Great New Yorker article on a conlang

spotted here on Metafilter.

Hyperpolyglot videos

Nice Canadian news item here on hyperpolyglots, with quite a few faces familiar from the language blogroll (Richard Simcott, Steve Kaufmann).  Also: Benny gets the polyglots singing.

Stopping and starting

Have been stopping and starting a lot of things this year without actually completing very much.  Japanese, Chinese, French, German.  All stuff that I've tinkered with many times in the past.  It's a destructive habit as it means I'm surrounded with reminders of unfinished projects, and re-starting is always a dismal reminder of a previous failure.  I get very enthusiastic about things for about three days—I'm a classic three-day monk—then it tails off rather rapidly.  I was really keen on getting my French up to scratch a week or two ago, wasn't I?

Jana Fadness has recently posted on the subject of Just Do Something; ie, don't be paralysed by choices.  Paralysis by choices seems a particular danger for Japanese learners, as there are several different and apparently legitimate ways to go about it.  Work through a romanised introductory book, or use a kana text?  Learn all the kanji first of all using Heisig?  Perhaps go further and even do the readings of the kanji too before doing anything else?  Stick to audio until the conversational language is mastered?  Try to do everything at once?  A lot of choices.

Le Figaro

Bought a copy of Le Figaro yesterday and read about 75% of it with about 75% understanding, which isn't bad; didn't bother with a dictionary, just ploughed on.  I tend to feel daftly guilty when skipping bits I don't understand in a foreign-language text, as though I'm wasting a resource.  I have to try to remember that I'm never actually going to run out of foreign stuff to read!  The Internet exists now!

I linked the other day to that Helen DeWitt article on reading Proust in French; it's something I wouldn't mind trying if my French got good enough - I'd want to read it in English first, but it'd be interesting to reread it in the original, trying to cling on but using the English as a crib when necessary.  A long-term goal.

Documentary on the Michel Thomas method

That documentary I linked to yesterday, in three parts starting here, is worth watching - 1997 (it seems) BBC documentary on his method.  None of it will be surprising to anyone who has tried using the Michel Thomas Method CDs that came out afterwards, but apparently the Method was very much a secret back then.  Startled to see Leo Marks, cryptographic maven for the wartime Special Operations Executive, chipping in with praise.  (Marks's memoir Between Silk And Cyanide is one of the very best books I've ever read).  Thomas is pickier than most British teachers would be on the matter of pronunciation, but then he has to be - nobody's writing anything down so the sounds are all that anyone has.  I'm embarrassed that I've tried and failed a few times to learn the IPA and understand that two-dimensional chart you put the vowels on, but to me languages really means books, not sounds.  And avoiding French orthography saves you a lot of time and worry; far too much of my school French was taken up with getting verb endings right that in fact all sound the same; they're just spelling rules of no interest if you're trying to get to conversational competence.

Someone will eventually 'gamify' language learning successfully and make a fortune out of it.  As someone who loves maths but dislikes combinatorics it always astonishes me that people who 'hate numbers' (their own words) can get pleasurably addicted to hardest-possible Sudoku.  There's a lot of psychology about challenge and feedback and sense of achievement that's only being uncovered right now in the games industry.

French (again)

Back-cover copy for Teach Yourself French, N Scarlyn Wilson, 1938 (1969 printing): "Anyone who studies this book conscientiously should be able at the end to read any novel or newspaper, to write understandable French, though it won't be faultless, and to find his way about France without choosing toothpicks on the menu instead of soup, or telling an astonished waiter that he has an enormous wife, when he really means that he is very hungry.  In other words, he will know quite a lot of French and something about France and be in a position to get to know a great deal more about both."

The book-reading claim is quite a specific claim; how believable is it?  To claim a text will give you conversational ability is one thing: conversations are full of give and take, and even a poor linguist can get the message across if the other person is helpful; books are different.  Are you allowed to use a dictionary on this test?  If I manage to work my way through this textbook, I'll have a go at reading a novel.  I picked up Clochemerle by Gabriel Chevallier in the charity shop today; the one thing I know about it is that it's about pissoirs; let's see what I get out of it.

