108276475238812015-01-28T15:25:00.001-08:002015-01-28T15:41:57.363-08:00Seta (Silk): A Short, Easy Italian Novel<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Universale-economica-Italian-Alessandro-Baricco-ebook/dp/B00B4224RA" target="_blank"><i>Seta</i></a> (2008, 108 pages) is a quick, easy read: ideal for someone's first attempt to read an Italian novel.<br />
<br />
Hervé Joncour, a young man in 19th century France, tries to save his town's silk industry by smuggling silkworm eggs out of Japan. Although he's happily married to Hélèn, he becomes obsessed with a girl he meets in Japan. But Japan, newly opened to the world, is sliding into civil war.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Universale-economica-Italian-Alessandro-Baricco-ebook/dp/B00B4224RA" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYCDOX72FZLaErOeQd9TnEiyzo-BBUWZk51ASKhjcj_-0aGfJZKrIto-25Pb9QsB9IIl-sZ9FRZd8HQ0ObsYtSWrqcS_fUXDf2Uq_1rkk_0P0IvlVLKUzw0m6wH4zS9NCnrPru/s1600/seta+1+cover.jpg" height="400" width="260" /></a></div>
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<h3>
The Worm Turns</h3>
The silkworm spins a cocoon from a single, kilometer-long thread. From such threads hangs the prosperity of the little town of Lavilledieu, which specializes in silk making. When a silkworm blight starts killing European silk worms, the citizens have to send someone to find replacements. Every year, Hervé Joncour has to travel across the world to buy millions of eggs and get them back to France before they hatch. Each trip takes months, while the world around him keeps changing.<br />
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And even when he's back in France, he can't stop thinking about a mysterious girl he met in Japan. One who makes him eager for each return visit, even as they grow more and more dangerous.<br />
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<h3>
You can too!</h3>
This is an excellent first novel for someone ready to make the leap to reading Italian. Other than a limited amount of silkworm terminology, <i>Seta</i> doesn't demand a lot from the reader in terms of vocabulary. Like any Italian novel, the narration makes heavy use of the <i>passato remoto</i>, but the only forms you have to learn are the 3rd-person singular and plural. The 108 pages are divided into about 65 little chapters, many of which fit on a single Kindle screen. This gives you an incredible sense of accomplishment when you're reading it because you can knock the chapters off in rapid succession.<br />
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One chapter is very sexually explicit. <i>Very</i>. That may be a problem for some readers. Others, having read this warning, may be disappointed that that chapter is quite out of character with the rest of the novel and very near the end as well.<br />
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The ending may present a different problem; I noticed that some reviewers complained that it left loose ends. <i>Seta</i> is literature, not action-adventure (although there's a fair amount of action and adventure in it), so it's really about Hervé Joncour's own issues and contradictions, and it's over when those are resolved. In that sense, there are no loose ends. It really is one long thread.<br />
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Feel free to review my list of <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/p/books.html" target="">foreign novels I recommend reading</a> as well as <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/p/references.html">reference books I use for learning how to read foreign languages</a>.Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-83739157292390890342015-01-20T16:31:00.001-08:002015-01-20T19:59:15.953-08:00La forma dell'acqua: Why I Abandoned itI decided to abandon the popular Italian novel <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/forma-dellacqua-memoria-Italian-ebook/dp/B0085WLBOE" target="_blank">La forma dell'acqua</a></i> (first novel in the Inspector Montalbano series by Andrea Camilleri) because it is too far from standard Italian to read comfortably, and because there is no value to a non-native speaker in learning the non-standard words.<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/forma-dellacqua-memoria-Italian-ebook/dp/B0085WLBOE" target="_blank"><img alt="http://www.amazon.com/forma-dellacqua-memoria-Italian-ebook/dp/B0085WLBOE" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyTussbaZggfJ58TCRO5iNZgPfRUX9OOOQK0CqVqofQMb9-TRlDhph_ZbK5NcxiDEQOflfvPCbD7KyBfPVDy-NEvJ8qSPpv5l8dql300wDUxOGM5bPL-nnGz7it51yZgOhjjJa/s1600/La+forma+1+Cover.jpg" height="320" width="230" /></a></div>
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<h3>
How I Chose it</h3>
About a month ago, following my usual process for <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/12/finding-foreign-novels-to-read.html" target="">choosing a foreign novel to read</a>, I made a list of Italian novels to consider. About a week ago, I asked my Italian teacher for some suggestions for novels suitable for a strong intermediate reader. He sent links to a few web sites that listed books that are popular in Italy at the moment. Camilleri was the only name to turn up on both lists.<br />
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I really like crime stories, and the Inspector Montalbano series sounded interesting. If any of the reviews complained about the unusual language in the books, I missed that entirely.<br />
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<h3>
What happened when I tried to read it</h3>
From the very first page, I found myself looking up way too many words that didn't exist in the dictionary. This slowed me down a lot because I'd try switching dictionaries, then checking Wikipedia, and finally highlighting the word for later. Sometimes there would be two or three unknown words in a single sentence. Given the setting, I had expected to encounter a few Sicilian terms in the dialogue, but <i>not in the narration</i>. Regardless, I forged on to the end of the first chapter.<br />
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Even with all that trouble, I did get the gist of the story. A couple of garbage men doing their morning rounds and complaining about their bosses find the dead body of someone they know. They report it to the local police, commanded by Salvo Montalbano. In retrospect, I'm amazed I got that much out of it.<br />
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It's not just that it took a couple of hours to do this--it was <i>painful</i>. Still, figuring that perhaps there were only a few words I'd need to know for the rest of the book, I went back to the start and looked up the mystery words online. Or at least I tried to.<br />
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The first unknown term, <i>cummigliava</i> probably meant "accumulated," but Wordreference didn't have it, Linguee didn't have it. I consulted an <a href="https://it.glosbe.com/scn/it">online Sicilian-Italian dictionary</a>, and that didn't have it either. Finally I did a Google search for it, and I found this article:<br />
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<a href="https://www.academia.edu/909417/_I_am_Montalbano_Montalbano_sono_Fluency_and_Cultural_Difference_in_Translating_Andrea_Camilleri_s_Fiction_Journal_of_Anglo-Italian_Studies_10_2009_pp._201-219" target="_blank">‘I am Montalbano/Montalbano sono’: Fluency and Cultural Difference in Translating</a> <a href="https://www.academia.edu/909417/_I_am_Montalbano_Montalbano_sono_Fluency_and_Cultural_Difference_in_Translating_Andrea_Camilleri_s_Fiction_Journal_of_Anglo-Italian_Studies_10_2009_pp._201-219" target="_blank">Andrea Camilleri’s Fiction</a>, by Saverio Tomaiuolo<br />
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There I learned that I'm not the only one who has trouble reading this author's work.<br />
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<h3>
Why I abandoned it</h3>
The author has loaded it with words that he himself invented by merging words from the Sicilian dialect with standard Italian words. Apparently Italians find this entertaining--my Italian teacher told me that he's hugely popular over in Italy, and that you can figure out most of the words by doing Google searches on them because there are all sorts of web sites where people argue over what they're supposed to mean.<br />
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I actually considered that. After all, even time spent reading someone's Italian web page is time spent reading Italian, but what put me off the idea is the fact that I don't want to be memorizing a bunch of non-words. Not when there are so many real words I need to add to my Italian vocabulary.<br />
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So even though Italians love Camilleri's work, I think students of Italian need to stay away from it.Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-70630387650651382582015-01-06T13:54:00.001-08:002015-01-07T12:47:17.657-08:00Candide Despite being 250 years old, Voltaire's book <i>Candide ou l'optimisme</i> was a delight to read, even at my level of French. It's a wild and crazy tale of a very young man's misadventures across half the world--adventures that retain their power to shock, horrify, and make you laugh. Sometimes all at the same time.<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Candide-French-Voltaire-ebook/dp/B005R3YTBG" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRvXLPiQLrTy5rsr080yor3NcgDGZ4SlzupvA_9DrxIxi60K9KTAITvWAc22VcnfxTy7zlv_FHFYwbFKoQBpqGLLW8D4T_dO2i0-5tLBKStfxL1FFsVbf98M4ZvE4HwoXLEyrw/s1600/Candide+1+cover.jpg" height="320" width="201" /></a></div>
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<h3>
The Best of All Possible Worlds</h3>
<div>
Candide's teacher, Pangloss, teaches that logic proves that this is the best of all possible worlds and that all things work out for the best. Starting with chapter one, things don't seem to go that way for Candide though. He's kicked out of the castle, drafted into the army, almost flogged to death for trying to desert, almost killed in a battle, almost drowned at sea, almost killed in an earthquake, almost burned by the inquisition--and this is all in just the first six chapters (out of thirty). </div>
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Much of the message of the novel is that the "this is the best of all possible worlds" philosophy is ridiculous, but to some degree the text contradicts this. Bad things have a way of happening to Candide, but <i>worse</i> things happen to the people who tangle with him. If he's driven out of a castle, you can expect a few chapters later to learn that he just escaped the castle's destruction. If he misses a boat with all his belongings on it, expect to learn later that the boat sank. It may not be the best possible world for Candide, but things work out a lot better for him than they seem to have any right to. This makes his misfortunes a lot easier to bear. He's a comic figure, not a tragic one.</div>
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Of course the message isn't the fun part of the book, and it's quite easy to just ignore it and enjoy the trip. And what a trip it is! The story takes you to Europe, Africa, South America, and just over the border into Asia. Sometimes he's fleeing, sometimes he's pursuing, and sometimes he just goes with the flow.</div>
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Part of what makes it funny is that no matter what happens, no matter how strange, he always takes it in stride and cooks up some sort of explanation. And some <i>really</i> strange things happen.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheEhYT3Cp4WROC8SklqKPRjzt08v9kHNcrYQI1H6vtwgjezRY3xHiGLI3paczc55EZGRporHOjQ3lqqYVc3XegKfL60aFwc_cCJwZLGbeVDyzblIxvEmjrQ7UGO-kP0-OcrKEG/s1600/Candide+2+Monkeys.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheEhYT3Cp4WROC8SklqKPRjzt08v9kHNcrYQI1H6vtwgjezRY3xHiGLI3paczc55EZGRporHOjQ3lqqYVc3XegKfL60aFwc_cCJwZLGbeVDyzblIxvEmjrQ7UGO-kP0-OcrKEG/s1600/Candide+2+Monkeys.jpg" height="320" width="300" /></a></div>
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When I was in high school, students in second-year French read <i>Candide</i>. Now I understand both how teenage students would be able to read such a book and why it would entertain them.</div>
<h3>
Issues Reading Candide on a Kindle</h3>
This was the second novel I ever read in French. Most of the notes I wrote about how I read <i><a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/10/cinq-semaines-en-ballon-five-weeks-in.html">Cinq semaines en ballon</a></i> apply to <i>Candide</i> as well. In hindsight, <i>Candide</i> would have been the easier one for me to start with despite it being over 100 years older.<br />
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Because the book was so old, I went ahead and bought an English translation as well--if "bought" is the right word for free books. (Candide is free on Amazon.com in both <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Candide-French-Voltaire-ebook/dp/B005R3YTBG" target="_blank">French</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004UJGFKG" target="_blank">English</a> editions.) What I discovered, though, was that I really didn't need the English version at all. I consulted it at the end of each chapter, but I rarely found any translation mistakes worthy of note.<br />
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As with any novel in French, the reader has to be prepared to cope with the <i>passé simple</i> verb tenses in the narration. Unlike modern novels, you also have to deal with it in dialogue, which means you'll occasionally see forms beyond the third person ones. This turns out not to be a big problem because the Kindle's free monolingual French dictionary knows all the <i>passé simple</i> forms and always gets you to the infinitive. If you see a mysterious expression like <i>nous parlâmes</i>, it's enough to know that the verb is <i>parler</i> and you can figure out that this means "we spoke".<br />
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One other thing that took some getting used to is that Voltaire often says <i>point</i> instead of <i>pas</i> to make negative statements. The free monolingual French dictionary does explain this, but, of course, it explains it in French. I think that's the only grammatical point that took me by surprise though.<br />
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The hardest vocabulary for me were the words involving Pangloss's philosophy. As it turns out, nothing Pangloss says is of the least importance, and even translated his comments are generally arrant nonsense. (I'd probably get those jokes better if I'd ever had to study philosophy in Latin.)<br />
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Supposedly Voltaire wrote the whole thing in just three or four days. I find that hard to believe, but almost as incredible is that I <i>read</i> the whole thing in three days. Of all the foreign-language books I've read so far, I think this one was the most fun. Highly recommended.Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-61774661879117508342014-12-30T13:29:00.002-08:002015-01-12T05:05:32.656-08:00How to Make a Gold Duolingo TreeFinishing <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/duolingo-language-learning-as-game.html">Duolingo</a> isn't enough; you want all the skills to be "gold," and you want them to <i>stay</i> gold. In this post, I'll talk about how to "regild" a completed tree, what to do about weak skills if you're half-way through a tree, and how to keep a tree gold from the very start. I'll also discuss how to do this in a way that actually teaches you something--it shouldn't be an exercise in aesthetics!<br />
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Those who are impatient can just <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-to-make-gold-duolingo-tree.html#summary">skip straight to the end</a> and read what I recommend as the best practice. For everyone else, I'll explain what it is we're talking about and how I reached the conclusions I did.<br />
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<h3>
The Decaying Tree</h3>
When you first finish a skill, Duolingo turns its icon gold, and five "strength bars" (like on your phone) appear beside it. If you don't do regular "strengthening" exercises, though, the strength bars will gradually weaken from five to one, and at anything less than five, the skill appears in its original color--not gold. This is what we mean by "strong skills" and "weak skills." "Regilding the tree" means doing enough exercises to turn the whole tree gold again.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZdTGAL4hMwh1FaMMJwBOYSWLIe8qEW-TxXwvuDPYX9IpAcZRJEtvp7QLoFdNOn9cSveXK8fTS0e6WBYGATa-SABoC7QIrNHiw19HuI_sElu43r77_wbxrR5bPrJTpuuKYxae8/s1600/Reguilding+1+Bottom+of+Tree.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZdTGAL4hMwh1FaMMJwBOYSWLIe8qEW-TxXwvuDPYX9IpAcZRJEtvp7QLoFdNOn9cSveXK8fTS0e6WBYGATa-SABoC7QIrNHiw19HuI_sElu43r77_wbxrR5bPrJTpuuKYxae8/s1600/Reguilding+1+Bottom+of+Tree.png" height="640" width="530" /></a></div>
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People who do new lessons but never do review lessons get used to the way a wave of color chases them down their tree. Those who took the placement test and skipped over a large part of the tree are often stunned when a huge slab abruptly turns color all at once. In both cases, Duolingo is sending a message that those are skills that ought to be reviewed. This post is for those who want to do something about weak skills and who want to enhance their language learning at the same time.</div>
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<h4 style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Why Bother?</h4>
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As Duolingo warns, if you don't review what you learned, you'll start to forget it. Lots of people eventually abandon Duolingo because they get about a third of the way down the tree and then they have terrible trouble finishing new lessons, due to the fact that they've forgotten too much of the earlier material. Doing regular review lessons spares you from this.</div>
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Duolingo has a decent algorithm that tries to target the things you most need to review. Done right, the review lessons really shouldn't end up being a waste of time--they should help you solidify your understanding of the language. And they often contain material you didn't see when you did the skill for the first time.</div>
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<h4>
Two Kind of Strengthening Exercises</h4>
To reverse this decay process, you can either do a <i>skill-specific</i> strengthening exercise or a <i>general</i> strengthening exercise. To do a skill-specific one, you pick a weakened skill and click on its icon. On the right, you'll see a colored box showing the strength of the skill, and inside that box is a button to strengthen the skill. Press that button and Duolingo gives you a review lesson targeting the skill as a whole. That is, it doesn't just repeat one of the lessons--it asks you questions drawn from all of them.<br />
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Because it only takes 17 correct answers to complete a lesson, and because Duolingo usually has far more than 17 possible questions per lesson, when you do a review lesson you will frequently see sentences you never saw when you did the skill in the first place. Usually not entirely new words, but you'll definitely see new ways to use the old words.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglEwYvI81wVLTsCH9g3P0b_f9c08SeADvstmFRKNyk6R5WNJXpoQWQmVpNB6xj-P6SB2dN7h5zJManMUxc86ZTHsQ88RJbo3nNHCQHENZgCrVUZUKYOuD6zyN18uSbmZpTdAIo/s1600/Reguilding+2+Skill-specific.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglEwYvI81wVLTsCH9g3P0b_f9c08SeADvstmFRKNyk6R5WNJXpoQWQmVpNB6xj-P6SB2dN7h5zJManMUxc86ZTHsQ88RJbo3nNHCQHENZgCrVUZUKYOuD6zyN18uSbmZpTdAIo/s1600/Reguilding+2+Skill-specific.png" height="379" width="640" /></a></div>
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Depending on how weak the skill is and how big it is (i.e. how many words it covers), a single strengthening exercise may not be enough to make it gold again. Repetition may be necessary. On the other hand, occasionally you'll strengthen some entirely different skill that just happens to share a few words with the one you were trying to strengthen.<br />
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To do a <i>general </i>strengthening exercise, you go back to the main menu and click the blue "Strengthen Skills" button on the far right of the screen." This brings up a review lesson that has a random mix of things you have already studied but that Duolingo thinks are weakest.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyxsUqsIC_-FJn4_AFjiOZ3xLMa-wIPgxdxX_MCmGa0SUEJi5qQBQnQtxKg9zkoUvps9lL5OLpLFCfb7NXGjkWQIzkBbDiTcRbuLjRArCiMbI4awJD8LHpx0gUUz3lcEClXh57/s1600/Reguilding+3+General+Strengthening.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyxsUqsIC_-FJn4_AFjiOZ3xLMa-wIPgxdxX_MCmGa0SUEJi5qQBQnQtxKg9zkoUvps9lL5OLpLFCfb7NXGjkWQIzkBbDiTcRbuLjRArCiMbI4awJD8LHpx0gUUz3lcEClXh57/s1600/Reguilding+3+General+Strengthening.png" height="348" width="640" /></a></div>
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Because the benefits of the general exercise are spread across the entire tree, it usually strengthens anywhere from zero to three skills--<a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/duolingo/comments/2q2qec/has_this_happened_to_anyone_else_in_spanish/" target="_blank">some people have reported as many as 13</a>.<br />
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In short, your tree weakens over time, and you have to do strengthening exercises if you want it to stay (or become) gold. The question is how often to do them and what kind to do. To answer that, we'll start with a look at Duolingo's algorithm--what's known of it, anyway.<br />
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<h3>
How it Works</h3>
Duolingo does not publish much about the algorithms they use for weakening and strengthening, but they did make at least <a href="https://www.duolingo.com/comment/486819" target="_blank">one posting with hints about it</a>. Further, a Duolingo user with the handle <a href="https://www.duolingo.com/pinkodoug" target="_blank">pinkodoug</a> has made an extensive study of the Duolingo JavaScript and he has some plausible ideas about their algorithms for <a href="https://www.duolingo.com/comment/4015927$comment_id=4016377" target="_blank">strengthening</a> and <a href="https://www.duolingo.com/comment/4149488$comment_id=4149579" target="_blank">weakening</a>.<br />
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Drawing from those sources plus my own experiments, here's my best guess as to what they do. (N.B. these are my conclusions, so if they're wrong blame me--not the sources above.)<br />
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To Duolingo, strength is about <i>words</i>, not <i>skills</i>. Strong words have a score of 100%, and they decay over time until they reach zero. <i>All</i> words are decaying <i>all the time</i>, but some words decay faster than others.<br />
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You can actually see this if you click on the "Words" tab at the top of the home screen.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVXA11JAy2Cz8F-k8tpBo4iR2xdThrx9t_JiFGzz7JA4XecfwAzC9EvDoO-4khbeoS8BDN32bVSW_1MRYJxqhObRgr3qAWpEQK8hGQMlHeikQmqCR7TEcub0e9CNJ3XrcdE-23/s1600/Reguilding+6+Words.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVXA11JAy2Cz8F-k8tpBo4iR2xdThrx9t_JiFGzz7JA4XecfwAzC9EvDoO-4khbeoS8BDN32bVSW_1MRYJxqhObRgr3qAWpEQK8hGQMlHeikQmqCR7TEcub0e9CNJ3XrcdE-23/s1600/Reguilding+6+Words.png" height="356" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
This shows all the words that Duolingo thinks you've studied so far. It tells you how long ago you practiced each one, and it gives each word's current strength using a bar system that goes from 1-4 (not 1-5 the way skills do). If you sort by "Last Practiced," you'll see that the older words tend to be weak while the latest words are almost all 4-bars strong. This is because all words weaken over time, but, as I said before, <i>some words decay faster than others</i>. We'll get back to this last point in a minute.<br />
<br />
Every skill is associated with a set of words--probably the same words that you see in the individual lesson descriptions. Whenever those words have an average strength of 2.5 bars or more, the skill is gold. Otherwise, it shows the original color, and the skill-strength declines based on some function of the average word strength.<br />
<br />
Whenever you do a review lesson, it targets some number of your weakest words for review. A skill-specific review only picks words from that one skill. A general review picks words from every lesson you've completed so far. Otherwise they're the same--with one important exception: in <a href="https://www.duolingo.com/comment/486819" target="_blank">the tips that Duolingo offered</a>, they said that skill-specific strengthening turns your tree gold faster than general strengthening does.<br />
<br />
As long as you complete the review lesson, the targeted words all get set back to four bars <i>whether you get them right or not</i>. The catch is that getting them right makes them decay slower in the future. Getting them wrong or <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-to-make-gold-duolingo-tree.html#hints">using the hints</a> makes them decay <i>faster</i>. This is why some people report making tremendous efforts to strengthen every single skill only to watch them start decaying again a few days later.<br />
<br />
The fact that some people seem to keep their trees gold without much effort suggests that there actually is an optimal way to do this. To determine what that might be, I did a few experiments--with help from a friend.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Experiments</h3>
<h4>
Greg's French Tree</h4>
For the past twelve months, I have been slowly going through Duolingo's French tree, following a rule of doing two review lessons per day followed by one new lesson. In that time, I have completed most of the tree, <i>and it has never weakened</i>. That is, although an individual skill has weakened two or three times, I simply strengthened it specifically and thus ended the day with a solid-gold tree. During that time, I had three different week-long vacations during which I couldn't do lessons. Even so, when I got back, the tree was still gold. Others have reported similar experiences.<br />
<br />
This suggested to me that it is possible to have a <i>durable</i> gold tree without a whole lot of work. That is, it seemed that as few at two general strengthening exercises per day might be enough, if done daily for a long enough time.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Naomi's Italian Trees</h4>
My friend Naomi in New Zealand was interested in exploring this, and she agreed to help do a few experiments. She had finished her English-to-Italian tree (aka the "forward tree") in just a few months and wanted to gild it. She had also just completed the Italian-to-English tree (aka the "reverse tree") in a single day and wanted to keep it gold.<br />
