A4.8.9 meta: o pokroku

I gave myself a deadline of today to decide whether or not I'd continue with my Czech A4 learning schedule as planned. It's not so much a schedule (there are not really deadlines) as a big spreadsheet with lots of check boxes.

<ranty tangent about programming>

In other news, a while ago now I discovered conditional formatting in google sheets. I suppose it was only a matter of time until I discovered the IF and IFS functions and started writing nonsense strings of characters in my spreadsheets. It's so useful. I am probably reluctantly clinging to my ignorant non-programmer ways only because I know exactly how hard and painful the learning curve is gonna be. It is not going to be fun at all. Things like { } and ~ and | and < > and / \ can just stay away from me for a little while yet, but I am sure that someday, I'm going to cave in under this mighty pressure of, "auuuugh I wish I knew how to do x." And, you know, five years from then, after I've learned at least two programming languages (Danny says you have to learn multiple ones before you can really start to see the patterns in what applies to the language and what is universal to programming), watch out world.

But for the moment, I have other pursuits and projects and my self-confidence is still very fragile. I recently decided to wean my baby, which was definitely the right choice for my mental health. I've felt so much better since then - dramatically better. But it's not like lactation immediately ceases, so... I should be careful not to take on too many new projects too quickly.

Besides that, like I said, I know that learning how to write code is going to be difficult to me. I've had a few false starts on that trail (though I did get an A in that Java class in college - but it's allllllll forgotten, except things like sitting in the computer lab next to Nate, or the joy of seeing the stupid GUI work for the first time, or feeling very self conscious about being the only woman in my class..).

It's abstract. It's not intuitive. It is very logical, and I know that I struggle with organizing my thoughts that way. It takes me time and a lot of effort. My 8 year old son, of his own ambition, decided to learn python through Khan Academy. I'm still at the point where I can help him when he gets so frustrated he can't work his way through the tutorials ("Hmm. I think you need to call the variable inside the function. Try putting it there [points] instead." "Mom! You're the best!") but that is not going to last very long, and I know it.

</tangent>

I've been reading some very interesting academic articles about Second Language Acquisition. There's this big theory out there called the "input hypothesis" which basically is that SLA depends on the input being just a teeeeeeny tiny bit beyond your capacity. I have vague memories about learning about this in college, too. It's logical. There is also a lot of support of read-read-read-read-read-read-read-read-read for SLA. Just, read everything you can. That is not the current plan. The next version of my plan is going to look a lot different.

I had been feeling really frustrated because the second that my emotional limitations felt like they were lifted from me, I found myself surrounded by some very real physical limitations. I have five children, it's summer, my mom was not around to watch them at all - my days have been completely consumed in childcare and housework. I don't hate it, and at the same time, I'm looking forward to September when school starts again.

I did what I could to try to work my way through my really ridiculous spreadsheet. I started with the tasks that were the easiest to do alone. Part of the problem is that even though emotionally I feel so much better, it's still really difficult to communicate with my Czech collaborators (almost all of whom I haven't spoken to in weeks). But this week, I finally managed to drop some of them a line and vaguely explain where I've been, ascribing it to a serious health problem. Mental health is still health, even though it feels so... much... not. Ughh.

Whatever kind of collaboration is in store for me this summer, it's almost certainly mostly going to be asynchronous. I mean, it's going to have to be (see point about having five children).

In the end, I decided that I'm not going to give up this plan, in spite of its flaws. I already modified it to be much, much fewer words/"unit". I just want to work my way through it. Maybe that's just because of pride, but I don't really care; I want to finish something I start, especially when it's something like this. When this is over, I will move on to A5, which I think is going to be a lot simpler in design, and involve a lot more reading and watching films or TV shows (which are shorter, which is an advantage).

If I could program, I would write a program that would automate finding the frequency of words in SkELL. I don't even care what kind of output it would be. Copy and pasting 120 values from a single table into a spreadsheet would be a cinch compared to looking up 120 different words and doing it one at a time. 

A4.7.9 meta: o pokroku

Here's how things are going with my Czech learning currently:

I have been having a lot of false restarts, and it's really difficult to find the kind of time this project deserves/needs/sucks up because of the fact that I am home with 5 children, and it's summer.