N Scarlyn Wilson also wrote Teach Yourself Spanish, 1939 (I have the 1970 reprint).  Inside front cover flap: "By the time you have mastered its contents you will have acquired a really sound groundwork and will be able to tackle a book or a newspaper in Spanish."  Again, quite a specific claim.  Teach Yourself Books were still making the claim in 1960, with John T Bowen and TJ Rhys Jones's Teach Yourself Welsh, whose preface (in my 1967 edition) says: "When you have worked conscientiously through this book, you should be able to speak Welsh, understand Welsh conversation and read an ordinary Welsh book.  Is that a sufficient reward?  Surely yes, but more will be added.  If you are a Welshman, then you will be a proper Welshman, standing on his own feet, with his own language, his own heritage and not just a strange sort of Englishman.  Remember 'Cenedl heb iaith, cenedl heb galon' (a Nation without language, a nation without heart)."  Well, I'm not a Welshman, so I'll have to remain a strange sort of Englishman.  If I fail to get out of a textbook what the textbook claims I should, am I a bad workman blaming my tools, or should I just put it down to Wrong Learning Styles or a clash of personality with the author?  Michel Thomas used to say that there was no such thing as a bad student, only a bad teacher, but I've had enough education-related disasters to know that some of them were undeniably my fault alone.

French

Have left DuoLingo alone for a few weeks; fun as it is, I was getting irritated with its rough edges.  I know it's a work in progress but when one keeps getting penalized for not guessing correctly the exact English translation that's wanted as an answer, or the right one of two German pronouns to slot into the sentence, it wears me down a bit.  And being offered real-world translation exercises right from the start still strikes me as daft.

I was thinking of using it to brush up my French, but perhaps I'll just use textbooks instead.  Am listening to France Inter right now; we're getting music rather than talk as they're on strike against austerity:

It always surprises me when I stop dabbling in languages that are newer to me and return to French that my listening comprehension is a bit better than I think it is.  Listening to languages you really don't know very well makes listening to one you first heard thirty years ago seem much easier.  I took seven years of French at school, age 9 to 16.  The first years didn't cover much: "forced to exchange banalities in the language" as Helen DeWitt damningly said.  A lot of drilling of the basic irregular verbs, and then gradual introduction of the regular conjugations and not enough vocab to be able to read anything of interest.  I still remember a lot of it so possibly, as far as it went, it was actually taught quite well, but it was no preparation for dealing with genuine French texts.  Did I really study French for seven years and never meet with the past historic tense?

At middle school we all had to do French, but when we went to high school there was a telling bit of streaming depending on French proficiency: top set continued to do French and had to do either Spanish or Latin as well; middle set continued to do only French; bottom set abandoned French and started Spanish.  I did Latin, which was very instructive in terms of seeing a language taken to bits and examined analytically, but it's a shame that French and Latin weren't used to inform knowledge of one another.  One would think that they weren't related, so tightly-contained in silos the syllabuses were.

Apropos of that I recall this anecdote about Catullus in French and Italian: French for muck, Italian for absolute filth.

Textbooks.  I have copies of Teach Yourself French (1938) and Teach Yourself Everyday French (1940) by N. Scarlyn Wilson (that stranded initial at the start somehow evokes a lost world of affable bookish textbook-writers), the first being a standard TY textbook of its era covering all the grammar briskly, the second being a more wandering and discursive look at literature and 'situational' stuff (Motoring, At The Dressmaker's).  Working through the first one shouldn't be too hard as most of it is stuff that I've known for decades, more or less.  And the exercises are full of Thirties charm.  An older textbook still: William Cobbett's French Grammar, written in odd moments when he wasn't busy mislaying the bones of poor Tom Paine.  It's charming.

DuoLingo: German

So, spurred on by a friend who is working her way through it, I've signed up for DuoLingo and am working my way through the German course.

Have done the first few lessons (Basics 1) and am working my way through the next lot (Basics 2).  Eine, Das, Der, Brot, Mann, Zeitung, usw. usw. usw.  I tore through them at quite a pace, which is no great boast as I've been starting to learn German and then putting it aside since the start of the Britpop era.  I've read the first two or three chapters of every German textbook in the world.  I certainly should know the commonest words by now!

Each block in the skill map consists of several lessons and each lesson consists of several questions: translations and type-what-you-heard and cloze tests.