<br />
The experiment was very simple: On her forward tree, she did two general strengthens per day. On the reverse tree, she did three general strengthens per day. Back when Duolingo allowed you to fail, she would persist until she <i>completed</i> that number, although, as it happens, she rarely failed an exercise.<br />
<br />
Here's what happened.<br />
<br />
With three general strengthens per day, the reverse tree got worse for about 40 days, leveled off for about a month, and then started improving in an irregular sort of way.<br />
<br />
The forward tree decayed steadily, reaching 57 weak skills on day 91. At that point, we changed our strategy.<br />
<br />
Starting on day 92, Naomi began doing three skill-specific exercises instead of two or three general ones. She selected the skills to strengthen by picking the weak skills highest in her tree. She applied the same algorithm to both trees.<br />
<br />
We only have 13 days of data with the new method, but the results speak for themselves.<br />
<br />
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<br /></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_Rx-eilzMNtkKlNL4X_lccG4JBqCf-fIdHHQEsvnx5L5BlqWrLeqvQgY1QkMgNPYV14re5z_3JIvAAhIvuePCRg4DHF2YXsM5YGaUBhFR3rbWHAadBPwRE9_7FGK8GH7VKZwO/s1600/Reguilding+7A+Naomi+Graph.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_Rx-eilzMNtkKlNL4X_lccG4JBqCf-fIdHHQEsvnx5L5BlqWrLeqvQgY1QkMgNPYV14re5z_3JIvAAhIvuePCRg4DHF2YXsM5YGaUBhFR3rbWHAadBPwRE9_7FGK8GH7VKZwO/s1600/Reguilding+7A+Naomi+Graph.png" height="466" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
This graph shows how many weak skills were left each day <i>after</i> Naomi did her strengthening exercises. This shows that the reverse tree was 100% regilded on day 99 and that it has remained so for six days now. On the present trend, the forward tree will be regilded in two more weeks.<br />
<br />
Obviously this strongly suggests doing the per-skill exercises rather than the general ones--just as Duolingo had advised people. In fact, the per-skill exercises appear to be <i>more than three-times as effective</i> at regilding. It also suggests that two exercises per day was not enough.<br />
<br />
We adopted one additional rule: substitute general exercises for specific ones if there are no weak skills left, but never do more than two general exercises on the same day. That is, if the tree has any weak skills, then Naomi still does three strengthening exercises--padding them out with general ones as needed, but if the tree was solid gold to begin with, then she only does two generals, not three. The idea is that, like with my French tree, a durable gold tree should eventually need only two per day to maintain it.<br />
<br />
Note: Throughout the process, Naomi reported that the algorithm seemed to have a knack for finding exactly the things she was weakest on. She felt the exercise improved her Italian enormously, even if she did spend 91 days making no visible progress on regilding her trees.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Greg's Spanish and Italian Trees</h4>
During this time, I let my own Spanish and Italian trees decay. (Both had been gold on day zero of Naomi's experiment.) Over the next month or two I'll try to reproduce the results from Naomi's trees, but I wanted to share one key result that I got on the first day:<br />
<br />
<i>For the best learning experience, you should strengthen from bottom-up instead of top-down.</i><br />
<br />
The reason to prefer bottom up is that it drills you in the skills you most-recently learned--the skills you are most likely to need help in. You'll discover that Duolingo has a lot more material for those skills that you never saw when you did them the first time. Most people have a weak grip on the last skills in a tree, so it makes a great deal of sense to prioritize strengthening them first. In contrast, the stuff at the top of the tree is far easier to do, but it's also far less valuable to review.<br />
<br />
The exception would be for someone trying to resurrect a long-unused tree or for someone who has become overwhelmed and is considering quitting. Those folks should strengthen from the top down because it's equivalent to starting over, in a way, without losing everything you learned the first time. (In my view, no one should ever delete their Duolingo tree and start over.)<br />
<br />
<h3>
Other Issues</h3>
<div>
I always advise people to avoid timed practices and not to use the mouse-over hints unless absolutely necessary. I'll explain my reasoning for both suggestions.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h4>
Timed Practices</h4>
<div>
You buy the ability to do timed practices at the lingot store. It's a one-time purchase, but it's still a bad deal. The way it works is that when do a review Duolingo offers you the option to do timed practice instead of the normal kind. In fact, it becomes the default.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh47RSjQbd0Md2EwVdDm4-8l02fmiOpXfO4YF0KBwZCjGbejdjfQtevS7CW3glSmWcartM3-ukn5o9lSOwe8ZhdP0-ZUy-hYuC-ptS3qAUmquPF8SGcUvBlJgDD1jNDRq0MIyzL/s1600/Reguilding+4+Practice+Without+Timer.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh47RSjQbd0Md2EwVdDm4-8l02fmiOpXfO4YF0KBwZCjGbejdjfQtevS7CW3glSmWcartM3-ukn5o9lSOwe8ZhdP0-ZUy-hYuC-ptS3qAUmquPF8SGcUvBlJgDD1jNDRq0MIyzL/s1600/Reguilding+4+Practice+Without+Timer.png" height="345" width="640" /></a></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In timed practice, you only have a few seconds before the clock runs out and you lose the round. Every correct answer puts more time on the clock, so you need to go like lightening to keep ahead. In theory, this helps you develop the skills to handle conversation in real time.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Many of the people I've talked to who reported doing lots and lots of review lessons with little progress on regilding their trees told me they were doing timed practices. I think this strengthens the tree slowly because time pressure encourages people to skip long sentences. The earlier post from Duolingo said that every word counts, so it would make sense that skipping the long sentences would really hurt you.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Given that Duolingo's new UI is much more forgiving of mistakes, it probably makes more sense to try to get the same effect by simply going through the exercises as fast as you can, accepting the fact that you'll make more errors. As a bonus, when you do make an error, you can stop and study what you did wrong. Anyway, if you want to regild your tree, you should probably stay away from timed practice.<br />
<br /></div>
<h4 id="hints">
Hints</h4>
The other thing that seems to be strongly associated with lack of success is using hints. Using a hint means doing a lesson and mousing over a word to get Duolingo to show you the definition.<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu4WvyIWAsYf8PUEEx2tpFaX962LEyUDJMjFi_mHFx7OpBHDfYfksU6ukNQ_jHHFAjT0zbfKRA_Oc8uDi-V75Nv_n2kgsWfCknTB3y2cxJeqq5rhw9KCxp60Le1sMb1ymSdwPn/s1600/Reguilding+5+Hints.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu4WvyIWAsYf8PUEEx2tpFaX962LEyUDJMjFi_mHFx7OpBHDfYfksU6ukNQ_jHHFAjT0zbfKRA_Oc8uDi-V75Nv_n2kgsWfCknTB3y2cxJeqq5rhw9KCxp60Le1sMb1ymSdwPn/s1600/Reguilding+5+Hints.png" height="355" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
Unfortunately Duolingo takes this as a hint that you don't know that word at all, and it makes that word decay faster. <b>Do </b>use the hints if you really don't know the word. (We want to help Duolingo figure out what you really need to study, after all.) But don't use them just because you want to be 100% sure of a word before you press return.<br />
<br />
<h3 id="summary">
Summary</h3>
<div>
Plan to do three exercises per day. <i>If you can't invest that much effort, you probably can't do this in a reasonable time.</i> With that, here is the system I recommend for making durable gold trees with Duolingo:<br />
<ul>
<li>Always do a skill-specific strengthening exercise if there are any weak skills in your tree at all. Only do a general strengthening exercise if there are no more weak skills to do.</li>
<li>If there are multiple weak skills to choose from, always pick the one that is furthest down the tree. (That is, prefer skills you learned later over ones you learned earlier.) <i>But</i>, if you are effectively starting over (e.g. after a long absence or because you're overwhelmed) then pick the highest (that is easiest) weak skills first.</li>
<li>For an incomplete tree, do two strengthening exercises and then do one new exercise every day. If you're not ready for a new exercise, do a third strengthening exercise instead.</li>
<li>For a complete tree that isn't all gold, do three strengthening exercises every day, using general strengthening exercises if you run out of skill-specific ones.</li>
<li>For a complete, solid-gold tree, only do two strengthening exercises per day--both of which have to be general ones, of course.</li>
</ul>
<div>
<i>Never </i>do a timed practice. <i>Never</i> use <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-to-make-gold-duolingo-tree.html#hints">hints</a>.<br />
<br />
Finally, <i>take your time</i>. Don't try to regild your tree in a day or two of inhumanly focused effort--followed by a month of neglect. A steady effort over a long period of time is the best way to do this. You'll learn the most that way, and it won't burn you out.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
If you follow this plan, assuming that you are doing your best on the exercises, your tree will eventually be "durable gold," meaning it will stay gold with minimal effort on your part, even if you go on vacation for a week or so. How long it will take to get there depends on a lot of things, but a month or two seems typical. (It depends on how well you do the exercises and on how deeply decayed your tree was in the first place.) Have at it, and best of luck!<br />
<br />
I would love to hear from anyone who gives this a try. Leave a comment and let me know how it went.</div>
</div>
Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com58tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-67262877782580213572014-12-14T20:05:00.002-08:002015-03-10T06:34:30.487-07:00Como Agua Para ChocolateI finished <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Como-agua-para-chocolate-Spanish-ebook/dp/B004774D14" target="_blank">Como Agua Para Chocolate</a></i> ("Like Water for Chocolate") this week, and enjoyed it a lot. Other than requiring the reader to master a hundred or so words of cooking vocabulary, it should be well-suited to an intermediate reader with a good sense of humor. Young female readers may especially enjoy it, but it's really a fun read for anyone.<br />
<br />
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</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Como-agua-para-chocolate-Spanish-ebook/dp/B004774D14" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpr7A9yzbfr9YXH8krRD6Y8vWCldFTqfZVjSGUUwgygKGx9CpocNIdK2lqE_GXhHIoND6HzygPnH9CCXVDn2JsNU1GeiZwLFkMfuX7ce61y9znV_6p61bkRhc8RGJb0l6LgDw0/s1600/Como+Agua+Para+Chocolate+1+Book+Cover.jpg" height="400" width="255" /></a></div>
<br />
<h3>
Outline of the story (no spoilers)</h3>
<h4>
A basic but boring description</h4>
<div>
Tita la Garza is the youngest daughter of a wealthy Mexican family whose ranch lies in northern Mexico not far from the US border. The novel takes place during the Mexican Revolution in the early 1900s. Tita wants to marry Pedro Muzquiz, the boy next door, but her family's tradition says that the youngest daughter must stay home to take care of her mother. She rebels, but her mother is a very strong woman who brooks no disagreement. Tita boils with repressed anger and passion--like the water one boils to make hot chocolate.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h4>
A more exciting description</h4>
<div>
Strange things happen around Tita. Magical things. Surreal things. Forced to work in the kitchen, she pours herself into the work (and excels at it), but when she's very emotional--for better or worse--all kinds of things happen to people who eat her cooking. Even without Tita's help, the la Garza ranch is a place where people do strange things for stranger reasons, but Tita definitely pushes it over the top.<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
Strange things happen to the reader too. You laugh. You get angry. You get sad. And then you laugh some more. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
There are twelve chapters, named for each of the months of the year, although the story encompasses more time than that. Each chapter is organized around a particular Mexican dish that Tita will prepare, and you can bank on the fact that <i>something</i> unexpected will happen when people sit down at the table with it. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h4>
The target audience</h4>
<div>
Unquestionably, this is a girl's book. The heroine is a teenage girl, all the strong characters in the book are women, and cooking is a major part of the story. That said, you don't have to be a girl to enjoy it, and there is a lot here to enjoy. For me, at least, the book flew by. I don't think I was ever bored.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h3>
Challenges Reading the Novel in Spanish</h3>
<h4>
Vocabulary</h4>
<div>
<i>Como agua para chocolate</i> has quite a lot of cooking vocabulary. You'll find the names of cooking utensils, actions for preparing and cooking food, and a long list of foods. Assuming you are <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/how-to-read-foreign-novel-on-kindle.html">reading on a Kindle</a>, you'll find that the free monolingual dictionary almost always has definitions for these words, so be sure to check it whenever your bilingual dictionary lets you down.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
A trick that is sometimes useful, especially for long lists of unknown words, is to use the translate feature on the Kindle. Although the translation often makes a hash out of complex sentences, when you have a simple list of nouns, it usually does a pretty good job, and it's far faster than looking up seven or eight words in a row.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
There are a few references to the Mexican revolution that might throw you. One important one is that a follower of Pancho Villa is a *villista*, but none of my dictionaries told me that--I just had to figure it out.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h4>
Experiment</h4>
<div>
For this novel, I tried an experiment: during the first chapter, I highlighted every word that I had to look up in the dictionary. I sometimes look up words even though I think I know them, so I didn't highlight anything if the result was what I expected. Just the words I really needed to understand the sentence.<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
At the end of the first chapter, I created a new deck of flashcards with <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/10/using-anki-flashcards-for-vocabulary.html">Anki</a> but instead of using my special template, I used the basic Anki template--the one that assumes you only drill in one direction and that you don't type the answers. On the front sides, I put the Spanish words I had looked up, and on the reverse I put the definitions.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Drilling on those words was really fast. For example, Anki might prompt me with:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
I might think "that that means "to shell," and I'd press the space bar. Anki would show me the answer:</div>
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<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In this case, I'd be right, so I'd press space again to mark it correct and advance to the next card. If I was wrong, I'd press the "1" key, marking the card wrong for further review.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Although not as comprehensive as the sort of two-sided cards I create for serious vocabulary review, I could blitz through these one-sided cards like lightening, largely because I didn't have to type anything.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
After drilling on the words from the first chapter, I proceeded to read the second chapter. Sure enough, lots of those words occurred again--even unusual ones. I repeated the experiment in chapters two and three. This fairly simple exercise made the rest of the book a good bit easier to read. I'll try this again with the next couple of books to see if I really think it's worth the trouble.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Amazon actually has a built-in flashcard feature called "Vocabulary Builder" which does almost the same thing. Unfortunately, as of this writing, there is a bug in the Vocabulary Builder that causes your Kindle to slow down and eventually lock up if you look up too many words with it. I can't get past a single chapter without having to turn it off.</div>
Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-65939367277984696032014-12-05T16:37:00.002-08:002014-12-08T03:28:50.373-08:00Finding Foreign Novels to ReadOne of the challenges of <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/learning-foreign-language-by-reading.html">reading in a foreign language</a> is finding novels to read in the first place. You want something hard enough to challenge you but not so difficult that you give up in despair. If you already have recommendations from friends or teachers, that may be all you need, but recommendations can go badly wrong too. (See the last section of this post for a story about that.)<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Even if you follow my advice on <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/how-to-read-foreign-novel-on-kindle.html">reading a foreign novel with a Kindle</a>, you are likely to spend a hundred hours or more on this book, especially if it is your first in the language. It's worth your while to take a couple of hours to pick one out.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Availability</h3>
<div>
Because my strategy calls for using a Kindle, it does limit you to books you can buy on a Kindle. This turns out to be a limitation, but not a fatal one.<br />
<br />
Amazon has a large selection of foreign-language novels in the Kindle store, but you'll be disappointed to learn that it's only a fraction of what's sold in those markets. For example, I checked just now and there are 113,182 Spanish Kindle books in the US Kindle store, but on Amazon.es, there are 3,198,321 available. That calls for an explanation.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Unless you have a mailing address in the EU, Amazon cannot legally sell those books to you. This is because standard contracts with publishers set out different rules for different countries and those contracts usually only give Amazon the right to sell a book in a few markets. It's okay (in theory) to order copies of the physical, printed books, if you're willing to pay the shipping costs from Europe, but you cannot buy the e-books. The fault for this lies entirely with the publishers, who generally won't sign international contracts even for e-books. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle/ref=cm_cd_et_md_pl?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdMsgID=Mx2J32RKDZCS132&cdMsgNo=14&cdPage=1&cdSort=oldest&cdThread=Tx2MUOYQX66HG0D#Mx2J32RKDZCS132" target="_blank">People complain about this a lot</a>.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
As a practical matter, there are plenty of interesting books in the US store; you really aren't going to run out. But sometimes I'll see a book review that praises the English translation of a foreign novel, and I'll want to see if I can read it in the original language. So far, I have never been able to.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The most you can do is write a letter to the publisher. Short of that, you can find the US Amazon page for the printed book and click the link that says "I want this book on the Kindle." </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The upshot is that you have to start your search with the set of books that are actually for sale on Amazon in the US.<br />
<br /></div>
<h3>
Selection Criteria</h3>
<div>
As mentioned above, you want to pick a novel that'll be fun and challenging but not too difficult for you. Toward that end, I've come up with a set of rules. They aren't hard-and-fast rules, but they're a reasonable guide to start with. As you read more and more books, you can relax some of these rules.<br />
<br />
The most important thing--above all else--is that you pick a book that interests you enough to stick with it. This is a principle that supersedes any rules.</div>
<div>
<ol>
<li>The book must be an "authentic novel." This means written by and for adult native speakers. That rules out translations, children's books, and materials for students. The reason is that these things all dumb-down the vocabulary and sometimes use unnatural grammar.</li>
<li>The book must be new to you. If you already read an English translation of the book, don't try reading it again. It's not just that this makes it too easy--it also makes it too <i>boring</i>. Worse, because you already know what you're reading, it can lull you into a false sense of accomplishment--of thinking that you understand what you're reading when you really don't.</li>
<li>The book should be exciting. I like crime novels, action-adventure, etc. Find something that sounds fun. If this is your first novel in the language, you'll need something interesting enough to get you through the first chapter. Young-adult novels may be a good compromise. They're only a little simpler than mainstream novels, and they're action-packed.</li>
<li>The book should be contemporary. Books over 100 years old often use different grammar and/or spelling. Sadly, most of the free books on Amazon are old ones.</li>
<li>The book should not be too hard. Literary writing uses a bigger vocabulary and often uses unusual grammar. Science Fiction often makes words up (some claim that this is offset by the fact that SF is otherwise simpler).</li>
<li>The book shouldn't be too long. Under 200 pages is good. Over 500 is probably too much.</li>
<li>The author should be one you haven't read before. Authors have favorite words and phrases that they reuse a lot. That's part of why the first chapter or two of a new novel is always the hardest to get through. But if you keep reading books by the same author, you're not growing. That said, if you really like an author, that can add a lot to your motivation to read.</li>
<li>The book should be a professional publication. You do not want to be reading something with spelling or grammar errors in it! Almost all self-published books are really bad, and it doesn't matter what language they're written in.</li>
</ol>
</div>
<div>
<h3>
Browsing</h3>
<div>
Start by going to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=lp_154606011_nr_n_28?rh=n%3A133140011%2Cn%3A%21133141011%2Cn%3A154606011%2Cn%3A7735160011" target="_blank">the foreign-language section of Amazon's US Kindle eBooks store</a>. If you're in the UK, then visit <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=sr_nr_n_27?rh=n%3A341677031%2Cn%3A%21341678031%2Cn%3A341689031%2Cn%3A4219685031" target="_blank">the UK store</a>. Amazon Canada is more complex because <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=lp_2980423011_nr_n_28?rh=n%3A2972705011%2Cn%3A%212972706011%2Cn%3A2980423011%2Cn%3A5794627011" target="_blank">French Books</a> are listed separately from <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=lp_2980423011_nr_n_29?rh=n%3A2972705011%2Cn%3A%212972706011%2Cn%3A2980423011%2Cn%3A8407245011" target="_blank">Foreign Books</a>. In any case, look at the left-hand column and select the language you're interested in. That will then let you select the genre (e.g. crime stories, science fiction, romance, etc.) and finally you can look at the top twenty or so best sellers.</div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
With that restriction, start at the top of the list and ctrl-click on every novel that seems like it might meet your criteria. This opens up a separate tab for each one. When you get to 10 or 15, go through them and discard any that don't meet the criteria above.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Now take some time and read the book descriptions on Amazon. Discard anything you're sure you wouldn't be interested in. (For example, I won't read anything that depends on some conspiracy theory being true.) Then have a look at the comments from readers--especially the three-star ones. To get more comments, go to Amazon's foreign-language site (e.g. amazon.es for Spanish) and read the reviews posted there. You can't buy anything from the foreign language site, but it's perfectly okay to read the reviews. Be suspicious of anything that doesn't have very many reviews. Goodreads is another place to look.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Of the books that remain, do Google searches for the titles and/or authors. See if they have Wikipedia articles that say anything positive about them. Look to see if they won prizes.</div>
<div>
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<div>
For any book that passed your screen, add it to a Wish List. Amazon lets you create private, named wish-lists to keep track of books you're thinking about but haven't decided to buy. Sleep on it. Review the list in the morning, and buy one!<br />
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<h3>
Recomendations </h3>
<h4>
Conventional Wisdom</h4>
Many people will tell you not to attempt a book if you need to look up more than five words per page. You'll get discouraged and give up. There is a lot of truth to this recommendation--it certainly describes my own pre-Kindle experiences. But I claim that advice is now out-of-date for the following reasons:<br />
<ol>
<li>A Kindle with electronic dictionary eliminates 99% of the work involved with dictionary lookups. That completely changes the equation.</li>
<li>The notion of "a page" was always shaky (would that be a page from a hard-back book or from a paper-back book) but on a Kindle it makes no sense at all. Scholars studying reading usually talk in terms of words. To read a novel without a dictionary, you can only be confused about 1 or 2 words in 100. I would adapt this rule, then, and say that there should only be 1 or 2 <em>hard</em> words in every 100. That means words that take more than a few seconds to figure out even with the dictionary.</li>
<li>If you use the old standard, there are almost no books that an intermediate student can read. The ones that are available are called <em>graded readers</em>, and they use a carefully restricted vocabulary. They're very expensive, they're rather boring (in my opinion), and there are very, very few to choose from. (Most of them are for people who are trying to learn English.)</li>
<li>It makes more sense to estimate the difficulty <em>after</em> the first chapter. Unless it's really easy or the author is familiar to you, the first chapter will be by far the hardest. It's not good to give people reasons to give up so soon.</li>
</ol>
<h4>
A Cautionary Tale</h4>