I haven't skyped with any of my learning partners since the end of April, and I feel kind of terrible about it.

I had been waffling over how to approach my approach. Haha. Throw it out, adjust it, just go with it - I couldn't commit. I also have been dealing with a substantial amount of postpartum anxiety in my personal life. Fortunately, that problem seems to have been solved, or at least resolved: I weaned my 10 month old baby, and have started to feel normal again.

"Feeling normal" means I want to work on Czech. It's something I crave when I feel normal, actually. When I feel a massive amount of anxiety, the whole thing seems to daunting and I am paralyzed, not knowing what to do or where to start.

But I have a really clear roadmap, and I'm going to follow it through. I decided to work through 17 weeks of A4 until I redesign the whole thing (to be called A5, which is, well, stupid, but...I'd rather call it that) - already I am thinking of ways I can do that successfully. But for now, I will just plow forward.

I decided that I'm personally just completely fine with skipping around from "unit" to unit. I also realized that I have to reduce the target words from 10 to 3 in order to get this done in anything that even vaguely resembles a reasonable time frame.

So. Yeah. Tally-ho. Onward. I spent some time updating the conditional formatting in the google sheets spreadsheet where I track this stuff. It will be glorious to see the whole thing "golden". My goal is to have that done by the time the kids go back to school. I think I can manage.

I must be feeling a lot better, to feel that confident!

A4.6.9 meta: o pokroku

I put aside Czech for about two months because of two things:

1. Lice struck my family. Invaded, rather. It was horrible.

2. I "firehosed" the book I've been writing. The Grundbücherbuch. My collaborator called it this once and that is how I have ever referred to it since.

But now it is summer and I miss Czech immeasurably. I decided to go ahead and work really hard at the plan I already have in place to see if I can't just, well, move forward.

Also, it's totally strange that my blog's readership here spiked by about 12x. I am scratching my head a little bit. But the internet is weird. I'll just proceed as normal.

"Normal" means I am in a fishbowl, but it's in the corner of a masssssssssive aquarium. So it's unlikely to attract much notice.

A4.5.35 meta: o pokroku

Okay so here's the deal.

Reworking the system over and over again is *really* fun.

But it is also a *really* big time waster.

I am trying to juggle the difficult task of balancing two really worthy projects that ultimately share the same goal: understanding my Czech ancestors. But the first project, the number one priority which eats up the majority of my limited computer time, is definitely to finish writing the Grundbücherbuch. I have to get this thing done. It is really important. It is somehow urgent. It will help many, many people to have better access to their roots. There is nothing like this book written out there. 

Mám recht. I've spent the last decade looking for it. And guess what. When I couldn't find the book, it turned into writing it with probably the only person on this earth who could stand to teach me, my friend Lukáš.

This book has to get done. It is really important to me.

So. Instead of revamping my system again and again, I am just going to move forward with what I have, which is actually really good. 

What is sort of silly is that I am just finishing up A4.5 but I have gathered the words through A4.10. Haha. In the next iteration - maybe when I finally get the guts to like, admit that maybe I am at a B1 level, at least when it comes to some topics (some really niche topics like nezakoupená usedlost hahaha), I will revamp the system again. For now I just have to persevere. 

And set timers. I am going to give myself time limits to complete certain tasks, because if I don't, I will end up totally spilling my soul into the silly meta parts of this. For example, the time limit for this post is 7 minutes, which is nearing its completion.

One last note. After returning from a nice family vacation, we discovered that everybody except the 7 month old is infested with head lice. It is totally nasty. So I will do my best to get back on track, but this week I will be lucky if I can just survive the project of de-licing six people. Eugh....

A4.5.30 meta: o pokroku

Alright, time for another round of, "Kate's feelings about her learning." :-) 

So! 

Here is my beautiful spreadsheet showing what I've been up to. 

If my goal was to finish A4.6 this week, uh, well, that ain't happenin'. 

