Question: What can I do to make sure that I am still studying Czech now?
Answer: make it more fun.
Fun totally "sparks joy" for me. I recently wrote in depth about this idea elsewhere.
1. I am really limited in my time right now.
2. It's been about a month since I've been able to really sit down and intensely study Czech. Perhaps even longer. It makes me sad. When I try to restart, it just doesn't work. Granted, there were a lot of extraneous circumstances, but those are likely to continue to pop up, especially as children get out of school and I need to pay more attention to them.
3. I have to prioritize a different, important project: co-writing my book. We are just finishing editing chapter 7 (of 21?) of a book about Czech land records. It's important to me that the major edits for this project be finished before I start school in January. I don't know if that's possible. It's only possible with a lot of work. The work is a little bit grueling. I don't think I can emotionally handle pouring my soul into two majorly difficult projects.
4. I also cannot do nothing for my learning Czech. That is a bad solution, it leaves me feeling unsatisfied, it doesn't help me with my ultimate goals, etc.
5. I have to do something, but my current study plan is not going to work because it's too time-intensive, too much work, and some aspects of it are, well, not very fun. They either need to be optimized or they are too rote-y. That's a lot of work. The work if worth it, but it can also wait.
6. I can go back to that study plan later.
7. Movies are always fun and somewhat passive. I have a lot of time for movie watching because I nurse a baby 2+ hours daily.
8. I have a long backlog of Czech movies to watch.
9. If my plan is to simply watch Czech movies and talk or text with my willing collaborators about them in Czech, and maybe sometimes write a tiny bit of what we say about it here, then that seems like a lot less work.
10. I already had the idea to do this in the past. But I did not implement it because it didn't feel right. I felt a kind of hesitation, like a little voice saying, "Shh, just wait a bit." I don't feel that same feeling now, so perhaps it is time to move forward.
I will have to try to figure out how to make this work. Hmmm.
Hey! It is Spring Break here. I am putting my Czech learning almost completely on pause and going with my family on a vacation that will last all week. In the middle of nowhere.
So far this March has been an extremely unproductive month for Czech learning :-)
I am sitting here next to my sweetheart, who is working on his schoolwork. I just recorded a couple videomessages for my Czech friend who lives in China in response to the ones she sent me.
I feel a little bit like a moron for not having thought of the idea of asynchronous sound/video messaging before now, but really what got me to think of it was my sisters in laws' fetish with this app called marco polo (wrote about it at length here). I don't have any idea if it works internationally. I don't really even know if I would want to try to find that out, since it is not...well, it's not exactly optimal for what I'd want to use it for when it comes to Czech learning. Anything to avoid trying to explain through broken Czech how to download and use some kind of app, since there's a pretty wide range of computer/tech ability amongst my collaborators. But all of them use facebook, hangouts, and skype.
The idea of being able to replay a message over and over and over is super appealing to me. It's like what I was doing with quizlet but with real language in context. There's still room for quizlet, because of it's quizzy interface - but to hear natural speech is super valuable for me.
Also, it's possibly a better tool in some ways than face to face real time communication because it's a LOT easier to correct someone.
So I thought, why not. I'll try this. I sent a couple collaborators some video messages, got back some great responses - they could immediately see the value in it for them. Basically, I sent a message in English and one in Czech and asked them to fix my Czech. So then they responded with fixing my Czech and saying something in English. So then I respond with fixing their English and saying something in Czech, etc. It is kind of fun.
Another super big advantage: since I am saying some of the same things over and over again to the same people, it can be good practice for me to try to say it naturally. It's maybe not great to be practicing my mistakes over and over, so I will try to like, correct myself on the second round of Czech messaging.
It was really neat to see Alena's view from the balcony of her apartment in China, the flower arrangement that she learned how to make, etc. I tried to tell her about the book I am reading - the same subject which I droned on and on about to my other collaborators.
Some notes to future people who may want to attempt such an experiment:
- you might want to talk about it beforehand with your collaborators, lest you totally weird them out.
- since you'll be working with a time change, you might accidentally end up waking them up, which is *the most embarrassing thing* - more embarrassing even then recording the stupid message in the first place.
- you will want to practice beforehand since most of these free videomessaging/voice messaging services are short - limited to only 1-3 minutes. It is REALLY hard to say everything you want in one minute. 3 minutes is better, but that is also hard.