A friend or a teacher may recommend a book to you. You should welcome that, but check it out a bit before you read it. I'll illustrate just how bad it can be.<br />
<br />
When I was a senior in high school, the teacher of my fourth-year Spanish class assigned each of us a novel to try to read over the Christmas holidays. She gave me <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gaviota-Spanish-Fern%C3%A1n-Caballero-ebook/dp/B004UIUO9A" target="_blank">La Gaviota</a> by Fernán Caballero. For all the <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-in-foreign-language.html">reasons I've described earlier</a>, I failed to finish even the first chapter. Thirty-eight years later, I am still ashamed to admit that I lied to her about it, claiming I'd read it but that it was just really, really dull.<br />
<br />
In the summer of 2014, after I'd mastered the technique of <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/how-to-read-foreign-novel-on-kindle.html">reading a foreign novel using a Kindle</a>, I decided that after all these years I would finally make this right, so I bought a copy of La Gaviota and read it all the way through. Even with all the resources of modern technology, it took me weeks to finish it. Part of the problem was that it was written in 1848 and the grammar and vocabulary were different enough to make quite a few sentences difficult to decipher. I eventually broke down and bought an English translation, which I consulted when all else failed. (The translation turned out to only cover the first half of the book, but fortunately I didn't need it after that.)<br />
<br />
And it was awful. It's about a peasant girl whose talent for singing briefly lifts her to the top of Spanish society but whose selfishness and ingratitude destroys her life and the lives of those around her. There isn't a single likable character in the story. The book has an unfinished feel to it, at least by modern standards, because it has numerous plot elements that go nowhere and lots of characters who are introduced but never developed. Worst of all, the novel's message seemed to be that God was punishing her for rising above her place and punishing those her helped her do it. Yuk! (For a different opinion, read <a href="http://www.alquiblaweb.com/2013/11/10/la-novela-realista-en-la-gaviota-de-fernan-caballero/" target="_blank">Eva's glowing review</a> of La Gaviota.)<br />
<br />
To add insult to injury, the book was actually a translation from French into Spanish, so it wasn't even an authentic Spanish novel in the first place.<br />
<br />
On the bright side, I no longer feel quite so ashamed of myself. Mrs. Parker never should have assigned such a book to an 18-year-old boy. Not without strong guidance on how to read it, anyway.<br />
<br />
So pick your novels carefully. If you like, you can <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/p/books.html">review my own list of novels</a>. These are books I've read, am reading, or thinking about reading.Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-49430457211929469622014-11-15T17:25:00.003-08:002014-11-15T17:25:30.522-08:00Sostiene Pereira (According to Pereira)This month, I finished reading the literary novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sostiene-Pereira-Universale-economica-Italian-ebook/dp/B008E1RKUK" target="_blank">Sostiene Pereira</a> (Antonio Tabucchi, 1993, 214 pp). It's a suitable novel for an intermediate Italian student looking for a first novel to attempt. It's a quality piece of writing, the vocabulary isn't overwhelming, and the story is entertaining.<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sostiene-Pereira-Universale-economica-Italian-ebook/dp/B008E1RKUK" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/71c9hlnpo9L._SL1500_.jpg" height="640" width="392" /></a></div>
I attend a monthly <a href="http://www.meetup.com/italian-seattle/events/213706002/" target="_blank">Italian conversation meetup</a> here in Seattle, and at our last meeting I had asked for suggestions for an Italian novel to read. Previously, I had read two Italian detective novels, but I thought I was ready for something a bit more serious, and Sostiene Pereira is what the organizer proposed.<br />
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<h3>
A Short Review</h3>
<i>Sostenere</i> means to support, or to affirm, or to maintain, but in the context of the story, "according to Pereira" is probably the best way to translate it. The first sentence in the novel is therefore, "According to Pereira, he met him on a summer day." It quickly becomes clear that the third-person narrator is some government official writing a report to a superior. This style creates a certain tension because we expect Pereira to have serious problems, and we're not even sure if he'll survive the story.<br />
<br />
Problems aren't hard to find in fascist Portugal in 1938. Pereira is the middle-aged editor of the Cultural Page of a newspaper in Lisbon. He meets a young writer who reminds him of the son he and his late wife were never able to have. But the young man writes things that are too revolutionary to publish, and he has a girlfriend who is illegally helping the Spaniards fight Franco. Against his better judgment, Pereira does what he can to help the couple, even though the receptionist in his office seems to be working for the secret police.<br />
<br />
I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I believe it would make an excellent first novel for a strong student of Italian.<br />
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<h3>
How I Went About Reading It--Dealing with the dictionary</h3>
I have already described my technique for <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/how-to-read-foreign-novel-on-kindle.html" target="_blank">reading a foreign novel on a Kindle</a>, but Italian presents some unique challenges--mostly involving the dictionary.<br />
<br />
I used the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Collins-Unabridged-Italian-English-Dictionary-ebook/dp/B008LQ85JI" target="_blank">Collins Italian-English</a> bilingual dictionary, which unfortunately has <a href="http://www.amazon.com/review/R15WKJ8XP0J4D3" target="_blank">some serious problems</a>. The upshot is that although it has a good selection of headwords, it does a miserable job of finding inflected forms. By contrast, the monolingual Zingarelli dictionary that comes with the Kindle for free has complete conjugations for all verbs. It also seems to have a good bit bigger vocabulary than the Collins. But, of course, being a monolingual, it gives Italian definitions for Italian words.<br />
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I ended up using the Zingarelli as my default dictionary. I would make a serious attempt to understand the Italian definition before giving up and switching to the bilingual. On the Kindle Voyage and Paperwhite, that's pretty easy to do. Here's an example from the first page. Suppose you don't know what <i>soleggiato</i> means. You press on it and get the following definition.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj__-0YCkikdpX_pXlaLh2PKZgk1KsVpiScosQgZpLo9Gh_APsnrgmLRUbAdymVrg-rMjtbBL0cyo7oEiDhR6EGOIS8I9v0RLoZE-fbsKpgUjKpi6_0tddvDzVCrNl7p2Gh4V_/s1600/Sostiene+Pereira+1+Zingarelli.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj__-0YCkikdpX_pXlaLh2PKZgk1KsVpiScosQgZpLo9Gh_APsnrgmLRUbAdymVrg-rMjtbBL0cyo7oEiDhR6EGOIS8I9v0RLoZE-fbsKpgUjKpi6_0tddvDzVCrNl7p2Gh4V_/s1600/Sostiene+Pereira+1+Zingarelli.png" height="400" width="295" /></a></div>
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Between the context, "A magnificent summer day," and "well exposed to the sun," you probably wouldn't need the bilingual for this one at all. But assuming you did, the way you switch is you press on the words "Lo Zingarelli Vocabolario della Lingua Italiana" down at the bottom of the dialogue box. Kindle immediately pops up a dictionary selection screen:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdmpeCU-BJptHjSCD4SE44STIWfKWU7NDQz3drNmJ_C9_kzZ_2_C4s6DgxVwqdDG22iF2jYJHgBr9TRxOWUbNm2XSwWHVoZanV_4Wtruy3MmCH_SK66SMdEfFK4dCTX_MLZswp/s1600/Sostiene+Pereira+2+Dictionary+Screen.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdmpeCU-BJptHjSCD4SE44STIWfKWU7NDQz3drNmJ_C9_kzZ_2_C4s6DgxVwqdDG22iF2jYJHgBr9TRxOWUbNm2XSwWHVoZanV_4Wtruy3MmCH_SK66SMdEfFK4dCTX_MLZswp/s1600/Sostiene+Pereira+2+Dictionary+Screen.png" height="320" width="236" /></a></div>
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Simply click on "Collins Unabridged Italian-English" and you're in business.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_uI5C-4F4lfgdax8uwm868RoGaclXXY7ghRi0eZfLx19bobWMGu3ZrULkWWtbh_V-yA7rQnG_uwz_GC6tr25-EoinupvPTBQqQ9H0Wf8wjh6xGmeukwwvekEJtV-f9fmMUdT_/s1600/Sostiene+Pereira+3+Collins.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_uI5C-4F4lfgdax8uwm868RoGaclXXY7ghRi0eZfLx19bobWMGu3ZrULkWWtbh_V-yA7rQnG_uwz_GC6tr25-EoinupvPTBQqQ9H0Wf8wjh6xGmeukwwvekEJtV-f9fmMUdT_/s1600/Sostiene+Pereira+3+Collins.png" height="400" width="295" /></a></div>
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As expected, the word simply means "sunny." </div>
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When Collins doesn't have the form, you work around the problem by opening the Zingarelli as a book and looking up the headword. For example, suppose you couldn't figure out <i>riflettava</i>. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6rkiI7YLCOaxoFV4w-4IhBiOo31IwmfkO4qX-0_k8LUXlv4jy_5kqsXY6ZKt1I7psaOSxofKNrvFqjTqyK5MdScLAU2ZFwi-gDK82V3l1dw3prcYMrkfrPmiTGVKmTaMtmsHf/s1600/Sostiene+Pereira+4+Zingarelli.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6rkiI7YLCOaxoFV4w-4IhBiOo31IwmfkO4qX-0_k8LUXlv4jy_5kqsXY6ZKt1I7psaOSxofKNrvFqjTqyK5MdScLAU2ZFwi-gDK82V3l1dw3prcYMrkfrPmiTGVKmTaMtmsHf/s1600/Sostiene+Pereira+4+Zingarelli.png" height="400" width="295" /></a></div>
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Again, the Italian definition is probably enough by itself, but if not, switching to the Collins gives you this disappointing screen:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW5XU5XfDVtf2mMxYKZUMODo9-JvFGk21UnoNh9SPT_ZvgZFDfexcTt6mE51Hny7K_CQ-jacXvQ1jOt1A5zkCpjw-rmxzj5QTpQso4JZBbQMVjE8ChiZmg7YnJPmyds71a7vjb/s1600/Sostiene+Pereira+5+Collins+(blank).png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW5XU5XfDVtf2mMxYKZUMODo9-JvFGk21UnoNh9SPT_ZvgZFDfexcTt6mE51Hny7K_CQ-jacXvQ1jOt1A5zkCpjw-rmxzj5QTpQso4JZBbQMVjE8ChiZmg7YnJPmyds71a7vjb/s1600/Sostiene+Pereira+5+Collins+(blank).png" height="320" width="236" /></a></div>
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So switch back to the Zingarelli and click on the "More" button in the lower-right corner of the dialogue box to get the "More Options" Menu.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNZjLhx31N6H2hcea7mTA9kQSoqqHQuA9O84dDC1XnzLtnIo1jdZI1N9mr7IXd7yiWlQSGcLtoa3p2onxSTYguHD8Ux1O3RHHV7M0vOI0qy9Dmk6Na3tL-oSsztovU0PhyJEE2/s1600/Sostiene+Pereira+6+More+Options.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNZjLhx31N6H2hcea7mTA9kQSoqqHQuA9O84dDC1XnzLtnIo1jdZI1N9mr7IXd7yiWlQSGcLtoa3p2onxSTYguHD8Ux1O3RHHV7M0vOI0qy9Dmk6Na3tL-oSsztovU0PhyJEE2/s1600/Sostiene+Pereira+6+More+Options.png" height="320" width="236" /></a></div>
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Then tap "Open Dictionary." This opens the Zingarelli as a book.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZYiL8PAnyWQPmCCIErN9tAzep7fi-T9VenYkLwW3jZHCXzZAjzV75rO0pY9t6sad_S2fatGAjSm5D_ytqYMU3Yb5cb5xtlgzeZ_RZYYZvDdWdjky-1DcpSQWPFFiu-J5zZ0xR/s1600/Sostiene+Pereira+7+Zingarelli+page.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZYiL8PAnyWQPmCCIErN9tAzep7fi-T9VenYkLwW3jZHCXzZAjzV75rO0pY9t6sad_S2fatGAjSm5D_ytqYMU3Yb5cb5xtlgzeZ_RZYYZvDdWdjky-1DcpSQWPFFiu-J5zZ0xR/s1600/Sostiene+Pereira+7+Zingarelli+page.png" height="400" width="295" /></a></div>
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Now we can use the Collins to help us read the Italian definition. In cases like this, the first thing to try is the headword itself. Press on <i>riflettere</i> and you'll see that Collins has the word after all. It just didn't have the form <i>rifletteva</i>.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg42hLZrR-cICiRB4JruXizgiKgEozNSvOotQmy_oAruRGH0qpIuE-7VENdqvob5YWQXnovnImiTFfU-iOKgdt5r-FyLZqnfkhCm6BQWm1ORHM12A6hpJ9Erji1pZHGHwlG1lhq/s1600/Sostiene+Pereira+8+Collins+in+Zingarelli.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg42hLZrR-cICiRB4JruXizgiKgEozNSvOotQmy_oAruRGH0qpIuE-7VENdqvob5YWQXnovnImiTFfU-iOKgdt5r-FyLZqnfkhCm6BQWm1ORHM12A6hpJ9Erji1pZHGHwlG1lhq/s1600/Sostiene+Pereira+8+Collins+in+Zingarelli.png" height="320" width="236" /></a></div>
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Then just tap the "back" arrow at the upper-left, and the Kindle takes you right back to the novel.</div>
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I found that I was able to use the monolingual dictionary most of the time, especially toward the end of the book. A contributing factor is that authors tend to reuse the same words a lot, so if you have to look up a word at one point, you're likely to see that word again. If you made some effort to understand the monolingual definition the first time you saw it, then if you do end up looking the same word up again, the monolingual definition alone will usually jog your memory. That's a very good thing, because the more you spend immersed in Italian, the faster you'll learn.</div>
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I followed most of my own advice for <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/learning-foreign-language-by-reading.html" target="_blank">learning a language by reading</a>, and created flash cards for most of the words I had to look up. As a result, I learned about 100 new words in the course of the book.</div>
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Conclusion</h3>
<div>
Perhaps I'm getting better at Italian, but I found <i>Sostiene Pereira</i> an easier read than the two detective stories. Both of those contained at least a few sentences that I never managed to figure out, but I feel I understood every word in <i>Sostiene Pereira</i>. According to me, that's very satisfying.</div>
<br />Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-47165454071488575232014-10-28T15:52:00.000-07:002014-10-29T12:53:35.038-07:00Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon)On October 19, I finished reading Jules Verne's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cinq-semaines-en-ballon-French-ebook/dp/B005R49TA6" target="_blank">Cinq semaines en ballon</a></i>, after ten weeks of on-again, off-again effort. Since the book itself came out in 1862, it seems a bit late to write a review of the novel itself, but it was the first novel I ever read in French, and since I've only been studying French for 40 weeks, I thought it might be of interest to discuss how I managed to read a French novel at all.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Cinq_Semaines_en_ballon/Chapitre_1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/62/Cinq_Semaines_en_ballon_002.png/388px-Cinq_Semaines_en_ballon_002.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">(All pictures taken from <a href="http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Cinq_Semaines_en_ballon" target="_blank">WikiSource</a>.)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<h3>
The Motivation: Reading on a Kindle</h3>
As I've mentioned <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-in-foreign-language.html">elsewhere</a>, I got excited about reading foreign-language novels about a year ago, when I discovered that I could use the bilingual dictionary on a Kindle to read a Spanish novel in four days. That was remarkable because I had spoken Spanish for forty years without ever managing to read four pages of a Spanish novel. I felt this proved the <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/how-to-read-foreign-novel-on-kindle.html">Kindle lets students beat the "beginner's paradox,"</a> and I wanted to get more people excited about it. Trouble was, my Spanish was too good in the first place--to be really exciting, this would need to work for people who didn't start off with C1 fluency in a language.<br />
<br />
I had studied Italian on and off for about ten years, but I had never had better than A2 competence, so I brushed up my Italian for a few months and managed to read an Italian novel. As I expected, this was more work than reading the Spanish one, but still reasonable, and the effort improved my Italian dramatically.<br />
<br />
But for a really strong test, I started studying French in January 2014, with the goal of showing that I could read a novel in a language I had never studied before at all. Moreover, I wanted to show that the mere act of reading could itself greatly boost one's ability with the language.<br />
<br />
<div>
Elsewhere on the blog I've discussed my method for learning French. <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/duolingo-language-learning-as-game.html">I use Duolingo as the core</a>, and supplement that with other resources. I have invested about two hours per day for almost 300 days now. I estimate I'm somewhere between B1 and B2 French, which is about right for that level of effort. It's where someone should be after two years of college French, and those are exactly the people I'm hoping this will work for.<br />
<br /></div>
<h3>
Reading the Novel</h3>
<div>
To read <i>Cinq semaines en ballon</i>, I carefully followed my own suggestions for <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/learning-foreign-language-by-reading.html">learning a language by reading a novel</a>. I was able to buy the original French text plus an <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004TP35I6" target="_blank">English translation</a> for under a dollar. The translation wasn't very good (it contained a lot of rather unnatural English sentences) but that didn't matter, since I only intended to use it as a last resort.<br />
<br />
In a number of ways, this wasn't really the ideal first novel to pick. I chose it partly because I had really loved reading Verne novels as a kid, and this was one I'd never read before; I thought it would be cool to say I had read it in French. It was a little longer than I'd have liked--the first Spanish novel I read was about half as long. I also worried a little bit that French itself might have changed in 150 years, but that doesn't seem to have been a real problem.<br />
<br />
A more serious problem is that like a lot of nineteenth-century literature, <i>Cinq semaines en ballon</i> starts slow and doesn't take off until you're more than 25% of the way into it. It's an adventure story about three men who ride a new kind of balloon across unexplored parts of Africa, but the balloon doesn't leave the ground for a long, long time. This is terrible for the first-time foreign reader, because those first chapters are unavoidably difficult, frustrating, and slow. It helps a lot if they're exciting, but that's definitely not the case with this book. From reading in the other languages, I knew that my reading speed would build with time, and that was motivation enough to get me through the first quarter of it.<br />
<br />
After that, there's plenty of excitement.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Cinq_Semaines_en_ballon_033.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Cinq_Semaines_en_ballon_033.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
A different kind of problem is that I started the novel before I finished learning the French grammar. I was comfortable with newspaper articles, but French has a verb tense called the <i>passe simple</i> which is almost unused in day-to-day speech but is very heavily used for narration in novels. It corresponds to the Spanish <i>preterito</i> and the Italian <i>passato remoto,</i> so I had a solid understanding of what it meant, but I still had to learn to recognize it. Since the narration is third-person, I only had to learn the third-person forms, and that turned out not to be too bad.<br />
<br />
By the time the balloon finally lifted off, I had discovered another problem. The book is hopelessly racist. Given the era, that shouldn't be a huge surprise, but somehow I expected better of Verne. It's also not very environmentally conscious; the elephant in the picture above is eventually shot and killed, and the heroes eat just a single meal from a piece of the trunk. To be fair, there's not much else they could do given their circumstances, but neither the killing nor the waste bothers them one bit. This sort of thing doesn't turn up in every chapter, and it's not enough to spoil the book; it just jolts you every now and then.<br />
<br />
That aside, it's a fun adventure with a satisfying ending. It turned out not to be such a bad choice after all.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Results</h3>
My reading speed climbed from under 1% an hour to over 5%. It's hard to say what that means in pages or words, but toward the end, I could comfortable read two or three of the little chapters (44 in all) at a time.<br />
<br />
At the beginning, when I found an unknown word, I consulted the bilingual dictionary first and used the monolingual only if that failed. By the half-way point, I had reversed this. The Kindle's built-in monolingual French dictionary turns out to be pretty good. Not only does it have a much bigger vocabulary than the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Collins-French-English-Dictionary-Grammar-ebook/dp/B008ZUDXXS" target="_blank">Collins French-English bilingual dictionary</a>, the definitions are written in simpler language. By the end of the book, nine times out of ten, when I needed to look up a word, the monolingual French dictionary was all I needed. It felt really good to stay immersed in the language and the story.<br />
<br />
In the first half of the book, I made heavy use of the English translation. I always made myself read at least a paragraph before resorting to it, but all too often there was no other way to make sense of the text. Toward the middle, though, I was usually able to finish a whole chapter in French and then quickly reread it in English, looking for any big mistakes in my interpretation. There were quite a few to start with. For the last quarter of the book, though, the rereading didn't turn up any big surprises. That is, my reading in French was accurate enough that in the last quarter of the book, I didn't really need the English translation at all.<br />
<br />
As with the other languages, I felt this really improved my ability across the board. For example, I'm comfortable reading most stories in <i>Le Monde</i> now without using a dictionary at all. I haven't attended a French meetup lately, but I should do that soon to see if there's a difference with my listening ability, as there was with Spanish.<br />
<br />
All in all, it was a very worthwhile experience. I think I'll try <i>Voyage au centre de la terre</i> next.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-63651463831351351832014-10-18T11:19:00.001-07:002014-10-21T13:52:15.611-07:00Flirting with FrenchI just finished William Alexander's wonderful <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Flirting-French-Language-Charmed-Seduced-ebook/dp/B00KNCWLNY" target="_blank">Flirting with French: How a Language Charmed Me, Seduced Me, and Nearly Broke My Heart</a>, and I highly recommend it to anyone with any interest at all in learning another language. In his thirteen-month quest to learn French, the 57-year-old author tries everything short of marrying a French woman, and he describes it all in hilarious detail. It's a story about a language, it's a story about people, and it's a story about not giving up.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Flirting-French-Language-Charmed-Seduced/dp/1616200200" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw2nRhSc-Wnv-4VVMP97v2dqQhf94l72wGgrRE2g-qO_3wHyYCAgib59dL3LHM3_GChbbNRLzuLR8k9Dj2tVUbvXIMyGKzZ-zUrRpSeP6ZdXN9gyOCdMeMv-3qFn9fbI29UQiX/s1600/Flirting+with+French+1+Book+Cover.jpg" height="320" width="212" /></a></div>
<br />
I bought this book after reading <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/books/review/flirting-with-french-by-william-alexander.html" target="_blank">an excellent <i>New York Times</i> review</a>. Building on that, I'm going to go through the various things Alexander tried and comment on how effective I think they are for others trying to learn French. Since I taught myself French during the past nine months using many of the same materials and yet pretty much the opposite philosophy, I'm in a good position to compare and contrast.<br />
<br />
Given the nature of his book, I don't think it's possible to have "spoilers," but it's possible some people <i>might</i> want to read the rest of this post after finishing the book.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Synopsis</h3>
<h4>
What did he know to start with?</h4>
Alexander had studied French for two years in high school, and even though that was 40 years ago, it still seems to have given him a head start. He took an online college placement exam which said that he almost qualified for "entrance into first-year college French." Since the qualifications for <i>entrance</i> into first-year college French are tuition and a pulse, I assume he really means he almost qualified for placement <i>out</i> of the first semester. That's not bad at all.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, he hated his high-school French teacher and as a result had nothing but contempt for the whole concept of learning a language in a classroom. He intended to teach himself using the latest technologies, but without a teacher or even a tutor.<br />
<br />
For my part, I had never studied French before at all, but because I speak Spanish and Italian, I had something of a head start of my own.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Why did he want to learn French?</h4>
Motivation matters, and his motivation was that he loved France and and all things French so much that he wanted to <i>be</i> French. Obviously that meant learning to speak the language and not just read it; he wanted to attain conversational fluency in French.<br />
<br />
My own goal for learning French was to be able to read books in it, and as a side-effect, to prove out <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/how-to-read-foreign-novel-on-kindle.html">my ideas</a> that devices like an Amazon Kindle can make it much easier to read books in foreign languages.<br />
<br />
<h4>
What did he do?</h4>
In thirteen months, Alexander put 900 hours into active study, he spent "hundreds" of hours passively absorbing French movies, TV, and radio, he practiced with French people locally and online, and he spent at least five weeks in France. I estimate he spent at least $20,000 in the process.<br />
<br />
If nothing else, one has to salute the power of his motivation.<br />
<br />
For my part, I invested about 500 hours in active study. I also practiced with French people locally and online, and I spent about $100.<br />
<br />
<h4>
What was the outcome?</h4>
Using the levels from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages#Common_reference_levels" target="_blank">Common European Framework of Reference for Languages</a>, I'd have expected that much investment to make him a strong B2 speaker, verging on C1 in some areas. Instead, he seems to have barely managed to reach B1. You can do a lot with B1 French, but given that given that he dreamed of being a C2 speaker, he missed the mark by a long shot.<br />
