I was preparing a version of this already, but I didn't like it. I only have time to do things piecemeal, so anyone reading this, I apologize for my posts from now on, they'll all be shorter and more piecemeal. It'll be like putting together a puzzle's pieces.
I've been learning Gregg Shorthand for awhile, in a piecemeal way. I write fast but I don't know all of the theory, so I need to get faster.
The basic way to learn the alphabet and the theory is to pretend Gregg is another alphabet, that comes with ligatures and abbreviations. Getting fast at translating eventually transfers to recognizing the shapes themselves but this is, I think, an important in-between step. It would be easier if people learned the abbreviations first actually.
Cue this idea. There's a Gregg phrasal/entry dictionary that lists Gregg words in ASCII format. It's great but it's a little hard to read because it spaces all the graphs, digraphs, and trigraphs with dashes. If it just did it like the normal written language the abbreviations would be easier to learn; for example, the phrase "he can go" is just <ekg> (I know, ha.)
ru ar oot ad haPND?
Are you <ru> aware <ar> of what <oot> had <ad> happened <haPND>?
Are you aware of what had happened?
DTe g eththm OR n?
Did he <DTe> go <g> with them <eththm> or <OR> not <n>?
Did he go with them or not?
This would be super-easy to use for a lot of texts if I could just get an automatic translation key working.
Friday, April 26, 2013
Thursday, April 25, 2013
What is a reddit?
When I said awhile ago that I needed a very special kind of news-site, I didn't realize that reddit fit the bill to a T. It's crazy, people create their own forums (aka subreddits) on the fly! All that's missing is a wordfilter thing like lernu.
Wednesday, April 24, 2013
Pirahã, Simplicity, & ASL
Article about ditching recursion in clause subordination for "ontological promiscuity" aka storytelling.
My head hurts. I've just basically learned that storytelling, rhetoric, and metaphor are all interchangeable tools, and I've been trying to learn language (specifically Gaeilge) with Where Are Your Keys? and I know I'm not getting it. It's just that when I look at the set-up I see all kinds of different things being brought to bear on what should be a simple situation but which isn't. Even the use of demonstratives i.e. 'this' and 'that', are not simple. Why don't we just use 'it'? What's the point of the game? The most difficult part is that it switches between role-playing, where you have to give a response, and copy-catting, where you're passively learning. I still don't get the hang of transitions. It's probably because I've never really actually played with another good player. It's just not viral. What's the point? I'm talking about coffee? And then it hits you, "Yeah, I'm talking about coffee in another language and by playing along other people can too!" That is the craziest feeling ever, but it entails a loss of will you don't really feel unless you're already an author, I think. It's very hard for poets to do that, because it means sinking into a language rather than carving it out like poets do, creating an antilanguage. You don't have to understand exactly what's going on, or that there are several options available to you (I think those come up later, in more fluent speech, and aren't too tricky? But maybe I'm wrong. I found variations in the use of this/that based on empathy and perspective in English; crazy but cool! And they're just a casual everyday part of the language!)
This is why I wanted to dig around for a language that truly needs no more distinctions than just pointing, naming, and describing. I'm talking about ASL. Why not create a language that does for ASL what ASL did for English when they made Exact Signed English? Basically, bend English to ASL's rules like when they bent ASL to English's!
ASL has no words for articles, like Latin. Unlike Latin, and like Chinese, it has classifiers, and a whole host of other exotic phenomena. Notably, it tends to drop the inanimate pronoun (relying on context) and of course, deixis and pronouns are merged under ostension (aka pointing at stuff) so there's only pointing at yourself or other people. English is a German language, which has the least dropping of any language family, but that is changing somewhat in America (where pronouns tend to be left off the beginning of sentences sometimes); other languages like Japanese and Piraha tend to not need pronouns at all except as almost like nonce titles (like 'I' actually meaning 'yours truly', etc.) On the other hand, Japanese has a very complicated animacy hierarchy which does a lot of work circumscribing what cannot go into a sentence's interpretation. These languages which do not need pronouns are in the minority.