- it feels really good to get a nice response. So be sure to give nice responses.
With language learning collaboration, you're always like, jumping between the layer of what you're actually talking about and the aboutness layer, the meta-conversation. It's really rare to find people who can easily navigate the meta-conversation with you, so sometimes you have to like, really hide your train of thought. I should give another concrete example, but the clumsy conversation tab on this blog (as of this writing) already does a pretty good job, I guess.
Well, I'm back from RootsTech 2019, and finally catching my breath at the end of the week here. Monday and Tuesday were almost completely devoted to two tasks: catching up, and "processing" (I hate that word - it's so...psychobabbly) this emotional thing that I decided would be really self-defeating/counterproductive to talk about.
Tangent:
Here is a list of other things that are totally self-defeating/counterproductive topics of conversation:
- passwords! How you create 'em, how you remember 'em, what your favorite one is
- explicit details about your sexual experiences
- how annoying talkative people are
- how you want to be sleeping but aren't
- how antisocial you are
- the fungus on your left foot
- opinions you have that always make everyone else angry #greatestshowman #utahsucks
- how awesome Czech is [hahahahahaha]
/tangent (though...that would be a really fun list to continue!)
By Wednesday I had started to think about starting to dive back into my projects, but that also happened to be the day that my friend Lukáš decided we should start the FINAL ROUND OF EDITING of the book we have been writing together since 2016 or so.
For some perspective, Lukáš also basically has told me to stay away from writing anything at all for the past 3 months, since sometimes...
Well co-authoring something is really hard and I am really nitpicky, and writing is not the same as editing. I actually deeply enjoy editing, but only *with* someone else.
This is actually really what I wanted to write about anyway: how to solve the problem of working collaboratively on a project. At RootsTech I learned that FamilySearch approaches their development with an agile philosophy. Later, I learned about Scrum (which is a horrible sounding word! But sounds about right. Very app-y) which is basically this strict collaborative work method that programmers sometimes use for agile programming. From what I understand, it's basically that you work in small teams with a leader, you have short time frame goals (like 2 weeks), and you sprint to completion. There's probably a lot more to it.
It was actually the first time in my life I had even considered that like, other people had thought about, let alone studied in great depth and created entire plans for how to collaborate on projects. Like, I know about all kinds of collaborative tools (evernote, trello, github, basically the entire gsuite...) but to learn about it as a philosophy, a method - that was really interesting and new to me.
My Czech programmer friend compared Scrum to communism, so...there's that :-)
But there are also probably some good things about it; basically acknowledging the very real human tendency to get super caught up in one thing. The idea of sprinting.
I am totally a sprinter! I can get very one-track in my projects. Danny is always telling me that I flit around from interest to interest - but it's not like...constant flitting. It's more like...like steering the car into totally different lanes of traffic or something.
It's even sort of like this with Czech genealogy, which is my deepest, most long-lasting interest. It has sort of been temporarily put on hold(ish) while I get a handle on the Czech language itself, which is a newer but possibly even deeper (!) interest. Although, both these interests kinda serve the same goal, so maybe the analogy doesn't hold. Or maybe it does, it's just they represent separate lanes on the same road going to the same destination? By the way, Corpus Linguistics is also going to the same place: true, deep understanding about my Czech roots?
I just love making connections between my deep passions and interests. It's so fun!
I'm a sprinter. Lukáš wanted to start editing. In one day I made my first round of edits to the entire chapter (18 pages). We have been slowly attacking all the edits together.
For me, it's the together part that is so crucial to keeping me motivated. It's why I am capable of learning Czech: it involves other people! I just really love interacting with other people.
tangent:
Today I taught a webinar to a classroom full of people in Reno, Nevada. The subject was Getting Started with Czech Family History. I walked away from that experience on some kind of high or something. It was like a drug. I *love* teaching! It so fun. Not much can compare to the kind of satisfaction that I feel after doing that, though teaching these really nice Czech people English comes pretty close. Learning from them is really high up there, too. Interacting in the comments of google docs/sheets is basically my favorite form of social media bar none. #Iamadork #ohwell
/tangent
How can I successfully sprint on two projects at once?
