Cebuano and the quest for B2

The upper limit that I've heard is 3 years. If so I'm halfway there. I guess I'll find out won't I?

In a fit of wanderlust I discovered that I have been on an island where half the native language is hiligaynon. West of Cebu island is the island of Negros. I new already that they speak Cebuano where I was (with a slightly different accent), but I guess the other side of the mountain range must be like a different country.

Hmm, while I'm here let me list some useful things that are not in a book.
Abi nako nga... = I thought that...
Kanang... = um...
Morag...= um.../It's like...
pagka... = so...

I was told if I paused with kanang in a Filipino airport, maybe they will see me differently.

I was kind of worried today because I haven't been able to use Cebuano for several days, but after a good night's rest, I was able to use it today. There was someone in particular who was going easy on me, and then sped it up to normal. When he did that at first I was like "oh no, no way I can get that", and then a few seconds later I figure it out. Then later that day I saw someone in the store, they said one thing to me and I didn't get it Someone repeated it though, and it's due to a vocabulary gap.

In the evening, my Cebuano disappeared again. My energy level keeps taking control of my Cebuano level.

The map is great. Have you some photos of those places?

not really, but here's the whole map http://www.muturzikin.com/cartesasiesudest/5.htm

Well, I've got some Tagalog vocab on the backburner because of Tagalog TV that everyone likes to watch. Thankfully when I hear a word and don't know what it means, I can lean over and ask someone. So I'm getting bits of oral vocab in context here and there. One thing I found confusing was that sira in Cebuano is to close (from spanish) but int Tagalog it's break.

How does spoken Cebuano correspond to written? You have said you would estimate yourself near C1 in reading, but still have problems in listening comprehension. Are there things like vowel reduction (or consonant - you mention "l"s being dropped) that are causing the problems? Or is it agglutinated forms of words that appear more often in spoken form than written? Or is it mainly dialectical problems which you also mention? A combination of all of the above?

One thing I have found helpful in German, either regarding pronunciation or grammar, is to decide each day a couple things to concentrate on in my listening and reading. This seems to help make those things stand out and stick better. Especially with passive activities it is even easy to understand completely but not really in a way that would automatically activate. Like with declensions, absent a non-standard word order like object first for emphasis, it is easy to understand while not concentrating on those declensions because there are not alternate ways it could be interpreted.

I think my main problem is that some people speak less clearly than others. There are also some here that I might call "super fluent" because thier phrasing is like hmmm, like a babbling brook? I tried in the past to understand less than ideal audio to try and get used to it, but I don't think it really did anything. I find that the best way to prepare is to listen to allot of clear audio, and indeed, things crackly phone calls and listening to someone with background noise are now clearer.

Haha another problem I have is one word commands. For example:

Bob, Bukog! (literally: Bob, Bone!)

Thankfully, Cebuano is highly phonetic. One of the challenges is that (aside dropped l's) many of the letters are the same. o and u, i and e, b and v, f and p. The spelling can change accordingly. They will even spell words without those l's.

I remeber seeing a word in a dictionary whose definiton was "shoddily made" and it was something like madin-dypan. It took me 3 seperate times of looking at it and saying it until I figured out that this is an English phrase.

There's much the same problem in other filipino languages. I Sometimes get stuck in listening as well as reading... for the same reasons.

There's a glottal stop and accent that is not written, but if I know the variants, this does not block understanding because, for example I might be chosing between the words basa (read) and basâ (wet). If there is confusion, I'll know why.

To tell the truth some days I understand just fine and other days I don't. I tend to understand the people I've been around more, which is odd because one of those people has been labeled "hardest to understand" by the other missionaries that have already achieved fluency. (These people were born here and learned Cebuano in their teens, they also tried to learn Spanish, but that didn't go anywhere)

I often find it useful to "prime the pump" and listen to a newscast before going where the Cebuano speakers are. Somedays it will take up to 10 minutes to start understanding easily, and then that makes the rest of the day eaiser.

Tonight I noticed a strange phenomenon... I was listening to 4 cebuanos talking to each other and I would start to understand the speaker, someone else would start talking and after about 2 sentences I would start understanding them. It's like everytime someone new started talking I had to re-adjust my ears.

In addition to the normal 4 competencies with a language, i.e. listening, speaking, reading and writing, some authorities add a 5th: the ability to follow the normal course of a conversation among native speakers.

