Saturday, December 1, 2018

A3.9 Meta

This was a pretty good Czech studying week, though I really struggled with some migraines. II really think they are migraines because sometimes I'll close my eyes because the light seems to enhance the pain somehow and everything will go black - like extra black, blacker than normal. I think it's super weird. But it's probably just a hormonal thing. I hope that my body will quickly adjust to being postpartum. It's only been about three months, so I should be a little bit patient with myself.

This is the week that I made some copy Quizlet sets for me to record myself saying the sentences in the exact same way as my collaborators. I think if they could see me listening, practicing, and recording these sentences, they would be...well, they would be completely filled with Fremdschämen (sp?), that's what they would be. But it is nesmířně helpful. Possibly one of the most helpful things I have done all week.

Here are my observations about it:
- a lot of phonemes are pronounced differently depending on where they fall in a word. Like ch in jejích is not at all the same as ch in všichni.

- It is a lot easier to remember sentences as a whole. But there is definitely a magic point at which it is too long to easily recall. I need to make sure to pick shortish sentences for now.

- It was especially useful for me when my collaborators said the sentences as naturally as possible, even it meant there was slightly less emotion in the sentence.

- My kids listened to these recordings with me. "Oh, that's what Czech is supposed to sound like? It's so...monotone." That's what my daughter said. Hahaha, I can just imagine how that will make Tom, who recorded the set she heard, laugh.

- One of my husband's friends developed an L2 computer test using voice recognition. His theory is something about how we remember chunks of words in syllables, not independently. He kind of dumbed down the theory to me, and there were eight children under the age of nine running around when he was saying it, so I am not exactly sure what he's talking about. But yeah. Our brains remember chunks, and they aren't necessarily chunked by the word. Like, I have this phrase running through my head now, "všiml jsem si..." - and it is very useful.

- On a related note, this would explain the exact reason why I have really hard time remembering the meaning of "bychom." The phoneme "chom" (okay, it's actually hom, but close enough) is the Arabic* word for third person plural "they." So that's really difficult for me to assign it to "we." Like, "měli bychom" in Czech is "we should" but I always think of it as "they should" because in Czechabic (?!) it kind of breaks down that way: měli (some kind of plural of have) by (some kind of conditional past marker) ch/hom (subject pronoun they). I wonder if this is even comprehensible to anybody else reading this - but I don't have to worry too much, since nobody reads it anyway :-) It will be useful a couple years down the road when I go to write the ultimate Czech as a Fourth Language Textbook. I won't call it that. It will be something like Czech for English Speakers. But I need to suppress that urge with all my might; it's not useful to think about.

- Notice that I tried to make my example sentences from HP 1.8 (which have not been corrected yet; I am quite sure there are errors) follow the patterns in the example sentences that were recorded on Quizlet from HP 1.3.

I hung out with a friend this week to help her make some Christmas decorations for our ward Christmas party. Her other friend was there and my friend introduced me. She said this about me, "Yeah! She's teaching herself Czech." I kind of don't know how I feel about that characterization. I think it's not quite accurate. I know I put a ton of effort into Czech. But it's like, hand in hand with the effort to have authentic relationships with the Czech people who are teaching it to me. They are not really separable. And I would never be able to learn Czech if it weren't for these people. I wish that we did not live so far away. I had to unfollow one of my friend's facebook feeds - I like her a lot, she's perfectly nice. But her husband's new job takes him to Prague about 4x/year, and she got to go with them this time. It was not very fun to see all the photos. I guess people might feel a bit like that about me the handful of times I will ever get to go there in my life, when I post things. But it's dumb to think about it that way; I guess globalization means the world is a lot smaller.


*Levantine dialect, which isn't in any online translator, and which I learned alongside with MSA/Fusha. I definitely never mastered MSA because it was not spoken language and I got really bored with reading about explosions and al umum el mota7da - I did reach an advanced mid level of speaking Levantine dialect once upon a time, though it's very rusty now.

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