|
 |
Lorren’s Language Log | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Lorren Senior Member United States brookelorren.com/blo Joined 4243 days ago 286 posts - 324 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Danish, Irish Studies: Russian | Message 137 of 212 25 July 2014 at 1:06pm | IP Logged |
|
Today I had the chance to finish reading January's National Geographic in Spanish. I only had about 2 1/2 pages of text left; I had to look up 9 words, including pickle, Renaissance, scrutinize, octopus, and cannibal. I thought that I knew what cannibal meant, but I wasn't sure, so I looked it up.
Ugh... I just discovered that Amazon sent the two Spanish books that I ordered to my OLD address. The post office will forward mail for 12 months, but I moved about 12 months and 1 1/2 weeks ago. I guess I'll go to the post office tomorrow... hopefully they will be able to forward these two packages for me. Although the post office makes its fair share of mistakes, they can at times be pretty smart... like my magazine subscriptions pretty much followed me to my new address without me even contacting them. So hopefully there is something that they can do. I doubt that whoever is living at my old address now has a use for Spanish language books, but I don't particularly want to go to their house, knock on the door, and ask for them, either. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Elenia Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom lilyonlife.blog Joined 3848 days ago 239 posts - 327 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Swedish, Esperanto | Message 138 of 212 26 July 2014 at 2:21am | IP Logged |
|
Hey! I'm not up to date on your most recent posts, but I spent a day or two looking
through your log a while back and I just wanted to say that your perseverance and commitment is inspiring, as is your progress. I know for certain it's been said before, but you're about the only (real!) person I've ever heard of reporting positive results with Rosetta Stone. I'm really glad it's working for you! Good luck seems kind of useless here as it's not luck but your hard work that's giving you results, so I'll say good continuation instead. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lorren Senior Member United States brookelorren.com/blo Joined 4243 days ago 286 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Danish, Irish Studies: Russian | Message 139 of 212 28 July 2014 at 5:46am | IP Logged |
|
Thank you!
Of course, I think that Rosetta Stone has it's pluses, but it's obviously not the end of a journey. It gave me a jumping off point to move into real stuff. It's likely that a lot of people quit well before they get to the point where they can move to the next stage, since it's such a commercialized product... the masses of people are not going to finish the course, let alone move on to the next phase. Today I started reading February's issue of National Geographic. I'm at the beginning, which contained a page regarding the cover story, which is on the human mind and strides that scientists are making in that arena, including in the area of Alzheimer's disease. I read another (quite timely!) page on the border immigration on the US southern border, and how they are finding dead bodies along the border. Considering that this was published in February, and written well before the flood of immigrants coming right now, I'm sure that the problem is much worse now. I also read through some captions for some pictures. That's all I had time for today. In those pages I had to look up five words: blanket (frazada), battle, wander (divagar), scuba, and rainbow. Obviously, there would be several words that mean the same or similar things, just like there are in English. I've already come across several different Spanish synonyms for blanket, tangle, and wander. I suppose as I become more familiar with the language, it will make more sense what to use where. One of my Spanish books that I ordered reached the destination that it wasn't supposed to go to, and it is being returned to the original sender. I contacted Amazon, and Amazon let them know what my correct address is. So I'm either going to get a refund (and will have to re-order the book), or the seller will get it back and ship it to me at my current address. The other seller didn't put tracking on their book, so I have no clue what happened with that one... however, since the seller is from Arizona, I'm guessing that that book met the same fate. Sigh... the second book with the unknown fate is the one that I need to read first, since they're part of a series. My husband (who wants to learn Spanish) says that he wants to read the second book while I'm reading the first one. Good luck to him... his Spanish is not as good as mine, but he is also familiar with the book series, so if it works for him, great! I read the first little bit on Amazon as a preview, and understanding the individual words were not easy, although I could figure out what was going on based on my familiarity with the story. By the time I get through the first book though, I bet it will be much easier to understand. The books are both about 450 pages long! That will give me 18 "books" towards the Super Challenge when I read through both once. I don't have plans for what to read afterwards... although I know that Project Gutenberg has Spanish language books (I did some proofreading on one of them). That may be a long ways off though. My little boy seems to have a knack for language. He was with his grandma yesterday, and she took him to the store. He saw someone who spoke Spanish, and said that he knew Spanish. When she asked him how much he knew, he said "poquito". I didn't even know he knew that word, although I knew that he could say a few phrases. Maybe I should get him to start watching Frozen with me in Spanish, or perhaps Lord of the Rings. It would be good for him to start at this age, because he could pick up the accent a lot better than me. I can speak with a pretty good German accent because I started learning it in fifth grade... but my Spanish accent is terrible and I can't roll r's to save my life. Edited by Lorren on 28 July 2014 at 5:46am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lorren Senior Member United States brookelorren.com/blo Joined 4243 days ago 286 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Danish, Irish Studies: Russian | Message 140 of 212 29 July 2014 at 10:45am | IP Logged |