I don't think it is likely to be very healthy if I try to maintain the status quo. I really love my Czech learning plan, and how it's basically just in a series of feedback cycle loop-de-loops. But it literally takes all the limited discretionary time that I have, including hours and hours in the evenings while my sweetheart works his way through his online master's degree (he has gotten an A in every single class, and I have to take a tiny bit of credit for that feat, since I am making it possible). Maybe if I found a way to reduce the number of steps in my Czech learning units, it would be better.
OR...
There are 18 chapters in the book I am editing with Lukáš. We've got a tentative goal to do about a chapter each week. I don't really think we can do it faster, it just doesn't work that well with the asynchronous editing (though we often end up editing stuff at the same time; we've been working like this for about 3 years now and it's pretty familiar).
18 weeks from now is the end of June.
What if from now until the end of June, I adopt an abbreviated version of my Czech learning plan? Or a totally different plan that somehow is less time-intensive?
What aspects of my plan do I have to keep?
- cs SkELL frequency of words
- word lists <-- but can I get somebody (maybe Danny?) to write me a program to find the frequencies automatically? I don't really care if they output into a google doc, it takes like 20-30 minutes to find the frequencies of 200 words. That's a lot of time.
- videochatting with native speakers. That's a total must-have for me.
- reading reading reading reading reading and reading. It's like I am building my own internal language corpus. The only way to get enough access to words is via reading.
What activities could be streamlined?
- I want to keep quizlet but it could be streamlined
- blog posts!
What tools might help me speed up my process?
- My sisters in law started using this video-messaging app called Marco Polo. It's actually surprisingly fun. I enjoy it a lot. I wonder if I could use it to help with my language learning, since one of the big problems with finding a good time to videochat is scheduling it and that we generally sit there for 20-40 minutes (which is a lot of time!). Another advantage to a short video message is that I could watch it over and over and over, which would be good repetition. Also, it has potential to give me more authentic language experiences. I can't experience immersion since I am a housewife in the middle of Iowa, but I might be able to like, get a tiny bit closer to it by seeing people interacting in their actual, real lives. I guess this is how the people who I've been video-messaging use it. Very short messages that are within the real (and sometimes messy and not perfect) worlds. Think: crying children, messy laundry, sweaty and makeup-less faces, bedrooms, etc. It's somehow extraordinarily real because it's unrehearsed and totally authentic. There's also no hesitation since the point of no return is "record" not "send" making it a bit snapchatty I guess (I don't really know, I've never used and never will use snapchat - why would I?). Here is the main problem with Marco Polo, though:
I have two really great female collaborators, plus a couple other potentials, and only really one guy (Petr) with whom I'd even be comfortable considering video-messaging. I just...
It's too intimate somehow. Thinking about videomessaging with some of my male collaborators (the majority of my collaborators) is just...it kind of makes my whole body tense up in fear and anxiety, to be honest. I don't really know why. I guess I should think about it more.
Like, I'm really comfortable with videochatting. I taught English online to little Chinese kids for a while, and I've been skyping with people since Skype was a thing - so, well over a decade. But videomessages...it's sorta different somehow. I don't know how. I don't know why. I have to write about something different because I am literally starting to shake thinking about this. It is so...uncomfortable!
What things do I probably need to reduce (or change) a little in order to really achieve all of my goals?
- One of my favorite things to do is text. I enjoy it. I am a words girl. Texting in Czech is great, but I'm not very clever or funny in Czech, it seems. Also it's wayyyyyyyy hard to read between the lines, which is, well, all you have in texting. Sometimes I end up spending a lot of time texting in English when it could be in Czech. Danny says, "Well, you do need to take breaks, and this is an important friendship for you." Yes...but...Tom, if (okay, minus the if) you are reading this, we have to text in Czech more often! I don't really know how to solve this problem. It is hard. It is related to feelings and embarrassment and self-consciousness and all those things. But it's also related to trust and friendship and doing something really super worthwhile and all those things, too. I need some help with that.
- I also need to make sure I get more sleep. That will help my productivity more than anything.
- And...well...maybe blogging here is a tiny bit self-defeating. It's fun, but it's also time.
I will have to spend some time thinking about this in depth over the weekend.
It's one of my favorite things to think about at all :-)
Brief pause - back on Monday! Going on a trip with Danny and little baby Joey :-)
I guess I feel like I have to write this officially on my blog because I'm so...tied to posting here. It is really fun.