<br />
I estimate that I'm also speaking B1 French, but I'm reading at between a B2 and a C1 level.<br />
<br />
<h4>
What went wrong?</h4>
Since we had very different goals, we took very different approaches. He shunned formal training, books of rules, tables of verbs, etc. Obviously those are things you cannot use in conversation; everything must come to you naturally. He was drawn to approaches with little or no written component, and definitely to those with no English component.<br />
<br />
I bought grammar textbooks (my only actual expense), <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/10/using-anki-flashcards-for-vocabulary.html">drilled vocabulary with flashcards</a>, and used a free online program called <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/duolingo-language-learning-as-game.html">Duolingo</a>, which essentially trains you to translate from French into English. I used some of the other resources Alexander did, but only as a supplement to my main program. I do want to speak French (not just read it) but that's not my top priority.<br />
<br />
Given, then, that we had very different goals, it's comparing apples to oranges, except for one thing: I think he picked the wrong goal in the first place. My opinion is that if you build up strength in reading and writing, you can leverage that to improve your ability to converse and to listen. Learning to read a language is not sufficient by itself to make you conversant--there are many, many people who can read English and even send e-mails but who can't utter a comprehensible sentence--but I think it's a necessary first step. This is backwards from how children learn, but adults are not children and do not learn the same way.<br />
<br />
I should note that my view on this is rather old-fashioned, and a great many people don't agree with it. Alexander certainly didn't. Draw your own conclusions.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Tools for Language Learning</h3>
<div>
In this section, I'm going to go through all the resources Alexander writes about using, in the order that he mentions them. I'll summarize his results and then give my own opinions.<br />
<br /></div>
<h4>
Rosetta Stone</h4>
<div>
What draws him to Rosetta Stone is the promise of teaching you the language "like children learn"--i.e. not with the methods of his hated high school teacher. Instead, it tries to immerse you entirely in French--spoken French--and get you to learn by osmosis.<br />
<br />
Alexander's hilarious account of what it's like to actually <i>use</i> Rosetta Stone is in the chapter titled "First-Person Shooter." It's priceless. He never comes out and says so, but it appears that he got very little of value for all the hours he spent with it.<br />
<br />
I am amazed that he had the determination to complete Rosetta Stone. <a href="http://www.casl.umd.edu/sites/default/files/Nielson08_RosettaStoneEval.pdf" target="_blank">Studies I've read</a> suggest that almost no one does so. I won't go into depth on the problems with the package, as <a href="http://www.fluentin3months.com/rosetta-stone-review/" target="_blank">others have done so</a> at great length. Since it's so far away from my own philosophy of language learning, I never even considered it, so I have nothing to contribute first-hand.</div>
<div>
<br />
<h4>
Vacation in France</h4>
<div>
A two-week bike vacation in France may not seem like a language-learning technique, but <a href="http://static.duolingo.com/s3/DuolingoReport_Final.pdf" target="_blank">according to some research</a>, a pending trip to a foreign country motivates people to do language study more than almost anything else, so as a technique, it's not to be underestimated. In terms of price, it certainly makes Rosetta Stone look cheap. That said, it's not clear how much you really learn on a vacation. You read signs and talk to waiters, mostly. A business trip where he'd have had to use the language all day long would have likely been much more effective.<br />
<br />
I didn't visit France this year, although I have been there before, but all this French study has definitely given me a powerful desire to go back!</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h4>
<a href="http://www.tv5monde.com/" target="_blank">TV5Monde</a></h4>
<div>
He spent an hour a day watching this famous international French cable network, but apparently never discovered that you can get it online. The free online version has an <a href="http://apprendre.tv5monde.com/" target="_blank">excellent set of lessons</a>, which are targeted at making it easier for students to learn how to watch their shows, but he either didn't discover them or else decided not to use them.<br />
<br />
Since he speaks about "enduring" the shows, I gather he didn't get a lot out of them. No surprise. <a href="http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/October2014/articles/nation.pdf" target="_blank">Nation</a> claims that you need to know about 6,000 word families before you can watch a movie, and that's two or three times what someone knows after two years of college study.<br />
<br />
I made extensive use of the lessons on TV5Monde, even though they are really targeted at listening comprehension, because I didn't want to develop bad pronunciation habits. Their lessons are graded, and I advanced from A1 to B1 over the months. That means I can watch a French news broadcast and pick out a lot of it, but movies are still hopeless.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h4>
Online Immersion Class</h4>
<div>
Breaking a bit from his idea that he would learn French entirely through osmosis, he signed up for an online class complete with video and a live instructor in France. He appears to have done only a single lesson this because they expected such a high level from their students that English wasn't allowed even to ask for the definition of a word.<br />
<br />
This is something I've never even considered doing. It's something that might make sense to try <i>next</i> year--once my reading is better. It does bring up another point; once you are strong enough in a language, you really can study it without using English. That is, people can teach you French in French. However, I think you need to reach level B1 <i>before</i> you do that. In my opinion, Alexander did this in the wrong order.<br />
<br /></div>
<h4>
<a href="http://www.fluenz.com/languages/learn-french/?gclid=CNTc6czfr8ECFQtgMgodEkgAPw" target="_blank">Fluenz French</a></h4>
<div>
He only mentions this $500 product briefly to share the fact that he didn't like it, although he later tells us he completed the whole thing. <a href="http://www.frenchcrazy.com/2011/09/fluenz-french-or-rosetta-stone-which-is.html" target="_blank">Fluenz is quite different from Rosetta Stone</a>: It uses English in the lessons to explain some of the grammar, although it stops short of giving detailed rules for things like verb conjugations.<br />
<br />
Alexander's complaints were more to the effect that he wanted more focus on speaking and that he found the videos distracting. It does seem that Fluenz should have been an improvement on Rosetta Stone, but apparently not much of one.<br />
<br />
I hadn't heard of Fluenz before, so I searched the web for "Fluenz Problems." Apparently Fluenz only tries to bring people up to about the A2 level. Great for a traveler--A2 French is enough to get a lot done and it'll impress your friends and family--but it's not what Alexander was seeking.<br />
<br /></div>
<h4>
Vocabulary sticky notes</h4>
<div>
I only mention this because it's something a lot of people talk about doing. Alexander and his daughter used sticky notes to label everything in the house in French. He only mentions it once, so I have no idea whether it worked for him. I have a suspicion that his wife didn't put up with it for very long.<br />
<br />
I have never done this myself, but I can see the merit in it. Household vocabulary is important for reading, since many scenes in novels take place inside houses. You can also practice the language by making up sentences that use the words as you bump into them. The biggest limit is that it only covers a faction of the words you need--and none of the verbs or adjectives.<br />
<br /></div>
<h4>
<a href="http://www.mylanguageexchange.com/" target="_blank">MyLanguageExchange</a></h4>
<div>
Frustrated with Rosetta Stone and Fluenz, Alexander decided to give social networking a try, and he enrolled in MyLanguageExchange. Oddly for a man so focused on speaking, he opted to use MyLanguageExchange strictly for e-mail correspondence with a pen-pal named Sylvie who lives in Orléans, France.<br />
<br />
He used <a href="https://translate.google.com/" target="_blank">Google Translate</a>, <a href="http://www.wordreference.com/" target="_blank">WordReference</a>, and a printed dictionary to help compose messages, and he maintained a correspondence with Sylvie for months. When he finally met her in person, she was appalled at how bad his spoken French was, considering that his e-mails had been so well written. Alexander doesn't make a big deal out of it, but this is actually his one big success with French; he clearly developed decent reading and writing skills, even though that was not his goal.<br />
<br />
There's a lot to be said for using social networking to help people learn languages. It lets you practice reading, writing, listening, and speaking with real native speakers. I practice writing using <a href="http://lang-8.com/" target="_blank">Lang-8</a>, which is a bit more limited than MyLanguageExchange, but follows a similar principle. For example, I can write something in French, submit it, and get critiques from native French speakers. In return, I critique their attempts to write English. It's a great way to learn.<br />
<br /></div>
<h4>
<a href="http://www.meetup.com/" target="_blank">Meetup</a></h4>
<div>
Alexander used Meetup.com to find a local group of French speakers who meet regularly for practice. He describes it as like attending a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, with twelve people sitting in a circle taking turns talking. Worse, his group had only a single native speaker. It's not clear whether he attended more than once.<br />
<br />
It's a pity this didn't work out for him, because I've found Meetup.com an excellent way to practice conversation. Here in Seattle, there are French, Spanish, and Italian groups with a mix of learners and native speakers. There are weekly meetups, and when I go, I force myself to speak only my target language for two hours. If the goal is to be conversational, this is the best way to get there.<br />
<br /></div>
<h4>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci" target="_blank">Memory Palace</a></h4>
<div>
A memory palace is the trick Sherlock Holmes used to quickly memorize lists of things. You visualize the words you're trying to memorize as lying in some physical location you're familiar with. Alexander says he successfully used it to memorize the entire 1,000-word children's English-French dictionary with 98.5% recall. Since the largest barrier to conversation for most intermediate students is lack of vocabulary, I really would have expected this to make more of a difference that it appears to have. Perhaps the memory palace is just too slow to use in conversation, but I would expect it helped him a lot with his reading and writing.<br />
<br />
I've personally never managed to make the memory palace trick work, and I'm not sure it's really the best idea for anything other than lists that you need to recite in order.<br />
<br /></div>
<h4>
French Movies</h4>
<div>
He watched at least one movie: <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1156143/combined" target="_blank">Les herbes folles</a></i> (Wild Grass). Since his wife watched it with him, it must have had English subtitles. I personally find it impossible to hear much of the foreign language in a film if I'm also reading the English subtitles. Subtitles in the foreign language work much better, but are harder to find. As I mentioned earlier, it takes a very big vocabulary to enjoy most foreign-language films. My bet is that he understood only a handful of words.<br />
<br /></div>
<h4>
Reading</h4>
<div>
<a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/learning-foreign-language-by-reading.html" target="_blank">Reading is my favorite way to learn.</a> Alexander casually mentions reading "the Respectful Prostitute" by Jean-Paul Sartre with the help of a dictionary and a translation. The "and a translation" is what worries me. It's very easy to half-guess at a paragraph, read the English, tell yourself "oh yeah, I got that," and keep going. You finish the book and imagine that you really read it. The same concerns apply to the dual-language book he read. Depending on how he read it, it might have helped his reading ability a lot, or it might have done little or nothing for him.<br />
<br />
A disciplined person can make this work--someone who makes a detailed study of sentences they didn't get on the first try--but you have to really push yourself to do that. If you're enjoying the story and want to get on with it, it's hard to make yourself stop. If you're <i>not</i> enjoying the story, it's hard to do this at all.<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
I have my own ideas for learning a language by reading, and I feel I've been very successful with that approach. Given Alexander's success with his pen pal, I suspect he was more successful than he lets on.<br />
<br /></div>
<h4>
Skype</h4>
<div>
On Skype, Alexander found a 50-year-old woman who wanted to practice her English in exchange for helping him with his French. Unfortunately, her English was so much better than his French that she couldn't even be bothered to try to correct his mistakes. This sounds like another one-time experiment, and, if so, I think it's another missed opportunity. Real-time conversations on Skype had the potential to make a really big difference to his conversation ability, especially since he had no luck with a local Meetup group.<br />
<br />
Because meetup.com works so well for me, I haven't bothered with Skype, although I've thought of doing it to get exposure to more kinds of accents.<br />
<br /></div>
<h4>
French Language Immersion Class: <a href="http://www.newschool.edu/continuing-education/on-the-go/" target="_blank">French on the Go</a></h4>
<div>
Eventually he broke down and decided to take an actual class. Run by the New School in New York City, this was a one-time, 16-hour immersion class with only four students (him included). The instructor wasn't a native, but that didn't seem to bother him.<br />
<br />
In this class, he learned that he wasn't distinguishing nasal vowels at all. No wonder people couldn't understand him! I'm surprised he didn't find a way to get some sort of intensive training just in pronunciation.<br />
<br />
French vowels have been, for me, the hardest part of learning French. French has lots of vowels that English doesn't have, but making the vowel sounds is only half the problem. English is rather sloppy with its vowels, and we tend to slur them all in the direction of "uh" in unstressed syllables. To speak French, you must fight this habit and pronounce each syllable clearly and distinctly. It's like fighting with your own tongue.<br />
<br /></div>
<h4>
Boot camp: <a href="http://www.millefeuille-provence.com/home.php" target="_blank">Millefeuille, Provençe</a></h4>
<div>
Finally, he invested about $5,000 in a top-notch, two-week intensive-study program in France. This included room and board, 30 hours a week of classes (no more than four to a class), after-dinner talks, and group discussion. His description of his interactions with people during this period makes it seem as though he were actually speaking French at the B2 level or better. Given the level of individual attention that Millefeuille offers, I would have expected them to really work on his accent. He certainly finished up feeling really good about his French.<br />
<br />
I did something like this for Russian back in 1992, when I spent six weeks in St. Petersburg. I do think two weeks is too little time, but I also think it was good that he did this <i>last</i>, since it would have been wasted had he tried it before he had a reasonable grasp of the language.<br />
<br /></div>
<h4>
Real Life: Conversation with Sylvie</h4>
<div>
Remember the French pen-pal? After all this, fresh from boot camp, he met Sylvie and her fiance in Orléans for the very first time. It was a disaster. He couldn't understand their French, and they couldn't understand his, so they ended up speaking English.<br />
<br />
This is why I evaluate his conversational French as B1. A B1 speaker can manage a conversation with people who are willing to indulge him, but the way he describes the afternoon, they weren't in the mood. A B2 speaker should have been able to manage it, even if it was a struggle.<br />
<br /></div>
<h4>
Real Life: Bribing the Taxi</h4>
<div>
You'll have to read the book to learn why Alexander needed to bribe a taxi driver, but he managed to argue with the guy and get what he wanted all in French. For me this reinforces the B1 rating, since an A2 speaker would be unable to cope with a non-routine setting. At least, I hope it's not routine.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Miscellaneous Resources</h4>
</div>
<div>
At the end of the book, Alexander summarizes the resources he used during his 13 months of study, three of which hadn't been mentioned before:</div>
<div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://radiolingua.com/coffeebreakfrench/" target="_blank">Coffee Break French</a>. These are podcasts, of which he listened to 100. It looks interesting, but I know nothing about it.</li>
<li>Pimsleur Audio Courses (2). I used Pinsleur Mandarin before a trip to China. It's an all-audio course, with no textbook. For my purposes it worked quite well--when I got separated from our group I was able to tell a Taxi driver how to take me back to our hotel. Pimsleur is generally thought of as a very elementary package, though, targeted at travellers.</li>
<li>French In Action (all 52 episodes). I like FIA. I haven't finished it, but it's fun, it's free, and it's 100% in French. It's an attempt to teach French in French, although there's a textbook that you can buy. As a supplement, I think it's a great way to get used to hearing French people speaking naturally but using few enough words that you have a hope of understanding them.</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
<h3>
The Road Not Taken: Tools Alexander Didn't Use</h3>
</div>
<h4>
Formal classes</h4>
<div>
"Classes are a sore point for me," he tells us, owing to that bad teacher he had in high school. He claims he couldn't find any nightly classes in his area and dismisses the idea of once-a-week classes out of hand--even though his wife claims to have learned Spanish that way.<br />
<br />
I didn't use classes for French either, but I'm a linguist with an interest in second-language learning and I already spoke five other foreign languages. I think a good class (or at least a proper textbook) would have helped him a lot.<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
<h4>
<a href="https://www.duolingo.com/" target="_blank">Duolingo</a></h4>
</div>
<div>
Alexander never mentions Duolingo at all. It might have had too much typing for his taste, or perhaps he thought it was too similar to Fluenz. It's also possible that he did most of his studies before Duolingo really took off.<br />
<br />
I personally like Duolingo a lot, <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/duolingo-language-learning-as-game.html" target="_blank">as I've described elsewhere</a>. Duolingo is not a panacea, but I have to think that had he put hundreds of hours into Duolingo instead of Rosetta Stone, he'd have been better off. Richer too: Duolingo is free.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h4>
<a href="http://ankisrs.net/" target="_blank">Anki</a></h4>
<div>
Perhaps he felt his memory palace eliminated the need for flashcards, but I think flashcards are the secret to learning lots of vocabulary, and I think <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/10/using-anki-flashcards-for-vocabulary.html" target="_blank">Anki is the best flashcard program</a> out there. The closest he comes to flashcards is his post-it notes experiment, and that's doing most of the work without gaining much of the benefit, in my view. Failing all else, I think flashcards would have been a good way to manage and maintain his memory palace, but he never mentions the concept at all.</div>
<div>
<br />
<h4>
<a href="http://lang-8.com/" target="_blank">Lang-8</a></h4>
</div>
<div>
Given that his focus was speaking, it's not a surprise that he doesn't mention this site where users help each other improve their writing ability. However, since it appears reading and writing are the two abilities he really did develop, it's the sort of site he ought to be looking at now. He seemed to have a strength there--perhaps not a surprise, since he's a writer. He should build on it.<br />
<br /></div>
<h4>
Conclusion</h4>
<div>
Alexander's goals were different from mine. For me, reading is #1 and everything else is a distant second. For him, conversation was #1. Conversation practice is difficult to arrange, and the various programs that promise to "immerse" you really don't seem to deliver. Reading practice, especially <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/how-to-read-foreign-novel-on-kindle.html" target="_blank">using a Kindle</a>, is easier than it has ever been. So I set myself a much easier task than he did.<br />
<br />
Even so, he didn't really fail. B1 French is nothing to sneeze at, and, as I said elsewhere, I suspect he reached B2 or better in reading and writing. It's only that he set his sights so high and worked so hard that it seems like failure.<br />
<br />
I do think he'd have gotten better results if he'd used his time differently. In particular, if the backbone of his study program had been a more traditional weekly class of some kind, then he could have augmented it with some of those other resources he used. If he had recognized that the written language came easier to him, and if he'd trusted that progress in that area would eventually help him with conversation, I think he wouldn't have wasted so much time bashing his head against the wall. Of course, that would have taken a lot of the fun out of the book!<br />
<br />
I'm very, very impressed both by his dedication and his positive attitude. In that spirit, I'll close with Alexander's own words--my favorite passage from his book:<br />
<blockquote>
I may not have learned all the French I wanted to, but what I did learn has enriched my life immeasurably. Yet perhaps the most important French lesson learned over the past year is this: you can love a thing without possessing it. Even as French has eluded me, my ardor for the language has only grown. I love, and will always love, French. Whether it loves me back, I have no control over.<br />
<br />
<i>Je ne regrette rien.</i></blockquote>
</div>
Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-86317671572229947942014-10-12T16:38:00.003-07:002014-12-10T09:21:46.809-08:00Using Anki Flashcards for Vocabulary DrillTo read effectively, you need to learn thousands of words, mostly by rote. Flashcards are the tool <i>par excellence</i> for rote memorization, but, unfortunately, they become unwieldy beyond a few hundred cards. <a href="http://ankisrs.net/" target="_blank">Anki</a> is a free computer program that lets you comfortably manage the thousands of cards you'll need if you want to comfortably read books in foreign languages. This posting discusses how I use Anki, and shows you how to set up decks the same way I do.<br />
<br />
<h3>
What are Flashcards?</h3>
<div>
In its simplest form, a flashcard is a 3×5 index card with an English word or phrase (e.g. "to walk") written on one side and the corresponding foreign word (e.g. <i>marcher</i>) on the reverse. Make cards for the vocabulary you want to learn, shuffle the deck, and <i>voila</i>: instant random vocabulary quiz. Deal the cards one at a time and try to guess what's on the other side. Ones you get right go into a discard pile. Wrong ones you stick back into the middle of the deck. When you have discarded all the cards, reshuffle the deck and repeat until you can make a pass without any mistakes.<br />
<br />
The astonishing thing about flashcards is how fast you learn. On the first pass, you typically get up to half the words because the simple act of creating the cards has taught you that much. On the second pass, that jumps to 90% or more. On the third or fourth pass, you get all or all but one or two, and by that point you're zipping through the cards just as fast as you can deal them.<br />
<br />
Drilling with flashcards is fast, effective, and immensely satisfying. It's hard to imagine mastering a language without them. But you really don't want to do this with paper cards.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
<h3>
What's the Problem with Paper Flashcards?</h3>
<div>
If you just keep adding new words to the same deck, you run into a number of problems<br />
<ul>
<li>Beyond one or two hundred cards the deck becomes impossible to shuffle.</li>
<li>No matter how fast as you are, a quiz with hundreds of cards takes a long time.</li>
<li>The deck fills up with words you know really well, and you start to feel you're wasting time reviewing them over and over.</li>
</ul>
<div>
You can avoid this by making multiple decks. That works to some degree for a language class, where you make a new deck for each new lesson and you don't review the old ones until exam time, when you dump them all together for a few marathon study sessions. If you do it that way, you'll find you retain some words pretty well, even after weeks, while you forget others almost at once. That may be okay for passing quizzes, but it's not what you need if your objective is to actually <i>use</i> the language. What you really want is a system that separates the "easy" cards from the hard ones.<br />
<br />
In other words, you want the computer to organize it for you.<br />
<br />
<h3>
How does Anki work?</h3>
The Anki program lets you create decks on your computer and it handles running and scoring the drills. He's an example card from my English/French deck:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjfvJGT9s83xqScvUEkwDB-9-0jpFs0o8bc5s_TCxiWHf_0_XOEBwXAvW0pKcyrBQYmZ9p38HHGobCETOPzh6Oqfgva54CtPVOne__VmuZ-dLCUBhU_LhFd6zQOLsoAl7P3axh/s1600/Anki+Flashcards+3+Question.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjfvJGT9s83xqScvUEkwDB-9-0jpFs0o8bc5s_TCxiWHf_0_XOEBwXAvW0pKcyrBQYmZ9p38HHGobCETOPzh6Oqfgva54CtPVOne__VmuZ-dLCUBhU_LhFd6zQOLsoAl7P3axh/s1600/Anki+Flashcards+3+Question.png" height="272" width="320" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
<div>
It's showing me the English side of the card and prompting me to type the French translation of "to walk" in the box. The phrase "move on feet" is a hint which I put there to remind me that this does not mean "walk the dog," which would require a different verb in French.<br />
<br />