|
Today I had the opportunity to do a little Spanish outside of Anki practice. I read the short little articles that are at the beginning of the National Geographic... including stories about telling an elephant's age by their tusks, tsunami refuges in Washington State, how quinoa is now being cultivated around the world and that the people that used to eat it as a daily staple were finding it too expensive for them once it gained popularity in the western world, and how the city of Tatooine that was used in the movie Star Wars is slowly being overtaken by sand dunes. It amounted to eight pages of short articles with pictures, and I had to look up 13 words, including hummingbird, owl, wasp, old age, and elusive.
I ran into a lot of words that I knew from reading before and practicing them in Anki. I thought that was pretty awesome. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lorren Senior Member United States brookelorren.com/blo Joined 4243 days ago 286 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Danish, Irish Studies: Russian | Message 141 of 212 02 August 2014 at 11:07pm | IP Logged |
|
I missed a couple of days of Anki practice because I was absorbed in reading the Divergent trilogy. I ended up with a ton of words to do yesterday, when I went back to Anki. It wasn't too much, but more than I'd like to. Today, I once again have quite a bit of words to do, but tomorrow shouldn't be too bad. Tomorrow, I once again have to go to work.
The Dragonlance books that I ordered in Spanish are still lost in the mail... however, my husband brought home The Chronicles of Narnia in Spanish from the library. I also thought to myself... "I wonder if they make Divergent in Spanish?" So I checked, and they do. So even though the books that I originally bought in Spanish haven't arrived, I have plenty of new books in Spanish to challenge me. I'll pick up the Kindle version of Divergente when I'm ready to read it. I started reading El Sobrino Del Mago, and finished the first chapter. There is a lot that goes right over my head, since I am not looking up any of the words as I read. With these books, I don't really plan on looking up any words. I just plan on reading and use the Spanish that I already do know, along with the knowledge of the books in English, in order to understand what's going on. Reading these books goes a lot faster than reading National Geographic en Español though, since I´m not looking up any of the words. I´m sure that by the time I finish reading the final book of the Divergente trilogy, it will be a lot easier for me than reading El Sobrino Del Mago is at the moment. I figure that each issue of National Geographic en Español is about 100 pages, and I've read about 7 issues, so that's about 700 pages total. The hardback Divergent books that I have average about 500 pages each, so finishing those is about 1500 pages total, plus whatever I finish of the Chronicles of Narnia by the time I have to return it to the library. Then I will also eventually get the Dragonlance books, which are about 450 pages each. So, my reading skills will definitely improve by leaps and bounds from just these books that I have read in English and plan on reading in Spanish. While I was reading the first chapter of El Sobrino Del Mago, I noticed that there are a ton of words in there that I recognize from Anki, but I sometimes have trouble with. So hopefully seeing the words in context will help me to understand them a lot better. I'm thinking of getting Divergente on the Kindle and reading that at lunchtime at work, rather than bringing a physical book with me. I don't know why, but I feel a little self-conscious about the idea of reading a Spanish book at work. We have a lot of Spanish speakers at work, and I still have such a long way to go with my Spanish... so I figure if I read my Kindle at work, then I don't have to feel weird about reading a Spanish book when I'm not a fluent reader yet and my speaking skills have even further to go. I will still be reading National Geographic En Español, of course, and that I will be looking up words on. However, since I'm familiar with the books that I'm planning on reading, I'm going to give just reading the books a shot. It will be a new challenge, but I'm excited about it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lorren Senior Member United States brookelorren.com/blo Joined 4243 days ago 286 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Danish, Irish Studies: Russian | Message 142 of 212 03 August 2014 at 5:20am | IP Logged |
|
Even though I already updated today, I just had a thought... these books that I'm going to be reading are really the first ones that I'm going to be reading that will be dealing with what people often talk about in real life. You don't often have a conversation about Komodo dragons in Indonesia, or about how the brain works. Sometimes, but not often. Other than National Geographic, I've read newspaper articles... while I do discuss the news with my husband, it's still more removed from ordinary life.