I am somewhere at the end of A4.5 and beginning of A4.6. Kind of antsy, wishing I could have finished one of them before leaving. And there will be absolutely no time for this while we are gone, so it will just have to wait :-)
A slightly upsetting thing happened to me yesterday. I looked up and suddenly my kids were home. It was shocking to me - where had the time gone? I thought I had literally just sat down at my computer. Suddenly they were home? What had I been doing?
I couldn't answer that question definitively, and I still am a bit puzzled. The time slipped by so quickly.
I think that it was more of my perception of time, rather than my actual memory. I can tell you what I did. I skyped with a friend, I chatted with some people, I listened to some music, I read some of my book and recorded it, I nursed the baby multiple times, I read my scriptures, and I made corrections in a spreadsheet, and edited a few different spreadsheets. Somewhere in there I ate a small lunch of some sort. The time went by extremely fast because I was totally occupied - happily - with interesting things. It was alarming that my perception of time was so completely wrong.
Time marches at a steady pace. It wasn't that time sped up. It must have been something with my mind that changed.
***
After Joey was born in August, and after I'd given myself the required six weeks rest, I decided not only did I have to start running again in order to lose the 50 pounds (yeah, five-oh. Ugh. So discouraging.) but also as a kind of preventative measure against my anxiety. I guess it is fairly obvious to anybody who actually knows me: I have anxiety. There. I said it. Now I have a label slapped across my forehead and you'll never be able to take me seriously ever again, because you'll wonder whether it's something believable or if it's just this mental illness speaking. It is excruciatingly painful to think of this condition as a mental illness, by the way. On just about a daily basis I wish that I could think my way out of it, but of course I can't.
But running - exercise of any sort, especially the obnoxious aerobic sort - does seem to help.
I like running outside.
But it's nasty outside. So I have to run in the gym. I can't stand running on a track. Other machines like stationary bikes and elliptical machines don't seem to get me enough of a workout. Classes would be okay but honestly, I'm not really that thrilled about staring at myself in a mirror at the moment, surrounded by other sweaty women. I'd rather...just not. At least for now. Maybe my opinion on that will change.
Also, I get competitive, and that's not a terribly awesome feeling. I'd rather compete against myself than other people.
So! Running. My gym has a track. I've tried listening to various things while running:
- audiobooks : I keep running out of good choices. I don't know what to listen to right now. I've exhausted my current list. It is, frankly, exhausting exhausting it ;-) haha
- MOOC audio lectures : this is an especially bad choice - too many pauses, too boring, too necessary to watch too much of the time because the slides matter
- nothing : this is a horrible choice because it means that I end up listening to my thoughts which, while running, tend to be along the lines of I hate this. This is so annoying. I hate this. I hate running. How many more laps. Ugh. I hate this. This feels terrible. I hate this. I've heard that people can get in some kind of zone while running.
- my quizlet collaborators' voices saying the ridiculous sentences I beg them to record : this is a fairly good choice because my thoughts tend to focus on their voice, the inflection, the rhythm, the meaning of the words, the word order, etc. My mind wanders to what kind of contexts this sentence might appear in. I create all kinds of weird dialogues and situations in the brief pauses between sentences. It's a good choice, but it is not exactly distracting enough.
- and then there's music.
Music, of course! Music of any sort - literally, of any sort - is so blessedly distracting. I cannot even carry on a coherent conversation when there is music playing. It completely steals my focus. Maybe that's why it's never been a real passion of mine; it'd be a total time stealer for me.
For a while I was listening to some amazon music playlists while running. You know what was the best? Horrible pop music from the 1990's that I knew by heart because it was from a time in my life when I religiously listened to the radio because I longed to be "cool." Crap like Brittney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. Really embarrassing that I still have all of their songs memorized somewhere in the recesses of my brain.
I guess if you've been reading this blog, by now you will know that I decided to transfer this idea to using music for language learning. And there's a lot more I want to write about this, but can't because my time is almost completely used up now, and I haven't gotten to the main point yet - gah....
Basically, this idea was quite effective. It is fun to listen to Czech music while running, even - especially? - stupid Czech music. I enjoy it.
To a point. I think stupid Czech music has a limit of about one day before it starts to really grate on my nerves. Stupid English music is much, much shorter. I guess that's why I mostly don't listen to music.
