Friday Five 12-August-2022 Double + Extra for Language!

[elusivek]

thefridayfive 

1) What's the weather like where you are right now?
Hot. Humid. Typhoon-possible.

2) Has your weather been seasonally appropriate lately, or has it been unusual?
It's been more or less right. Gradual climb temperature-wise, and typhoon season coming a little later than usual, but more or less right.

3) Have you noticed any trends in the weather near you over the past few years?
Pretty much the same, it seems.

4) Are you worried about climate change?
I believe it, but I don't see it obviously in this part of the world. There are no huge icebergs to obviously see melting, so it doesn't feel real, but I don't disregard it either.

5) Are you doing anything to combat climate change?
In primary school, when the topic was touched briefly, a teacher said "hair sprays (the pressured cans ones) destroy the ozone" so I've since not used anything that's air-pressured, be it hair sprays or deodorants. Don't know how helpful I'm being on that front. I also try not to leave the air con on when I'm not around. As I've mentioned before, I only switch on the air con when it's really unbearable, and during the night time. I mostly try to deal with the heat with the fan, or outright going out to the mall or something with public air con.


http://f.riday5.com/

1. One lump or two?
I'm not sure what this question is alluding to... at the sight of "lump" I only think of breast cancer, so it's no lumps, please, thank you very much.
/edit
Just read other's answers and apparently it's about sugar cubes LOL so standard for coffee it's 2, none for straight tea, 2 for milk tea.

2. What was in the last box you received in the mail?
I don't remember. Probably some shopping I did.

3. In those places where you prepare your own soft drink, how much ice do you put in the cup?
Surprise, surprise, I never drink soft drinks. I'm thinking this question means for those soft drink machines at convenience stores? I (almost) never, drink soft drinks.

4. How do you have your workspace decorated?
A couple of "trays" for documents to be processed, a small mirror, a couple of figurines and on the partition walls photos of my dogs and one very important piece of paper listing the public holidays of the year LOL.

5. What’s your favorite dice-driven game?
People are going to think I lead a sad, sad life, because... dice games were never big in my life. I know we had a box of monopoly, and I think we had a box of... is that called ladders? or Snakes and ladders? But we almost never played on it. I don't recall ever having any "family time" where everyone sat around playing games. There were a couple of toys like a... some magnet thing you move with a stick so the worm above moves and something, but I think 4 years was a rather big gap in age in terms of these home games: I may have wanted to play but my Sis had no interest, and the parents didn't have time for my shenanigans?


Next, these aren't any Friday Five questions but I figured I'd group them into the same post. Snagged these language-related questions from annaserene 

What would you consider your native language?
Technically, Portuguese is my native language. I even started at a Portuguese nursery then kindergarten. But soon my Mom put me in an English-based school because she thought "poor dad, if the kids don't speak English they can't communicate with him!"  I have no memory of this though.

Over the years, I got better at English, and Mom then thought my Portuguese was really weak, so she wanted to swap me back to a Portuguese-based school. I had already "gained consciousness" by then and vehemently refused.

However, in English school, 95% of classmates and many teachers are Chinese, so Cantonese Chinese was common communication language. I consider English my native language though. For most of my life, it was English in writing, reading, education and everything. Even my diary as a kid was all in English.

What was your first language learning experience?
In the English school, I mentioned 95% of classmates are Chinese. The remaining 5% are mostly Portuguese or Portuguese descent or somehow related to Portuguese, and these are the kids that would get pulled out of Chinese class to go to a "Portuguese Class". One year however, in upper kindergarten (third and last year of kindergarten I think), the school was unable to procure a Portuguese language teacher, so everyone had to take a year of Chinese, but for the Portuguese gang, the subject score got turned to something like an "extra-curricular class score" and did not count to the final exam and eligibility for promoting to Primary 1.

I don't recall much of these Chinese classes... I only remember having to write a lot in repetition. I remember one homework where we were to write 火車 all over the page (a page with many squares and you write one character per square) but for some reason I wrote 車火 and then the teacher had me write another whole page.

As for the Portuguese class, it didn't feel much like an extra class because mostly it's just chatting with the teacher. The longest same teacher we had was for 2 years, so every time we had a new teacher for the year it was the same story. "Introduce yourself in Portuguese", "Greet everyone in Portuguese", "okay, now we learn the simple present", "then we learn the simple past", and then it's "the past perfect tense"... and usually by this time it's the end of the year (and the next year with a new teacher, all over again). The furthest we've reached was the imperative I think.

