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Grammar vs. Sexy Dancing

Hugo Rodallega — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:03:11 +0000

Found on a blog about learning Korean:

Even after almost thirty years of studying Korean, I still have a hard time understanding much of what is said on Korean comedy programs. I have gotten pretty good at understanding Korean news, but there are still certain reports that lose me.
Korean is so complicated that I usually get a little suspicious of people who claim they have become fluent in the language with less than ten years of study. It may be possible if the person lives in Korea for the entire ten years, is socially active, systematically studies the language everyday, and is much smarter than me, which is not than big of requirement; otherwise, I think it would be difficult.

Oh God… This guy’s Korean is no joke, but his blog centers on methodical grammar acquisition, and this is the result. 30 years. Can’t watch TV. Can’t fully understand the news. THIRTY YEARS.

To be fair, I bet he can conjugate the $%^# out of a verb worksheet.

According to this post, Ramses, Khatzumoto, et al. haven’t learned their languages to fluency because:

1) They haven’t been studying for ten years
2) They haven’t lived in the home country of their L2 for ten years
3) They immerse + SRS native media, rather than “systematically study” the language everyday
4) They are both of average intelligence (language learning requires intelligence, that’s why all stupid people are mute)

Sorry guys, looks like you aren’t fluent after all.

…but I bet you can watch television! XD

tl;dr Who needs grammar when you’ve got Alizee?

[ There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video. ]

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The End?

Hugo Rodallega — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:02:35 +0000

Bad news for language learners: yesterday the U.S. government raided the MegaUpload offices and seized its assets. For French students in particular, this is a devastating blow. Because French file-sharing networks are based almost entirely on direct-download links rather than torrents, and the vast majority of direct-download links are via MegaUpload, this means that as of today French file-sharing is effectively shut down until further notice.

I’m not a big fan of piracy. People should be paid for their work; if everyone pirated their movies, there wouldn’t be any movies. I get it. That’s why nearly every movie/show I downloaded I actually own on DVD. I just wanted the French language track, and didn’t feel I should have to re-buy something I already own, not to mention the cost of shipping hundreds of DVDs from France. I’m made of sexy lean muscle, not money.

So what’s the next move? I suppose from here on in French learners will have to use the files found on other file-sharing services (there are a lot of files out there for sure, but probably 80% were on MegaUpload), or go completely “legit” and re-buy the things they already own + pay ridiculous shipping prices to get them. Either way, the era of the French content harvest is over.

On a personal note, I think this is my government’s response to the SOPA/PIPA protest two days ago. 24 hours after the SOPA blackout, the Feds raided a file-sharing site. And of course, 12 hours later, Anonymous initiated DDoS attacks for revenge. As one wise commenter said, it looks like WWIII will be fought on the internet. In this new war for digital independence, the U.S. government is the old British army and the colonial American rebels are hackers. Irony is a stinky cologne.

As an American, all I can do is apologize. Sorry.

BUT HEY, wait, it’s not the end of the world, so turn that frown upside down! Yes, we’ll all have to start spending more money than we want to. So what? We didn’t find the time to spend on language study, we made the time. We can do likewise with money.

Now, as always, you choose your linguistic destiny. This is a constant, an inviolable law of the universe. If you want it, no one, from a man to an entire government, can do anything about it.

This isn’t a roadblock, it’s an opportunity to reevaluate your mission. Still want it? The hop over and join us on the other side. Know who’s over here?

French news babe Mélissa Theuriau.

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¡Feliz Año Nuevo! / Happy New Year!

Hugo Rodallega — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 22:02:40 +0000

Ya hace mucho tiempo que he publicado un artículo en el blog, pero el caso es que estoy muy ocupado.

El año pasado empecé a trabajar en un colegio de turismo. ¡Por fin doy clases de español a adultos!

Mis metas para este año nuevo son publicar más en el blog, terminar mis estudios y por supuesto disfrutar mi vida al máximo.

¿Cuáles son tus metas?

¡Feliz año nuevo a todos!

It has been a while since I published an article on this blog, but it’s just that I’m too damn busy.

Last year I started my new job at a school for tourism. Finally I’m giving classes to adults!

My goals for this year are publishing more on this blog, finish my studies and of course enjoy my life to the fullest.

What are your goals?

Happy New Year everybody!

Further reading:

Spanish Word of the Day: soler
A MANLY NEW YEAR
New Year, New Design

Further

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Tools of the Trade: Twitter Clients

Hugo Rodallega — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:03:29 +0000

Even the French love Kelly Kapowski!

Let’s keep it short and sweet, like my maid. Today’s tool: Twitter Apps!

I downloaded the official Twitter app for Mac and found some bitchin stuff with it.

