Learning Spanish - week 5

During this week I tried to immense in Spanish more. Again method Listening-Reading was used.
I decided to try Harry Potter again as this book can be easily found in many languages. So English and Spanish ebooks and Spanish audio book (this was tricky to find, but i succeeded in the end). I have listened to this audiobook while reading the English version. Sometimes I have read Spanish version to check whether I have heard certain words correctly.
This was really effective so I'm going to continue using this method for some time.

The results of the year

2014 year is coming to the end. Many things happened during this time in the world, be they good, bad or something else. There were also events, changes and new things in my own life. So it's good idea to remember what have this year brought to me.

• Realized that I like learning languages. Not only it grants access to a whole new world of possibilities, not only it helps to train brain, but it is fun by itself. For example, there is a strange and unknown text. At first it is like a cipher text. But then you begin to unravel in step by step. Of course, there are some known words. Then some loanwords can be understanded. More words are guesses from the context. Inevitable, dictionary is used for unknown termins. And now you know what this text is about. You continue reading texts this way for a long time until something changes. You don't need the dictionary anymore. Sure, the comprehension rate of the texts isn't 100%, maybe it is just 60-80%, but it doesn't matter. If you see a sentence like "Evil pirates and their dastardly deeds should be punished!" and you don't know the meaning of "dastardly", this lack of knowledge doesn't impede your apprehension of the sentence. And also a general meaning - a bad characteristic - can be derived from the context. This means a quality change in the knowledge of the language and it inspires to continue studying it;
• Experienced more deeply the fact that it is very difficult to change a person's point of view and his opinion on the matters. Especially if this is convenient for that person. The person can be your relative, close person, friend, colleague, stranger with whom you have to communicate or someone else. The first problem is that most people don't like to have direct conversations. They prefer to be angry, disappointed, stresses by themselves or tell about these problems to other people, but not to talk with the one who causes these problems. Mostly this course of actions ends in quarrels and possibly break-ups. The second problem is inability to listen. It is much easier to speak, to impose one own views or just to ignore the words of others. Another problem is the people prefer to endure the problems rather than find solutions to them. Of course there are much more problems that those which are written here. But in the end the result is that people often stick to their ways as long as possible. From time to time - they do it too long and make the problems irreparable. And this is sad;
• Acquired the confirmation of the idea that the fact that someone is your relative can be a foundation for relationships between both of you, but it can be not enough to maintain them. If the relationship is one-way -  good things are done only in one direction and bad things are done in the opposite direction, then it can be better to cut these ties off. Or they will continue and will bring only pain and problems;
• Making big changes is really difficult. It is much better to stay in the comfort zone. It is more simple to stay the way you are. But one should remember the meaning of the words of Lewis Carrol "we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that". If you want to improve, to become better, to try something new, to reach success you have to change. This isn't easy, but it can give big rewards. I tried different ways of beginning a change: little steps which steadily brought me to the target or a sharp (and in some cases painful) jerk. Sometimes I failed. Even when i was able to change I felt the urges to stop it, to revert back. But when I was able to meet the target, the success inspired me to do more. And it was nice;
• Health is really important. A little health problem can cause painful consequences later. Little early care can prevent it. Some work on the health can bring big positive effects in the coming years. Health is with us for the length of the life, so it better be good. So why not improve it? So I started active exercises. Hope I'll be able to do it long enought to have some results;
• Once more remembered that I like reading. For several years I have been reading business books, manga, visual novels, textbooks, articles and so on. A lot of time was spent on learning languages. Oh, of course I read normal books, but they got buried in the flow of other things. This year I made a break and tried to read something good and big again. And I was able to remember the joy of it: imagining the world and trying to live in it, following the heroes and empathizing with them, forgetting the things happening around me, wishing to continue reading, coming up with an alternate course of actions or a continuation of the story and so on. As a result I have read more than 40 books and some fanfiction. It can amount to 5-8 mln of words, I suppose. I hope to continue reading a lot in the next year;

Learning Spanish - week 4

This was the last working week in 2014, so I was busy. Sadly it negatively impacted the time which I could spend on learning Spanish.
Mostly I just repeated the lessons on Duolingo.

Also I tried reading some Spanish news. At the first look it was like "A mysterious text with several known words". Then I tried to use my brain more and realized, that it's not that bad. Surely there were many new words and sometimes unknown grammar, but thanks to the title I knew the general content. And many words could be just guessed :)

Next week I'll have more free time, so I'll try another method of studying.