The ASL situation actually reminds me of the deixis in some languages, which marks for near, far and out of sight; similarly, we have me, you or him or her, and the people I can't gesture at. The latter are particularly interesting, because they are the language's other innovation: signing space. Basically, this little piggy goes to market, and this little piggy...The storyteller points to spaces he has established as being occupied by imaginary entities, of which there can be at most 8.
This trick takes advantage of natural tendencies of the human mind, e.g. the Roman memory trick. It also breaks down very difficult recursive sentence structures and turns them into stories. Pirahã does it super-effectively to get around using clauses in any sort of difficult fashion. It seems like the stories unfold in a way that makes it easy to keep track of the referents, but not that easy. In fact, this shows why clauses exist at all, to make telling the order of events in the way you want, easier. On the other hand, subordinating parts of sentences means that some phrases and clauses are not going to have the same bearing as other sentences, they're going to serve other sentences. This has an effect on the breaks, or cesura, between clauses. To the Pirahã, this is perhaps unacceptable. The Pirahã don't just speak their language like other peoples—they mumble it, they whistle it, etc. There's even an effect whereby the few consonants in the language can swap out for each other at different times. You cannot make this up; its called the 'Sloppy Phoneme Effect', whereby what matters to the speakers is the syllable structure in terms of tone (Pirahã is a tone language like Chinese), stress, length of vowels and length of consonants. The language is highly musical as Keren Everett says.
What this means, and I'm just guessing here, is that Pirahã prosody is a pain. It's fully loaded with all the distinctions the language makes already, so it cannot carry the additional burden of, like English, telling speakers what sentence focus and informations structure is—so they resort to a highly conscripted definition of a clause and a sentence, and don't differentiate between different levels. Perhaps it's not so much that they cannot speak, but that all the prosody that can be carried over into whistling, etc. determines the baseline speech. In other words, the whistled speech could be the bottleneck for the spoken speech—which is unprecedented. It's like if texting determined speech, and everybody stopped talking on their phones and just—oh wait. But in truth, the written word has functioned over the years...much the same way. How much gets left out from the written word, when compared to speech? Yet we use it, in the past to write letters. Our words carried over long distances to reach others' ears. How is a whistle any different?
This post is still about ASL, the only language that is still more easy to understand orally/visually than in any form of writing. It is also, perhaps, the one language I still really care about, because you can talk about things you see and experience. It seems like the purview of all language nowadays is writing, and fiction at that.
I thought it would also be cool if a sign language became oral like is suggested as the source of all languages by some researchers. That could mean that a conlang could really take off the ground, and that there may be many origins of language!
My head hurts. I've just basically learned that storytelling, rhetoric, and metaphor are all interchangeable tools, and I've been trying to learn language (specifically Gaeilge) with Where Are Your Keys? and I know I'm not getting it. It's just that when I look at the set-up I see all kinds of different things being brought to bear on what should be a simple situation but which isn't. Even the use of demonstratives i.e. 'this' and 'that', are not simple. Why don't we just use 'it'? What's the point of the game? The most difficult part is that it switches between role-playing, where you have to give a response, and copy-catting, where you're passively learning. I still don't get the hang of transitions. It's probably because I've never really actually played with another good player. It's just not viral. What's the point? I'm talking about coffee? And then it hits you, "Yeah, I'm talking about coffee in another language and by playing along other people can too!" That is the craziest feeling ever, but it entails a loss of will you don't really feel unless you're already an author, I think. It's very hard for poets to do that, because it means sinking into a language rather than carving it out like poets do, creating an antilanguage. You don't have to understand exactly what's going on, or that there are several options available to you (I think those come up later, in more fluent speech, and aren't too tricky? But maybe I'm wrong. I found variations in the use of this/that based on empathy and perspective in English; crazy but cool! And they're just a casual everyday part of the language!)
This is why I wanted to dig around for a language that truly needs no more distinctions than just pointing, naming, and describing. I'm talking about ASL. Why not create a language that does for ASL what ASL did for English when they made Exact Signed English? Basically, bend English to ASL's rules like when they bent ASL to English's!