The music I do listen to sort of consistently is a Pandora radio station called "Puttin' on the Ritz." It's mostly big band, dancey songs with funny lyrics that typically have some subtle innuendo - which is so much sexier and fun to listen to than anything modern, which is just like, dripping in private parts and pulsing rhythms that force you into this really gloomy, depressing, animalistic state of mind where men and women are just beasts meant for ripping each others' clothes off and nothing else. I hate that. It's not at all who I want to be, or who I think I am. Or who most people actually are, for that matter.
***
Music more than any other thing has this powerful hold on my attention. I don't much like to listen to it because it is difficult to use my brain for other interesting things. It's the same reason why sometimes I don't like to read novels: it requires a level of mind-surrender that is not always that enjoyable. Even though I have this mind problem, I rather like my mind, and exploring the thoughts within it.
If I had to describe what it's like to live inside my mind, it would be like a giant flowchart tree. Imagine that every individual thought branches into several different paths. For a normal person, I guess this analogy could apply as well; and remember, the paths aren't linear at all. They double back and criss cross all the time, of course!
For a person with anxiety, every branch involves at least one possibility of going down an extremely dark path. That is the difference; I guess normal people sometimes have dark paths, but not always. And when I say always, I really do mean always. There are ways to twist even the most analytic, intellectual thoughts into dark, gloomy, depressing paths of darkness. Granted, when I'm focused on some kind of analysis, or some kind of language learning task or organizational activity, or writing, those dark paths look pretty small and unappealing.
But when I listen to music, especially popular music, those paths are almost irresistible.
***
I am only really able to stand running about a mile and a half on a track. Outside, I can run two or even three miles without it being too terrible of a chore; but on a track it's so tedious and boring.
Unless the soundtrack is right.
I was listening to Disney's Moana soundtrack. Maybe because thinking about being on an island somewhere warm is really appealing? I don't know. Maybe because Moana's struggles to find out who she wants to be are deeply relevant to me? Maybe because there are parallels in her struggle to my language learning struggle? I'm not sure.
I have to carry a little clicker thing that they have at the gym otherwise I'd never know how many laps I go; it's too hard for me to keep track of that without wanting to die with every step. eiiiiight....eiiiiiiiiiiiiight....eeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiggggghhhht...No, the clicker is much better.
Suddenly I looked up and noticed, "I've run 15 laps! I'm done!"
***
There are surely tasks involved in language learning that, similar to running, are necessary chores. If I can figure out exactly what those are and apply music in focused, small packages, that will probably be an effective way to use the weird way music affects my brain to my own advantage.
***
Let's think about running as a metaphor for language learning. If I want to be a truly excellent runner, I have to take breaks. It is not ever a good idea to sprint one's self to death. Sometimes what my heart really wants is to do exactly that - to know Czech now. To be able to communicate now. Why is this taking so long? Why is it so hard?
Well, first of all, I've only been actively learning Czech for a year and a half.
Second of all, I am objectively doing a good job. There is a lot to learn, and I make a lot of mistakes, and will continue to make terrible mistakes for a long time yet to come. But I am making progress. I know that, because I've noticed that my reading comprehension has improved. I am also able to better communicate with people now than before. I don't have to look up as many words. Sometimes I don't know exactly how to respond, but I do know what they're saying.
I don't enjoy resting my mind because when I'm not focused on pursuing intellectual paths, I tend to accidentally wander down the dark paths mentioned earlier. Self-deprecation. Self-loathing. Anger. Sadness. Worry. Fear. Despair. Discouragement. Those are the paths of Anxiety. I wish they weren't there - or that they were not appealing. I wish I could will myself to stay off those paths. I can't always rely on audiobooks, reading, and study to bridle my mind.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that I have not found a consistent method of relaxing that is really appealing to me. Ever. Except -
I love people. Talking with people is fun. Listening to people is fun. I love to be with my husband, who really gets me. I guess it might be strange to say this, but seeking the company of other people might be my way of trying to relax. It gets so lonely at home caring for the needs of young children and my house. I really need people in my life. The older my kids get, the better. I was able to actually have a fun conversation with my nine year old yesterday as we went grocery shopping together.
This is, of course, why language learning has always been so appealing to me. It's the means by which communication can happen.