Verdict so far: pretty (looks very Twitterish); quite addictive; main annoyance is that the multiple meanings of common words such as Sie makes for questions that could have several answers, only one of which is accepted.  Lose all your 'lives' during a lesson and you have to redo it.  I was also taken aback at the end of Basics 1 to be faced with translation exercises for extra credit which were taken from real-life German texts way, way above the level of that elementary block.  I made a brave stab at them but felt foolish, and it was extremely daft that I had to try to rate the attempts of others at these tests from my position of ignorance.

I feel inclined to stick with this and see how it goes.  I've tried and failed to learn German many times and feel uneducated not knowing it; perhaps this time I'll make it.

DLI GLOSS archive

is here and has thousands of interactive lessons on various languages.  Via; I don't know how I failed to stumble on this while looking for DLI-related stuff the other week.

DuoLingo

Benny interviews the inventor of Captchas, who has come up with an intriguing-looking language-learning site.  I'm tempted to sign up for this; there is mention either in the video interview or the introductory video on the DuoLingo site (can't remember which) that they might be rolling out Chinese learning for English speakers this year.  This would be quite something.

The exact structure of the translation lessons doesn't seem to be spelt out explicitly on the DuoLingo site; it looks as though you have to sign up for further information, which is annoying.

More on the Defense Language Institute

Two more videos here and here (these two have almost identical scripts, and were filmed in 1970 and 1978; the latter one shows what glorious facial hair America grew to celebrate the bicentenary).  Just as the 1953 one had a lot of Korean in it, the 1970 one has lots of Vietnamese and the 1978 one lots of Russian.  Really interesting to see that hanja are still being taught in the 70s in the Korean class.

I read Anthony Kenny's A Path From Rome some years ago, a good account of Catholic life in England as observed by a young man who became a priest but then left the priesthood back when this was a very unusual thing to do.  Back then, in the 50s, trainee priests had a seriously good command of Latin: they weren't quite fluent in the sense of being able to converse without strain, but they were pretty close.  A few months ago I saw a documentary about modern English trainee priests, and they seemed to be doing only GCSE-level Latin in the first year or two of their training.  It's a different world.

Army Language School

Interesting documentary here (various formats) about US Army language training, circa 1953 (date guessed from the reference to the Korean War peace talks at Panmunjom).  I felt relieved for the class that had had the good fortune to be selected for Korean, which at least has a very rational writing system... but then we see them later down the line writing hanja, which were not as officially defunct then as they are now.  Armies know what they want from linguist-soldiers, and are good at getting it; and since learning a language is better than square-bashing or being shot at, the students tend to be well-motivated against the threat of having to drop out.  Forty-something weeks to full fluency is pretty impressive.

Anthony Burgess in one of his books on language debunks the myth that the British are rubbish at foreign languages: we can be good at them when there's a specific financial imperative, such as a proficiency bar in the old Colonial Service.  He inevitably claimed to have been brilliant: I passed my Standard One at distinction level after three months of instruction.  This did not make me popular among my fellow-expatriates.  I went on to pass my Standard Two in less than a year, a Federation record.  This made me hated.  Before leaving Malaya I took the optional Standard Three examination, all hard Arabic and Sanskrit loanwords and scrawled Jawi, which conferred a bonus.  This made me worse hated, but I did not care.  (From the not-always-believable "Little Wilson and Big God").  Memoirs and biographies of old Colonial characters such as George Orwell (who mastered several local languages when out in Burma) show that as a country we're not inherently rubbish at languages.

Benny interviewed in Irish

here - interesting for me to try to match up the audio with the English subtitles.

The only Irish textbook I have to hand is Teach Yourself Irish by Myles Dillon and Donncha Ó Cróinín, 1992 reprint of 1961 edition.  The exercises fully support Benny's contention that although Irish is certainly not a dead language, it can often be taught as though it were one.  A pall of hard-working gloom hangs over far too many of the sentences.  "We had six barrels of herring to bring home".  "Four sevens are twenty-eight, two shillings and fourpence".  "We shall all die, but we do not know when or where".  "It is a great pity that she is so tall".  Ireland comes across as a land of turf, death and rain.  Of course, with vocabulary you have to start somewhere, and it's depressing to come across language primers that try too hard to be trendy and yoof-oriented, but it's a good job that it's possible to tune into stations like Raidió na Life and hear something that sounds encouragingly like real life, like fun, but in the target language.

The issue of school language courses that take you, over a period of several years, pretty much nowhere towards fluency or even bare usefulness, is something else that I'll address another day.

