Most of my focus these days on DuoLingo remains on learning Japanese, but depending on my degree of exhaustion or boredom or how much time again I may still deviate into Italian, Polish, German, French, Spanish or even, when I am being really slack, Russian. I keep waiting for Serbo-Croatian to show up.
But my real project is Japanese, and it is a project indeed. All these characters! No common morphology with English! No spaces between words! It has really turned into an ongoing exercise in acceptance of my own limitations and the necessity to just keep plugging away.
Recently I have reached the point where DuoLingo has at long last made available to me a set of exercises where I just have to listen and repeat back what it says. Quite interestingly, I have discovered that this is easier for me if I close my eyes and just listen instead of looking at the characters on the screen. I am better able to divine the spaces between words this way.
If, indeed, the concept of "word" even applies in Japanese in the same way that it does in English and in Indo-European languages generally. It seems like it might be easier to frame Japanese in terms of "semantic units", insofar as one can insert a concept (pastness, conditionality, negation) more easily into a Japanese phrase. Or does this just apply to verbs?
Must keep going.
3 comments:
That is a great project! The fact that you divide the spacing better with audio only sounds like a good sign.
I wanted to ask you... I wanted to get my Spanish and German to good spots, and I bumped into this lecture about the "comprehensible input" theory. It is very Chomskian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh6Hy6El86Q
I've been just listening to and reading a ton of Spanish, some easy, some closer to native, and ... how to say this ... the ability to get things sort of is invisibly swelling up within me, in a way that I never felt when I (say) studied German for years and years. I always wanted to be a polyglot but I felt I had no talent for it, and I don't know if this approach is a second shot or if I'm kidding myself....
Do you have a sense of where your ability and fluency came from? Osmosis? Directed study? A little of column A, a lil of column B?
Well, I don't have anybody else in my family who's particularly good at languages. So I think it's hard to build a case for a genetic cause. I'm not even sure I'm particularly good at them.
I do know I have spent a lot of time and effort working on them over the course of my life. I think it is mostly persistent effort and enthusiasm for the task more than anything.
On vacation next week but maybe let's have another video call when I'm back.
Well, I suspect you're giving your self too little credit, and if nothing else effort and enthusiasm is a kind of talent, perhaps the most useful kind!
Yep, a call would be great to usher in the fall. Have a great vacation.
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