ASL has no words for articles, like Latin. Unlike Latin, and like Chinese, it has classifiers, and a whole host of other exotic phenomena. Notably, it tends to drop the inanimate pronoun (relying on context) and of course, deixis and pronouns are merged under ostension (aka pointing at stuff) so there's only pointing at yourself or other people. English is a German language, which has the least dropping of any language family, but that is changing somewhat in America (where pronouns tend to be left off the beginning of sentences sometimes); other languages like Japanese and Piraha tend to not need pronouns at all except as almost like nonce titles (like 'I' actually meaning 'yours truly', etc.) On the other hand, Japanese has a very complicated animacy hierarchy which does a lot of work circumscribing what cannot go into a sentence's interpretation. These languages which do not need pronouns are in the minority.
The ASL situation actually reminds me of the deixis in some languages, which marks for near, far and out of sight; similarly, we have me, you or him or her, and the people I can't gesture at. The latter are particularly interesting, because they are the language's other innovation: signing space. Basically, this little piggy goes to market, and this little piggy...The storyteller points to spaces he has established as being occupied by imaginary entities, of which there can be at most 8.
This trick takes advantage of natural tendencies of the human mind, e.g. the Roman memory trick. It also breaks down very difficult recursive sentence structures and turns them into stories. Pirahã does it super-effectively to get around using clauses in any sort of difficult fashion. It seems like the stories unfold in a way that makes it easy to keep track of the referents, but not that easy. In fact, this shows why clauses exist at all, to make telling the order of events in the way you want, easier. On the other hand, subordinating parts of sentences means that some phrases and clauses are not going to have the same bearing as other sentences, they're going to serve other sentences. This has an effect on the breaks, or cesura, between clauses. To the Pirahã, this is perhaps unacceptable. The Pirahã don't just speak their language like other peoples—they mumble it, they whistle it, etc. There's even an effect whereby the few consonants in the language can swap out for each other at different times. You cannot make this up; its called the 'Sloppy Phoneme Effect', whereby what matters to the speakers is the syllable structure in terms of tone (Pirahã is a tone language like Chinese), stress, length of vowels and length of consonants. The language is highly musical as Keren Everett says.
What this means, and I'm just guessing here, is that Pirahã prosody is a pain. It's fully loaded with all the distinctions the language makes already, so it cannot carry the additional burden of, like English, telling speakers what sentence focus and informations structure is—so they resort to a highly conscripted definition of a clause and a sentence, and don't differentiate between different levels. Perhaps it's not so much that they cannot speak, but that all the prosody that can be carried over into whistling, etc. determines the baseline speech. In other words, the whistled speech could be the bottleneck for the spoken speech—which is unprecedented. It's like if texting determined speech, and everybody stopped talking on their phones and just—oh wait. But in truth, the written word has functioned over the years...much the same way. How much gets left out from the written word, when compared to speech? Yet we use it, in the past to write letters. Our words carried over long distances to reach others' ears. How is a whistle any different?
This post is still about ASL, the only language that is still more easy to understand orally/visually than in any form of writing. It is also, perhaps, the one language I still really care about, because you can talk about things you see and experience. It seems like the purview of all language nowadays is writing, and fiction at that.
I thought it would also be cool if a sign language became oral like is suggested as the source of all languages by some researchers. That could mean that a conlang could really take off the ground, and that there may be many origins of language!
Intonation; ToBI Revisited; Where are your keys?
I believe I've spoken before on the discontents of using ToBI before and briefly mentioned some of the alternatives (the British school, Bolinger, Rhythm & Pitch or RaP, etc.)
I personally think it's challenge lies partly in its presentation; if you could condense it into punctuation and diacritics people might like it more and it would be easier to use (not to forget, punctuation in English seems to focus mainly on the "cesura" or breaks, much as the Break Index part of ToBI does, but people have been using it forever, and its not conventionalized but it serves its purpose well enough for the times and the fashions…but I digress. Another time).