Obenkyo for Android

Just installed it on my phone and it looks like a nice little tool for learning and drilling kanji, kana and vocabulary.  I had browsed the Android store for Japanese-learning stuff but had overlooked this for some reason; was finally directed to it by a comment on this thread on Charles Stross's blog.  Chances are of course that it'll turn out to be just another very useful thing that I don't actually use.  We shall see.

One thing my Android phone is useful for is listening to interesting radio while out and about; I frequently listen to Ban Ban Radio (Kakogawa) or FM West Tokyo when I'm going somewhere.  I rarely understand much but can at least make out syllables and particles, which is a start.

Tai otoshi

Watched a little bit of the Olympic Judo on iPlayer yesterday; the commentator mentioned a Tai otoshi.  I haven't heard anyone mention that throw since I stopped my very brief experiment with Judo 30 years ago.  Odd to think that I used to have a vocabulary of Japanese Judo terms in my head, almost all of which I've now forgotten.

Pictures from China, and Russian books

Listening to this programme featuring Robert Bickers whose Empire Made Me is a fascinating look at Shanghai in the 20s and 30s.  It's a very BBC thing to do, to make a radio programme about old photographs, but it works very well.  I'll have to have another proper crack at Chinese some time, but at the moment I've got distracted with reading Russian again.  Having returned to it after a long break I find that I'm much more confident at ploughing through texts and trying to guess meanings from context.  I've been looking at this archive of inter-war emigré magazines and journals, some of which is in the pre-1918 spelling (not at all difficult once you get used to it).  On the Russian Wikisource site there's this nice old encyclopaedia (transliterated into the new spelling, but there are links to page images in the old spelling on the Russian State Library website).  I'm not short of stuff to read.  Plan for the near future: keep reading, keep flicking through lists of vocabulary too (particularly verbs, which have always been my weak point: I'll remember one aspect and not the other), and try to get fluent.  I'll still listen to Russian radio occasionally but it's good reading comprehension that I most want.

Lists of kanji, and draw-and-recognise sites

Soon after posting yesterday I wondered why on earth I'd forgotten that there's a precomposed a-with-tilde at U+00E3, which reminded me to mention:

• Shapecatcher which lets you draw a Unicode character (not a Chinese/Japanese/Korean glyph, unfortunately), and it will try to match it to the right code point;
• Mouse Chinese Input Method - draw a Chinese character and it will try to recognize it and give translation/pronunciation;
• List of Jooyoo Kanji on Wikipedia: very useful if you remember characters by their Heisig names; you can click on a table heading to alter display order to by-number-of-strokes, which is useful for looking up unfamiliar kanji;
• Kanji Information on Jim Breen's site: lists of Heisig keywords, all 3007 Heisig kanji, old and new kanji shapes;
• Detexify, which allows you to draw anything and it will try to match it to a LaTeX symbol.

 

Men In Black

I had seen James Heisig, creator of the famous kanji-memorization technique, referred to a few times on the web with 'Fr' before his name, and a bit of digging confirms that he is indeed a Catholic priest, ordained in 1969 if this document is anything to go by, and a member of the Divine Word Missionaries (hence the SVD that sometimes appears after his name).  Given that the Heisig technique is one of the most-discussed learning methods for the Japanese language, it's odd that I've gone a few years mucking around with the language before discovering this rather basic biographical fact about the man.

On my to-read list at the moment is Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett, the story of the encounter between the author (a missionary) and the Pirahã, an Amazonian people with a language and worldview that have been argued about a hell of a lot over the years.  (See the tilde over the 'a' at the end there?  I went to the effort of finding out the Unicode point for a combining tilde, just to get the tribe's name right.  Don't say I never give you anything.)

So, that's written Chinese sorted out, then

A Californian lady's very own phonetic Chinese script (a modification of Pitman shorthand) from the late 19th century.  Well, it was a nice try, and her heart was in the right place.

The unreasonable difficulty of Chinese characters

An old Language Log post here about how difficult even native speakers of Chinese find it to write characters correctly.  Is the writing of Chinese by hand so intolerably difficult (and unnecessary, now, given that Pinyin input is so easy) that the writing of characters will inevitably die out?  There's a lot of cultural capital invested in the writing system, but that doesn't necessarily settle the matter—Turkey switched from Arabic to Roman script pretty quickly, after all.  Vietnamese is now romanized, albeit with some alarming diacritics.  I'd be sorry if the characters disappeared as it's one of the things that first got me interested in Chinese and Japanese... but ultimately it's up to the native speakers.

