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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4700 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 105 of 140 01 March 2013 at 12:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah, Icelandic is great. I have been to Iceland as well, great country! Enjoy!
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| Julie Heptaglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6896 days ago 1251 posts - 1733 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French | Message 106 of 140 03 March 2013 at 6:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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February - audio time: 03.02.2013-02.03.2013 (funny dates, not on purpose :))
French I think I had my little breakthrough/epiphany moment. While watching a movie, at some point I realized listening to French was actually pretty easy :). Well, this 'easiness' obviously doesn't apply to all kinds of French-language materials and situations, and there is still a looong way ahead of me, but this little moment a week ago was the first time I would feel like I made a real progress since I decided to focus more on French five months ago [I'm pretty sure I used the wrong tenses all over the sentence - please correct me!]. I understand more than I did back at that time but the biggest difference is that listening and understanding French requires much less effort. I tried to estimate how much reading and listening it actually took me to get there, and I came up with ca. 80 hours of listening (mostly: lots of French-dubbed TV series, news and documentaries on TV5 Monde, some RFI podcasts) and a bit less than 40 hours of reading (ca. 1,5 books + press and Internet articles) in the last five months. So, what was I doing during in February? - TV shows - I watched over 30 episodes of "90210 Beverly Hills : Nouvelle Génération" with French dubbing (I'm in the middle of season 2 now). This seems like a good choice: lots of everyday vocabulary, colloquial expressions (which are definitely my weak point in French) and generally, not difficult to understand, while still with some more challenging lines. Most importantly, I had never seen any episodes before so I had to rely exclusively on my French, and not on some vague memories of dialogues. This helped a lot. From time to time I would also use English transcripts to get the translation of something I didn't understand, and then I would listen to the dialog again. I also found it quite useful to quickly go through whole English transcripts of a few episodes, which took just a few minutes per episode. - I also watched and enjoyed Monsieur Lazhar. The movie is generally not difficult to understand, especially if watched with French subtitles. - I discovered a couple of interesting French podcasts, mostly thanks to suberb recommendations from two HTLAL threads (science, society/politics). I listened mostly to O Positif (scientific, reports from latest experiments + a 'dossier' on a chosen topic) and Europe 1 midi (discussions with experts on socially relevant subjects, a great variety of topics). It was nice to discover there is a whole world beyond my little RFI bubble :). At this point, I decided to try something new and maybe expand my comfort zone a bit. A few days ago I tried something that would seem like a suicide mission not that long ago :) - listening to original French audiobooks and radio plays. Right now, I'm alternating between three different audiobooks. Sometimes it's not easy (I'm very much the visual type) and I have to rewind the audio a few times to understand a more difficult passage but all in all, je me débrouille :). I'm listening to: - Quatre filles et un jean II : Le deuxième été by Ann Brashares - definitely the easiest one out of three. Slowly and clearly read out, and the language is easy. Plus, I know the story - not well enough to remember what is going to happen, but the fact I read the book years ago does make it easier to follow the recording. - radio play Oscar est innocent - it is not difficult language- or vocabulary-wise but still not all that easy to follow as I don't have a lot of experience with radio plays in general, so I tend to lose the thread when new characters appear or when the scenery changes. - A genoux by Michael Connelly - a crime story, the most difficult and the most interesting audio material out of three that I'm listening to at the moment. Sometimes it seems like I just can't 'process' the recording fast enough to understand it. However, when I rewind a difficult passage once or twice, I usually understand all or most of it. In some cases I just need a moment to realize what word I've actually heard - I know the word but I don't 'get' during the first listening. I'm going to continue with listening to audiobooks and I also want to expand