ToBI is tricky too because of the lack of audio recordings and quality presentation. So can you imagine my surprise when I found this website? It's absolutely fantastic because for the first time ToBI is presented succinctly and with a clear sense. I can finally hear what's behind it, and its not so bad after all. It seems fairly well-organized albeit focusing on rather pronounced and unusual distinctions, but I like it. I also notice that there are several correlations with the British tradition, in that there are low falling, low rising, high rising, etc. patterns, though in ToBI they represent phrasal interactions. One remarkable thing is that the British "Mid" seems to match the "High flat" and that there isn't a corresponding category to the British "High fall" (reference: John Maidment's NEWTON program, online; though it must be noted that the British tradition doesn't have a distinction between, for the most part, between the boundary tones that I just mentioned, and pitch accents.)
On the other hand, there are pitch accents which more nearly correspond to the idea of "nuclear tones" in British. There is one final stressed syllable in every intonational phrase (but what is an intonational phrase? other researchers have suggested that we focus on breaks, continuation patterns, and cesura to better understand that, but again that's for another time); this bears the stress that truly matters. That's what the British tradition says, and that may well be true—for the British. However, the appeal of ToBI lies in being able to distinguish between say, for example, a "peaking"pattern that can spread left, and one that can spread right. The stress falls on a specific syllable, and the syllable aligns on its left or right side—this is remarkable, and compelling moreover. (Certain words, like 'America', generally have boundary tones on both sides of the pitch accent; they're special, but ToBI can still work for them.)
It surprises me that there are only 22 combination tones (or is the page mistaken? I am not an expert anyway). It's almost like we can just have 22 punctuation symbols. Awhile ago, a Frenchman tried to introduce extra punctuation, for instance a symbol (in place of a period) for endearment, another for sarcasm, and so on. (Entertainingly the romantic pronouncement mark looked like a little heart.) I don't think it's a bad idea at all, though it would mean people would have to do one more thing to read well—maybe it would catch on, if people could be educated as to its systematic use. It would be brilliant for texting.
The problem with intonation, though, is that there seems to be no end. It's apparently bottomless. The distinctions made in ToBI in one paper were found to be gradient rather than categorical, meaning that they bleed into one another with wide overlap. They compared them to the vowelspace where they all bleed into one another, and that may be true, but…I feel there is a lot more. The quality of the peaks and valleys, their acceleration , gradation, etc. do not fall under the purview of ToBI; I think a resynthesis and integration of the kind of insights I saw in Bolinger, with the appeal of ToBI, would work wonders.
Whenever I read the British schools' works I can't help but read it in that dramatic, over-accented Downton Abbey-esque bombast that the actors over the pond seem so fond of.
I read that there were attempts at integrating the British and ToBI but it cannot have been too successful, they split hairs differently. I'll still have to go look for them again though.
P.S. I should be able to potentially use ToBI to pick out tunes to use in role playing. This should be especially useful for making plausible scenarios happen during Where Are Your Keys? gameplay, which currently vary amongst "game masters" as to the communicative goal of various interactions. These vary from language to language and are tricky, but I think just focusing on them will bring the right focus to gameplay, and what it should be about—in other words, functionl, pragmatic use of intonation to make small distinctions and split hairs in the ways natural languages do (split hairs, that is.)
P.P.S. I can finally get started on my Intonation Wiki that I've wanted to work on for so long! The ToBI examples are great, and I can easily think of scenes from movies that they pop up in.
I personally think it's challenge lies partly in its presentation; if you could condense it into punctuation and diacritics people might like it more and it would be easier to use (not to forget, punctuation in English seems to focus mainly on the "cesura" or breaks, much as the Break Index part of ToBI does, but people have been using it forever, and its not conventionalized but it serves its purpose well enough for the times and the fashions…but I digress. Another time).
ToBI is tricky too because of the lack of audio recordings and quality presentation. So can you imagine my surprise when I found this website? It's absolutely fantastic because for the first time ToBI is presented succinctly and with a clear sense. I can finally hear what's behind it, and its not so bad after all. It seems fairly well-organized albeit focusing on rather pronounced and unusual distinctions, but I like it. I also notice that there are several correlations with the British tradition, in that there are low falling, low rising, high rising, etc. patterns, though in ToBI they represent phrasal interactions. One remarkable thing is that the British "Mid" seems to match the "High flat" and that there isn't a corresponding category to the British "High fall" (reference: John Maidment's NEWTON program, online; though it must be noted that the British tradition doesn't have a distinction between, for the most part, between the boundary tones that I just mentioned, and pitch accents.)
