Turns out Sketch Engine has an API. I will try to get my husband to write me a program that can find the frequency of words in the cs SkELL corpus so I don't have to do that manually for 150+ words each week, 'cuz that's annoying and a time waster for me.
I've been trying to figure out a way to incorporate daily reading or even presentational speaking into this system of mine. Before it was encapsulated in the part of my plan called "exposure." I think the solution is to add one more step - which I am really loathe to do.
It's just the last time I updated my plan, it did not include a step explicitly for language exposure. It had a long list of other kinds of tasks, many of which were artifact-gathering. And they're necessary. And I really should include them in my plan.
But it's like this: for the plan to work, I need to have already exposed myself to language in some way previously. I'm working with a list of frequent words that I have already run across. So there's some disconnect between each "unit" - you know? It is...kinda weird.
So either I add another step or consolidate a step. I guess I am going to choose to consolidate "decide" and "exposure." That way, I don't have to offset all the other numbers again. Plus, the decision to do something and the act of doing it comes almost simultaneously anyway!
I noticed also that QUITE OFTEN as I discover and study the words from the reading, I read more fluently. Duh. So I will want to re-record myself after I learn the words. But I don't really learn them until I put them through the pipeline. Haha, silly to call it a pipeline. That is a word stolen from Danny's work.
But I think for exposure, I really should try to record myself speaking every day, as well as take notes on my speaking, etc. I think that the "mluvení" section should not be offset, though. It should be notes on the actual week that I am studying. Otherwise, I will forget what is going on.
Překlad is subsumed in this category, by the way.
Basically it includes at a minimum these things: watch a movie, read (part of) a book, work on a translation, write an email, read an email, text, talk with people, etc.
I wish I had a better method of keeping notes during speaking appointments. In other news, I have now had some regular correspondence with several new collaborators, some of which who are even the holy grail (for me) of collaborators: computer-literate, interesting, fun Czech women.
Honestly, the computer-literate aspect is probably why I keep on ending up with computer scientist Czech men for collaborators. There's a potential creepiness factor in there, which I have to do my best to look past, or quickly run from when things get weird. Fortunately, that has not actually happened to me yet. Also, some of my very best friendships have blossomed from this weird, uh, for lack of a better term, situation. Unlikely friendships. Really valuable to me personally.
I wonder if there is a point at which a collaborator's ease with English is actually more of a liability in my Czech learning than an asset? Like, it's really great to have Czech collaborators who can explain to me things in English. But I am not on this journey to learn about Czech. I want to learn Czech itself. So I will have to push myself harder to communicate more often in Czech. It's just so difficult when it's easier to speak English with certain people. I will just have to try harder to be more diligent? I bet there are scholarly articles written about this particular learning hurdle for second language learners. I should try to learn more about it. Hmm.
I was going to make a graph of my collaborators with "proficiency in English" as one axis and "helpfulness to me" on the other, because I thought it would be really interesting. I would then see if there are clusters, like, "computer nerds" or "stay home moms with kids" or "high school students studying for their maturita" or "older social women" - but my husband told me vehemently that this would be a totally inappropriate thing to do. "Most people don't measure their friends in terms of how 'useful' they are to you. If you make this graph, you absolutely cannot share it with anyone, ever, except me." I kind of whined about it because I thought it would be great and potentially even revealing and helpful to determine what kinds of collaborators to seek out. But in the end I decided to trust him on this, since he's probably more social adept than I am, even if I enjoy being social more than he does.
In other news, I've severely throttled my facebook use, and I don't miss it that much.
No comments:
Post a Comment