the range of movies I watch (at least beyond teen drama ;)). A few months ago I tried e.g. French-dubbed "Castle", which seemed too difficult back at that time... Maybe I'll give it a try again. Watching original French series would be a logical step forward, as well. Swedish I can't say I did a lot in February, at least not compared to the previous months. I focused mostly on learning French and on my work, plus I had a semester break in my Swedish course. OK, no more excuses :), just a report about what I was doing. - I watched 9 episodes of the Swedish "X-Factor". Hard to say how much this helped to improve my listening comprehension - I have to wait for the effects longer, as in the case of French. However, it definitely helped me to memorize the difference between "tro" and "tycka" that I knew in theory but always mixed up. I hope I learned it for good :). - I listened to a Swedish audiobook for a couple of hours. The choice of the audiobook wasn't really relevant, as I'm not able to follow the story yet. I used Ensamma hjärtan och hemlösa hundar by Lucy Dillon, that is read out clearly and slowly by a female narrator (which I find good as a pronunciation model). I listened 'focused' for some time and than had the further part played in the background while I was cleaning. As mentioned above, I don't know the language well enough to understand the content but I did understand some pieces here and there, also while listening 'unfocused'. And I did notice when one audio track got repeated :). - I also practiced my Swedish pronunciation a little bit, and I think I start to sound Swedish-ish ;). Obviously, there is a LOT to learn, especially regarding prosody and intonation, and also some sounds (I still struggle to distinguish between i and y when I hear them, for example.) - I listened (focused) to news in simple Swedish - Klartext and 8sidor (ca. 1 h in total). Sometimes I can really understand a lot. And sometimes I'm completely lost :). - I went to my course. And I did absolutely no Anki repetitions whatsoever. Kinda scared to open the deck :). Plus, I have to finallz move on to the new Anki version first. - last but not least, I met with you, Vikings, and during our second Skype session we actually managed to speak a bit in our target Scandinavian languages :). Icelandic Right now, I'm taking it slowly. I spent some time browsing through some learning materials and reading about Icelandic, and now I'm learning The 180 commonest words in Old Icelandic sagas on memrise.com. So far, I 'planted' half of the vocabulary. The vocab set prepared by Alaric Hall is nice, and the memrise site is not bad either. I liked the mem feature (anyone can add a picture or an explanation/association that may help to memorize the word) and the design/system (this whole flowery thing with planting, harvesting & watering may get on my nerves at some point but for now, it's kinda fun). On the other hand, I don't like the point system (too distracting) and, most importantly, no option to easily add diacritics/special characters is available (let me know if you find one). I want to complete the 180 words and then I'll probably move on to The 250 commonest words in Icelandic speech by the same author. I also want to try Hall's Michel Thomas-like course "Icelandic for beginners" - I wonder how similar it is to Michel Thomas courses that I enjoyed so much (including the second generation). As soon as I have some more spare time, I also want to start "Colloquial Icelandic", highly recommended by Josquin - but I don't want to begin with it unless I really have enough time for some solid learning. Daegga and Josquin - once again thank you for all the information. I'm glad that German should help me a lot. Plus, I'm a native speaker of a highly inflected language :). Josquin - the Icelandic language profile is great! Tarvos - I would love to go to Iceland one day. I hoped to go there a few years ago but unfortunately, it didn't work out in the end. English I finished reading "The Spellman Files" sometime in the beginning of February. Still not a big fan of the book but I do have the second book from the series so I may read it at some point. Now* I'm reading Because I Said So!: The Truth Behind the Myths, Tales, and Warnings Every Generation Passes Down to Its Kids by Ken Jennings. Some parts are hilarious, and there is quite a variety of not-so-obvious vocabulary describing everyday activities and items. I think I'm going to write more about the book in the next log update. * not the best word choice, probably ;), considering that I haven't looked at the book for two weeks or so. I also talked quite a lot in English (at least when compared to my average), both 'live' and on Skype (during our Viking meetings and the language exchange with Amerykanka). I met with Amerykanka on Skype twice, and we talked a lot in Polish and