On the other hand, there are pitch accents which more nearly correspond to the idea of "nuclear tones" in British. There is one final stressed syllable in every intonational phrase (but what is an intonational phrase? other researchers have suggested that we focus on breaks, continuation patterns, and cesura to better understand that, but again that's for another time); this bears the stress that truly matters. That's what the British tradition says, and that may well be true—for the British. However, the appeal of ToBI lies in being able to distinguish between say, for example, a "peaking"pattern that can spread left, and one that can spread right. The stress falls on a specific syllable, and the syllable aligns on its left or right side—this is remarkable, and compelling moreover. (Certain words, like 'America', generally have boundary tones on both sides of the pitch accent; they're special, but ToBI can still work for them.)
It surprises me that there are only 22 combination tones (or is the page mistaken? I am not an expert anyway). It's almost like we can just have 22 punctuation symbols. Awhile ago, a Frenchman tried to introduce extra punctuation, for instance a symbol (in place of a period) for endearment, another for sarcasm, and so on. (Entertainingly the romantic pronouncement mark looked like a little heart.) I don't think it's a bad idea at all, though it would mean people would have to do one more thing to read well—maybe it would catch on, if people could be educated as to its systematic use. It would be brilliant for texting.
The problem with intonation, though, is that there seems to be no end. It's apparently bottomless. The distinctions made in ToBI in one paper were found to be gradient rather than categorical, meaning that they bleed into one another with wide overlap. They compared them to the vowelspace where they all bleed into one another, and that may be true, but…I feel there is a lot more. The quality of the peaks and valleys, their acceleration , gradation, etc. do not fall under the purview of ToBI; I think a resynthesis and integration of the kind of insights I saw in Bolinger, with the appeal of ToBI, would work wonders.
Whenever I read the British schools' works I can't help but read it in that dramatic, over-accented Downton Abbey-esque bombast that the actors over the pond seem so fond of.
I read that there were attempts at integrating the British and ToBI but it cannot have been too successful, they split hairs differently. I'll still have to go look for them again though.
P.S. I should be able to potentially use ToBI to pick out tunes to use in role playing. This should be especially useful for making plausible scenarios happen during Where Are Your Keys? gameplay, which currently vary amongst "game masters" as to the communicative goal of various interactions. These vary from language to language and are tricky, but I think just focusing on them will bring the right focus to gameplay, and what it should be about—in other words, functionl, pragmatic use of intonation to make small distinctions and split hairs in the ways natural languages do (split hairs, that is.)
P.P.S. I can finally get started on my Intonation Wiki that I've wanted to work on for so long! The ToBI examples are great, and I can easily think of scenes from movies that they pop up in.
Monday, April 22, 2013
Reddit, Seddit
I love reddit, but…There needs to be a site out there for people to read out and record their funny comments so I don't have to. I don't care that it would require a lot more dataspace! It could be called Seddit.
Tonality, Tone, Tonicity, Intonation, etc.
I don't believe I've spoken about this before but this is one of my passions.
I have recently begun to research prosody in English again, and I 've found a fair amount of OK resources.
First of all, I use Google Scholar mostly, for those who would like to know, as well as publications. I've read Bolinger's works and a book by John Wells in the British school's recent work.
I have not been satisfied by what I've read of ToBI, and there is a lot of work with it in other languages but it's challenging enough for English, the very language it was designed for (though perhaps it suits Dutch better).
My biggest gripe is the use of separate symbols rather than using some sort of diagram or iconic diacritic, but there are reasons. The second biggest is that ToBI's tradition rarely contrasts examples in the literature. It also tends to wave things away as sandhi effects, and pretend that most things dictated by syntax.