P. S. A couple of days ago I found a wonder full game - godville. It is a text RPG. And it is almost a zero player RPG - this means you can't influence most of the things which happen. The hero fights monsters, earn money, buy equipment, drink in taverns and writes entries in his dairy about each action. This is really fun :) In fact with levels you (the god of the hero) receive some possibilities to take part in the game more actively. And you can encourage or punish your hero. Or just tell him something. I liked this game!
And I found out that the original version is in Russian and it started 7 years ago. So I registered in the Russian version and began this fun adventure.

Learning Spanish - week 3

Today I finished Spanish (from English) tree on Duolingo!
This was quite challenging. I learned a lot of Spanish words and some of its grammar. Due to high speed many things weren't remembered good enough though.
For all it merits, Doulingo has also disadvantages - grammar isn't explained adequately. And for many grammar points there is no explanation at all. Also the balance of exercises isn't really optimal I think - I'd prefer more exercises of translating English into Spanish.
But well, you can't hope to learn language from one sourse. So I also used additional sources to study grammar. The question is what to do next. I suppose I'll do the following things:

• Review the spanish tree (by using "strengthening skills") and translate articles in "Immersion" section;
• Begin duolingo courses in Spanish for learning English and German. The former will provide more opportunities to practice translation into Spanish, the latter will give an additional benefit of strengthening German;
• Try to start reading Spanish news;

Learning Spanish - week 2

This week I learned more about verbs.
Bad thing: there ~17 tenses in Spanish.
Good thing: only 5 or 6 of them are commonly used.

Bad thing: depending on the person (1st/2nd/3rd, singular/plural, casual/polite) verbs can have one of 6 different endings in each tense.
Good thing: at least this allows to drop personal pronouns. For example: "I am tall" can be written as "Yo soy alto" or just "soy alto".

Bad thing: there are ~200 commonly used irregular verbs in Spanish.
Good thing: most of them can be classified in patterns.

As any language Spanish has easy and difficult points. It just takes time to learn them.
For now I have an open point about the way of learning the conjugations.

I still remember how I studied the conjugation of irregular verbs in English language.
I was somewhere in 1-3 grade and had a private language tutor. She made me drill all the irregular verbs one by one. It was boring as hell and took a lot of time, it was repetitive and non-inspiring. But as a result even now I remember forms of most verbs by heart. So it was really effective.
But I'm not sure that this way will apply to Spanish good enough, as there are much more forms in it.
For example let's take English verb "to speak" and see it forms in present and past:
speak, speaks, spoke... and that's it.

Now the Spanish analog - "hablar".
hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, habláis, hablan, hablé, hablaste, habló, hablamos, hablasteis, hablaron.
And this is a regular verb!

Now you get the idea.

So at first I'll try to learn just patterns.

Learning Spanish - week 1

So I began learning Spanish last weekend. It was mostly Duolingo. ~700 words are in the vocabulary. Not sure how many of them I really know :)
In fact a lot of words weren't really new.
Some words are exactly the same as in other languages, for example "the animal" is "el animal" or "библиотека" is "la biblioteca".
Some words are almost the same as "der Pistole" and "la pistola" or "the calender" and "el calendario". 
Spanish, as many other languages, has many loan words, so this makes things easier.
Also in some cases things are simpler due to the endings - the world ending can change the gender the word, so that you need to learn only one word and not two:
la gata/el gato - the female/male cat
la hermana/el hermano - the sister/brother

But, of course, not everything is easy. For example, Spanish has more pronounce: they distinguish between "him" (lo) and "to him" (le). Also verbs have much more endings. In some cases word order is different.

During this week I learned several hundreds of most common words and the grammar for basic conversations. Next week I'm going to concentrate more on verb forms.

Anyway, learning a new language is a really interesting experience :)

New challenge is set - learning Spanish

It is rather sudden, but yesterday I decided to start learning Spanish. I wanted to take a break from studying Japanese and try a new language.
Spanish is widespread (in TOP-3 of world languages), interesting and not very difficult, afaik. Spain has a rich culture, so there are a lot of things to get known.
Anyway learning foreign languages is a good investment in many ways.

When one starts exploring something new, the first question is "How to do it?" Currently there are many ways of learning new languages:

• Many organizations and private tutors offer good education;
• The number of textbooks is impressing;
• Already many learning systems exist, and new appear frequently;
• There are many sites which offer information or courses;
• Communities (like lang-8) offer people a possibility to help each other on the way to the new language;
• And so on;

It is easy to be overwhelmed by the possibilities and one can spend days or weeks on choosing the "right" way or trying one idea after another, searching for the best one.