As for "learning a new language in a class setting that I completely knew nothing about", that would be French. It was fun. I actually did like it. In the end it was a schedule clash with school that made me have to stop it.

What languages have you studied and why did you learn them?
So we've got English and Portuguese down. For Cantonese Chinese, I am fluent, but back then I could only speak it. I never really learnt it in writing (except for that one year in kindergarten). In Secondary school, they did mandate the Portuguese gang to take extra classes for Chinese, but it was more like "extracurricular classes". All students had to take extracurricular classes on Saturday. So while my friends got into volleyball, badminton, cooking, sewing, and all that, the Portuguese Foreigners gang were stuck with taking "Special Chinese". The Portuguese gang also had to take an extra Portuguese class as well. But it was hardly formal, because there were so few of these students, that every year it was a ragtag of say, 4 students in Form 1, 5 in Form 2, 1 in Form 3, etc.... So again, every year we meet again, but with someone new and someone gone, so we couldn't proceed further, because we had to start all over again for the someone new. And it was considered as "extracurricular" only, so nobody ever took these classes seriously.

My gang of friends were into anime and manga, and then I liked the aesthetics of it, so whenever i had extra pocket money leftover I'd buy a Nakayoshi, more to look at the pretty pictures than anything. I wasn't particularly interested in Japanese just yet, but soon enough. I had always like video games but I was never able to complete any games, because I didn't understand Japanese. So games like Final Fantasy, Mana Series, and all that. I've played a lot, I hardly ever finished any LOL. When I really put an effort (that I remember) in Japanese was, playing the RPG Slayers. I had high levels already, and it was taking forever to level up, yet I had problems with defeating a certain Boss. So finally, I took the effort to learn the Japanese Hiragana and Katakana so that I can understand the equipment list. Being able to tell ショートソード (short sword) from シミター (scimitar)  was VERY helpful in making my characters stronger LOL (because, well, the shopping system in-game did not have "stats change figures" and one had to actually buy the equipment to put it on and then only knowing if it's a better equipment or not, and I didn't want to waste money recklessly, but that's gamers talk so I'll stop in case people are getting confused.)

French was just something that happened one boring summer. There IS an Alliance Française just at the ground floor of my apartment building, and one summer I was bored so I decided to just go down there and take a summer class to help kill time, and then decided to continue with regular weekend classes.

I later learnt Japanese properly in University. And there was a point in time where I was pretty, I wouldn't say fluent, but at least, the language came to me easily enough. I did write a blog and the words came easily. But the university course I was on, Japanese wasn't a mandatory thing, so they never sent us for any of the JLPT tests and once I graduated, there wasn't a chance to continue and whatnot.

I went back to Chinese writing in around 2010 I think. They had a special course for "Foreigners that could speak Chinese" but had to learn to write it. Took me 2 years, and now I do have certification to say I have Primary 6 level of Chinese, which is a colloquially accepted minimum level of Chinese required for jobs.

I only started to look at German in the recent years. It was easier to find a Russian course than a German course here in Macau (no idea why) so I never really had the chance. Whenever there was something German related I would take it, so I've on-and-off attempted to learn German many times over many years... only until 2 years ago when there was a "proper" and continuous course did I happily take up and actually learn something. But even that has fallen through (thanks covid) so now I'm on online learning for German, and it's tough. (More on that later). I just thought since I'm Austrian as well, then I should know German, right?

How does your personality affect your language learning?
I don't know... my "whatever" attitude sometimes makes me seemingly lazy LOL. Say like in German with all the declensions in Dativ/Akkusativ/Genetiv... I know the declension table by heart, but then, when it's "live speaking" my brain doesn't wire that information back to me, so I'm just meh. Whatever. And then get all the declensions wrong, sorry, LOL.

Do you prefer learning a language in a class or on your own?
I definitely prefer to learn in a class. I can't do self-study. I do not have the discipline to focus... and not just that. Self-study at home sucks, because, as mentioned before, if my Mom sees me at home, she thinks I'm free. I wrote just a couple days or weeks ago, I was on the treadmill, obviously busy running, and Mom throws a snit and wants me to stop to help her "Very Urgent" (not) thing on her phone. (That's also partially the reason why I didn't finish my thesis, but that's another story).