The trick? You have to find one, just one L2 person who produces something awesome and whose taste you trust (I used Cyprien from youtube). Add this person on Twitter, then add every single person he thought was cool enough to follow. BLAMMO, never-ending awesome content stream. I leave the app open and pop it up every once in a while to find hundreds of new tweets about new videos I never would have seen, funny slang, cool pictures, etc.

The internet is useful again!

Further reading:

Mini-post: Tools of the Trade
Twitter
Spanish on Twitter

Further

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A MANLY NEW YEAR

Hugo Rodallega — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 22:04:14 +0000

2011 is over.

Done. Gone. For-e-ver.

Not fluent yet? Join the club.

You can spend all the time you want thinking about the mistakes you made last year while you cry into heavy-flow lady pads, but all that’ll get you is a one way ticket to nowhere. Plus, you’ll have to buy new tampons.

Chew on this: you are you better than you were. You suck less.

This time next year, you’ll have had 365 more chances to practice. Imagine how much less you’ll suck.

Did you practice today? Then 2012 is yours for the taking.

You’re gonna be big, kid.

Happy New Year

Further reading:

New Year, New Design

Further

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Let’s Play French

Hugo Rodallega — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 22:06:28 +0000

Women tell me this all the time

So I’m pretty pumped right now. Not “yeah look at my ripped shoulders” pumped, but “holy potatoes, why didn’t I think of this before?!” pumped.

There are these things called “Let’s Play” videos on the internet, which you may have heard of. Basically, someone wears a mic and records him/herself playing through a video game from beginning to end, talking to you as if you were sitting next to them. It’s kind of a simulation of hanging out at a friend’s house, shooting the breeze while they play a video game. I was aware they were around, but last week had a major realization: OMG FRENCH PEOPLE PROBABLY MAKE THESE THINGS!

I was right. I found a few French online communities where they are posting these like they’re going out of style. The first thing I did was download an eight-hour Let’s Play of Metal Gear Solid, because all of the dialogue in the game is perfectly subtitled. Which means… I ripped these videos to shreds and added them to my Anki deck.

Which brings up the fact that SOME VIDEO GAMES HAVE EXACT SUBTITLES SOME VIDEO GAMES HAVE EXACT SUBTITLES!

Sorry, I got a little excited. Anyway, I’m waist deep in my next game, Mass Effect 2. I have decided to rip obscene amounts of dialogue from this game, and actually got a French-French dictionary app for looking up new words (a first for me, I never look words up). My Anki deck now looks like this:

"Hmm… On dirait que leur équipe d'infiltration a fait chou blanc."

The “question” is the audio, the picture is the answer. Did I hear/understand correctly? Pass. No? Fail. Which never happens, because I never faire chou blanc.

And that’s what I’ve been up to. I anticipate ripping at least 1000 sentences from Mass Effect 2, because it’s fun, at “i+1″ level for me, and easy to Anki-fy. Plus, it has excellent voice acting. In fact, I’m getting so used to French dubbing that I actually recognize a lot of the voice actors now (I’ve had many “Oh hey, that’s the dude from Dexter, that’s the chick from Lost” moments).

Want the French Let’s Play sites? Here ya go:

http://frapstesjeux.xooit.com/portal.php

http://www.lets-play.fr/

Let’s Plays are without a doubt the coolest new resource I’ve found. The only caveat is that you need to be around an intermediate level to really get the most out of them. But hey, do whatever is fun. It worked for me!

Further reading:

The Manly Alpha-Male’s Guide to Reading Things With French Words
Mandarin, French and SRSing
The Manly Alpha Male’s Guide to Guerrilla Wordfare

Further

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一石二鳥 and a Milestone

Hugo Rodallega — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 22:04:03 +0000

Haven’t learned your Kanji? It means “one stone, two birds.”

So I hit a major milestone today: 1000 cards in my audio-only Anki deck. Am I fluent in French? Not quite. Am I getting damn good at shoulder presses? Yes.

This is not your normal “learn 10,000 sentences, input them into Anki” deck. My style is based on audio, not text. I watch thousands of hours of TV and movies, and listen to podcasts like a maniac. When I feel like it, I chop a film or TV show into mp3s ranging from a single sentence to a small conversation and make them into Anki cards. I just listen, and if I understand, I move on. If I have to listen over and over again to pick up some detail, I mark it hard and do 50 crunches. If I don’t know a word, I fail it and do 200 crunches. If I can’t figure it out the next day, suspend it (this has only happened once).

Now back to the title of this post: 一石二鳥. One stone, two birds. Anki is the stone. The first bird is my Anki deck. What is the second, sexier and more important bird? The process of making the deck.

Making the deck means getting out of passive listening mode and into an intense, scorched-earth approach to listening (it worked for the Russians!). I spend upwards of an hour combing through maybe 15 minutes of dialogue, really focusing on listening to every word as I make my MP3s (and I don’t use subtitles, so it’s all based on listening as best I can). I think these periods of intensive listening have been really beneficial to kicking my French up a notch. My brain is getting ripped.