***
I'm not always able to effectively communicate at all, in any language. That is deeply frustrating to me.
Gah! So close to the end of A4.3! But it's Friday night and no Czechs are (or should be) awake right now, due to the stupid time difference. I can't quite finish up all of my tasks tonight - will have to wait until Monday. I can write the meta post, though.
Here are my thoughts at the end of this week:
Documentation makes me feel like I'm accomplishing something, but the real work is probably more likely to be in step 2 of my crazy plan: the exposure. It is also one of the more enjoyable parts of the plan.
But it takes concerted effort, since I don't actually live anywhere near anybody who can speak Czech with me "live."
The internet is amazing. It is the reason this dream is even possible for me to hope to achieve, why it's worthwhile to pursue. I am so lucky to have been born on earth when I was. I think about that fact nearly every day. More than any of my ancestors, I have the possibility of achieving both dreams of being a great wife and mother as well as my niche-y intellectual pursuits. I am very lucky. My maternal instinct and faith would have made it impossible to choose the latter in another situation. But that's pretty much tautological reasoning. "In another situation, I would be different." Yes, because the situation changes us.
I slightly tweaked some of the tasks since my last meta post. I suspect that will be the constant in this optimization problem: change.
1
not on a device
Decide
2
not on a device
Exposure : pády rote writing
3
anywhere, phone
Exposure: reading
4
phone
Exposure: film
5
desktop, phone
Exposure: conversation
6
desktop, phone
Exposure: translation
7
desktop
Find unknown words. Play around with them in the table.
8
desktop
Gather unknown words in original contexts
9
desktop
Discover their most common chunks
10
desktop
Gather several new contexts
11
desktop
Translate 10 examples
12
desktop
Correct translation
13
desktop, phone
14
desktop
Load to Quizlet
15
desktop
Quizlet - Learn
16
n/a
Native speaker records themself
17
phone
Listen - Quizlet (flashcards)
18
phone
Listen - Quizlet (flashcards)
19
desktop
Listen - Quizlet (flashcards)
20
desktop
Record yourself
21
desktop
Quizlet české věty - test (psání)
22
desktop
Quizlet all the words (learn)
23
phone
Quizlet all the words test (multiple choice)
24
phone
Quizlet all the words test (true/false)
25
phone
take 7 separate pády tests in the app
26
desktop
řeč do textu
27
desktop
use in a sentence
28
n/a
correct sentences
29
desktop, phone
use in a conversation
30
n/a
test creation
31
desktop, phone
fill in the blank test from a native speaking friend
32
phone
pády test
33
desktop
gather created test mistakes from * examples
34
desktop
test corrections
35
desktop, phone
meta
I color-coded the tasks this way:
not on a device
phone
desktop
laptop
Oh, also:
ask for help
I have been trying to minimize the tasks which require asking for help. I can't find someone who is going to be the Czech teacher I'd ideally want - so I have to work with what I've got.
Next week I want to make a graph of all of my collaborators and more about my learning anxiety - but that will have to wait for a while.
Note that as of this writing, I have not figured out how to optimize any of the tasks on a laptop. I just deleted a long paragraph about that subject but it's not important and is slightly embarrassing so it got censored.
Looks like I'm about split between tasks on my phone and tasks on a computer.
You know what sucks?
The most fun tasks for me personally are all off of a device, because they involve actually physically interacting with people in the real world. Skype (or whatever videochatting software - skype is actually giving me lots of problems recently, Petr complains about it all the time, and Tom says it's sucking a lot, too. Hmm) - skype is the next best thing, if I can't have true immersion. Texting is a solid third. Reading is great, too - but it's missing the feedback/interactive component.
I have added this meta task into my list of things to do each week because I need a place to vent about the feelings, frustrations, thoughts, and observations that I have as I try to scale this ridiculous learning curve of becoming a translator.
I have started to translate, but I don't really know how I will go about actually like, sharing what I've been doing.
Here is a word which I learned and which was surprisingly difficult to translate:
příslušnost
I guess it is like affiliation, or membership even, but that didn't really work in the sentence I was going for; it didn't sound at all natural. I thought it was a lot more natural like this:
Tato stránka odkazuje na seznamy šlechtických rodů seřazených podle abecedy působících v jednotlivých zemích Koruny české. Příslušnost rodů k dané zemi je vázána především na držbu svobodného majetku jako jednoho z hlavních atributů šlechty.