Right now I am averaging about 8-10 days to finish a "unit." But I really must keep moving forward, for momentum, interest, and just the fact that otherwise I will be stuck focused on the same dumb 10 words for too long.

I am easily going to finish A4.5 tomorrow. It is actually extraordinarily simple to ask my collaborators to give me a fill in the blank test. So far, they have all been more than accommodating in that regard, and they do it fast. I think because it is a concrete, easy to do task that does not take a lot of effort, and for which they can give me very easy feedback, that makes it a good choice for the majority of my collaborators.

I have pretty much three kinds of collaborators:

1. Nerdy Czech men who are interested in the aboutness of this project: the Computer Assisted Language Learning aspects of it, the connections with NLP and CL. These collaborators generally have a very high level of English, are computer programmers, and I have very little to offer them in return for all they give me. I guess there are three people who fall in this specific category (plus their spouses), and without them this project would not look at all the same. My life would not be the same either, since it turns out that these friendships legitimately matter to me on a personal level.

2. Brave Czech men and women in need of a speaking partner. They are generally intermediate/low-advanced level. Their tech literacy usually falls within a range of casual to advanced users. These people have a much broader range of occupations and also matter to me on a personal level. I was able to meet several of them last time we were in the Czech Republic. These collaborators tend to fluctuate a bit more in terms of whether or not we are actively communicating. They are goal-oriented, and I can help them concretely. Usually the main thing they want to do is "just talk." None of the collaborators I've worked with closely so far have had a background in foreign language teaching.

3. Very shy Czech women who are very self-conscious about their English. These women have surprised me: sometimes their tech literacy is beyond what I thought it would be. They often are not from the same exact social background, age, or lifestyle as me. It is extremely interesting to me - totally fascinating, actually - to talk with them.

I love all of my collaborators. It would be so interesting to try to scale this experience, to export it so that other people could also find a way to learn Czech.

A4.5.9 meta: o pokroku

I am not quite done with the "play with words" phase of things, but I really wanted to go ahead and write down my meta thoughts because it feels like it's been a while. Maybe it really hasn't. I am not sure.

I spend a lot of time thinking about and trying to learn Czech - but it fluctuates a lot depending on my emotional state and mood. There's basically one week every month that is just dominated by terrible thoughts and horrific headaches, at least it's been that way for the past five months or so. It's totally out of my control. Focusing on Czech is like an escape. It is really...it is something very important to me. It worries me a little bit that my overenthusiasm for this will somehow cause social problems. I don't usually worry about that, except during this time of the month. I dunno. It's annoying. I wish that it weren't this way.

It is frustrating to have to wait for feedback from other people to continue moving on in my goals. That is why I developed this plan - so that I can move forward without having to wait. I really like my plan. A lot. Here is a little screen shot of what I'm doing.

My friend Lukáš was the one who showed me that google sheets has this really cool option for checkboxes now in its data validation settings. He was the one who also pointed out how satisfying it is to check things off. Therefore, I decided to try it this way. It does save a little bit of time, too, so that is good.

The things in bold are artifacts that end up on my blog. I try to include as much as possible here because, well, it's really satisfying to post here. Also it's a good record of my learning. But you can see that there are a LOT of steps, most notably the quizlet steps (I guess I would call that "vocabulary memorization") that do not end up on my blog.

The other thing that is misleading is the first step. It is VERY important, and very long. I have an entire separate spreadsheet to record what I have been doing to gain "exposure" to the language. It happens to also be the most fun task - the one where I have the most choices. The one where I get to be social. I love it.

I really like learning Czech, even though at times it feels like there are specific issues with this language that make it more difficult to learn than almost any other. I am really, really lucky that Sketch Engine is a Czech company. I think it's...well, very, very lucky for me.

A4.4.35 meta: o pokroku

Alright! I have been looking forward to writing this post all day. And finally I get to do it!

I've been thinking a lot about my language learning "pipeline." This is one of my favorite things to think about.

There are several phases in the pipeline:

1. EXPOSURE
Watch a movie, read (part of) a book, work on a translation, write an email, read an email, text, talk with people, etc. This is the most fun part.

