- I have a very strong drive to start new things.
- I have a very strong ability to add too much to my workload. To overestimate my ability, to underestimate the time it will take. Things like that. They contribute to losing interest.
- Harry Potter is too hard (now). It's not in the sweet spot where it's just challenging enough to be a stretch. I don't understand too much of the text. I should expect this; I tried reading a chapter in French and there were *quite* a few words I didn't understand there, either. Granted, it's still a better choice than Bylo nás pět. But still.
- I pick too many words for each chapter. The reasoning was to give myself a chance at getting a reasonable "grade." It feels crappy enough getting 75% of 33 words - take it to 10 and I might get 50%. That is not an acceptable grade. It's immensely discouraging. There's already enough negative feedback in my Czech learning world. But 33 words is really too much. I need smaller chunks.
- I think the longest I've ever been able to singlehandedly (or single mindedly?) focus on a project was about five weeks. Maybe two months. Then my interest fizzles - unless it is sustained by a relationship, someone to push me along, someone to whom I feel accountable (like several of my book writing projects). It's so STUPID. I wish I could drink a magical potion that filled my brain with the NEED to finish. Like, I really want to complete things, but it is nothing at all like the need to start things for me. My husband can't relate. He likes to only start things he knows for sure he'll finish. I try to explain that in my head, I always think I'll finish all the things I start. I feel quite disappointed when I don't finish them, but I can handle the disappointment; I can't really live without starting new things. This applies to every aspect of my life. The whole "motherhood" problem - that really, truly is an NP-complete optimization problem. How to figure out what meals are the perfect balance of healthy, inexpensive, tasty, and easy to make - how to juggle the ability to cook all the things on time, serve them on time, accommodate the schedules of six other people - etc. Yeah. I am used to starting lots of new projects without ever "finishing" them. Ever. Basically, TLDR: it's time to revamp the system.
So out of curiosity, I read a chapter from Děti z Bullerbynu. It took me about 20 minutes. I had the English copy next to me (by the way, the American edition does not include all the stories, is somewhat abbreviated, and is not nearly as charming as the Czech version somehow. I will try to find the UK edition and ask for that for Christmas. It's out of print.) After some searching, I had found a place where I could print off the stories one at a time and highlight the text. After considerably more searching, I found a PDF version of the book so I could highlight the text and do a word count.
By the way - as an aside: this is one thing that Czech learning has going for it. Copyright is not really so much of an issue. You can generally very quickly and easily find free PDF or e-pub versions of anything you want to read. You can download movies with Czech dubbing and then splice in the subtitles (either Czech or English). I am very grateful that this is a possibility. I don't even feel bad - there is no possible way for me to purchase those movies and we own them already in English. It is not my fault the only languages included with movies on this side of the pond are French and Spanish. But maybe I'm just justifying my illegal (but not unethical?) activity. Hmm. I am not sure.
Anyway - I'll just brush those thoughts aside for a bit and try not to think about them -
So anyway, I read the chapter called Veliký nečas. It has 803 words (well, I copy and pasted from the PDF which was not a perfect solution; some of the words were screwed up). I did not know 59 of them. That is slightly more than 7% of the words.
What I could do (well, if I could figure it out...but let's just assume that I can) is stick all the words in a corpus-building tool thing that could tag all the different words and count how many lemmas there are - like, instead of counting verbs with different declensions as fully different words (muži and mužem being the same word), I could learn how many unique words there were.
This would be super useful to know because I already noticed that of the 59 words, several of them are repeats. Maybe even about 10 of them. I think some of them are the same word, but to my English language brain, some really do NOT look the same. Like, at all. Wouldn't it be really cool to be able to take my list of 59 unknown words and compare it to the 700 (let's say) -ish unique words, and then get a list of all of the instances/forms that each of my 59 words showed up as?
Wouldn't it be cool to take my list of 45 (let's say) unique unknown words and then compare them against a bigger, more general corpus of Czech language, to know which ones are the most frequently used? And then from that, wouldn't it be great to just pick 10 of them with which to shove into this really fun feedback loop of creating example sentences, recording them, etc. etc.?
This would only really work if it were something I could do quickly. I guess that once I figure out how to use some of the tools that are already right in front of me, it could be possible?
And more?
But yeah. 20 minutes to read a short chapter? 7% rate of words that I don't know? Yeah, this is a much better book for me than Harry Potter. By the way, this does not mean that I can't guess what they know, nor does it mean that I know what the combination of words I do know means together. But hey. It's a start.
I should remember that I wasn't reading books in French until my fourth year of it. Like, French 1a was 7th grade, French 1b 8th grade, French 2 was 9th grade, and French 3 was 10th grade. That is when I read my first "book" - probably le Petit Prince, I guess. I do not really remember. I read a lot of books (novels, poetry, plays etc.) while living in France, and afterwards as well. Not nearly as many as I bought and sent home and are sitting on my shelves, but...
So I will have to find a way to communicate this to my collaborators. A way that is concise, short, and communicates efficiently/effectively what I want them to do. Also, though it's useful for me to divide my learning into week-chunks, I think it's actually a bit stressful for me. So I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm just going to divide it into sections-of-the-book chunks instead. That way, I can move ahead while I'm waiting for feedback in my amazing feedback cycle of awesomeness. Which I drew on my whiteboard. And I like enough to draw on a poster. And hang with the other Czech posters. I guess I never mentioned this, but my basement (where my office is) is literally surrounded by Czech posters. Pády, zajména, the questions words like kdo, co, koho, čeho...etc. Yeah. Did I mention I am a language teacher?
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