This page contains an alphabetical list noble families of the lands of the Bohemian Crown. Free ownership of property is one of the most important criterion for families to belong to the nobility.
That is how I understood that sentence, anyway. Also, it is a bit annoying that "lands of the Bohemian Crown" is also found elsewhere as "Bohemian Crown lands" or even "Crownlands." I don't know which is right. I also don't know which sounds more natural: "Moravian Noble Family" or "Noble Moravian Family." I think the first sounds a bit more like Moravian is modifying "Noble Family", so I will go with that. But the second is more likely to be something I would actually say. So I'm not sure.
Dunno why there is that white space up there, but I can't fix it.
The other big translation project which I'm working on is Narození a smrt. I really enjoy working on that project with my friend Tom - I've invited others, but it's really mostly just us working at it. It is fun! But for some unspoken reason we are currently taking a break. I suppose we will pick it up again later.
For me, the block is that it is not really broken into small enough chunks for it to be satisfying. Maybe if I could will myself to translate at least one little paragraph per day, that would work. But I also know that this is not the way that I typically like to work on projects. I am a sprinter, not a slow and steady person. Sigh. I just want this book to be done so that I can read it all the way through in comprehensible English. Reading it slowly over time for the construction and naturalness of the language is not at all the same as reading it for the ideas.
So basically, I feel like a slacker this week. But in my defense, there have been a lot of obstacles in my way, like stupid stupid stupid snowdays.
Alright, so it's time for another edition of language learning meta word vomit.
Here're my thoughts.
I have really enjoyed the new system that I have developed - a big giant feedback loop. Practicing, repracticing, repracticing. Basing a lot of the focus on words with high frequency.
Though, of course, then you end up getting things like "lze" which seem to not be very functional in speech, but are all over writing. "jde to" = "lze to"
Anyway.
A fun part of this journey for me is of course, building the system. I really enjoy thinking about my learning, thinking about how to optimize it. That is really fun. I suppose that is one reason why I was drawn towards language teaching.
The dark part of myself tells me I only landed in that field because I didn't have many other great options after completely wrecking my options in the MESA major. I feel such regret and frustration about stupid choices I made when I was in my early 20's, young, not thinking, way overly impulsive and emotional. I really hate that past version of myself. I guess I am not alone, but that is hardly any kind of consolation.
But maybe I would have been drawn to language teaching anyway. I don't know. I certainly have done a lot of language teaching in our home, with our five children. I taught all of them how to speak English.
I'm finally making some progress towards the part of the Corpus Linguistics MOOC on Future Learn that is about what I'm really interested in doing: language teaching and building informed learner dictionaries and textbooks.
Because LITERALLY every. single. Czech as a second language textbook. Sucks.
I started making a running list of the reasons why they suck. It is quite satisfying to put it in writing. But they are mostly hypotheses. I could use CL methodologies to prove (or disprove!) what I am intuitively guessing. It's...it's really enticing.
More about my learning: I needed to pause and break things into even smaller chunks. I am quite sure that nobody knows what the heck I'm talking about. That's because I haven't shared my giant spreadsheet detailing the list of things I've been doing - the order, the feedback loop, etc. It is too embarrassing to share in its entirety. Here's the latest iteration of the labels of the things I've been doing:
Red means there's an artifact which belongs on my blog
Pink means I am dependent on a collaborator
1
Decide
2
Exposure : pády rote writing
pády
3
Exposure: reading
čtení
4
Exposure: film
mini dictée
5
Exposure: conversation
mluvení
6
Exposure: translation
meta: o překladu
7
Find unknown words
8
Gather unknown words in original contexts
nová slova
9
Discover their most common chunks
definice
10
Gather several new contexts
příklady
11
Translate 10 examples
překlady
12
Correct translation
překlady
13
meta: o pokroku
14
Load to Quizlet
15
Quizlet - Learn
16
Native speaker records themself
17
Listen - Quizlet (flashcards)
18
Listen - Quizlet (flashcards)
19
Listen - Quizlet (flashcards)
20
Record yourself
21
Quizlet české věty test (written)
testy
22
Quizlet all the words test (multiple choice)
testy
23
Quizlet all the words test (true/false)
testy
24
Quizlet all the words test (written)
testy
25
7 pády testy (app)
testy
26
gather test mistakes
testy
27
use in a sentence
příklady
28
correct sentences
příklady
29
use in a conversation
mluvení
30
test creation
testy
31
fill in the blank test from a native speaking friend
testy
32
pády test - 50 random questions (app)
testy
33
gather test mistakes
testy
34
test corrections
testy
35
meta
meta: o pokroku
I gave myself some extra flashcard practice spaces because I really need the encouragement to do that.