When I type <i>marcher</i> and press enter, Anki shows me the answer:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXk7wdNASZ9cEUWRSkMz-cHZ8XsG2S1colNrC1d2QPQZOPJGkSGIV6ZFtsnfBIMhyuGJ3kQvSaA-3UT990EzN9q8k-X_ZJduFDhN8wAElOOwStjkrr1xf_mjmUKOLzMj2BoqXj/s1600/Anki+Flashcards+4+Answer.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXk7wdNASZ9cEUWRSkMz-cHZ8XsG2S1colNrC1d2QPQZOPJGkSGIV6ZFtsnfBIMhyuGJ3kQvSaA-3UT990EzN9q8k-X_ZJduFDhN8wAElOOwStjkrr1xf_mjmUKOLzMj2BoqXj/s1600/Anki+Flashcards+4+Answer.png" height="272" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
The green highlight on the word I typed means that my answer completely agreed with the expected answer. Below it is the content of the French side of the card plus the pronunciation of the word.<br />
<br />
I can press any of the three buttons below that to indicate whether I got the word wrong ("Again") or got it right ("Good") or thought it was really easy ("Easy"). The numbers above the buttons indicate how long Anki will wait before showing me this card again. Cards that you get right over and over are rescheduled further and further into the future so you don't waste time going over them again and again.<br />
<br />
Unlike a physical flashcard deck, Anki treats the French-to-English cards as being separate from the English-to-French ones. That makes sense because, for example, it is much easier to guess that <i>extrême</i> means "extreme" but much harder to remember that the French word needs a circumflex on the second 'e'. Whenever you do a drill, Anki mixes both kinds together. That is, some cards will show you English and expect French while others will show you French and expect English.<br />
<br />
Anki is smart enough not to give you the same word in both directions on the same day, but here's what the French side of the card above looks like:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4gzzjo5hI570MBmLO6NdeluymELkujtm0y7vBwRJCqHiomzIKQbv1Ok0ABF4FUsj-r4Pbh5ZhbS0S7rf3N5Bj_t12CCjoaN9bAkooBddSGPnRLoie63yMTdlzhM2emO3kdfkD/s1600/Anki+Flashcards+5+French+Question.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4gzzjo5hI570MBmLO6NdeluymELkujtm0y7vBwRJCqHiomzIKQbv1Ok0ABF4FUsj-r4Pbh5ZhbS0S7rf3N5Bj_t12CCjoaN9bAkooBddSGPnRLoie63yMTdlzhM2emO3kdfkD/s1600/Anki+Flashcards+5+French+Question.png" height="272" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
In this case the hint, "French," is there because otherwise I couldn't tell if this was the French verb "to walk" or the English noun for "a person who marches." I'll answer with just "walk" and not "to walk." Here's the result:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3mIRgFtxs2PLejyo_roB7qA92Xxab7tVwddTB264ZWYYSZNBXMHEVHvsl1YDIOj_pP73Jb0FN9jksh5v0z3x2hxSgIk2LIAqRcDdo4rQh2xB-vv-km2hd_l_25vibtdDpiDW4/s1600/Anki+Flashcards+6+French+Answer.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3mIRgFtxs2PLejyo_roB7qA92Xxab7tVwddTB264ZWYYSZNBXMHEVHvsl1YDIOj_pP73Jb0FN9jksh5v0z3x2hxSgIk2LIAqRcDdo4rQh2xB-vv-km2hd_l_25vibtdDpiDW4/s1600/Anki+Flashcards+6+French+Answer.png" height="272" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
Anki shows me how my answer differs from the desired answer, but it still leaves it up to me to decide if my answer was good enough or not. In this case, I'd clearly mark it "Good" or even "Easy." Obviously that means I could just skip typing the words entirely, but I find that typing them keeps me honest. (I use the <a href="http://support2.microsoft.com/kb/306560" target="_blank">US International Keyboard</a> layout to input characters that don't exist in English, by the way.)<br />
<br />
Notice a couple of things about these cards: First, I only have to type the words, not the hints. Second, the pronunciation never appears with the question--only with the answer. That's very helpful because if it appeared with the English question, it would give the word away, but if it appeared with the French question, then I couldn't use it to help practice pronouncing the word. Always having it on the answer side means I can pronounce the French word out loud before I flip the card and <i>then</i> check myself. As always, it's up to me whether I count a pronunciation error as a serious enough error to call the card wrong.<br />
<br />
Every day, Anki decides which cards you need to review (again, counting French-to-English as separate cards from English-to-French) and sets up a drill for you. It limits the drill to 100 cards (even if you skip a day), and you can stop in the middle of a drill and resume later (or not) if you need to. When you're done with the drill, every card will have a new review date, and Anki can show you some cool statistics to help you track how well you're doing.<br />
<br />
For complete information, as always, <a href="http://ankisrs.net/docs/manual.html" target="_blank">read the manual</a>. Anki has lots and lots of features.</div>
</div>
<div>
<ul>
</ul>
<h3>
How Do You Set it Up?</h3>
<h4>
Download the app</h4>
<div>
The first thing you need to do is go to the <a href="http://ankisrs.net/" target="_blank">Anki Website</a> and download the program. Yes, this is a program, not a web application, so you actually have to install it on your PC. Don't worry--it's worth it.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Once it's installed, start the program. It should look something like this:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE-ut3a6rbb1kV9dNgavqO32pYHTXDyEL42jHna4p5uve2aJjhml7jI9glrf9Fh3K5o3d4l3iF89wnKglCX3n4CWXsjD3M6pDYUOezkENJfo5B0p-rgA37qNw15rx6hL-9YAKp/s1600/Anki+Flashcards+1+Startup.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE-ut3a6rbb1kV9dNgavqO32pYHTXDyEL42jHna4p5uve2aJjhml7jI9glrf9Fh3K5o3d4l3iF89wnKglCX3n4CWXsjD3M6pDYUOezkENJfo5B0p-rgA37qNw15rx6hL-9YAKp/s1600/Anki+Flashcards+1+Startup.jpg" height="273" width="320" /></a></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Yours won't say "Test Profile," most likely. There's no reason to name the profile until you want to have more than one, so don't worry about that for now. I didn't need a second profile until I wrote this article.<br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<h3>
Creating a Deck</h3>
<h4>
Downloading the Sample</h4>
The<a href="http://ankisrs.net/docs/manual.html" target="_blank"> Anki User manual</a> gives you lots of options for configuring a deck, but none of the defaults was quite what I wanted, and I went through a good bit of trial and error before I had something I was happy with. To make this easier for others, I have created a trivial sample deck. You can <a href="https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=9E2E0DEA251A3F4A!10045&authkey=!AKCK48ZWZxK7pSk&ithint=file%2capkg" target="_blank">download it from here</a>. The file called Sample.apkg is the one you want. If you've already installed Anki, simply download Sample.apkg and open it. That should cause Anki to import the Sample deck. Or you can just copy the file to your PC and import it manually. To do a manual import after you've downloaded Sample.apkg, run Anki, click on the File menu and select Import.<br />
<br />
Either way, once you've imported the Sample deck, Anki should look something like this:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgikQaXDNaWuCJv1yh21QN3j0wD5TpWCNbeTSLG-FWz6LhyOxAe17xutBfcBHpy5_hbqslN9ohx8DxBYl74PUT0AdeseIMvwg_p6-KyPXL0R-Y7UyloKJHippmNX7U_29EB8fTw/s1600/Anki+Flashcards+2+Sample.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgikQaXDNaWuCJv1yh21QN3j0wD5TpWCNbeTSLG-FWz6LhyOxAe17xutBfcBHpy5_hbqslN9ohx8DxBYl74PUT0AdeseIMvwg_p6-KyPXL0R-Y7UyloKJHippmNX7U_29EB8fTw/s1600/Anki+Flashcards+2+Sample.jpg" height="271" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
We've only downloaded the Sample deck so we can use the card type "Vocabulary," which is inside it. As soon as you have created a deck of your own, you can delete "Sample."<br />
<br />
<h3>
Creating your own deck</h3>
Click on the "Create Deck" button at the bottom of the dialogue box. Give your deck a reasonable name like "French Vocabulary."<br />
<br />
You should see this on your screen now:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHslLFxdgYt4vbPzUAqfEntXskZN0mMO4G6cRrF-o1QjFiivFj49rUapapzoV2gsyAuDzHvyzlIj6NxCen7EYHnn4mOHtoz1qyoUzbUgJ6qpAF_qBo6XvK36wjpCyoyoM5NEoU/s1600/Anki+Flashcards+7+Deck+Created.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHslLFxdgYt4vbPzUAqfEntXskZN0mMO4G6cRrF-o1QjFiivFj49rUapapzoV2gsyAuDzHvyzlIj6NxCen7EYHnn4mOHtoz1qyoUzbUgJ6qpAF_qBo6XvK36wjpCyoyoM5NEoU/s1600/Anki+Flashcards+7+Deck+Created.png" height="273" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
Click on your new, completely empty deck.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLAqfgFS7aoz7A912LaP3ccQKjRCaZ1xOM9b7-28N3HI3FjUpDmHIEzxw6ye4NWCnGSdAkcA40BIE1v0dfZf39ElyCWy7-SCtkvUqAkUUsj8UXuJKWoI_NZS-ITiRmwoGnRLS6/s1600/Anki+Flashcards+8+Empty+Deck.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLAqfgFS7aoz7A912LaP3ccQKjRCaZ1xOM9b7-28N3HI3FjUpDmHIEzxw6ye4NWCnGSdAkcA40BIE1v0dfZf39ElyCWy7-SCtkvUqAkUUsj8UXuJKWoI_NZS-ITiRmwoGnRLS6/s1600/Anki+Flashcards+8+Empty+Deck.png" height="271" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
This is Anki's way of saying that you have no more cards scheduled to review today. Not a surprise, since you don't have any cards at all yet. Up at the top in the middle, find the "Add" menu and click on that. It should pop up this dialogue box:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivOPRLzCuJrY7Oag3vQU9lx9MPS7bgrw5V7z8S7hfCXaArw-fL04Bjt58nZfsHKdoSml2NyE4pq9NIVzPk8OXxMdX5LKnYOsxew-ORteoE9EBNhpd-AAT_qHOFLlS225H2HGGR/s1600/Anki+Flashcards+9+Add+Dialogue.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivOPRLzCuJrY7Oag3vQU9lx9MPS7bgrw5V7z8S7hfCXaArw-fL04Bjt58nZfsHKdoSml2NyE4pq9NIVzPk8OXxMdX5LKnYOsxew-ORteoE9EBNhpd-AAT_qHOFLlS225H2HGGR/s1600/Anki+Flashcards+9+Add+Dialogue.png" height="320" width="310" /></a></div>
<br />
You may need to resize it to get it all to show. Be sure it says "Vocabulary" in the upper left-hand corner (after the word "Type"). If not, click on whatever type is does say and select "Vocabulary" from the list. The whole point of downloading my Sample deck was to get you the Vocabulary type because it describes the layout of the cards and defines the fields.<br />
<br />
So let's create a card. As you can see, we have five fields to fill in. Let's take them one by one.<br />
<br />
<b>Front</b>: This is where you put the English word. I follow the rule that I always put "the" with nouns and "to" with infinitives, which helps me distinguish "to walk" from "the walk". Use a word from the language you're actually studying. This time I'll use "the leaf."<br />
<br />
<b>Back</b>: This is where you put the word in the language you're studying. In this case, I'll put <i>la feuille</i>.<br />
<br />
The next three fields are all optional, but when you need them, they're very useful.<br />
<br />
<b>Comment</b>: This field that always shows with the answer but never with the question. I'll put the pronunciation here, but you can put anything you want there. I get the pronunciations from <a href="http://www.wordreference.com/" target="_blank">WordReference</a>. In fact, to be safe, I like to copy the text from the Back field and paste it into WordReference just to be sure I didn't mistype it. That also tells me if the word has multiple meanings. Then I can click on the English word (still in WordReference) and see if <i>that</i> has multiple meanings. When there's ambiguity, I use the next two fields to clear it up.<br />
<br />
<b>FrontHint</b>: This is shown with the English word, but it isn't part of the answer when you're drilling from French to English. I use this for three purposes: first, as in the "to walk" example, to clarify which meaning of the English word I want. "move on two feet" clarifies that I don't mean "e.g. walk your dog." For "leaf" I can say "e.g. on a tree."<br />
<br />
The second reason I use a hint is when the target language has synonyms and I want to be clear which one I want. For example, <i>cependant</i> and <i>pourtant</i> in French both mean "yet" or "however". The difference is that <i>cependant</i> augments the first clause while <i>poutrant</i> contradicts it, but this is way too complicated to express in the hint. Instead, I just put "not <i>pourtant</i>" or "not <i>cependant</i>". The long explanation can go into the Comment field.<br />
<br />
The third reason is when an English word and a French word have the same spelling and I need to specify that this is English. If the word and the translation are identical, I usually won't bother to create a card at all, so this doesn't happen very often. (E.g. "intelligent" in English is <i>intelligent</i> in French, so I don't bother to create a card unless I'm concerned about the pronunciation.)<br />
<br />
<b>BackHint</b>: This field works just like the FrontHint, except that you see it with the French word. It's very important not to give too much away in this field. I want to memorize the French words--not my hints. I in this case, I feel safe saying "not sheet," and I add a bit more explanation to the Comment field.<br />
<br />
Here's what it looks like all filled out. Again, don't bother with the three optional fields unless you need them; there's no reason to make extra work for yourself.<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmXhQjc1JRVgfUkmsrb7IMJIFXi-jQwOtAgR-lG3ueXc0TC4j2fsABdZJbFy2URFw0pho6ipS928cou_n8pLEBqSNOFzB7OdKER47b3QCBSA-or2iYCyk7YUGK25EXifr5JJUF/s1600/Anki+Flashcards+10+Add+Dialogue+Complete.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmXhQjc1JRVgfUkmsrb7IMJIFXi-jQwOtAgR-lG3ueXc0TC4j2fsABdZJbFy2URFw0pho6ipS928cou_n8pLEBqSNOFzB7OdKER47b3QCBSA-or2iYCyk7YUGK25EXifr5JJUF/s1600/Anki+Flashcards+10+Add+Dialogue+Complete.png" height="320" width="293" /></a></div>
<br />
Now click the "Add" button. This actually adds two cards: an English-to-French one and a French-to-English one. In Anki terms we have created a single "note" which comprises two "cards." You create and edit notes but you drill on cards. If you realize you have made a mistake, you can click on the "History" button and it will let you edit the earlier notes (and this will fix both cards). If you look back at my examples of what a quiz looks like, you'll notice there is an "Edit" button in the lower left corner. That lets you edit notes in the same way even in the middle of a quiz.<br />
<br />
Enter ten or so of your own vocabulary words and click the "Close" button when you're done. You should see a screen like this one:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibhn36ClUhLQIV8GF6J2SfWWO7oQ05OTksO_ERdcV7LoKs3ok4GmpPM5SPKrnvjaLX1eqRsdApZOzQ2pnlTpOQxhL3XlcgdfpS-uaL4Y7ETV1KNJxbmXd28ONqM5bXh657QJsv/s1600/Anki+Flashcards+11+Study+Now.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibhn36ClUhLQIV8GF6J2SfWWO7oQ05OTksO_ERdcV7LoKs3ok4GmpPM5SPKrnvjaLX1eqRsdApZOzQ2pnlTpOQxhL3XlcgdfpS-uaL4Y7ETV1KNJxbmXd28ONqM5bXh657QJsv/s1600/Anki+Flashcards+11+Study+Now.png" height="271" width="320" /></a></div>
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Press the "Study Now" button and see how you do!<br />
<br />
In a future post, I'll offer some tips and tricks to get the most out of Anki.Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-72650156178909606202014-10-01T17:27:00.000-07:002016-08-05T09:59:38.731-07:00French Prepositions with Geographical Names<h3>
Is it <i>à, de, en </i>or something else?</h3>
As students of French, especially on <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/duolingo-language-learning-as-game.html" target="_blank">Duolingo</a>, we're often confused about what preposition to use when we need to translate phrases like "He comes from France," "He goes to Brazil," or "He lives in the United States." Some places seem to have an article (e.g. "France" is <i>La France</i>) and others do not ("Paris" is just <i>Paris</i>), and the articles combine with the prepositions in what seem to be unpredictable ways.<br />
<br />
There is an <a href="http://french.about.com/library/weekly/aa062400.htm" target="_blank">excellent explanation at about.com</a>, but it's a bit lengthy. For my own study, I have found it helpful to reorganize the explanation in terms of broad rules followed by a sequence of exceptions.<br />
<br />
<h3>
The Main Rule</h3>
Use <i>à</i> for motion to a place or location in a place. <i>Je vais à Paris</i>. (I am going to Paris.) <i>Il est à Paris</i>. (He is in Paris)<br />
<br />
Use <i>de</i> for motion away from a place or origin in a place. <i>Je viens de Paris</i>. (I am coming from Paris.) <i>Elle est de Paris</i>. (She is from Paris.)<br />
<br />
Clean and simple, and it works for anything that doesn't have an article in the name, which includes most cities.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Cities and Islands: Exceptions we already know about</h3>
<div>
We already know a set of rules for how <i>á</i> and <i>de</i> combine with articles. You should already be very familiar with this table of contractions:</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div>
<table border="1" style="text-align: center;">
<thead>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>le</th>
<th>la</th>
<th>l'</th>
<th>les</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>à</th>
<td>au</td>
<td>à la</td>
<td>à l'</td>
<td>aux</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>de</th>
<td>du</td>
<td>de la</td>
<td>de l'</td>
<td>des</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div>
So, for example, you should not be surprised to learn that "I am going to Le Havre" is <i>Je viens au Havre</i>. Or that "We are coming from the Cook Islands" is <i>Nous venons des Îles Cook.</i><br />
<br />
We're also used to <i>de</i> becoming <i>d'</i> in front of a word that starts with a vowel. It should seem natural that "I am coming from Hawaii" is <i>Je viens d'Hawaï.</i></div>
<div>
<br />
This is precisely how it works for cities and islands, so the good news is that there is nothing new to learn for those kinds of location, even when there is an article as part of the name.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Countries and Continents</h3>
</div>
<h4>
What's the Gender?</h4>
<div>
For whatever reason, these larger regions take an article in French, even though they do not in English. So "France" is <i>La France,</i> "Brazil" is "Le Brésil," Germany is <i>L'Allemagne</i>, and the United States is <i>Les États-Unis</i>.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Our first problem is to learn what these articles are. Fortunately, there's an easy rule: everything that does <i>not</i> end in the letter e is masculine. No exceptions. All but six that do end in e are feminine. The only challenge is to memorize the masculine ones that end in e.<br />
<br />
The most important one is <i>le Mexique</i> (Mexico). The others are <i>le Belize</i> (Belize), <i>le Cambodge</i> (Cambodia), <i>le Mozambique</i> (Mozambique), <i>le Zaïre </i>(Zaire), and <i>le Zimbabwe</i> (Zimbabwe). (List taken from <a href="http://french.about.com/library/weekly/aa062400c.htm" target="_blank">About.com.</a>)<br />
<br />
All continents end in e and all are feminine, so the rule works perfectly for them.</div>
<div>
<br />
<h4>
A new table of contractions</h4>
</div>
<div>
Having gone to all this trouble to figure out which article goes with which country, it really seems like a shame that the next rule says that we <i>always</i> get rid of the article in expressions involving motion or location. The set of contractions that we learned before still apply, but there are new rules for the middle two columns. Notice that these are exactly the columns in the standard table that weren't really contractions in the first place, so there are really only four new contractions to memorize.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<table border="1" style="text-align: center;">
<thead>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th>le</th>
<th>la</th>
<th>l'</th>
<th>les</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>à</th>
<td>au</td>
<td>en</td>
<td>en</td>
<td>aux</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>de</th>
<td>du</td>
<td>de</td>
<td>d'</td>
<td>des</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
<div>
So "I am going to France" is <i>Je vais en France</i>. "He is coming from France" is <i>Il vient de France. </i>"We are going to Germany" is <i>Nous allons en Allemagne</i>. And "She is coming from Germany" is <i>Elle vient d'Allemagne.</i> </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h3>
States and Provinces</h3>
<div>
<a href="http://french.about.com/od/vocabulary/a/usstates.htm" target="_blank">US States</a> and <a href="http://french.about.com/od/vocabulary/a/canadianprovinces.htm" target="_blank">Canadian Provinces</a> all take articles, just like countries and continents do. They use the same table of contractions, so there's nothing new to memorize there. The only problem is learning the genders.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h4>
States</h4>
<div>
Most of the US States have the same name in French as in English. My mnemonic is that "those states don't have <i>real</i> French names." They are all masculine.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
For the ones that do have real French names, the ones that end in e are feminine and the ones that do not are masculine.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The sole exception is <i>Le Nouveau Mexique</i> (New Mexico), which is easy to remember because Mexico the country is an exception too.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h4>
Provinces</h4>
<div>
Everything takes a masculine article except the three western provinces <i>la Colombie-Britannique</i> (British Columbia), <i>l'Alberta</i> (Alberta), and <i>la Saskatchewan</i> (Saskatchewan) plus the three Maritime provinces <i>l'Île-du-Prince-Édouard</i> (Prince Edward Island), <i>la Nouvelle-Éscosse</i> (Noca Scotia), and <i>Terre-Neuve-et-Labrador</i> (Newfoundland and Labrador). This last one is actually masculine, but unlike all the rest it takes no article and follows the same rules as a city would.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The obvious mnemonic would be to make a Newfie joke, but I'll leave that to the reader's discretion.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h3>
Exceptions to the Exceptions</h3>
<div>
A few countries (e.g. Israel) don't take an article at all, so they behave like cities and islands. A few large islands (e.g. Corsica) take a feminine article and behave like countries or continents. These just have to be learned individually.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-11193430020668513512014-09-29T09:38:00.001-07:002015-01-12T13:45:31.652-08:00Duolingo: Language Learning as a Game<h3>
What is Duolingo? (Updated December 30, 2014)</h3>
<a href="https://www.duolingo.com/" target="_blank">Duolingo</a> is an <a href="http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/12/17/apple-announces-best-of-2013-itunes-list-for-music-apps-more" target="_blank">award-winning</a> free, web-based program for learning foreign languages. Duolingo manages to make language learning fun by turning it into a video game, but, more important, it also manages to be very effective. It presently offers English speakers a choice of five languages (plus four in beta and seven under development), and has lots of options for non-English speakers as well.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsfxACRGtd2y2RnR7GM68lLdLiW1bk5QQ4ESKT8PrjNTUrrDEQ0g2e0sEKfJMZ9lMBAJiE05RnUAXUdatojbvjHCylmMWCqDflSn0tuK868vVrtXT4RhhZaW_IDkpI6zgMf7cX/s1600/Duolingo+1+Languages.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsfxACRGtd2y2RnR7GM68lLdLiW1bk5QQ4ESKT8PrjNTUrrDEQ0g2e0sEKfJMZ9lMBAJiE05RnUAXUdatojbvjHCylmMWCqDflSn0tuK868vVrtXT4RhhZaW_IDkpI6zgMf7cX/s1600/Duolingo+1+Languages.png" height="640" width="400" /></a></div>
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I have been using Duolingo since January 2014 (351 days as of December 30, 2014). I have completed the Spanish and Italian courses, I expect to finish the French one in April 2015, and I have just started the German one. I'm very impressed with Duolingo, and I strongly encourage anyone who wants to learn a language to give it a try. For a free service, the quality is astonishing.<br />
<br />
And it's not just me. In <a href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2402570,00.asp" target="_blank">a December 2014 article</a>, PC Magazine said, "Duolingo is the best free online language-learning service." So it's worth taking a look at it.<br />
<br />
In this posting, I'll describe the basics of how to use Duolingo, I'll talk a bit about how it works, and I'll finish up with suggestions on how to get the most out of it. I won't talk about the mobile version (even though I know it's very popular) simply because I haven't tried it myself. Nor will I talk about the "Immersion" feature, in which advanced students collaborate to translate documents.<br />
<br />
<h3>
How Do You Use Duolingo?</h3>
<h4>
Skill Tree</h4>
<div>
Like any system for learning a language, Duolingo has a set of "skills" that you need to learn, divided between vocabulary (e.g. "Household," "Places," "Directions," etc.) and grammar (e.g. "Irregular Plurals," "Verbs: Past Imperfect," "Determiners," etc.) Unlike a textbook, which might have twenty chapters, Duolingo has a "tree" comprising 60 to 70 skills. Here's the top portion of my new German tree:</div>
<div>
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<div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
The gold skill, "Basics 1" is the only one I've completed so far (after three days). The two colorful ones under it represent skills that I'm allowed to attempt now. The gray ones below are skills I'm not allowed to try yet. When you complete the tree, you have "beaten the game." Note the similarity to a computer game where you complete quests that set you up to do more quests until you reach the final goal.<br />
<br />
The upper right corner shows "experience points" (XP) which are earned by answering questions correctly. You earn XP by completing lessons, which advances you in the language (and opens more of the tree). XP lets you compare your progress with friends and family.<br />
<br />
In the upper left corner, you can see that I'm currently at level 2 in German. Level is a function of the number of experience points (roughly the cube root, so each level requires more and more points). Again, note the similarity to a video game.<br />
<br />
When you have finished all the skills, you have learned the language. If you did nothing but Duolingo, you would probably reach a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages#Common_reference_levels" target="_blank">CEFR</a> level of A2. That's enough to "get by" if you travel somewhere. It's not enough to do much reading or hold serious conversations, but it'll sure impress your friends.<br />
<br />
If you <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/duolingo-language-learning-as-game.html#supplements">supplement Duolingo with other resources</a> (as I'll describe later) you should easily reach B1 and possibly B2, at which point you can read newspapers and attempt novels. But even A2 is nothing to sneeze at. It sure is a lot more than you get out of most video games! It's quite a lot to get from a free one.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Lessons: Inside a skill</h4>
If you look closely at the tree above, you'll see that the "Basics 2" skill looks like a pie chart. That skill comprises five "lessons," and so far I have done two of them. If I click on Basics 2, I can see the whole list.<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