I decided to start with 2 resources:

1. Duolingo. I suppose this site doesn't need introductions. While it has some drawbacks, it's very good at the beginning and lower medium levels, I think. It provides enough exercises so that topics and grammar points stuck in one's memory, it offeres training in pronunciation and various practice in the form of immersion;
2. The second one is a good textbook called "Spanish An Essential Grammar". I used a book from this series while studying German and it helped a lot;

I suppose these two things will keep me busy for a month. Looking forward for the new knowledge!

The autumn is ending, was there anything meaningful?

Once again the season is going to change. I think it is a good time to draw a line and to summarize what was done.

Japanese studying:

• I decided to try reading another visual novel in Nasuverse (the shared setting of a number of TYPE-MOON works like "Fate/Stay Night) - 魔法使いの夜 (Witch's night). Didn't regret the spent time. Captivating music, interesting characters, good plot, nice atmosphere, fine art - all of this resulted in a great work. The story is about Aoko Aozaki - a wizard apprentice, her teacher, her sister and a quite boy from a rural location, who wandered into a dangerous territory. Took me around 50 hours of reading. Maybe I won't read it again, but it will be remembered;
• Then I decided to try VN with RPG part, because... well just like playing games :) So next were three visual novels by Eushully: 創刻のアテリアル (Arterial of Origins), 戦女神 0 (Battle Goddess Zero), 戦女神VERITA (Battle Goddess VERITA). The first one is about part of a city and people in it moving to a different world, where main heroes manifest unique abilities and fight monsters to return home. There are three routes: siding with demons or angels and staying independent. Story isn't very original, but still quite nice, so it is possible to enjoy it. The second game is placed in a fantasy world. The hero is a follower of one of gods and after series of adventures loses his body and his soul dwells in a goddess's body (hence the title). A lot of fighting ensures. The narration was quite interesting. And the last piece is the continuation, which is difficult to understand if previous parts weren't played. The gameplay for all these games is quite good, but sometimes repetitive; there is one major problem though - a lot of grinding is necessary to achieve the full completion. And the games should be completed more then once for certain things. And it has diminishing returns to time spent. It took me 100-140 hours for the first one, ~80 for the second, ~60 for the third one. Suppose that 10-20% of the first two games and 30-40% of the second one aren't done;
• While reading VNs I also decided to improve grammar skills. Used series Kanzen Master (3kyuu and 2kyuu). Understood that I have a lot to improve. Will certainly try again next year;
• Starting to read light novels now. A couple of first ones weren't able to keep me interesting, so now moving to others. I use Anki with Yomichan plagin for reading (see the screenshot). This way looking up new words is easy, and adding them to the deck is done in one click. I hope this will be a step to success, as extensive reading was that thing which greatly raised my English skills (of course good foundation played a very important role);

Some other things:

• Spent a week in a hospital due to a little operation. Hope not to stay in a hospital once again. It's a kind of experience one doesn't want to have;
• After 1,5 years of working our project is coming to an end (1,5 year for me, but the start date is May 2012). We are developing a SAP trading system for one of Russian oil companies. In fact it is a first SAP trading system, so most was developed from scratch. My main occupation was manual testing: alpha, beta, perts of functionality, pre-UAT, scenarios and so on. It's a miracle for me how we managed to finish it. Maybe in future the thing we created will become a new standard module in SAP. Anyway, the project is ending by the New Year's Eve. A new project or a new job will follow;
• This autumn I read a lot. Maybe I starved for good reading after manga and months of studying, maybe I just got my hands on good things. Today I finished the 13th book of Dresden Files. A detective story with supernatural staff is an entertaining thing in itself, and these series offer good humor and some interesting insight into American culture. And the wiseass, deadpanning hero is quite fun;
• Also I read some more funfiction. "He Who Fights Monsters" is a funfiction based on "Rosario + Vampire" manga, which is good itself. The manga is about human finding himself in a school for monsters, where he finds foes and friends, who protect him (until he becomes a badass). But what if there are no friends for him? What if he has none to help. Then he can only fight back as a human. A dendroid attacks? Burn it! Golem? Use water under high pressure to cut it... And so on. A dark, but interesting story;
• Another one was "Victory at Ostagar". Funfiction based on the game "Dragon Age". One key point at the beginning is changed, and the things become really different. What if Wardens make the light signal in time, so that Loghain can attack the darkspawn in time to win the battle? As a result the King is alive, the army is in place, the Wardens can act with the crown's help. But as the King is alive, his correspondence with Orlais continues... Various characters have more brains, the story has more twists. One could say that the resulting plot is better than in the original. And the story is more than 1,1 mln words long! It's almost 2,5 times longer than "Lord of the Rings"! It is organized in 5 volumes with illustrations here.
• The last one is "In Flight" (760k+ words) - a crossover between VN "Fate/Stay night" and manga "Sekirei". The events of the "Sekirei" are places in the Nasuverse. The main hero is Shirou and the magic system is like in other Type-Moon works. The tournament in manga is really kind compared to the Holy Grail War, but it still sword some serious and bloody scenes. The crossover makes it darker and serous, more interesting. Most of the tale follows the manga, showing how differently can Shirou behave. Good humor, developing characters, interesting story and other aspects of this work made me like it so much, that I read it twice :)
• And while reading so much in English I decided that it would be good to make this pleasant time spending also useful. So new interesting words are written down for future learning. Now this list nears 500 words, and this will enrich my vocabulary I hope.