I also decided that one of my meta posts would specifically be about my feelings about my attempts to translate.
In other news, every time I see "o pokroku" it seems like it should be sung to the tune of "O Christmas Tree." haha
There weren't enough places to take a pause and write a meta post. So I have updated that. It is important to me to write about my learning. I am not exactly sure why - but it is. Maybe for that creating-the-perfect-textbook-for-English-speaking-Czech-learners that is wayyyy far away on the horizon. Maybe for some internal emotional reason. It really is word vomit, though. Unorganized. Stream of consciousness. How I would speak. Actually, probably a bit faster. I seem to be more collected in my writing than my speech. I dunno.
Also, I had to add some other steps to the process. These were the rote steps which I tend to skip unless I force myself to do them. And they are important. For example, I am going to force myself to write out the pády forms each week. It actually significantly helped when I was doing this before. It does not take very long. I can't base all of my learning on rote activities, but this is one I have to do. Also, flashcard practicing. Which yeah, of course, I have had many long conversations with collaborators about how dumb flashcards are. Contextless words are far inferior to words in context. But there is some value to the rote repetitive learning. I don't know why it's that way. I've tried to design this system so that it minimizes these kinds of frustratingly painful activities, or rather, incorporates them quietly into the other activities. Like, so it's invisible and I don't even notice. But I really think I'd do better if I did slightly more of them.
So, I renumbered my list, including at least three reflection checkpoints. This gives me about 35 tasks to complete each week. That's kind of ridiculous. I should probably shorten it. But...I'm already doing these tasks. This just labels them and makes them easier to figure out what to do next. I am going to label them according to where I can do them: on my pc, phone, laptop, just audio (driving). I've been organizing my to-do lists this way for the past month or so and it's been quite satisfying. I often end up nursing a baby with just a phone in my hand, so having a list of possible things I can do can help keep me focused rather than getting sucked into wikipedia or something like that. I got rid of Facebook on my phone entirely because it was such an utterly depressing time waster. There's too much stuff I want to learn and not enough time, so getting rid of the time wasters is an important task.
Talking to friends is not a waste of time. I have a lot of stupid things on these lists like, "spend time with my mom" or "call someone." I have to continually remind myself to do these things, and that they are crucial to my wellbeing, lest I get sucked into the trap of thinking that the only things that matter are the things in the appeals-to-my-emotions and appeals-to-my-intelligence sector of my brain. I also have to force myself to do things like work out.
Unrelated news: I have lost 10 pounds in the past month. Still 50 more to go. Baby weight is horrible. But I've done this four times before, so I'm sure I'll be successful again. I just really, really hate it.
Still other news: I'm really, really happy with sketch engine. It is so fun to play with. It has provided me with tools to explore whether or not my ideas are right, in a surprisingly wide variety of contexts, even. I wish that the beta version I have would allow me to upload my own corpora. I also wish that I knew the terms to look for the tools that would help me create my own corpora. But I think there's still a lot I need to learn and read about before jumping in and going crazy.
I feel like I'm so late to the game. It is not a great feeling.
I wrote a poem to express these general learner-anxiety feelings which I frequently have (by the way, writing poetry in Czech is totally miserable. An absolute exercise in the worst kind of embarrassing futility. Someday maybe it will be fun - that day is not today). I think the first step to divesting myself of them is to recognize that they exist, they are born mostly in my mind and emotions, and with a label smacked on them maybe it will be easier to discount them. "Oh, those feelings again. Well, I can safely ignore 'em. They're not useful at all."
Sorry that I'm not better for you. Sorry that I'm pathetic. Sorry that in whatever I do these feelings render me paretic.
Sorry that I'm not anywhere close to knowing the things that you already know.
Sorry that I'm so impossibly proud and can't find the things that I don't know about.
Sorry, just sorry - forgive me - forget. I'm not good enough.