Benny on the train

here as he travels through China.  Entertaining and well-made video.  Impressive given that he's only been learning Chinese for a few months.

Encyclopaedia Britannica

And so the Britannica print edition is dead.  I didn't actually use it much in the pre-Internet days; I was into radio, electronics, computing, maths and science, which EB never seemed good at.  I remember (I must have been about 15) looking up the definition of a tensor in the EB and being disappointed with the gnomic, incomprehensible little article there.  This would have been the fifteenth edition, a staple when I was a kid of any biggish library; this was the edition that notoriously mucked the reader around with its Propaedia, Micropaedia and Macropaedia sections that kept on telling you that better information might be available in a volume different to the one you'd just lugged off the shelf.

David Bellamy used always to be in the newspaper ads for the EB, testifying that his reading of it at home made up for his not getting much out of school.  Ads presumably aimed at well-off, benevolent parents; the advertising always talked up the educational benefits so as to convince prospective buyers that the volumes would be good value at any price.  One gathered from this that the price was actually very high.  In the mid-90s I was at an agricultural fair, of all places, where there were lots of tents full of people trying to sell stuff.  There was a Britannica salesman there.  He had a little flip-chart on his table, consisting of about half-a-dozen cardboard rectangles attached to a dinky triangular frame.  This was in the days before PowerPoint had conquered the world.  'Have You Considered The Benefits Of Owning A Great Encyclopaedia?' or something like that was on the first page, and probably the second page said something similarly-capitalized about how much my hypothetical kids would get out of my owning A Great Encyclopaedia, and etc etc etc.  He read out each little page, running his finger under the words as he (slowly) said them, as though addressing a cretin who needed reinforcement of the concepts via multiple channels.  Is this an actual sales technique that they're told to do, I asked myself?  If so it wasn't working.  I eventually interrupted his flip-chart usage to try to ask flat-out how much it cost, and I didn't get a straight answer, though he did imply that I probably wouldn't be able to afford it.

How times change.  I now own a nice 1950 edition of Chambers's Encyclopaedia, 15 alphabetical volumes plus World Survey volume, which I picked up from a charity shop for the price of a large round of drinks.  It looks good on the shelf and smells nice and leathery but I have to admit it doesn't get read very much.  I love the idea of books that set out to do something very specific; with language textbooks I'm always keen to see that the author has a specific end in mind, whether it be conversational confidence, fluent reading ability, or just tourist-level survival level in the language.  I want some evidence that the author has thought about what he's going to achieve.  With encyclopaedias, I like to see how much of the world the editors have set out to encompass.  I have a three-volume German set of Duden volumes from the 60s that betray fascination with machinery, processes, things that work; the Larousse French volumes are full of technical terms for old-fashioned things such as the sails of three-masted ships and bits of steam engines.  Reading an encyclopaedia from cover to cover is a routine sort of stunt but reading one in a foreign language would probably be very educational, and would leave you with a hell of a lot of arcane vocabulary at the end of it.  I've never done this, of course.

The famous 1911 Britannica is online now at various places, and I spent an hour or two today looking at the volumes that were available at OpenLibrary.  I do worry about the digitization of knowledge and the danger that everything we know might get clobbered by a Carrington Event, but there's no going back to the old days, and I wouldn't really want to anyway.

A Chinese Typewriter in Silicon Valley (Google Tech Talk)

An interesting talk by Thomas S. Mullaney.  If you've ever wondered how characters were arranged in the traybed of a Chinese typewriter, here's the answer.  There's more to it than you might think.

Dunna dunna dunna dunna dunna dunna dunna dunna Batman!

Picked up this delightful book for next to nothing from a remainder shop today.  Japanese Batman!  The lettering (kanaing?  Kanjiing?) has of course been Englished, but there are plenty of reproductions of covers and adverts and miscellanea from the 60s Batman boom in Japan to amuse me.

Poor Robin, he looks unhappy.

I like the spare, simple look of this.

299 days to go to the JLPT.  (I'm not going to be counting backwards every bloody day from now on, but I do want to keep track of how many days I have left if I am going to seriously target the December exam.)