Each lesson is described in terms of which words it teaches. Lessons must be done in a particular order. If I click on "Lesson 3," it begins the quiz for that lesson.<br />
<br />
Some lessons (especially the earlier ones) include grammar tips. It is almost always best to read these <i>after</i> attempting the lessons. Otherwise your eyes will glaze over--much as they might have in your high-school language classes. The best time to read a grammar rule is at the point where you're wondering "why do I have to say it like <i>that</i>?" Anyway, the tips are generally good--just don't think you have to read and understand them before doing a lesson.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Quizzes: How you complete lessons</h4>
Quizzes currently have seventeen questions, of which there are seven types:<br />
<ol>
<li>Foreign to English Translation. These show you a sentence in the language you are trying to learn and ask you to translate it into English.</li>
<li>English to Foreign Translation. You see a sentence in English and must translate it into the foreign language.</li>
<li>Listening. You hear a sentence in the foreign language and must type what you hear. (Not a translation.)</li>
<li>Multiple choice. You are given a sentence in English and shown three sentences in the foreign language. You must pick the ones that correctly translate the English sentence. This works best if you try to do the translation <i>before</i> you look at the multiple choices.</li>
<li>Match the picture. You are shown a word in English and three pictures, each labeled with a foreign word. You pick the picture that matches the word. Most (not all) new vocabulary is introduced this way.</li>
<li>Translate one word. Sometimes it gives you a single word in English and asks you to type it in the target language.</li>
<li>Speak into the microphone. This one is supposed to test your pronunciation by having you read something, but I was unable to make it work at all. Reports from those who've tried it suggest that at this writing the feature doesn't work all that well at the best of times, so I didn't try too hard to fix the microphone problems. Disabling the mic in the settings menu makes these questions go away, and I think that's what most people do.</li>
</ol>
<div>
Most of the question types give you lots of opportunities to hear the foreign language spoken. You can repeat what you hear, but other than the speak-into-the-microphone question type, there's no feedback from the program.<br />
<br />
Obviously the translation exercises have the problem that there are often hundreds or thousands of ways to translate a given sentence. The Spanish <i>¿Es su libro?</i> Could mean "Is it your book" or "Is it his book" or "Is it her book" for example. Duolingo generally has all the reasonable translations, and it benefits from a mechanism for users to report missing ones, so it gets better over time.<br />
<br />
In the year I've been on Duolingo, I have seen them adopt at least 100 of my suggestions, so they do listen to their users.<br />
<br /></div>
<h4>
Questions</h4>
<div>
Here's an example of a German-to-English translation question with a correct answer.</div>
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</div>
<br />
The red bar across the top shows how much of the lesson I've done. The word in gold, <i>sind</i>, is new vocabulary in this lesson. the number 2 on the right is the total number of questions I've answered so far--right or wrong. Whenever I get an answer wrong, the bar moves one to the left. That means each wrong answer cancels out one correct answer. You never "die" (like in many video games), but it can take a long time to win. The only way to lose is to click that Quit button in the upper right.<br />
<br />
Other types of questions have slightly different formats, but the basic idea is the same: answer questions to complete lessons. Complete lessons to master skills. Master all the skills to learn the language. That's the whole thing in a nutshell.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Review</h4>
<div>
If you look back at the skill tree, you'll see a long blue button on the right titled "Strengthen Skills." This creates a custom quiz based on the words or phrases you either seem to be having trouble with or which just haven't come up in a while. Doing review lessons doesn't advance you down the tree, but it does keep it from "weakening." If you don't do any review lessons, after a while the earlier skills will turn from gold back into some other color. They'll even have strength bars (like a wi-fi signal) that will gradually drop. It's Duolingo's way of saying that it thinks you haven't <i>really</i> learned this material. Weakened skills don't affect you finishing the tree, but most people want to keep their tree all gold. That's a good thing. I have written at length about <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-to-make-gold-duolingo-tree.html">the best strategy to keep a Duolingo tree gold</a>.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The optimal mix seems to be to do two review lessons for every new lesson you attempt. You don't need to do a <i>new </i>lesson every day, but it's a good idea to do at least two <i>review </i>lessons each day. Three lessons a day takes about 30 minutes. (Longer if you do outside study.) If you can't commit 30 minutes a day to it, you probably shouldn't be trying to learn a new language in the first place.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
If you really can do one new lesson every day, it takes about one year to finish a language. Since you'll have days when you don't want to do a new lesson, figure anywhere from 18 months to two years.<br />
<br /></div>
<h3>
How does it work?</h3>
<h4>
We don't need no grammar lessons</h4>
Despite the extensive grammar tips for the lesson above, Duolingo expects you to learn the language by trial and error--not by learning rules.<br />
<br />
In a <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/duolingo/comments/230umo/iam_luis_von_ahn_cofounder_and_ceo_of_duolingo_ama/" target="_blank">Redit Discussion in 2014</a>, Luis Ahn, the founder of Duolingo said, "I, personally, don't like vocabulary, grammar or verb conjugation. My dream in life is to be able to teach you a language without you needing to read textbooks about indirect objects. In fact, I consider the use of grammar to be discriminatory against those who unfortunately didn't have a very good education in their own native language (which is the majority of the world's population). I think slapping 30 pages of grammar before every lesson is the easy way out -- instead we should strive for something that everybody can consume."<br />
<br />
The person who approaches Duolingo purely as a video game will miss questions over and over until he/she has memorized the words and phrases needed to finish each lesson. Keeping the tree gold requires <i>remembering </i>all those words and phrases. The whole concept is that the brain will deduce the patterns so it can reduce the memorization effort and that after a while, correct expressions will start to "just feel right." To some degree, this really does happen.<br />
<br />
The makers of <a href="http://www.rosettastone.com/blog/does-rosetta-stone-teach-grammar/" target="_blank">Rosetta Stone</a> have a similar philosophy: they too believe that through repeated exposure to sentences in the foreign language, your brain will naturally deduce the grammar rules, and you'll speak the language without ever having studied the grammar at all. After all, children learn their native languages without studying grammar at all.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Or do we?</h4>
Things aren't really this simple. Linguists don't believe that adults can learn languages the way children do, so one would expect a few problems. And there are.<br />
<br />
Almost <a href="http://language101.com/reviews/rosetta-stone/" target="_blank">no one ever actually finishes Rosetta Stone</a>. A <a href="http://www.casl.umd.edu/sites/default/files/Nielson08_RosettaStoneEval.pdf" target="_blank">University of Maryland Study</a> showed that out of 150 people who had free access to it, all but one gave up during a twenty-week period. One wonders how they stay in business. My personal suspicion is that most people who paid $500 for the product a) blame themselves for not working hard enough and b) convince themselves that they're not really quitting--they're just putting it aside until "later."<br />
<br />
Duolingo doesn't publish statistics, but it's clear from the discussion forums that only a fraction of those who start it ever finish their trees. <a href="http://static.duolingo.com/s3/DuolingoReport_Final.pdf" target="_blank">City University of New York did a study</a> that asked 88 people to use Duolingo for 30 hours over an eight-week period, or about half an hour per day. One quarter of the people managed to do this. That sounds better than the Rosetta Stone numbers, but we don't know what the 20-week results would be like--never mind the 65-weeks it would take to finish the tree.<br />
<br />
So it's not actually clear that Duolingo has a better success rate than Rosetta Stone, but it does have one very big advantage (other than being free): it has a strong online community.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Discussion as Study Group</h4>
If you look back at the last picture (of the failed French translation question), down at the bottom there's a button labeled "discuss sentence." If you click on that, it takes you to a forum where the users discuss the challenges of this specific sentence. <i>These discussions are almost entirely about grammar</i>.<br />
<br />
Studying a language with Duolingo is like taking a college class from a professor who never bothers to show up to class, but somehow the TAs are regularly giving quizzes anyway, and they're harsh graders who can't be argued with. The discussion sessions are a study group where you and other students get together to try to teach yourselves the subject. Different people attempt to explain the rules, offering links to free outside material. Native speakers pop in to offer advice. And somehow it works. For those who stick with it, anyway.<br />
<br />
Duolingo does listen. A year ago almost none of the lessons had any grammar tips whatsoever. In response to endless user complaints, they have gradually been adding more and more tips in more and more languages--and from what I can tell, those are largely based on the sort of questions users ask in the forums.<br />
<br />
<h3 id="supplements">
Supplemental Materials</h3>
I said above that if you do nothing but Duolingo, you'll reach A2 competence in the language in a bit over a year. But what if you want more?<br />
<br />
<h4>
Grammar Books</h4>
As with a video game, Duolingo has the equivalent of walk-throughs and game guides. These correspond to free online grammar sites and professionally-produced thousand-page grammar texts, respectively. For example, the <a href="http://french.about.com/od/grammar/" target="_blank">French About.com Grammar</a> site is extremely popular with Duolingo users. For the first few skill levels, that may be all you want, but as you move through the language you're likely to want something more solid eventually.<br />
<br />
For French, I bought <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Schaums-Outline-Grammar-Foreign-Language/dp/0071828982" target="_blank">Schaum's Outline of French Grammar</a>: Sixth Edition, and it's quite good. Serious students will want a "Reference Grammar," which is more like an encyclopedia of the language and dives deep into difficult areas. I use <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-French-Grammar-Monique-LHuillier/dp/0521484251" target="_blank">Advanced French Grammar (L'Huillier, 1999)</a>, but most language students probably won't want anything that heavy-duty.<br />
<br />
Either way, whenever you see something you don't understand, you thumb through the grammar book until you've figured it out. This is something you'd probably spend thirty minutes on once or twice a week.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Dictionary</h4>
For French, Spanish, and Italian, nothing beats <a href="http://www.wordreference.com/" target="_blank">WordReference</a>. This free online dictionary gives you definitions, pronunciations, conjugations for words and phrases, and it automatically searches forums that have ten years worth of answers to questions about the meanings of words.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Flash Cards</h4>
Duolingo does a great job of drilling you on grammar (even though it purports not to teach grammar), but it's a little weak on vocabulary drill. If you supplement it with a few minutes a day of flashcard drill, it will make a big difference.<br />
<br />
Duolingo has a very simple built-in flashcard program, but it drills word forms (e.g. <i>mangeais </i>"I was eating") as opposed to headwords (e.g. <i>manger </i>"to eat") and it only drills from the language you're learning to English--not the other way around. There are no "glosses"(hints that let you distinguish otherwise-equivalent words) so, for example, when it prompts with <i>tiens</i> you don't know if it means "I keep" or "hey there". Finally, it doesn't drill phrases, which doesn't help if you want to learn that it's <i>commencer à </i>not <i>de</i>. Duolingo's flashcard program is very new (as of this writing), so it will probably get better over time.<br />
<br />
Instead, I use the <a href="http://ankisrs.net/" target="_blank">Anki</a> flashcard program, which is a free download. I create the cards myself based on what I get wrong or need to look up on Duolingo each day. Then I do a daily drill of up to 100 words per language (bidirectionally, so, for example, when I drill French, I see a mix of English-French and French-English cards), which takes from ten to fifteen minutes. I have a posting about <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/10/using-anki-flashcards-for-vocabulary.html">using Anki flashcards for vocabulary drill.</a><br />
<br />
<h4>
The Duolingo Wiki</h4>
<div>
Finally, serious, long-time Duolingo users have created a <a href="http://duolingo.wikia.com/wiki/Duolingo_Wiki" target="_blank">Wiki for Duolingo</a> which gives countless tips on how to make the best use of the software. Again, any serious videogame has a fan-maintained Wiki that gives you all the details; if you use Duolingo, you should bookmark the Wiki.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Speaking and Writing</h4>
Duolingo doesn't do a lot to directly develop your skills at conversation or composition, but it definitely puts you in a good position to do this yourself. I use the <a href="http://lang-8.com/" target="_blank">Lang-8</a> site to practice writing, and I have used <a href="http://www.meetup.com/" target="_blank">Meetup</a> to find local conversation groups for Spanish, Italian, and French. These are things that make more sense to try when you are almost finished with your Duolingo tree.</div>
<div>
<br />
<h4>
Reading</h4>
</div>
<div>
I have written at length about the importance of <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/learning-foreign-language-by-reading.html" target="_blank">reading novels to help learn foreign languages</a>. I still think this is the best way to advance, once you have reached an intermediate level. When you have learned the past tense in a language, I think it's time to start trying to read newspapers. Most of the worlds major foreign-language newspapers make at least some articles available for free. For French, I was delighted to learn that <a href="http://www.lemonde.fr/" target="_blank">Le Monde</a> has lots of free online content. Try to read just a paragraph or two a day to exercise what you learned from Duolingo. Use Wordreference for anything you couldn't figure out.<br />
<br />
Once you get to the point where you can read entire newspaper articles, try books. I have some suggestions for <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/12/finding-foreign-novels-to-read.html" target="_blank">how to pick a foreign novel to read</a>. If you do this, you'll be pleasantly surprised to discover that Duolingo has done a good job of selecting vocabulary; especially if you like action-adventure and/or crime novels.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Alternatively, use Duolingo's own "Immersion" feature, which lets you practice translation in a collaborative environment with other learners. (Think of it as the co-op version of the game.)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Whichever route you take, <i>read</i>. As soon as you are able to do it, <i>read</i>. Unlike speaking or writing, you can do it every single day, and it has the potential to lift your abilities in all the other skills simply because it boosts your vocabulary so much.</div>
<h3>
Conclusion</h3>
<div>
Duolingo is a remarkably effective free service for learning a foreign language. By making it into a game, the Duolingo people have managed to make learning fun. This may be the most effective way ever designed to learn a foreign language, short of studying abroad.</div>
<br />
<br />Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-46326878498104091542014-09-25T17:03:00.001-07:002014-09-25T17:03:34.783-07:00Spanish "Resumptive Lo"<h3>
What is "Resumptive <i>Lo</i>?"</h3>
In Spanish we often see sentences with a mysterious <i>lo</i> in them. For example consider this dialogue:<br />
<br />
<i>¿Estás listo?</i> (Are you ready?)<br />
<i>Lo estoy.</i> (I am.)<br />
<br />
It's fair to ask "what's the <i>lo</i> doing there?" It seems to mean "I am it." This <i>lo</i> is what linguists call an <i>expletive</i>, and it cannot be deleted.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Expletives</h4>
Sometimes the syntax of a language forces you to put a word into a sentence even when the semantics don't require it. When that happens, you use an expletive, which is just a dummy word that doesn't mean anything.<br />
<br />
In English, you find expletives in expressions like "It is raining," "There is trouble," and "Do you see?" The "It," "there," and "do" are there because English syntax requires something in those slots. The expletive disappears whenever there is a valid word for that slot. "Have you seen?" is valid but *"Have you done seen" is substandard.<br />
<br />
One of the challenges of learning Spanish is learning to leave the English expletives out. "It is raining" just becomes <i>Llueve</i>. "There is trouble" becomes <i>Hay problemas</i>, etc. It shouldn't be a big surprise, then, that <i>another</i> challenge is learning to put the Spanish expletives in.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Three places that need <i>lo</i></h4>
<br />
For words like <i>ser, estar, </i>and <i>parecer</i>, Spanish doesn't allow you to leave out the complement. That is, you can't just say "I am" or "he is"; you have to say <i>what</i> you are or what he is. Even though <i>lo </i>doesn't mean anything, it satisfies the syntax. If you just say *<i>Estoy</i>, then you've made an error on a par with saying "Is raining."<br />
<br />
Transitive verbs have the same problem. You cannot omit the direct object.<br />
<br />
<i>¿Quién tiene una carta?</i> (Who has a letter?)<br />
<i>Lo tengo</i>. (I have).<br />
<br />
This doesn't mean "I have it," obviously, since <i>carta</i> is feminine, and "I have it" wouldn't make sense in this context anyway. ("I have one" would also translate this correctly.) Again, *<i>Tengo</i> all by itself is wrong.<br />
<br />
Finally, when <i>haber</i> means "there is" you have to say <i>what</i> there is.<br />
<br />
<i>¿Hay algo que comer?</i> (Is there anything to eat?)<br />
<i>Lo hay.</i> (There is.)<br />
<br />
Likewise, *<i>Hay</i>, by itself is an error.<br />
<h3>
When do you use it?</h3>
That answers <i>why</i> you have to use it, but it doesn't explain when you would want to. You use the resumptive <i>lo</i> when the missing element simply repeats something earlier in the sentence or even in a previous sentence. In all my examples above, the <i>lo</i> represents something the first speaker said and which the second speaker doesn't need to repeat because "it's obvious." Nothing stops you from repeating what was said, of course, but almost no one does that--in any language.<br />
<br />
This use of <i>lo</i> to "reuse" something from earlier is why this is called "resumptive <i>lo</i>."<br />
<br />
You can use resumptive <i>lo</i> inside a single sentence. This example is from <a href="https://www.duolingo.com/" target="_blank">Duolingo</a>:<br />
<br />
<i>Este plato es bonito, pero ese no lo es.</i> (This plate is pretty, but that one is not.)<br />
<br />
It's very tempting to say <i>ese no es</i>, because that's what we do in English, but it's wrong. A form of <i>ser</i> has to have a complement--even if it's just <i>lo</i>.<br />
<br />
For more details, read "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reference-Grammar-Modern-Spanish-Fifth-ebook/dp/B00F2H3KVM" target="_blank">A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish</a>: Fifth Edition" (Butt and Benjamin, 2011, section 7.4 "<i>Lo</i> as a neuter pronoun").<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><br /></i>Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-65197214400957652522014-09-24T09:52:00.000-07:002014-09-25T14:03:45.410-07:00Italian Perfect Tenses<h3>
What are Perfect Tenses?</h3>
A perfect tense is a <i>compound tense</i> which combines an <i>auxiliary verb</i> with a <i>past participle</i>. For every simple tense, there is a corresponding perfect tense. Here are a few examples from English:<br />
<br />
Present: I eat<br />
Past: I ate<br />
Present Perfect: I have eaten<br />
Past Perfect: I had eaten<br />
<br />
In English, the auxiliary verb is always "to have". In these examples, the participle is "eaten."<br />
<br />
In Italian, the auxiliary is either <i>avere</i> or <i>essere. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
Present: mangio<br />
Past: mangiavo<br />
Present Perfect: ho mangiato<br />
Past Perfect: avevo mangiato<br />
<br />
In the last two, <i>mangiato</i> is the participle.<br />
<br />
Present: vengo<br />
Past: venivo<br />
Present perfect: sono venuto<br />
Past perfect: era venuto<br />
(I come, I came, I have come, I had come)<br />
<br />
In the last two, <i>venuto</i> is the participle.<br />
<br />
<h3>
When to use <i>essere</i> in Italian?</h3>
<div>
There are three fairly solid rules that cover most verbs:</div>
<br />
<ol>
<li>All <a href="http://www.grammar-monster.com/glossary/transitive_verbs.htm" target="_blank">transitive verbs</a> use <i>avere</i>. That is, if the verb has a direct object, it takes <i>avere</i>. </li>
<li>All <a href="http://italian.about.com/od/verbs/a/italian-verbs-reflexive.htm" target="_blank">reflexive verbs</a> use <i>essere</i>. </li>
<li>Simple verbs of motion take <i>essere</i>. Go, come, etc.</li>
</ol>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Beyond this, I'll paraphrase <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reference-Grammar-Italian-Routledge-Grammars-ebook/dp/B00IOPW1TQ" target="_blank">Maiden and Robustelli</a> (section 14.20). For intransitive verbs, <i>essere</i> tends to be used for verbs that emphasize a final state rather than the process that led to the state and for those whose subjects had little to do with controlling the action. So <i>cambiare</i> (to change) takes <i>essere</i> as does <i>annegare</i> (to drown).</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Intransitive verbs that take <i>avere</i> tend to be ones whose subjects play a major role in the action or state of the verb. So <i>agire</i> (to act) and <i>nuotare</i> (to swim) both take <i>avere</i>.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h3>
When does the Participle Change for Number or Gender?</h3>
<div>
In the example above, "I have come" was <i>sono venuto</i>, but that only works if I'm a man. A woman would say <i>sono venuta</i>. For a group of people, we would say <i>sono venuti</i> "they have come" unless the group was all women, in which case we'd say <i>sono venute</i>. On the other hand in the case of eating (as an intransitive verb), the participle never changes. <i>Ho mangiato, ha mangiato, hanno mangiato, </i>etc.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So what's the rule?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Whenever the auxiliary is <i>essere</i> the participle <i>always</i> agrees with the subject. As I just illustrated, this is true even when the subject is "I."</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
When the auxiliary is <i>avere</i> the participle doesn't ever change for an intransitive verb. When the verb is transitive, the following applies:</div>
<div>
<ol>
<li>If the direct object is one of the five clitics (pronouns) <i>lo, la, li, le, ne</i>, then the participle must agree with the <i>object</i> (not the subject).</li>
<li>For other direct-object clitics (<i>mi, ti, ci, vi</i>) agreement is <i>optional</i>.</li>
<li>If the direct object is a noun, then the participle never changes, although you may see it in older literature.</li>
</ol>
<div>
There are <a href="http://italian.about.com/od/verbs/a/italian-verbs-past-participle-direct-object-agreement.htm" target="_blank">some good examples</a> on about.com, although the explanation isn't (as of September 2014) up to their usual standards.</div>
</div>
Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-4891741383188484532014-09-22T16:32:00.004-07:002015-01-06T14:45:05.188-08:00Learning a Foreign Language by Reading a Novel<h3>
Reading for Pleasure vs. Reading to Learn</h3>
My previous posts on <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/how-to-read-foreign-novel-on-kindle.html">using a Kindle to read in a foreign language</a> outline most of what you need to know to do pure <i>extensive </i>reading--that is, reading just for enjoyment. Sometimes, though, you want to do a bit of <i>intensive </i>reading with the explicit goal of improving your language ability. This week's post talks about how to do that.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Intensive and Extensive Reading</h3>
The notion that you can learn a foreign language as a side-effect of reading for pleasure in that language is called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensive_reading" target="_blank">extensive reading</a>, as contrasted with <i>intensive reading</i>, which is when you analyse a text until you have understood it thoroughly. Teachers of English as a foreign language have had great success with extensive reading; <a href="http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/extensive-reading-why-it-good-our-students%E2%80%A6-us">when properly directed</a>, it's a key part of many if not most ESL programs today.<br />
<br />
The #1 principle for a successful extensive reading program is that "<a href="http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/October2002/day/day.html" target="_blank">the reading material is easy</a>." For this reason, most extensive reading programs direct students to what are called "graded readers." These are texts that are deliberately written with limited vocabulary and simplified grammar for the purpose of making the reading easier.<br />
<br />