English. I learned many new collocations, and I know I have to work on my "th" sound and some of the vowels. Amerykanka, thank you again so much for all your feedback on my English, and for correcting my e-mails. Hope to skype with you again :). German As you can see, I'm going through an 'audio' phase right now, so no wonder I turned to German audiobooks as well. I listened to over two hours of Lee Child's Undeground - a bit lengthy so far. I hope to get to the moment where I'll really want to know what will happen next :). I also tried listening to Chill mal, Frau Freitag: Aus dem Alltag einer unerschrockenen Lehrerin by Carolin Kebekus but I didn't really like it so far. I guess I know the school reality too well to have a good laugh. I'll give the book one more try, though. OK, that's everything for my longest update ever (even though I did leave out some of the usual activities). I hope I'm not the only one who has managed to read it till the end :). All comments will be strongly appreciated (as well as all corrections of my English). Edited by Julie on 03 March 2013 at 7:29pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Amerykanka Hexaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5164 days ago 657 posts - 890 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Polish, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian | Message 107 of 140 04 March 2013 at 8:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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Wow, you have certainly been busy! Congratulations on your breakthrough in French! It's always exciting
when all your hard work pays off. :) I enjoyed Skyping with you too - maybe we can talk again this week? I don't have time to correct your whole post right now, but since you asked about this sentence . . .
You have almost all of the tenses right. I would just change "was the first time I would feel like I made" to "was the first time I felt like I had made". "Would" is really only used in conditional statements and then sometimes to express ongoing action in the past, i.e., "When I was young, I would go to the store every morning" = "When I was young, I used to go to the store every morning". As for the other correction, you are talking about something that happened BEFORE you felt the change in your abilities, so it sounds better to use past perfect here. Later on you wrote "I decided", which by the same principle could be changed to past perfect, since you decided BEFORE you made progress. However, in this latter situation I think you'll find that a lot of natives will substitute past simple, so it sounds fine to leave it the way it is. One other note about this sentence: "progress" is grammatically singular but conceptually plural, if that makes any sense (I just made up the term, so it might not ; )). Anyway, you can't use the indefinite article with it, just like you can't say "a rice" or "a news". In this sentence, you should say "some real progress". 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6590 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 108 of 140 04 March 2013 at 9:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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(as for progress, you probably meant uncountable?)
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| Amerykanka Hexaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5164 days ago 657 posts - 890 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Polish, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian | Message 109 of 140 04 March 2013 at 9:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, "uncountable" makes a lot more sense than "conceptually plural". I couldn't think of the term I wanted so
I invented one. :D 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5340 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 110 of 140 15 April 2013 at 3:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hej Julie! Hur är det?
How’s your Swedish going? It would be nice to hear how your TAC’s coming along. Ha det så bra! Emme 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5002 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 111 of 140 15 April 2013 at 9:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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You're awesome! Congratulations on the French breakthrough. I remember when that moment
came for me and it was great. And your progress in all the other languages is very inspiring as well. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Julie Heptaglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6896 days ago 1251 posts - 1733 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French | Message 112 of 140 29 October 2013 at 11:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello everyone! I am happy to be back :).
