Cebuano and the quest for B2

"usage", or as Linguamor put it in several posts, "the way words pattern together". Most people don't distinguish between "idiom" and "idiomatics", which is why I also prefer "usage", though I sometimes use "idiomatics" in this forum as well. "Idiomatics" can wrongly be taken to mean just a collection of idioms, i.e. proverbs, phrases, aphorisms. "Colloquial" is not synonymous with "usage"/"idiomatics" either, as it connotes a common register, while usage is not dependent on register. Anyway that is the way I understand it all, though perhaps a linguist would define those terms differently.

Took a break today and tried to take on Lord of The Rings in Portugese. I've got about 98% comprehension. Thank you language families.

This made me laugh. I love that you "took a break" by reading a novel in a language that you've never studied. Ha!

haha yes I find joy in giving into wanderlust. I can't even use it here. With Spanish at least there's Chavacano. It's not fair to say I never studied it though. I listened my way through FSI Portugese programatic 1 already. I was expecting to have to look more up from LOTR today. I hesitate to bump my Portuguese up to intermediate though, because I can't speak it and I still get stuck on some basic words like "for".

On the other hand reading in English is a whole new pleasure now because there's no fear I'll get stuck on something. I'm still waiting for the final installment of "Name of The Wind."

worked a little on my Hungarian listening. The vowels are driving me bonkers. A long e sounds very close to an English long a, but not in the word estet (the second e is long) I assume I'm missing some additional info about the word accent.

edit: found a phrasebook with phonetic spelling and there was nothing weird going on there. I hear it now. Glad I sorted that out early.

my nieghbor may be the thing that brings me up to the next stage. She really doesn't want to use English at all. They got robbed again,although it's something trivial this time. managed to get through all that with just a few hiccups. The biggest one was where I was using a mag- prefix instead of a maka- I was getting kind of tounge tied and talking my way around some stuff. Then there was the pause where I couldn't remember the word for "sister/brother". That was odd.

I'm out of Cebu for a few months. It was kind of cool this time making the trip and figuring out what languages people were speaking. I'm most recently goldlisting some more Tagalog words. I find that I can do this even with jet lag... it kind of wakes me up.

So are you going to suspend Cebuano studies for the time being? It does seem like you are wanderlusting more as of late .

I'm not intentionally suspending it, no, but my schedule will be quite different and I don't know where I'll fit it in yet. Wanderlusting indeed... I studied hirigana while in a Japanese airport. I've got to get some focus back

want to pay 20$ for something that's free? now you can! https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/foreign-service-institute/id815344534?mt=8

Damn, the most expensive FSI course on eBay at the moment is $5.99. That $20 stuff must be really good.

Well, I finally got back to Cebuano again. With the jet lag the last few days it probably would have been counterproductive anyways. Picked up with the last watched episode with no problems, went on to the next. There are several times in the show now where they turn up the background music and I'm like, Really?? can anyone understand what these people are saying at this point? Myself I can usually make it out the third time around, but not always. Then again, I took a look at that (swedish?) CEFR checklist, and I would say the main thing holding me off of B2 for listening is dealing with background noise. (And it looks like the main thing holding me off of C2 reading is understanding older literary works).

Being back around Spanish speakers, I've been trying to ramp that back up. Surprisingly, I usually hear just fine, but there's some quality of speech that come up with certain speakers that makes it very hard for me. I haven't figured out if it's a regional accent or what. I picked up my copy of "Don Quixote" and it's a bit more readable than last time around but there's whole paragraphs sometimes that I can't make out. Most of the time there's a footnote for the native reader. I don't know this story.

I found an old copy of Transparent Language's "101 languages of the world" which is just the right thing right now to get me off track It's been a while since I pulled it out and it's so old that it requires at least windows 95. I went through the Afrikaans bit, a bit concerned about some grammar points like grammar, but low an belhold this one has no grammatical gender or any other difficult grammar to it.

Perhaps I should start a multi language log.

If I go on much longer like this I shall have to change my avatar to this... a bird that goes everywhere. Rather than the current bird that stays near the Philippines.
the-story-of-the-most-common-bird-in-the-world

I must recommend the book Language Master Key. This guy advocates a listening-heavy approach and I think he's spot on with that idea. He fills in a gap missing in most "how to learn language" books, because he has allot to say about this area, where most everyone else says to just do it. I really feel his advice has allot of experience behind it, while explaining in a simple way. There are a few ideas that I might try out in the future. One is listening to what someone says in L2 and translating it into L1. And the other way around. He likes the theories of Krashen, but he's not a slave to it, and it quick to point out when it contradicts his own experience.

For vocab (and grammar) he uses a notebook, as well as flashcards so that he can easily mix up the order of the words. The way he sets it up is attractive but I'm hard pressed to move away from Goldlist for my part.

Best I can sort out, he recommends studying in 3 week spurts. I guess it's because during this you will have fast progress and your motivation will go up, but after three weeks you really can't keep it up any more.

I recognize some bits from his blog. Including how-long-does-it-take-to-become-fluent. I found this interesting because it has an estimated time for learning a language to B2. Cebuano would be right along the lines of Tagalog, at Category III language, and according to this 10 hours a week would take about 3 years. I think if I did any more than that in a week I would probably pass out.

I've been listening to the Gospel of Luke in Cebuano. It's at a speed and clarity that I can easily pick things up, so I"m continuing on this path for the moment. I've found listening to clear speech helps you sort out unclear speech and background noise later on.

On a 2 hour drive yesterday I put one of these to use:



To play the Cebuano Book of Luke, while I was driving, from my ipad. (Incidentally, I was happy that one of the features on my 2001 car was that it had a tape deck) I did something like this on a 30 minute trip and slowly felt me working my comprehension back up the whole way, after a bit of a lull.

Anyway, after an hour of this, I couldn't stand it any more and wasn't really getting anymore (I might be hard pressed in English at this point) and turned it off. On the way back I tried it a bit but I was so sick of it. I really burned myself out today

Thanks for the tip.

Ron's blog is one of my favourites! He learned Arabic in an intensive US military language course, which gives him an interesting perspective. No snake oil - just solid language learning advice. And he also seems like all-round nice guy.

Yeah, I just got a new FM transmitter to accomplish the same thing since my car has only a slot for a CD (what's that ?). Guess we're both admitting the state of the art of our driving machines...