JLPT again

The December JLPT didn't happen last year.  Well, it happened, but not for me: the planned concerted throwing-myself-at-the-books never really got going.  I might have a go at it this year; I notice that today is day 38 of the year and Sunday December 2nd this year is day 337, so I have 300 days, if I include what's left of today, to prepare for it.

I haven't been totally idle recently; been doing quite a lot of listening to Japanese radio stations and am starting to be able to spot verb endings and postpositions.  There's a hell of a lot more to listening comprehension than that, but it's a start.  If there's any one thing I'm likely to screw up in a language exam it's listening comprehension, so I know I really need to get cracking on this.

For all that I 'want' to learn Japanese intensively, I find myself not getting very much study done.  Thinking about what a fine thing it would be to have studied the language to a high level turns out to be more fun than actually doing the studying.  I know the ends that I want but the means are too much like hard work.  Khatz, of the excellent AJATT site, has a lot of useful stuff to say about this sort of thing.

Japanese biscuit ads from the 70s

A charming vision of what English (I presume) life was thought to be like.

The gender of the TARDIS

Via, a glorious video of the construction of a foldable and transportable TARDIS by a talented young German lady.  She refers to the TARDIS as 'she', for which there is extensive precedent in the series (I remember Fourth Doctor calling the TARDIS 'old girl' early in the Ian Marter novelization of The Ribos Operation, just after Romana had cut a hole in the console).  And the TARDIS is a ship, and ships are female.  Still, this was enough to send me to the Wikipedia entry to see what gender the TARDIS has in languages other than English.  A few of the languages that have TARDIS articles:

•     Català - El TARDIS (M)
•     Česky - "Byla ukradena z Gallifrey" means 'it was stolen from Gallifrey', I think, with 'byla' having a feminine preterite ending; hence (F)
•     Deutsch - Die TARDIS (F)
•     Español - La TARDIS (F)
•     Français - Le TARDIS (M)
•     Italiano - Il TARDIS (M)
•     Русский - " ТАРДИС вернулась" is 'the TARDIS returned', I think, with feminine preterite reflexive-verb ending.  (F)

I've always vaguely wondered how newly-coined or newly-imported words get assigned a gender in those languages where gender can't be inferred from the word's ending...  Interesting how Spanish has TARDIS as M whereas Catalan, French and Italian have it as F.

Polyglottery

Interesting article here.  (Via).  Always good to see that there are others whose primary interest in languages is being able to read them rather than to speak them.  This may be The Wrong Way To Look At Language Learning but it's my attitude, mostly.

Immersion and insanity

Total immersion in the target language right from the start; according to many successful learners, that's the thing.  Throw yourself right in at the deep end and don't read, watch, listen to, anything in English at all.  Make yourself a native by changing your desktop language and locale to the target language, and read web pages only in the target language.

It's a seductive idea and I wish I were able to try it out, but the fact is that I love being able to read and even though I want very much to be able to read in Japanese and various other foreign languages, I'm not able to sacrifice the pleasure of reading English.  Looking at a wall of text that I can't comprehend at all is so immensely frustrating as to be a definite turn-off for the learning process: I'd rather be reading a textbook, in English, about the conjugation of adjectives or sentence-final particles.  I'd rather be doing anything else than immersion: I can't stick at it at all.

Something similar applies to languages where I have an intermediate reading ability: I can read French and Russian after a fashion, but it's so much slower and more frustrating than reading in English that my attention wanders.  If I force myself I can continue doing it, but it's still work, in a way that reading English has never been for me.

Clearly for foreign-language reading there's for every learner a productive level of frustration, a sweet spot where you're having to work at reading but not hard enough that it becomes a tedious slog.  The stuff about tadoku that I read last year comes to mind... perhaps I need to just immerse myself in pitifully easy stuff for a month or two.  Or do I need to just grow a thicker skin and be resigned to the fact that reading Japanese will be very frustrating for a long time, and learn to live with it? We shall see.

As for non-written media: I can listen to audio that I don't understand quite happily; I feel that it's instructive for getting the sounds and rhythms of the language but I'm pessimistic about the chances of actually gaining comprehension ability that way.  I've always been poor at listening to foreign languages.  Subtitled films are a pleasure; again, the incomprehensible audio isn't a problem and perhaps it's useful but it's not going to give me useful comphrehension any time soon.