Wednesday August 19th

• 12:00-14:00: Hanging out in *bucks reviewing old flashcards (lessons 1-18)
• 20:00-21:00: Home working on lessons 18, 19

So today I decided to stop bitching about the lack of grammar notes in L-Lingo and start looking things up in my books (Burmese for Beginners Book and CDs Combo by Gene Mesher which is excellent and also my school textbooks). L-Lingo is great in that it’s this interactive computer program which uses progressively difficult grammar to test you and that you can click on an word or phrase over-and-over until you are hearing it properly … but without the grammar notes it’s not complete (from what I understand Thai and Mandarin grammar notes are either out now or out soon).

I love how languages are like puzzles, one day a sentence baffles me and then the next day when I have all the pieces down the sentence finally makes sense. These ahh-ha! moments are one of the things that makes language learning so much fun, conversations which used to be gibberish slowly unfold to reveal themselves to us once we grok a certain percentage of the vocabulary and grammar. The reason that I wrote “certain percentage” and not “all” is that I don’t think that it’s necessary to understand every word that a person says in order to understand him. Just today I read an article in the New Yorker and encountered two English words that I didn’t know, but I still understood what was being said. The same thing happens to me with Thai when I’m in a situation where some sort of industry-specific vocabulary is being used.

Monday August 17th

• 14:00-14:45: New material from chapters 14, 15 (Burmese->English with the computer)
• 16:30-17:15: New material from chapters 14,15 (English->Burmese with paper flashcards), plus some older flashcards

Tuesday August 18th

Busy studying for exams today, only managed to put in

• 14:00-15:00: Review of paper flashcards

Wednesday August 19th

• 14:30- 15:20: Review of lesson 12, starting in on lessons 16, 17
• 16:55-:17:55: Review of lessons 16, 17, starting in on lessons 18, 19

The reason that I write down the time of day that I do my studying is to show that I’m breaking up the sessions as much as possible. Everything that I have read about memory says that the brain starts to slow down after about 45 minutes and that we are more effective if we do a quick burst of studying (45-60 min), then get up and stretch, do something physical, walk around, etc … and come back to it. Since I am also studying for some exams at Ram this weekend, I have been breaking up my Burmese study sessions with studying for my government and culture exams as they (probably?) tax the brain differently.

It’s becoming more obvious how grammar notes would help me out (they are working on it). I’m memorizing lots of sentences which I could readily use, however if I didn’t have a year of Burmese classes from my university, I would have no idea what was going on. Burmese (like Japanese) marks the subject, object and verb of the sentence with particles. While not really possible to translate into English (or Thai), they are essential when building sentences. The example sentences that they give just throw these particles out there, but don’t explain them. Additionally, while giving sentences which use negation (“The boss is not standing”), they don’t explain that “ma …. bhuu” needs to be wrapped around a verb in order to negate it.

One last final complaint is that they have started using the Burmese words for he, she, they, I, you and everyone without actually telling us what they were. Again, I was able to look them up in my textbooks, but have a feeling that people who are new at language study might be hung-up.

Thursday August 12th, Friday August 13th

Thursday and Friday were holidays, which should have meant that I had more time than normal to work on this project, but I ended up teaching strange hours and running around doing stuff. It’s unfortunate that I don’t have an Android phone with which to test out the mobile version of L-Lingo, but I was able to get a lot of use out of their paper flash cards and MP3s. I probably only put in two hours on each day, but still feel like I made progress.

At the end of week one, I can comfortably recall the 60 words in lessons 1-10 (Burmese->English and English->Burmese) and have a good grasp on the 18 words in lessons 11, 12, 13 (all lessons have exactly 6 new words). Today I’ll start back in with new words, and also review old words. I’m starting to realized how important the audio recordings are for learning these words, and am starting to think that I’m going to have to get my teacher to record part of my textbook for me. Has anyone done much voice recording with the iPhone? Or should I buy a dedicated voice recorder?