I suppose that nobody in my life will ever be injected with a transmitter that will turn them practically into a zombie, like in Divergente, but the book does deal with stuff that we run into in regular life... falling in love, being teased, dealing with family members, etc. It will be the first time where I'm reading dialogue, where people are talking normally, not to a reporter. So that will be interesting. Although I don't intend on looking up words as I'm reading, with Divergente at least, I might use the highlight feature to come back to something later. There are some passages that I particularly like in the English version... I could just reread it in Spanish, or use the highlighted parts in order to find passages in the physical book to read in English. I didn't read any from National Geographic today, even though this is my day off, but I did do a lot of Spanish reading anyway. Even though I missed a couple of days in my Anki deck, tomorrow the amount of words that I'll have will be at a pretty low level. I must be learning some new words... time to look some more up, LOL. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lorren Senior Member United States brookelorren.com/blo Joined 4243 days ago 286 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Danish, Irish Studies: Russian | Message 143 of 212 04 August 2014 at 7:59am | IP Logged |
|
Since yesterday, I read the first two chapters of Divergente. In the English version of the book, I can understand every detail of the book. In the Spanish version of the book... not so much. I know what's going on - I know what is in the book, and I understand enough words to know where I am at in the book - but there is a lot of detail that I am missing.
I'm sure that it will get easier as I go along... I'm marking certain passages to read again, so I guess that the first pages that I will understand well will be the ones that I mark. I'm going to read the book through, but some pages I will go back to multiple times. I'm doing the Super Challenge... I will probably wait until I finish 50 pages of the reading equivalent in the hardback version of the book (I'm reading the Spanish version in my Kindle) before I say that I read a whole book. If I read a specific passage, I'll just put that into the Super Challenge Bot after I read the pages. I found it interesting how they translate some things. In Divergente, all the people are divided up into groups, or factions. The factions are all named after a character trait. I was wondering if they would translate the names of all of the factions for the Spanish version of the book... they do. Most of the faction names were pretty easy... Verdad instead of Candor, for example. Dauntless was the faction that I wouldn't understand if I saw it out of context. As I read the book, it's easy to figure out, because I know that they are talking about a faction, or the personality trait, so I can figure it out. I'm sure that I will recognize that word anywhere by the time I get about 100 pages into the book. For now, all I know off the top of my head is that it starts with the letter O. So far, even though there is a lot of individual words that I don't understand as I read the book, I think that this will be good. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lorren Senior Member United States brookelorren.com/blo Joined 4243 days ago 286 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Danish, Irish Studies: Russian | Message 144 of 212 05 August 2014 at 12:03pm | IP Logged |
|
I'm up to chapter 6 in Divergente. It seems easier than it was the last couple of days. I don't know why... I know that I haven't made that much improvement over a couple of days.
I was curious about one thing... do they translate Four's name and call him Cuatro? I checked ahead, and they do. It makes sense to call him Cuatro, but it will probably seem a little weird. After all, they translate all of the faction names. Maybe there's like this Spanish switch that needs to get turned on in my brain. I don't know. There are still so many words to learn too. Even though I know well over 1500 Spanish words... I have more than 1600 words in my Anki deck, which doesn't include words that I know from study elsewhere or words that resemble their English equivalent so I don't have to look them up... I still run into so many simple words that I don't know. There are foods, body parts, and so many other words I need to learn. I'm glad that I am reading this book. For one, I like the book. Secondly, I like how it is written in the first person. That's often how we talk. 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