I don't imagine there are soap operas in Cebuano are there? What about talk shows? You seem to need some regular aural comprehension sources beyond that provided by courses or news, which are simpler. Something you could regularly listen to for a year or two, an hour or two a day.

As a last resort, perhaps you could occasionally ask permission in such social settings to record the conversation with a voice recorder, and slowly amass a personal library of such conversations which you could listen to at your leisure over, and over if necessary.

Edited to add: I just did a quick google and found a site listing television channels in Cebu. A couple of them have a morning show Mon-Fri at 6:30am. Those might be good shows to record if they follow the same format as elsewhere, with having guests and conversations with them. Of course they might not speak as colloquially as you encounter.

Hmm could you be more specific about that channel? I find that Cebuano soaps are quite rare.

I looked to find what I could on youtube. There is a Cebuano soap called "beyond forgetting", but I can only find clips. There was a clip I know I saw before but at the time I couldn't get anything, but now it's not so bad. Small victories.

Local TV Channels in Cebu - ABS & GMA

Of course I guess those morning shows could end up being in Tagalog.

For a bit of fun, I thought I would teach you a new word This word is tamsî. I'm a bit of a bird watcher, but I don't have as much time to do that as I would like. However this is a very common bird here, and I know its voice. Sometimes I wake up to it. It is closely related to the hummingbird, although not quite as nimble.

It looks like a hummingbird, it's beautiful.

I finally found some teleserie I can use. The very first lines I just couldn't make out after several tries. This looks like the right direction to go.

I also found a video with subtitles, and noticed that some of the guys did not pronounce things the way I expected. monaog sounded more like m'n'ng

Last night I got some help with the Ceubano series. There is one thread I have no trouble with, but the other one is posing difficulty. It's not the brick wall that it was, because I can grab enough to figure out what's going on, but I don't know everything that went by. Shadowing does not seem to be doing anything.

A local here, who actually does some foreign language evaluations, listened to me speak today, and said that's I'm already better because I'm not so tongue tied like I was maybe a month ago. She also said my speech needs to be more "hard", and someone else said to try talking from the throat.

I actually prefer not to use subtitles, but if there is vowel reduction going on here, which I think I mentioned earlier, then it can definitely be a big help. Hopefully learning such uses will extend to the speech of others, and not end up just being relevant to exactly one speaker, as if each Cebuano speaker you hear had his own dialect.

Is it still a problem of vocabulary for the series?

Though I don't use shadowing, the way I understand it as originally explained by Dr. Arguelles, was that one already had studied the material (made it comprehensible), thus meaning there should be no unknown vocabulary (unlike L-R). Thus the benefits of shadowing would not extend (beyond pronunciation and prosody) to other material that contains unknown vocabulary and grammar.

Sounds like Cebuano has a lot of guttural features and maybe a glottal stop. However when searching for that just now, I ran across a comment describing Tagalog as guttural and Cebuano as more sweet and musical. Perhaps the latter is more of a gender thing, and she meant that you shouldn't sound so girly .

Sometimes it's vocab, but only maybe a word here and there... I just can't catch all the sounds to shadow in the first place. Seriously, the first time there were times where I was like, "ok he said something about needing something?", then my freind would tell me and I would be like "you're kidding me, they said all THAT?"

Cebuano indeed has those stops on some words. I tried saying some from what I thought was the throat, and maybe they came out clearer. What you say is odd because they also told me the way I was speaking would be good for Tagalog.

One of the hazards of self-learning is not being forced to learn in a methodical way, which can leave gaps. I don't know if you have a pronunciation resource for Cebuano, similar to the programmatic type of FSI course, but perhaps a little more work on that to distinguish phonological boundaries would help. If you don't feel you need that, then maybe it is the common problem for language learners of having a hard time understanding rapid speech by native speakers. I would again make the suggestion I did earlier, that you seek permission to record conversations with others, that you can review later. You could even with the help of software, slow it down and see if that helps (if it doesn't then back to the phonetic boundaries training).

The other factor here might simply be that you are mostly exposed to colloquial and dialectical speech, which may be all there is in Cebuano. I mean, do college educated native speakers use an upper register and more clearly enunciated variety of Cebuano, or do they just use the prestige language of English?