The last day of the summer - time to check what was done

The summer is almost finished, so it's a good time to think whether it was meaningful or meaningless.

Considering studying languages:

• I was able to finish reading "Fate/stay night" last weekend. I think it took me 1-1,5 hours every day, so, yeah, it was a very long novel. It was really fun and provided a lot of useful words and expressions - maybe more then a thousand;
• In late July I tried to take a test to determine my Japanese level and the result was Pre-Intermediate. Not bad, but I hoped for higher figures. I think the main problem is that I never tried to prepare for such tests - at the beginning I learned necessary grammar and vocabulary, and then I just studied the things which I encountered. So for several weeks I drilled grammar - there are heaps of grammar points about which I had no idea. Also I specifically tried to acquire as much words from JLPT sheets as possible. So I'm going to tackle this j-cat test this week again and hope for higher results;
• Going for another visual novel now :)

On other things:

• I usually don't read fanfiction. But somehow I came upon "Hill of Swords" - a crossover between visual novel "Fate/Stay night" and light novel "Familiar of Zero". Quite a big story (~350k words)... and it is just incredible. After several chapters I was completely hooked and was almost unable to stop reading it. The plot is based on "Familiar of Zero", which has a good plot, but it's completely wasted by dumb and silly characters and tons of fanservice. The fanfic fixes the problems by swapping the main hero with the one from "Fate/Stay night". As a result narration is greatly improved, characters are more reasonable, fanservice is more adequate. Now I'm rereading it with slower speed to savour it; if only there were less typos >_<;
• At last read "Stranger in a Strange Land". It was interesting to read, but left mixed emotions as the ideas are aren't really close to me;
• I remembered that many years ago I read some fantasy book and was able to find out that it belongs to series of four books named "War God" of David Weber. So got them, they were fun, though didn't give any useful thought after the finish;
• Tried to read "Chronicles of Thomas Covenant", but my determination completely failed in the middle of the second book. I just can't approve of such a hero, he is too different from me. This series increased the list of books, which I dropped without finishing them. By the way, this list have less then 10 items;
• Currently reading "Dresden files" - quite interesting and entertaining;
• There were many frictions at my job - I almost threw it up, but one way or another it became more reasonable and peaceful; so continue it for the time being;
• Got some new health problems, hope to be able to fix them soon;
• After 6 years of wearing the same glasses I changed them at last. The first impression: I see world in HD! Well, with these glasses my effective eyesight is ~1,5 dioptres, but it is twice as good as in previous glasses. Anyway, now the world is much clearer for me :)

Language learning notes

Some time passed since last post and I made good progress since then.

German

The main problem with studying German for me is a lack of motivation: I just don't know what to do with this knowledge. So I'm trying to find something interesting in German. And I remembered that some years ago I have read two books by a German author in Russian translation. They were about the son of famous Captain Nemo. The books fascinated me then, so I decided to read them in German now. I was really surprised to find that the series contain twelve books! So I found them and began reading. I was able to comprehend ~70% of the text, which I suppose is quite good. And as I couldn't find the last book in e-format, I had to use audio book. I was very glad that this German audio book didn't give me much trouble.

So I suppose my German isn't too bad. I'm looking forward for more interesting German books to read.

Japanese

I have read two lengthy visual novels and I can say that they are great for studying Japanese. They provide a variety of terms in different spheres, they show differences is speech used by peoples of various social standings, the speech is voiced and so on.

I was able to learn a lot from them.

Now I'm going to read visual novel "Fate/stay night", they say that it has more text that "The Lord of The Rings". Concidering it's size and the fact, that my job takes a lot of time, I hope to finish it in 1-2 months.

I'm not sure what will be next. Maybe I'll start preparing for JLPT (Japanese-Language Proficiency Test), which takes place twice a year - in December and in July.

Anyway, I realize now that I like studying languages. I suppose I may start learning a new language within a year or two.