On Rocket German, they have this function to speak/repeat what is said. I think they use the Siri type thing for speech recognition, then it tells you if you are right or wrong. Again, when Mom and Dad hears me doing that, they butt in to see what I'm doing and ask all the things in the world... each and every time... so I do it late at night when they are sleeping (but then I'm tired too) or when they go out and I'm alone... which is not always, because they expect me to go out with them to "help carry stuff".

What are your favourite language learning materials?
My first Japanese sensei at University made his own materials, and to-date I can still recite some of the conversations he came up with. バス代はいくらですか？2.5パタかです！(Pataca is the local currency here) LOL! He also created one of those... something like a tongue twister with a rhythm and dance moves to help us memorize prepositions: 右・左・前・後ろ・上・下・中・間・隣・向かい

He was also very accepting of the crazy dialogues I wrote in class for practice. Accepting as in... erm... let me think. At that time I had just started reading Terry Pratchett, and I remember I wrote a dialogue that had Otto the vampire (loves taking photographs with flash and dies instantly because, duh, he's a vampire, then has to be revived with blood)... and the dialogue I wrote had something to do with that as well. Ken-San found it weird and just commented I have weird things in my head but graded the dialogue accordingly - because there were no grammar mistakes despite it seemingly making no sense to him LOL. I suppose he understood fandoms and weird things that can happen in them.

I think materials that somehow correlate to your direct surroundings and experiences are best. Say for example, in Minnano Nihongo, there are certain conversations about train tickets, or garbage disposals and such. But, there are no trains in Macau. Garbage sorting was non-existent in Macau back then, so combustible days and non-combustible days made no sense to me. (Now obviously I know what it's all about). So the sensei that custom made those materials? It was great.

How much time do you spend on language per day?
I'm now only actively learning German, I don't think I can focus on too many things at the same time. Whenever I have some free time I would do a lesson or two at Rocket German. I also muck around on DuoLingo and while I understand repetition helps with memory, that kind of repetition is just too much, and I can't jump levels... I don't need to repeat Wasser and Bier anymore.

I haven't made a schedule yet, but now I'm trying out a couple of German podcasts as well. Once I find one I like, then I'd like to be able to listen to at least an hour of German podcast a week. I currently have one on that I quite like the format and the guy speaks relatively slowly (not slow like news in slow German) and enunciates his words clearly, but it's a true crime podcast in German, so like... 90% of the things just go over my head LOL. I catch some phrases and words that I would understand, but it doesn't help with my overall understanding of the podcast it self. I'm also worried I'll learn to ignore hearing what I don't understand too, so I might as well dial down and find something less daunting.

What are your short-term and long-term language goals?
Don't particularly have any goals. I'd like to be able to at least communicate in German one day. I once had a wish to at least take the JLPT up to N3 or N2 but I figured... I'm past my prime in working or doing anything in Japan anyway (too set in my current job nature). I know enough Japanese that I won't get lost in Japan if I'm stranded there, but probably can't do much further than that, and I've made my peace with it, so it's Ok.

What is your favourite language?
I have to say Cantonese. I am fluent-level, and yet I am still learning something new almost everyday. Cantonese is actually an "older", more "traditional" language than Mandarin. Some poems, when read in Mandarin, don't  make sense and have to be read in Cantonese. It's also very versatile, the 9 intonations make Cantonese a better dialect to "transliterate" foreign words as well. Alas. It's all Mandarin now in China. I've been asked why I don't make an effort to learn Mandarin, and my response is "I've already gotten the most difficult Chinese dialect down my belt, why should I take up Mandarin?"... though that is in jest, I know I HAVE to learn Mandarin eventually........

What is the next language you want to learn?
Focusing in German.

What advice could you give new language learners?
I don't know. I haven't successfully learn and become fluent in any of my language endeavors LOL. Just keep at it, I suppose. Combine it with something that you actually like and practical. For example, when I was learning Chinese writing, I negotiated with the teacher to pick up a "dim sum menu" 點心紙 and teach us the characters on it, instead of always the text in the book. It was practical, and the class loved it. Managed to learn a lot more characters from that one menu than from the book.

Comments

[gilda_elise]

5) Are you doing anything to combat climate change?
In primary school, when the topic was touched briefly, a teacher said "hair sprays (the pressured cans ones) destroy the ozone" so I've since not used anything that's air-pressured, be it hair sprays or deodorants. Don't know how helpful I'm being on that front.


The ozone destroying property of pressurized cans were the chlorofluorocarbons used. Most countries outlawed them in the late 80s-early 90s.

[elusivek]

I see…. Thanks!