I am so sorry for over 6 months of radio silence... and I would to like to particularly apologize to my dear Viking team which I must have disappointed badly. I am really sorry. The last half of year was pretty hard as I had an insane amount of work. Plus, I got pretty sick and I generally tolerate the heat rather badly (I do realize that for the European HTLAL users the hot summer is just a vague memory now :)). All of that was not exactly optimal for my language learning but I did manage to learn a bit... and, unfortunately, to forget quite a lot. So here it comes... my language learning report. Long months in between: March - October 2013 Swedish That's the sad part of my story, dear Vikings (and it is your support that I am particularly seeking now). The story starts pretty well - I continued my Swedish course at the university roughly until mid-June and I took final exams (about A2 level, I suppose). In fact, I passed them with flying colors, getting the highest mark possible, mostly because of my great results (maximal point count) in the oral part of the exam. I was told I had a great accent, made only minor grammar mistakes; my speech was fluent, coherent and easy to follow. All of that was very pleasant to listen, I admit, but I felt kinda like a cheat, to be honest. I just made a really good use of communication and exam strategies, saying what I was able to say instead of what I wanted to say :). Still, I did pretty well. However, that's just no longer the case. My skills are gone. Well, at least partly gone. Or at least I feel like they're gone. During three months (July - September) I did not do much with my Swedish. Some reading, a bit learning here and there, but it feels like nothing, I'm afraid. In the beginning of October the new university year started and I am back to my Swedish course, and extremely unhappy with it. OK, maybe "extremely" is a bit of an exaggeration but it has gotten pretty bad. The group size has doubled, the teaching team is partly different and I am very unhappy both with the content of lessons and the teaching methods used. It feels very much like I am in a motivational low. All my plans of going to Sweden in the summer did not work out, the initial fascination seems to be gone and I have not managed to develop strong internal motivation. Unfortunately, I have not managed to find a lot of Swedish-language content that I would REALLY enjoy. Something that would not feel like learning... something that I would want to watch/read/listen badly, despite all the comprehension problems. Hence my lack of motivation... It is a vicious circle, I'm afraid - when I don't find interesting content, I am less motivated and less eager to keep searching... which obviously means that the chances to find something enjoyable are getting lower. I don't want to give up/take a break, not now at least, before I have gotten to the point where I would have at least some decent reading comprehension and be able to maintain basic language skills without a lot of effort. It would be really a pity to give up at this moment. On the positive side, last week a Swedish professor gave a lecture at my university, and I was able to understand most of it and generally to follow it pretty easily. Obviously, the speech was slow and clear, and Power Point slides helped a great deal :), but still, this felt like a success and, most importantly, it was very enjoyable. I am going to look for some lectures on YouTube/other websites. The results of my initial searching were not very encouraging (maybe wrong keywords/websites?) but I am not giving up that easily :). Let me share with you one video which was both interesting and very easy to follow: "Språkutveckling och flerspråkighet" by Gisela Håkansson (look for this on YouTube; for some reason Google Chrome and HTLAL don't like each other and a link wouldn't work). Other thing which I enjoy (but not in large amounts, as I tend to get tired very quickly) are popular science magazines. For beginners, I can definitely recommend the Swedish edition of "Science Illustrated", "Illustrerad Vetenskap". But all of that is just not enough to keep the ball rolling. Summing up, I guess I need some advice :). Both content tips and some motivational advice (a pep talk would be nice ;D). If you don't hate me yet, dear Vikings, help the stray Swedish learner, please :). French This was my priority in the first half of 2013, mostly because of an exam I was going to take in the end of May. Unfortunately, I failed the exam, not because of the French skills, though. My French comprehension (both reading and listening) has improved a lot this year and even though I haven't done that much these last few months, I am still pretty happy with my progress in general. I have more commute and walking time than I used to, and I listen quite often to French podcasts when I'm on the go. Listening/reading of a lot of content is often close to effortless, not that much harder than listening or reading in English or German. There is obviously still a long way to go, thousands of words, idioms, expressions to be learnt, but I am optimistic: I conquered French for me. :) My active French skills are much worse but I was able e.g. to hold a long conversation with a nice co-traveller at the airport, and I was under the impression I wasn't the only one to enjoy it :D. I also managed to pass a phone interview which was partly in French. Furthermore, I've enrolled in a French conversation course this semester. Today I've had the first class and I've been happy to find out I am able to use some expressions I'd never ever used before :). Grammar is my biggest problem, especially articles, pronouns, prepositions and subjunctive (i.e. most of French grammar, I'm afraid). Even though active French skills are not really my priority, I think I will put some time into mastering the grammar basics. It will be a pity if I keep making the same simple mistakes just because I've never really sat down to learn it... Dutch and others ... coming soon... :) Edited by Julie on 31 October 2013 at 11:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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