My experience has been that using a device like a Kindle makes the reading experience so much easier that you can do extensive reading with authentic texts, which I'll define as being texts written by and for adult native speakers. Richard Day talks about "the rule of hand," which says there should be no more than 5 difficult words per page. For readers using a Kindle, I would amend that to say "no more than five difficult words <i>despite</i> the dictionary look-up."<br />
<br />
<a href="http://scottthornburyblog.com/2013/10/13/expensive-reading/comment-page-1/" target="_blank">Scott Thornbury</a> wrote a fascinating account of his attempt to improve his Spanish strictly using extensive reading (never using the dictionary at all). He was already a very advanced Spanish speaker, so it makes some sense that it didn't help him as much, but I think the important takeaway from his experience is that <i>you need to do some of both</i>. Extensive reading is fun and it does improve your ability as a side-effect. Intensive reading is--well, <i>intense</i>--and you can't do a lot of it, but it pushes you ahead faster.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Learning Objectives</h3>
<div>
There are four things to try to improve in the course of reading:</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Simple vocabulary. These are words that have easy translations into English. For example, in Spanish "to melt" is <i>derretir</i>. That's a common enough word that if you didn't already know it, you probably want to make an effort to memorize it.</li>
<li>Collocations. These are combinations of words whose meanings aren't obvious from the pieces. For example, in Spanish <i>dar</i> is the verb "to give" and <i>por</i> is "for" but <i>dar por</i> is "to consider" as in "I consider him a friend." <i>Lo doy por amigo </i>does not mean "I give him for a friend." These can be tricky because the words don't always come right next to each other.</li>
<li>Basic grammar. This is the material covered in a basic college textbook. How to conjugate the verbs, how to decline the adjectives and nouns, when agreement is required, etc. You should have already been exposed to the entire basic grammar before attempting to read a novel, but that doesn't mean you know it by second nature.</li>
<li>Complex grammar. Sometimes people are surprised to learn that languages have grammar beyond what they learned in school. When reading a book, you'll find sentences that seem to make no sense at all unless you know one of these <i>extra</i> rules. For example, in French, Spanish, and Italian, the form that you learned as the future tense is also used as a "suppositional" tense. So the Italian sentence <i>Avrà potuto nuotare</i> does not mean "He will have been able to swim" but "He probably managed to swim."</li>
</ul>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Each of these objectives needs a different method of attack, and you need to arm yourself accordingly.</div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h3>
Tools</h3>
<h4>
Ones you buy</h4>
<div>
Some things are worth paying for. Here are the key ones:</div>
<div>
<ol>
<li>An electronic bilingual dictionary. We've talked about this already, but the speed of doing look-ups on a Kindle is what really transforms the reading experience. This is where you'll find most of the words and collocations.</li>
<li>If you have lost your original college or high-school language textbooks, you'll want to get one of the "Schaum's Outline of [your target language] Grammar" books as a resource for the basic grammar. A quick read through it will tell you what you ought to refresh yourself on before attempting a novel, just in case you've forgotten some of the basic grammar.</li>
<li>A reference grammar. This is a book of 500 to 1,000 pages that explains countless nuances of the grammar. Like an encyclopedia, this is not the sort of book you read straight through, but it is <i>the</i> place to go for complex grammar questions.</li>
<li>An English translation of the novel. This one is debatable. I've read nine foreign novels now, and I've only used English translations for two of them. In both cases, the novels were from the mid 19th century, and I was concerned they might use grammar that wasn't covered in my reference materials. If you do use someone else's translation, the key is to use it <i>sparingly</i>.</li>
</ol>
<h4>
Free ones</h4>
<div>
The Internet is rich in free resources, but I want to list some of the most important ones.</div>
</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.wordreference.com/" target="_blank">WordReference</a> is the ultimate online dictionary for a dozen languages. It has pronunciations, it gives verb conjugations, it has collocations. It also has forums where native speakers can answer questions for you. Note: you will get better results if you can ask your questions in their language.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.linguee.com/" target="_blank">Linguee</a> claims to have the results of over 1,000,000,000 translations, and it's a good place to look for suspected collocations that you couldn't find elsewhere. Paste in a phrase and see how professional translators have translated it in other documents.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.duolingo.com/" target="_blank">Duolingo</a> turns language learning into a game. If you're ready to read a novel, Duolingo may be too elementary for you, but it includes a translation section called "Immersion," which is excellent practice for reading. In Immersion, people try collaboratively to translate texts, mostly from Wikipedia. It also has forums for people who are trying to learn English, and those can be a good place to ask language questions--especially if you're willing to write in their language. I have a posting about <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/duolingo-language-learning-as-game.html" target="_blank">how to get the most out of Duolingo</a>.</li>
<li><a href="http://ankisrs.net/" target="_blank">Anki </a>is a free flashcard program. It's hard to beat as a way to drill yourself on new vocabulary and collocations. Steer clear of the decks others have constructed, though; write your own flash cards so you're studying just the words that you need to. Otherwise the flashcard task can become so overwhelming that you quit doing it. Adding ten new words per day is a reasonable upper limit. I have a posting about <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/10/using-anki-flashcards-for-vocabulary.html">using Anki flashcards for vocabulary drill</a>. Note: The Kindle has a built-in flashcard system called "Vocabulary Builder." <b>Don't turn it on!</b> It gradually makes your Kindle slower and slower until it locks up and you have to reset it.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.meetup.com/" target="_blank">Meetup.com</a> lets people organize groups for (among other things) native speakers and learners to meet regularly to chat informally. If there is a group near you, by all means go and talk about what you're reading. It's also a great place to ask questions about sentences that stumped you.</li>
</ul>
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
<h3>
The Process</h3>
<div>
So how do you use all of this to read intensively? The general idea is to read some unit (say a paragraph) and make a solid attempt to understand it <i>before</i> resorting to any of the materials above. Then you use the resources in roughly this order:</div>
<div>
<ol>
<li>Use the monolingual dictionary for any words you're not absolutely sure of. Don't feel bad about looking up words you already guessed correctly; there are lots of "false friends" out there. (E.g. <i>embarazada</i> means "pregnant" in Spanish.) Whenever you look up a word, decide whether it's worth memorizing. Common words (e.g. sidewalk) and words the author uses a lot are worth it. Names of plants, animals, foods, etc. are probably not. Highlight anything you think you should memorize and add it to your flashcards later.</li>
<li>If you can't make out the monolingual definition, switch to the bilingual, <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/better-reading-on-kindle.html">as I described last week</a>. When you've figured out the word, switch back to the monolingual and see if you can make sense of the definition now. It is is important to get comfortable with the monolingual because it will generally be a far better dictionary than the bilingual and also, the more time you spend immersed in the language, the faster you'll learn.</li>
<li>Sometimes there is no definition in the bilingual. In that case, open the monolingual as a book and then use the bilingual to read the definition. In general you shouldn't have to do this, because dictionary definitions are usually written using simplified vocabulary, but sometimes there is no other way. (I describe this in detail in <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/11/sostiene-pereira-according-to-pereira.html" target="_blank">my review of <i>Sostiene Pereira</i></a>.)</li>
<li>If that fails, use Wikipedia--especially if the word looks like it might be a proper name. The Kindle will take you to Wikipedia for the language you're reading in--not the English version--so be prepared. Often it's enough just to know that it's a plant, or an animal, or a location. This will only work if you're online, of course. Otherwise, highlight the sentence so you can find it later.</li>
<li>Sometimes the issue is basic grammar. You simply didn't realize that this particular verb had an irregular past-tense form. That would be a good time to consult with the grammar outline (or your old college text book). Maybe even do some exercises. <i>You will have a very hard time reading if there are aspects of the basic grammar that you don't really understand</i>.</li>
<li>Other times the dictionary fails you because it doesn't support compound words or because the inflected word happens to look the same as a different word. A good English example is "carving". If you wanted the definition of "to carve" it won't help much for the dictionary to show you a definition for the noun "carving." In those cases, you open the dictionary as a book and manually look the word up. This is a defect, so consider <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_left_v4_sib?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200127470" target="_blank">submitting a complaint to Amazon</a>.</li>
<li>If all the words seem to make sense individually, but you're not sure how they work together, then it's time to consult the reference grammar. The reference grammar is especially useful if you're pretty sure what the sentence has to mean but you're not sure <i>how</i> is can mean that. For example, as mentioned above, you would probably know from context that <i>Avrà potuto nuotare</i> had to refer to a past event, but couldn't figure out how the future tense verb fit in there. A quick look at the future tense section of the reference grammar will explain it clearly.</li>
<li>If none of that worked, try the Bing translate feature. Select the sentence and see what Bing has to say. If you did all the work described above, you'll have most of the sentence figured out, so even if Bing makes some hilarious errors, you have an excellent chance of finding what you need in the parts it gets right. For me, this is especially helpful when I have made some assumption about a word that just isn't correct. For example, you might not have known that <i>esperar</i> can mean "to wait for" not just "to hope," and you didn't even think of looking it up. The Bing translation will likely call your attention to it.</li>
<li>If all else has failed, go ahead and look at the English translation, if you have it. I cannot emphasize strongly enough the importance of doing this only in the last extremity. It is very easy to look at the translation, look back at the original, and say to yourself "Oh, I get it," and keep on reading without realizing that you still don't know how to read that sentence. So if you do resort to using someone else's translation, at least get the most out of it. Now that you know what the sentence means, dig into it and be sure you understand exactly <i>why</i> it means that. Is it a collocation you didn't know about? Or an obscure grammar rule? Was it as simple as misreading a word entirely? Whatever it is, figure it out.</li>
<li>For things that you can't figure out to save your soul, highlight the sentence, bookmark the page, and bring it to a native speaker for help. I really recommend meetups for this, since it gives you a topic to talk about, but there are online forums you can use as well. </li>
</ol>
</div>
<div>
Obviously you don't have to do all these steps all the time. Even when I'm reading extensively, I do steps 1-4. When I'm reading intensively, I sometimes highlight problems for later study rather than doing them on the spot. Remember that extensive reading will improve your language a lot all by itself; only do intensive study when you're in the mood to do it. Don't let it spoil the book for you!<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
<h4>
Highlighted words</h4>
So what do you do with the things you highlighted? Install the free Kindle application on your PC or laptop and open your book there. (You can have the same book on five or six different Kindles without having to pay extra.) You'll be able to see all your highlights. This makes it easy to use WordReference, Linguee, or other online references to look words up. This is a good time to <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/10/using-anki-flashcards-for-vocabulary.html" target="_blank">use Anki to create a few flashcards</a>. If you bought the Kindle version of the reference grammar, the online app is generally a better place to read it than the e-Reader Kindle because reference grammars usually contain big tables.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I usually process highlights backwards from my current place in the book. Don't let it overwhelm you. Do as many as you feel like and then just let the rest of them go.</div>
<h3>
Final Thoughts</h3>
<div>
I'm usually motivated to thoroughly understand a problem sentence when I think I've seen the same problem two or three times in a row. For example, when I was reading my first novel in Spanish, I realized I was confused about the clitic pronouns <i>le</i> and <i>les</i>. When I dug into the reference grammar, I realized that I had<i> never</i> understood how to use them properly, and a half-hour's reading clarified things considerably. This made the whole rest of the book much more pleasant to read, so it was well worth the effort. With practice, you'll figure out when it's worth it and when it's not.</div>
Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-91889770964543601332014-09-14T20:32:00.004-07:002014-11-19T09:42:09.652-08:00Better Reading on a Kindle<a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/how-to-read-foreign-novel-on-kindle.html">Last week</a>, I explained how to use a bilingual dictionary on a Kindle to read novels in foreign languages. This week I'm going to talk about strategy for using the dictionary, how to switch back and forth between the bilingual and the monolingual dictionary, and how to use the translation option.<br />
<br />
<h3>
When to Use the Dictionary</h3>
As a rule, you want to immerse yourself in the text in the target language, making as few lookups as possible. The more you can immerse yourself, the better the reading experience and the more you'll learn. So you should guess at unknown words, where possible, rather than looking them up--at least at first. Sometimes the next sentence will clue you in, so try to finish the whole paragraph before going back to look up words you couldn't figure out. (Don't overdo this, though; there's no point reading if you're not understanding.)<br />
<br />
If your command of the language is strong enough, try using the monolingual dictionary instead of the bilingual one. That gives a better immersion experience, but it's also more of a challenge. My own experience has been that when I am first trying to read in a language, I use the bilingual dictionary almost exclusively, but as I get more and more practice reading, I make more and more use of the monolingual. Do what's comfortable for you. (I'll illustrate how to switch between them shortly.)<br />
<br />
<h3>
How the Dictionary Can Fail</h3>
When you do look up a word in the bilingual dictionary, you can fail either because there was no entry at all or because none the available entries made any sense in the sentence. If you are looking up a common word, there may be so many entries that it takes too long to find the right one. The monolingual is likely to be much larger than the bilingual, but it can fail for the same reasons, plus, it can "fail" because you're unable to make sense of the definition.<br />
<br />
For illustration purposes, I'll use the book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Como-chocolate-Vintage-Espanol-Spanish-ebook/dp/B004774D14"><i>Como agua para chocolate</i></a> (Like Water for Chocolate). You don't need to speak Spanish, since I'll explain everything along the way.<br />
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The first chapter is called "January: Christmas Cakes"<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihyphenhyphenvgfREpuMXMEDMyQC6G0rv21LMhew2yyvF80IbDw07yY3u0IH0OVjWJZlzd-3SHx4Bki7WoCqC2oYHPEsUlp9SNIkJR78Xl60W_QK-x7gl45nDL8Yy6ChipZXtLQ2LgR3XcV/s1600/Better+Reading+1+Chapter+I+Como+Agua.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihyphenhyphenvgfREpuMXMEDMyQC6G0rv21LMhew2yyvF80IbDw07yY3u0IH0OVjWJZlzd-3SHx4Bki7WoCqC2oYHPEsUlp9SNIkJR78Xl60W_QK-x7gl45nDL8Yy6ChipZXtLQ2LgR3XcV/s1600/Better+Reading+1+Chapter+I+Como+Agua.png" height="400" width="295" /></a></div>
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The first page is the ingredient list for a recipe. The entire list is readable without trouble except for the very last word, although sardines, sausage, onions, oregano, and chilies do seem like odd ingredients for a Chrismas cake. But when you try to look up <i>teleras</i>, you get this:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcSifGWRQMBQBffJhSkrQoqgAtOE_-wu_0Lc2tMl-Bsoad3HtArWFSbNa3nXkPc6AF5C4jIdfLSKF0SgWgEITyS48NMHKki1-qRB8LpcXZgB7OLLD-zowzJBlz08mX-80dAYSq/s1600/Better+Reading+2+Teleras.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcSifGWRQMBQBffJhSkrQoqgAtOE_-wu_0Lc2tMl-Bsoad3HtArWFSbNa3nXkPc6AF5C4jIdfLSKF0SgWgEITyS48NMHKki1-qRB8LpcXZgB7OLLD-zowzJBlz08mX-80dAYSq/s1600/Better+Reading+2+Teleras.png" height="400" width="295" /></a></div>
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When the Kindle can't find a word in the dictionary associated with a book, it automatically tries to find that word in Wikipedia. This is almost always the wrong thing to do for a foreign student who is just beginning to read the language, but it does make a certain amount of sense for a native speaker. The monolingual dictionary is meant to be so large that anything it doesn't have is probably a proper name.<br />
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<h4>
You Don't Always Need to Figure it Out Right Away</h4>
At this point, you need to decide whether it's worth it to research the word now (or at all). In this case, it makes a certain amount of sense to say "Oh well, it's some kind of food" and skip over it.<br />
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If you think you'll want to come back to it later, tap "More" and you'll get this screen:<br />
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Then tap "Highlight". The highlighted text will be easy to find on any Kindle device or Kindle app--including one on your phone. (There's an option to go to note/marks.) That's lets you either come back to research it yourself at a later time or show it to a native-speaker friend. <br />
<br />
<h4>
Machine Translation is Limited</h4>
If you look at the previous screen again, you'll see there is a "Translation" option, which automatically invokes Bing translate, provided you have an Internet connection. Machine translation is flaky at the best of times, and it is at its worst when dealing with single words. In this case, here's what it gives you:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimRHJpWiR5XoLAG1G8M0LKOk7w-SIxnmXY2PLHscqZjxX-_bGrNMAJQCulmxccyuQPkRAsNjYntKhHRc3LsSWjfpM5nureEWyqql7wWzJq4u91x_hV2EytCNH2M96Bkv1LYvls/s1600/Better+Reading+4+Translate+Teleras.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimRHJpWiR5XoLAG1G8M0LKOk7w-SIxnmXY2PLHscqZjxX-_bGrNMAJQCulmxccyuQPkRAsNjYntKhHRc3LsSWjfpM5nureEWyqql7wWzJq4u91x_hV2EytCNH2M96Bkv1LYvls/s1600/Better+Reading+4+Translate+Teleras.png" height="400" width="295" /></a></div>
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Whatever <i>teleras</i> means, it has to be something you can eat, so this result is useless to us.<br />
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<h3>
Using the Monolingual Dictionary</h3>
<div>
Normally, when you press on a word, the Kindle shows you a definition from the current dictionary and offers you the option to switch to any other dictionary. For some reason, Amazon does not let you do this when the original lookup failed. You must look up some other word and then you can change dictionaries. At one time, it would automatically default to a second dictionary, but apparently that feature has been removed.<br />
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<div>
To switch dictionaries, then, simply look up any other common word, <i>cebolla</i> (onion) for example.</div>
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Down at the bottom right, it gives the name of the dictionary, "HarperCollins Spanish-English College Dictionary". Tap that and the Kindle offers you a choice of dictionaries:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYd7OQlqtsmlDPfOsvxKFQvb-ln8udW9QERgbnkQvuZJux6WK_gcMth4koIqZF_vc3g77B2L084tqIxMGyC8imC8aTvtGyYDbuGgng8Zq0fM0e3TAgaN1styJpSSqYUx5HyUoE/s1600/Better+Reading+6+Dictionaries.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYd7OQlqtsmlDPfOsvxKFQvb-ln8udW9QERgbnkQvuZJux6WK_gcMth4koIqZF_vc3g77B2L084tqIxMGyC8imC8aTvtGyYDbuGgng8Zq0fM0e3TAgaN1styJpSSqYUx5HyUoE/s1600/Better+Reading+6+Dictionaries.png" height="400" width="295" /></a></div>
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The monolingual Spanish dictionary is <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diccionario_de_la_lengua_espa%C3%B1ola" target="_blank">el diccionario de la lengua Española</a></i> (usually just called the "DRAE" or even just the "RAE"). It is <i>the</i> authoritative dictionary in the Spanish-speaking world, it's enormous, and it's free on the Kindle. Select that dictionary and we get a much, <i>much</i> longer definition for <i>cebolla</i>.<br />
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By doing this, we have changed the default dictionary for the book. Now we can close that entry and press on <i>teleras</i>. This time we get a definition! Of course, it's entirely in Spanish, and it's also very long.</div>
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There are a total of ten definitions, and, depending on your level of Spanish, it could be quite challenging to actually read all of them, but the first one clearly is about something made of iron, the second is something made of poles, etc. We know it must be something you can eat, so we can eliminate nine of the ten definitions without fully understanding them. In this case, the very last one is what we want:<br />
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A reader with intermediate Spanish ability should be able to figure out from this that a <i>telera</i> is some sort of bread, that's it's large, oval shaped, and usually eaten by workers. For most readers, that should be sufficient and they can continue with the story.<br />
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<h4>
Using the Monolingual as a Book</h4>
Suppose you're not "most readers" and you really, really want to know what <i>bazo</i> means in that definition. In that case, you'll want to open the monolingual dictionary as a book and then use the bilingual dictionary to read it. Start by tapping "More".<br />
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Notice that there's a new option: "Open Dictionary." Tap on this, and you've opened the DRAE as a book, <i>positioned in the same place.</i><br />
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Now you can select <i>bazo</i> and look it up.<br />
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The reader can probably puzzle out that it's an adjective meaning "brown verging on yellow." The second definition seems to say something about the viscera of vertebrates and something that's dark red, irregular, and usually to the left of the stomach. We hope <i>that's</i> not what goes into the Christmas cakes!<br />
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If you switch to the bilingual dictionary at this point, it simply offers "spleen" as a translation, which is consistent with the DRAE's second definition, but obviously (we hope) not applicable to the recipe.<br />
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Finally, at the very bottom of the screen, the DRAE tells us that <i>pan bazo</i> is a collocation. That is, the two words together mean more than "brownish-yellow bread." Much as "brown sugar" means more than just sugar that someone has dyed brown. To explore this further, we should actually be looking at the definition for <i>pan </i>(bread).<br />
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<h4>
Translation inside the Dictionary</h4>
Since we already have the dictionary open, we can search for <i>pan </i>just by pressing on the word, but before we do that, it's worth trying to use the translation option again. We select the whole sentence this time.<br />
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We tap "More" and then "Translate," as before.<br />
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Once you stop laughing, notice that it actually got the correct meanings for all the words except <i>bazo</i>; it simply messed up the grammar. (Figuring out what's the subject and what's the object is one of the special challenges of reading Spanish.)<br />
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This actually highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the translation option. It can find a lot of information for you, even though the result is comical. It helps the most <i>after</i> you have already taken a stab at understanding the sentence on your own. Sometimes it supplies that one bit of information you were missing.<br />
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In particular, it excels at finding collocations, even though in this case it comes up dry.<br />
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If we go ahead and look up <i>pan</i>, we'll find an entry for <i>pan bazo</i> which explains how to prepare it, but I'll stop here. As a general rule, trying to hunt down the exact names of local foods isn't a great idea. The truth is, the best translation of <i>telera</i> into English is probably "telera."<br />
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<h3>
Summary</h3>
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I've illustrated how to switch back and forth between the bilingual and monolingual dictionaries, how to use the highlight and translation options, and how to open the monolingual dictionary as a book. </div>