Working through just ten minutes of audio can provide hundreds of sentences, depending on your source. Movies provide the fewest sentences, TV shows are somewhere in the middle, and podcasts provide a blistering amount of possible cards.

I only recently started taking this Anki thing seriously, because I figured that staying immersed in media provided its own natural SRS. This works for the basics, but not really for the more advanced vocabulary and phrases. Most importantly, I didn’t take into consideration the enormous benefits of the process of constructing a deck, and the sexy results of 50 unexpected crunches.

1000 sentences isn’t really a big deal. No, I think the real milestone is realizing the value of mixing intensive listening periods in to your immersion environment.

Also, my abs are getting really defined. The stone is protein. The birds are my pecs and abs.

That’s what this post was really about.

Further reading:

Spanish Word of the Day: pájaro
Dearest dudes and babes,
Using FrenchPod (and SpanishPod) to Get Sentences With Audio

Further

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A Weekend of Compelling, Sword-based Input

Hugo Rodallega — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 22:02:35 +0000

VRAIMENT BADASS

So yesterday I watched all of the Le Seigneur des anneaux (Lord of the Rings) films in one sitting. The extended versions. Yep, it took about twelve hours, but I was pretty much glued to my seat.

The day before yesterday, I watched every episode of Le Trone de fer (Game of Thrones) in one sitting. The whole season. Yep, it took ten hours, but I didn’t feel the time passing at all.

Both nights, after my marathon viewings, I did some light French reading before bed and was kind of blown away by how natural the day felt, despite being spent entirely in French. I’m starting to think that when input is really compelling, when you are so into your media that you forget it’s in another language, your capacity for acquisition really opens up. And I’m not alone in thinking this.

Dr. Stephen Krashen, my personal hero, penned a paper called “The Compelling (not just interesting) Input Hypothesis,” which details just this phenomenon. A food analogy, because I’m hungry: Think of your media as a burrito, and your L2 as the tortilla holding it together. You didn’t order it for the friggin’ tortilla, you want to get to that sweet meat within; the tortilla just happens to be holding it all together.

Give Krashen’s paper a read (it’s only two pages long), do some shoulder presses, put on your battle armor, make a protein shake, and spend the day eating in L2 burritos. It totally works.

Gluttons make the best language learners.

TASTE THE COMPREHENSION

Further reading:

Understanding Spanish: How to Make the Transition from Input To Output
The Manly Alpha-Male’s Guide to Reading Things With French Words
Input vs. Output

Further

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Frame Games

Hugo Rodallega — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 22:04:53 +0000

After publishing my post about setting frames to make your language learning ten times more effective and future-proof, I received an e-mail from long-time reader Marcelle. She wrote the following:

A story I love to tell is when we were sitting around a pool in sunny Cape Town and I asked a 5 year old girl if she could swim. She looked me straight in the eye and said: “Yes, it’s just that nobody has taught me yet.”
How’s that for a frame?!

The girl realized, young as she was, that everyone is capable of swimming but that it just requires certain knowledge to do so. We, as intelligent adults, should realize that everyone is capable of learning a language.

If you’re reading this post and understand every word of it, that means that you’ve learned English to fluency. It doesn’t matter if English is your first, second or third language, you’ve learned enough to understand this post.

Of course you’re able to speak Spanish, it’s just that you haven’t taught yourself it yet. When you get rid of that minor annoyance, you’ll speak Spanish with no problem.

How’s that for a positive frame you can use right now?

If you have a similar story or have used a positive mindset successfully to learn a language, please e-mail me your story so that I can publish it.

Further reading:

Have a Solid Frame

Further

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Mini-post: Tools of the Trade

Hugo Rodallega — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 22:02:42 +0000

"Any tool is a weapon if you hold it right." – Ani DiFranco

The internet is:

The greatest language acquisition tool ever invented by Al Gore.
The greatest hindrance to language acquisition ever invented by anybody.

Optimally, you use the internet like you use a gas station. You fill up your tank (media), and cruise around until you’re on fumes. In reality, most people hang out at the digital gas station, smoking cigarettes and whistling at high school chicks while doing donuts their step-dad’s F150. Cut it out.

Today’s Mac tool is called: SELF CONTROL

Today’s PC tool is called: FREEDOM

These are programs that completely deactivate the internet on your computer for a time period of your choosing. The beauty of it is that you only need about five seconds of willpower to activate the thing, and then you can rest easy knowing that your only entertainment option is your L2 media. Resetting, powering off, and furiously rubbing a magnet on your hard drive will have no effect on this badass software.

I’m going to bold this sentence because of its importance: SelfControl is the only icon I have on my desktop. This program is so important that I feel it needs to be front, center, and in my face.

The internet is a flaming sword of power, handed to us by Prometheus’s hot girlfriend Kristie.

Use it… sparingly.

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