2. PLAY WITH THE WORDS
Try (and mostly fail) to keep a meticulous list of unknown words and phrases. Find their frequencies in the cs SkELL 2.2 corpus. Perhaps there are flaws with using this corpus, but it's certainly better than no corpus!

3. RE-EXPOSURE
This is the step I have been really struggling to figure out! The fact is, I read a lot and talk to a lot of people. The vast majority of the time I read, there are new words (and sometimes ideas!) that I don't know. I put these words into the pipeline and then sometime later I figure out what they mean. That's not good because I read so much more fluently when I know what the heck the words mean. I had been recording myself reading various texts. I think it would be more effective studying for me to record myself rereading texts. This will require two things: keep better records of step 1. I don't always write down exactly what I'm reading. I just kind of go for it. The flexibility of the pipeline is important. It can remain flexible, but I should create a tab on my table that records what I'm reading the previous week. The second thing that I need to do is be more diligent at spending time daily in this re-exposure phase.

4. QUIZLET
This step is fantastic but there are some flaws in it as it currently stands. First, I don't typically get the corrected translations of 10 sentences to a willing collaborator until Thursday. That's too late in the week. I need to get it to them by Monday or Tuesday to allow them more time to record themselves. Second, I have been making the false assumption that more is better. It really is not. As soon as I stopped taking 50 question quizzes in that pády app it became easier for me to see and remember patterns! I have to, therefore, be much more choosy with my sentences.

Good sentences for Quizlet are:
- short!
- natural Czech constructions! These sentences will stay in my head for weeks, months - hopefully longer. I can easily pattern other sentences on them.
- something I'm likely to say! It is really stupid to talk about the state of something's airspace or compulsory liability! I intuitively know that I don't talk about those things!

I think it might be easier to recruit willing, computer literate volunteers to record themselves saying 10 sentences rather than 32+. My best collaborators on this end speak clearly and get it done in a relatively timely manner. I have only had one woman record her voice, which is a huge hole in my language production. I am a woman. I want to sound like one. I guess it won't make an enormous difference to my production. But it would be great to get a variety of voices. On a daily basis I get 2+ messages from willing collaborators who want to help me out. We'll see if the spirit is willing and the flesh isn't incompetent.

5. USE IT IN CONTEXT
This step is ridiculously fun. So far all my words have been high enough frequency that it's possible to slyly slip them into the text of an email (or some of them into one email, others into another) or into a chat conversation. I try to avoid it with people who might be reading this blog because, well, that's...that's awkward. It's like slapping something with a sticker that says, "OUR FRIENDSHIP IS A LANGUAGE EXPERIMENT." No thanks! My friend Petr slyly slips the words into our conversations, though. I didn't notice it at first, but then when I did, it cracked me up. It's fully okay in reverse that way. There is absolutely no way for me to signal to new collaborators that I would like them to do that. It's not a natural way to use language.

6. RE-TEST
This step should be quick and easy. It includes gathering my test mistakes and correcting them. The test from a native speaker is usually really short and simple. I have been doing this on Mondays.


Actually, let's see the breakdown for how things have been going:

1. EXPOSURE - Continuously, every day
2. PLAY WITH WORDS - Monday-Wednesday
3. RE-EXPOSURE - Not happening consistently
4. QUIZLET - Thursday-Saturday
5. USE IT IN CONTEXT - Friday-Saturday
6. RE-TEST Monday of the following week

I want to try to get things to work out more like this:

1. EXPOSURE - Continuously, daily, but slightly more purposefully. I will start to keep an "exposure" journal. That sounds really risque to be honest. Haha.
2. PLAY WITH WORDS - Monday-Tuesday
3. RE-EXPOSURE - Monday-Saturday
4. QUIZLET - Wednesday-Saturday
5. USE IT IN CONTEXT - Wednesday-Saturday
6. RE-TEST - Saturday

But I realize that I'm an idealist and things don't often, or even usually, turn out how I plan them. That's okay.

Now I'm going to attack my really nerdy pipeline spreadsheet. It is really addictive to "perfect" a spreadsheet.

A4.4.10 meta: o pokroku

Slowly crawling along at a snail's pace here.

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.