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<a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/learning-foreign-language-by-reading.html" target="_blank">In next week's posting</a>, I'll discuss how to use online resources besides the Kindle to research hard-to-translate words. For example, if we google <i>telera</i> we immediately find that it looks pretty much like we expected it to.</div>
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<a href="http://www.artimexbakery.com/Telera.html" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOwJh5lzTbkfzKTkb8PfKM4735uvcNk-v4bc8ny-XUTcCq6sjXPglC6I5h2x31dBHBnyf7vvYEbHrTX5KIPgzCDzrvoTIWAIgcKt1MZ1PZWcjUpgsE2LkS7MKacrBf9XW13AUi/s1600/Better+Reading+14+Telera-color.jpg" height="277" width="320" /></a></div>
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Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-73408580011271042402014-09-08T10:15:00.000-07:002015-02-05T10:33:40.162-08:00How to Read a Foreign Novel on a Kindle<h3>
The Challenge</h3>
If you speak a foreign language well enough to puzzle out newspaper articles, you have probably at one time or another attempted to read a novel.<br />
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And it kicked your butt.<br />
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If you got five pages into it, you did very well indeed. Even five paragraphs is more than I think most people could manage, unless they had a copy of the English translation at hand.<br />
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The reason for this is that a strong student finishes a two-year college language program knowing about 2,000 "word-families." (Run, runs, runner, running, runny, etc. are part of one word family.) But to read "authentic" novels (written by and for adult native speakers) one needs a knowledge of about 6,000. The "beginners paradox" states that you can only learn those extra 4,000 word families by reading, but you can't read until you know those 4,000 word families. You end up needing to check every fifth word in the dictionary, and that effort defeats you. One in fifty is thought to be the limit for pleasure reading. That is, you must know 98% of the words on the page without a dictionary--<i>not counting words you can guess from context. </i>(You can find a good summary of current thinking in Paul Nation's "<a href="http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/October2014/articles/nation.pdf" target="_blank">How much input do you need to learn the most frequent 9,000 words?</a>" [Reading in a Foreign Language, October 2014]).<br />
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I have spoken fluent (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages#Common_reference_levels" target="_blank">B-level</a>) Spanish for forty years, but despite multiple attempts, I never got past the first page or two of a novel until September 2013 when I attempted a Spanish novel on a Kindle and was astonished to polish it off in four days. In the following twelve months, I have read six Spanish novels, two Italian novels, and I'm 50% of the way through the French novel <i><a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/10/cinq-semaines-en-ballon-five-weeks-in.html" target="_blank">Cinq semaines en ballon</a></i> (Five Weeks in a Balloon) by Jules Verne. In this post, I'm going to outline how to do it.<br />
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<h3>
Choosing a Kindle</h3>
For my reading, I use a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Paperwhite-Ereader/dp/B00AWVXK5O" target="_blank">Kindle Paperwhite</a> e-reader. This is the version that says "Amazon" (not "Kindle") on the back. I read my first Spanish novel on a Kindle Touch, and, of course it does work, but it's a bit more limited and it's not what I'll be describing here. Update October 22, 2014: I have tested it with the new Kindle Voyage, and it works exactly the same way the Paperwhite does.<br />
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A Kindle Fire will <b>not</b> work, nor will any of the Kindle apps for PCs, tablets, or phones. The reason is that, at this writing, none of those allows you to use a bilingual dictionary. As will be clear below, it's the bilingual dictionary that makes this work. Update October 22, 2014. Several people have reported that this does work with the iPad Kindle app. It still does not work with the PC app or the Windows Phone app.<br />
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To repeat, you must actually buy one of the dedicated e-reader devices--those black-and-white things that can only be used for reading books. None of the Kindle apps for more sophisticated devices will work for this purpose. (Update: one person claims the reader for the iPhone will now let you choose a bilingual dictionary. Someone else told me about a way to hack an Android device to change the dictionary, but I don't think most people want to hack [and possibly break] their devices.)<br />
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<h3 id="choosing">
Choosing a Book</h3>
(Update: I have since written a much longer post on <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/12/finding-foreign-novels-to-read.html">finding foreign novels to read</a>. This section is still a good summary, though.)<br />
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Because reading in a foreign language is challenging--especially for the first novel you attempt in a language--it's important to pick something exciting. It will be very, very tempting to give up during that first chapter. For that reason, I like mysteries or thrillers. Literature, even if it's your goal, is not the place to start.<br />
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Second, I personally avoid novels for children; the grammar is no simpler, the vocabulary will be filled with words of limited use to adults (e.g. tug-of-war), and the dialogue is apt to contain slang expressions found only in the Urban Dictionary. On the other hand, the pictures probably do help.<br />
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Third, I avoid translations of English novels. This point is debatable, if your goal it to make it easier, since translators use a simpler vocabulary than native authors. (For example, words like azure, cobalt, or cerulean are apt to become just "blue" when translated.) However, as I mentioned above, I'm going for the "authentic" reading experience, so, for me, translations are out. As are books that were specifically written for foreigners studying the language. I only consider books written by and for native adult speakers of the language.<br />
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Fourth, I usually choose contemporary novels, since historical works often use obsolete words and even obsolete grammar. (It will be obvious that <i>Cinq semaines en ballon</i> breaks several of these rules. <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/10/cinq-semaines-en-ballon-five-weeks-in.html" target="_blank">More on that in a later post</a>.)<br />
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Amazon sells quite a few foreign-language books for the Kindle, and although archaic publishing laws mean that recent best sellers may not be available (another topic for <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/12/finding-foreign-novels-to-read.html">a future post</a>), there are still hundreds of thousands of books to choose from, many at prices under one dollar.<br />
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As soon as you buy any book in a foreign language, the Kindle will offer you the options to set up the device for reading it. Those options are not available before you do this. If you want to do the setup before settling on the book you really want to read, pick any of the many books available for free in that language. Once you've downloaded it, the Kindle will recognize you as a bilingual reader and you can finish setting up the device. (Update November 19, 2014: It is no longer necessary to do any special setup.)<br />
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<h3>
Choosing a Dictionary</h3>
A bilingual dictionary is a dictionary with entries in one language and definitions in another one. As I mentioned above, a good bilingual dictionary is essential, I have had good success with the Collins products for Spanish, Italian, and French, which I'll describe in more detail in later posts. The most important thing is to remember that although a physical bilingual dictionary is really two books in one--Foreign-to-English and English-to-Foreign--the Kindle bilinguals are sold separately. Be sure you buy the Foreign-to-English dictionary (definitions in English), since you will be <i>reading</i> in a foreign language; you are <i>not</i> trying to <i>write</i> your own novel in a foreign language!<br />
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Note that the bilingual dictionary does not count as a foreign-language book. As we'll see later, the Kindle considers it a book in English, since that's what the definitions are written in.<br />
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As soon as you downloaded that first book in a foreign language, the Kindle should have made a huge monolingual dictionary available to you as well for free. For example, a French dictionary with definitions in French. You will actually make use of both dictionaries at one time or another. As you become a stronger reader, you will make more and more use of the monolingual dictionary, but in the beginning, you will only use it for words that are not found in the bilingual dictionary.<br />
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<h3>
Setting up the Kindle</h3>
Update November 19, 2014: If you have the latest version of Kindle Voyage or Paperwhite, you should be able to skip this section entirely. If you have an older Kindle, you may still need to do this.<br />
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Begin at the Kindle home screen:<br />
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Click on the menu (the <span style="font-family: 'MS Mincho';">≡</span> button in the upper right) and choose "settings."<br />
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Second from the bottom, click "Device Options"<br />
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At the bottom of the screen, click "Language and Dictionaries"<br />
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You should see an entry for every language represented on your Kindle. Press on the entry for the language you're planning to start reading.<br />
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The Monolingual dictionary will probably be selected, but you don't want it to be the default. Instead, click on the bilingual dictionary you just bought. Don't forget to click "OK" or else it won't take effect.<br />
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Now you're ready to read your novel!<br />
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<h3>
Reading on the Kindle</h3>
The basic idea behind reading on the Kindle is very simple. When you see a word you don't know, you press on it and the definition from the bilingual dictionary pops up. For example, here's a page from <i>Cinq semaines en ballon</i>:<br />
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Let's look at the first paragraph. "The night became very dark." No problem there, although literally it seems to say "The night made itself very dark." (I'll discuss how to learn more grammar in <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/learning-foreign-language-by-reading.html">a later post</a>.) First part of the second sentence is okay, up to the semicolon: "The doctor had not managed to check out the countryside:" but the second part of the sentence has an unknown word in it: "he had [verb] to a very tall tree, a confused mass in the darkness, which he barely identified."<br />
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So press on <i>accroché</i> and Kindle pops up the definition:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh5VUHIK2nmRxi0Y2kUjM0V-bdxkQXj0-SEuSxH0gUyPiuwsGG7ZwK9M7Uy3gBw4EZrj8vdA2SvYwbHsRchL7vtVpX9Bl-I2UsbEo2TE5AgA2wb10RyPSC0Ditv-C-xMRzlUQ_/s1600/How+to+Read+7+accroch%C3%A9+definition.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh5VUHIK2nmRxi0Y2kUjM0V-bdxkQXj0-SEuSxH0gUyPiuwsGG7ZwK9M7Uy3gBw4EZrj8vdA2SvYwbHsRchL7vtVpX9Bl-I2UsbEo2TE5AgA2wb10RyPSC0Ditv-C-xMRzlUQ_/s1600/How+to+Read+7+accroch%C3%A9+definition.png" height="400" width="295" /></a></div>
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The second definition is clearly the one we want. The professor tied the ballon up to a tall tree.<br />
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Update November 19, 2014: If you tap on the name of the dictionary in the dialog box ("Collins French-English Dictionary and Grammar" in the example) Kindle gives you a list of dictionaries to choose from.)<br />
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Update December 15, 2014: Be sure the "Vocabulary Builder" option is turned off. There appears to be a bug in it which causes your Kindle to get slower and slower and eventually lock up, forcing you to reset it.<br />
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With this, you now know enough, in theory, to read a novel on the Kindle. I have a number of tips for how to make this work better and for how to learn more about the language in the process, and I'll discuss those <a href="http://gregreflects.blogspot.com/2014/09/better-reading-on-kindle.html" target="_blank">in the next post</a>. One should actually try reading at least a few paragraphs or chapters now. The suggestions for improving the process will much much more sense once you're done a little reading on your own.<br />
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You should definitely be able to read more than five paragraphs this time.<br />
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<br />Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-3458372705674629582014-09-01T13:30:00.000-07:002014-10-01T19:46:00.288-07:00(French Translation) Protests Against Israel, Which Wants To Appropriate Land In The West Bank<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 19px; line-height: 19.97px;">I translated this from <a href="http://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2014/09/01/protestations-contre-israel-qui-veut-s-approprier-des-terres-en-cisjordanie_4480100_3218.html">Protestations contre Israël, qui veut s'approprier des terres en Cisjordanie</a>, published in <a href="http://www.lemonde.fr/">Le Monde</a> today. This a test of how good my French is after 230 days of study--I'm not expressing a political opinion with this.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 19px; line-height: 19.97px;">Protests Against Israel, Which Wants To Appropriate Land In The West Bank</span></h3>
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On Monday, September 1, the United states called on Israel
to annul its decision to appropriate 400 Ha (1000 acres) of land in the West
Bank, in Gva’ot, in the Bethlehem area. This announcement, less than one week
after the cease-fire between Hamas and the Israeli government, is perceived as
a provocation.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The area is extra sensitive, because it was there that
three young Israeli youths were abducted and killed in June—one of the precipitating
events of the war between Hamas and the Israeli army in the Gaza strip. Israel
has attributed their abduction and murder to the Islamic organization [Hamas], which
denies initiating those acts.<o:p></o:p><br />
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The Egyptian minister of foreign affairs has denounced a
decision that “contravenes international law and will have a negative impact on
the peace process.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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“This announcement . . . is counter-productive to the fixed
objective that Israel reach a solution negotiated two-state solution with the
Palestinians. We demand the Israeli government annul this decision,” declared
the United States Department of State.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It will “only make the situation even worse,” deplored Nabil
Abou Roudeina, spokesperson for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, reasserting
that the international community would consider colonies in occupied territory illegal.
These “crimes would wipe out all prospect of a two-state [Israeli and Palestinian]
solution,” the Palestinian negotiator Saëb Erakat also said.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">“Collective
Punishment Inflicted on Israelis” </span></h4>
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Amnesty International has called on Israel to “stop, once
and for all, confiscating property in the West Bank.” For Amnesty, this
announcement represents “the biggest land grab in the occupied territories
since 1980.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Under Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, since 2009, the
number of residences and houses constructed in the West Bank has gone from
1,500 and 1,800 in previous years to 2,000 and 2,500, the anti-colonization
organization La Paix maintains. Moreover, the movement has moved eastwards and
into the interior of the West Bank, according to Hagit Ofran, an official of
the Israeli organization [La Paix]. This decision is a “collective punishment
inflected on Israelis that takes us even further away from the perspective of
peace between two states for two people,” she said.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">A “New City”</span></h4>
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The council of colonies of Gush Etzion, a bloc of colonists
located in a zone entirely under Israeli control, and where the coveted
territory is located, greeted the birth of a “new city.” Gush Etzion belongs to
those territories that the Israelis definitely intend to keep in the event of
any settlement with the Palestinians. About 60,000 people live there now,
according to La Paix, but only 10 to 15 families in Gva’ot.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In all, 350,000 colonists live in the West Bank, and around
200,000 in East Jerusalem, according to the NGO [La Paix]. The pursuit of
colonization—construction of civilian residences in the territories occupied or
annexed by Israel since 1967—is largely considered a major hindrance to to the efforts
rolled out over the decades to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Thoughts</h3>
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I've been reading bits and pieces from <i>Le Monde</i> for many weeks now, but I this is the first article I've done in its entirety. Since I know the material already, I could guess at the meanings of lots of words without having to look them up, but I made a point of using the dictionary anyway--just to be sure. Even so, I only needed to look up about ten words out of the 500, which puts me right on the threshold of being able to read without a dictionary. That's excellent progress for only 34 weeks of study, at least by the standards I'm used to. I think it speaks very strongly to the benefits of using modern technology to support language learning.</div>
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Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8116153.post-14414940833899593232014-08-24T16:17:00.000-07:002015-01-12T05:00:43.812-08:00Overview of Language LearningLearning a language really amounts to learning four different skills:<br />
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<li>Reading</li>
<li>Writing</li>
<li>Listening (passively watching TV or movies)</li>
<li>Conversation</li>
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Language proficiency tests generally provide different grades for each of these four competencies. Each has different advantages and each presents different challenges. Although my personal focus is on reading, I still think it's important to be proficient in all four skills. I'll discuss each in turn briefly, summarizing the benefits, challenges, and available resources for each.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Reading</span></div>
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Reading opens up a whole world to you. You can read the literature that helps define a culture, you can read their newspapers and see how they view the world. You can read whenever you feel like it--no need to travel anywhere or get anyone else to cooperate. Reading doesn't require any sort of accuracy in pronunciation, and it tolerates a surprising amount of grammatical ignorance. (For example, a poor grasp of Spanish verb forms can be overcome simply by having a good idea of who is speaking and when the action is taking place.) A reader has all the time in the world to look up new words and can even search the web for more information, if need be.</div>
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Reading requires a <i>huge</i> vocabulary. Unlike writing, you don't get to pick the words. Unlike conversation, you don't get to ask questions. Reading novels may take three times the vocabulary of any of the other three skills.</div>
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The best resources for reading in a foreign language are the online newspapers like <a href="http://elpais.com/elpais/portada_america.html">El País</a>, <a href="http://www.lemonde.fr/">Le Monde</a>, and <a href="http://www.corriere.it/">Corriere della Sera</a> and (for books) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/">Amazon.com</a>, which sells countless cheap foreign-language books for the Kindle.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Writing</span></div>
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Writing really exercises your command of the language. Unlike conversation, you can take your time and get it right. It lets you practice areas of grammar where you're weak. If you are interested in a job overseas, writing ability is absolutely critical.</div>
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There is little real point in writing unless there is someone around to read what you write. People are much less tolerant of writing errors than they are of speaking errors.</div>
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The best site I've found for writing practice is <a href="http://lang-8.com/">Lang-8</a>, where you can get native speakers to review your attempts to write in their languages. All you have to do in return is review their writings in English.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Listening</span></div>
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Like reading, listening opens up new cultures to you. Watching a movie or a TV show, you can take advantage of visual clues to figure out what's being said. You can sometimes understand a show without following more than half of what's actually said. You get exposed to a variety of different speaking styles, which will make conversation easier.</div>
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It can be very discouraging to listen to five or ten minutes of a show without understanding a single word. The people often talk very fast, in accents you're not familiar with, in dialects you're not familiar with, and there is no way to ask them to "explain that" (although replaying the same bit a few times can help). You cannot use the dictionary to look up words if you didn't understand what was said in the first place.</div>
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There are a number of good online resources to help foreigners get an ear for listening to TV. The important thing is to get access to video with transcripts in the target language. For French, I have found <a href="http://apprendre.tv5monde.com/">Apprendre la français avec TV5MONDE</a> to be really outstanding. For Italian, <a href="http://www.initalia.rai.it/">In Italia</a> is helpful. For Spanish, I haven't found anything better than <a href="http://www.learner.org/series/destinos/index.html">Destinos</a>, which is really meant to accompany a college textbook. </div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Conversation</span></div>
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Being able to converse in a foreign language lets you awe all your friends and family who cannot. It can make a visit to a foreign country much more comfortable and fun. If you have coworkers from other countries, it can improve your ability to communicate with them. And it exercises all of your abilities at once.</div>
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On the other hand, it's almost useless if you don't ever go anywhere. Even if you do take a vacation abroad, you're unlikely to spend much of your time chatting with the natives--especially if you're travelling with friends and relatives who don't speak the language. Practicing with coworkers presents a different challenge: unless you're very careful, you'll insult them by leaving the implication that their English is inadequate. Even if you avoid that, you may irritate them if your speaking ability is too low. It's easy to be discouraged from even trying with someone whose English is very, very good.</div>
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There is no way to practice conversation without finding real people to talk to. I have had great success with <a href="http://www.meetup.com/">Meetup</a>, which lets people organize groups for all manner of activities. Here in Seattle, I have a choice of two different Spanish groups per week, a couple of French groups that alternate weeks, and a number of Italian groups that average four or five meetings per month. This lets me get anywhere from five to ten hours of conversation practice per language per month.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Time and Immersion</span></div>
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Most authorities feel that the strongest factor contributing to language-learning success is simply the number of hours you invest in it. You learn a useful amount with just 100 hours of effort. Fluency (depending on what one means by the term) takes more like 1,000 hours. That said, I think the way you spend those hours does make a big difference, especially at the higher levels. I'll discuss that in greater detail in future posts.</div>
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On a final note, I often meet people who confidently proclaim that the best way to learn a foreign language is to just immerse yourself in it and let nature take its course. If you are a child, this really will work. If you're a teenager 16 or under, it is likely to work, especially if you do a few things to help it along. (You at least have a chance.) But if you are an adult, naive immersion really won't work at all. You <i>must</i> have some organized program of study, and you must reach a certain level of proficiency <i>before</i> you attempt an immersion experience. A well-planed immersion, though, can make an enormous difference--even for an adult. A one-month immersion amounts to 500 hours of particularly intense study, after all.</div>
Greg Hullenderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16720604327299886491noreply@blogger.com0