This is not a problem with ToBI per se, but moreso the standard of research. If you open up Professor Well's book 'English Intonation' the notion that you are limited by the options available disappears. On the other hand, the British school doesn't mark a distinction between boundary tones a.k.a. spreading tones, and pitch accents, i.e. pitch "excursions" associated with stressed syllables (not to be confused with the phenomena in Japanese and Swedish.) Notably boundary tones may be associated with the left or right side of a pitch accent.
ToBI's other weakness is not distinguishing lexical and sentential stresses and their interaction (remedied to an extent in certain adaptations, which hilariously have ToBI as a phonological level and go further into detail in a "microprosodic" phonetic level; ToBI is in addition somewhat like the generative syntax/transformational grammar tradition in referring to the sandhi rules as a "grammar".) It does have a "break" tier to show how closely together words and phrases are tied together (which is replicated in the afore-mentioned systems as well.) The assumption is that syllable structure, segments, and suprasegmentals don't interact directly, hence autosegmental theory.
The most difficult aspect of intonation is that it can be stereotyped, but it is essentially gradient everywhere. They are "fuzzy" categories in other words with exemplars and marginal cases. (They were compared to vowels in that study but I think vowels may be more cut-and-dried.) This may or may not have to do with the study being about reproducing intonational contours. I think maybe they are like "best practices" for a language, and they accumulate from people speaking and living in a language. Over many generations they are refined, and the language itself is more streamlined and refined so that all parts fit together better and don't leak oil. Much of language is analogous in some sense to fashion.
Going back, Bolinger's prototypical profiles include two which are contrasted by 'rising to' and 'rising from'. Astoundingly, when I discovered the right and left boundary tones, they reminded me of this. I'll have to go back and look but I think that maybe he was referring to L+H* and L*+H, respectively, in RaP (Rhythm and Prosody). My notes from that were unfortunately destroyed (don't write with Frixion pen and then put a warm coffee mug on top) but I feel this is very promising.
IVie is an extension like RaP to ToBI albeit older; it was used in a large-scale research project on the comparative prosody of the dialects of English in Ireland and the United Kingdom.
There are interestingly applications in copular study in cognitive research and in Austinian speech [illocutionary] acts. This is all so very up my alley. It just seems very overwhelming. I already have a very obtuse personal Wikipad dedicated to this, and I can never get it in order. The first order seems to be a better platform for hosting recordings than SoundCloud, because I don't want to stream everything at a time. The other difficulty lies in the production of these intonational profiles; they're not easy. I wonder why, if they're used as they are in conversation. So curious.
I have recently begun to research prosody in English again, and I 've found a fair amount of OK resources.
First of all, I use Google Scholar mostly, for those who would like to know, as well as publications. I've read Bolinger's works and a book by John Wells in the British school's recent work.
I have not been satisfied by what I've read of ToBI, and there is a lot of work with it in other languages but it's challenging enough for English, the very language it was designed for (though perhaps it suits Dutch better).
My biggest gripe is the use of separate symbols rather than using some sort of diagram or iconic diacritic, but there are reasons. The second biggest is that ToBI's tradition rarely contrasts examples in the literature. It also tends to wave things away as sandhi effects, and pretend that most things dictated by syntax.
This is not a problem with ToBI per se, but moreso the standard of research. If you open up Professor Well's book 'English Intonation' the notion that you are limited by the options available disappears. On the other hand, the British school doesn't mark a distinction between boundary tones a.k.a. spreading tones, and pitch accents, i.e. pitch "excursions" associated with stressed syllables (not to be confused with the phenomena in Japanese and Swedish.) Notably boundary tones may be associated with the left or right side of a pitch accent.
ToBI's other weakness is not distinguishing lexical and sentential stresses and their interaction (remedied to an extent in certain adaptations, which hilariously have ToBI as a phonological level and go further into detail in a "microprosodic" phonetic level; ToBI is in addition somewhat like the generative syntax/transformational grammar tradition in referring to the sandhi rules as a "grammar".) It does have a "break" tier to show how closely together words and phrases are tied together (which is replicated in the afore-mentioned systems as well.) The assumption is that syllable structure, segments, and suprasegmentals don't interact directly, hence autosegmental theory.
The most difficult aspect of intonation is that it can be stereotyped, but it is essentially gradient everywhere. They are "fuzzy" categories in other words with exemplars and marginal cases. (They were compared to vowels in that study but I think vowels may be more cut-and-dried.) This may or may not have to do with the study being about reproducing intonational contours. I think maybe they are like "best practices" for a language, and they accumulate from people speaking and living in a language. Over many generations they are refined, and the language itself is more streamlined and refined so that all parts fit together better and don't leak oil. Much of language is analogous in some sense to fashion.
Going back, Bolinger's prototypical profiles include two which are contrasted by 'rising to' and 'rising from'. Astoundingly, when I discovered the right and left boundary tones, they reminded me of this. I'll have to go back and look but I think that maybe he was referring to L+H* and L*+H, respectively, in RaP (Rhythm and Prosody). My notes from that were unfortunately destroyed (don't write with Frixion pen and then put a warm coffee mug on top) but I feel this is very promising.
IVie is an extension like RaP to ToBI albeit older; it was used in a large-scale research project on the comparative prosody of the dialects of English in Ireland and the United Kingdom.
There are interestingly applications in copular study in cognitive research and in Austinian speech [illocutionary] acts. This is all so very up my alley. It just seems very overwhelming. I already have a very obtuse personal Wikipad dedicated to this, and I can never get it in order. The first order seems to be a better platform for hosting recordings than SoundCloud, because I don't want to stream everything at a time. The other difficulty lies in the production of these intonational profiles; they're not easy. I wonder why, if they're used as they are in conversation. So curious.
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Duolingo
I've been going steady with this service for quite awhile now and I'm very impressed. Basically, its very basic but comprehensive. My only concern is that I won't be able to keep my pace up, because I have to revisit sections now because they're still adding new material. Each section grows, so you revisit sections on, for example, food with new vocabulary and expressions after a time. You go through new sections to unlock more things, but obviously if you have to redo the same stuff it's hard to grow. In a way it reminds me of the skill grid in a game like final fantasy 10 (ten or x—lol) except instead of battle you do tests. I'm good at tests but it's a little disheartening to strike out occasionally like I do, or only get one heart out of three (plus 10 for making it at all—but I get hung up on is junk). Speaking of hang-ups, I always say "How fascinating!" and row my arms up whenever I make it or screw-up. It's supposed to release illogical, unnecessary negativity and make criticism fit in its place rather than take over and discourage your perspective because, let's be realistic, it's a fantastic thing you're learning language. Mistakes mean you've learned the error of your ways so you have those chances to fix them again. Realizing you forgot also means you remembered! Capiche? Life is about growing, and you are still growing if you are alive. Do stuff that doesn't restrict your growth!
P.S.
I don't think there's any difference between these. These are all ways to ask "What's that?" in French.
P.P.S.
I look forward to reading comics soon, which is really the whole point of all of this. Then I might continue with French For Reading, but even that is really too dry. It should be pretty clear that Duolingo fills a functional gap in learning a language in a fairly traditional way without too much effort. I've had enough classroom training for me, and I am tired of it all. Hopefully I can fix my mistakes and just speak soon. I can almost hear the language now when I read, which is a personal benchmark that the testing tries to bring out. That's heartening!
P.S.
I don't think there's any difference between these. These are all ways to ask "What's that?" in French.
...
C'est quoi?
Qu'est-ce?
Quel(le) est-ce?
Qu'est-ce que c'est?
Qu'est-ce que c'est que ça?
C'est quoi?
Qu'est-ce?
Quel(le) est-ce?
Qu'est-ce que c'est?
Qu'est-ce que c'est que ça?
I know, right? How fascinating!
P.P.S.
I look forward to reading comics soon, which is really the whole point of all of this. Then I might continue with French For Reading, but even that is really too dry. It should be pretty clear that Duolingo fills a functional gap in learning a language in a fairly traditional way without too much effort. I've had enough classroom training for me, and I am tired of it all. Hopefully I can fix my mistakes and just speak soon. I can almost hear the language now when I read, which is a personal benchmark that the testing tries to bring out. That's heartening!
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