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Expug’s All at On(c)e Log - TAC14 | ||
Tags: Papiamento | Estonian | Georgian | Native Materials | Norwegian | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | Mandarin | Russian | German | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5158 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 305 of 415 01 September 2014 at 11:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you YnEoS, I really appreciate your comprehensive work. I don't doubt SRS's effectiveness, I just don't like the idea of having my learning 'scheduled', which is what SRS does for me. I prefer to do it myself. Also, the 'dead time' that is the main SRS time for most people doesn't really apply for me - either I have 'full time' when I can do textbook studying, videos, intensive reading - or I can't study at all.
I'm really going through a plateau for several languages. I realized that trying extensive reading at low levels of understanding is practically helpless, and maybe even extensive listening - though extensive listening does help getting familiarized with he sounds and main expressions of the language. What should I do now: work on intensive reading of small texts exactly as if they were textbook lessons, by trying to translate and understand everything with the help of Google Translate and by reading more than 1 text on the same subject/field in order to reinforce knowledge (just like I used to do when I loosely studied several textbooks one after another so in the end something stuck). I need to insert these pieces of intensive study in my routine so that they don't bore me and they also count for the SC, otherwise I'll be concerned that I'd be doing stuff that 'counts' for the SC instead. I don't intend to drop any of the extensive activities either, so here comes the challenge. My main concern is with Georgian. As predicted, Russian surpassed it, but the gap is wider and wider, with Georgian being stuck as a post-contemporary, apolitical, intangible pre-intermediate stage. I see now how the lack of good material - or the waste of the good intermediate ones when I still was a a beginner - hindered my progress in Georgian. I've seen several words often enough but I didn't learn them because I didn't translate them directly, and I didn't bother doing so because I was reading 'extensively'. I tried more complex texts before the simpler ones, because I believed having an original in my native language would help a better understanding. But now I'm still at a stage at which it's too much of a chore to flip back and forth for each sentence for 5 pages. That's why I want to do this for 3 paragraphs at most. All this while keeping the extensive reading, because it does help, but as a complement. I (am supposed to) read Chinesepod's text intensively and I do Memrise's HSK courses + one textbook (currently Contemporary Chinese III - 1 dialogue and 1 text based on the dialogue) all intensively; when I get down to reading non-ficion more extensively I run acrosss a lot of characters I've just learned, and this reinforcement is a confidence boost. No wonder my Chinese is becoming more and more solid. By the way, last Friday I dreaming I was talking to an audience of young Chinese. It was so real! I could only come up with sentences I actually know,and I could see the same difficulties in articulation with the very same initials that seem to be harder, though I did manage to 'say' them properly, just had to put a little more emphasis - like it would have happened in a real conversation, anyway. I started my speech with '你们吃过了吗' and one girl in the audience said that this greeting sounded a bit outdated and didn't make sense in the environment we were at the moment, and I said 'no', I saw it everywhere hehe. Digressions apart, I can see clearly how words with a combined intensive + extensive approach improve through bounds and leaps and how the others lag behind. Chinese, Russian, German all with comprehensible listening input (subs in a fluent language, short text with side translation) progress smoothly. Norwegian reading is frozen, it improved enormously after my first novels read extensively, but nowadays I'm not learning many new words, and I'm reading only extensively. I read French intensively until I became comfortable with following the story, and I'm also in a plateau in terms of acquiring new words as I'm only reading extensively now. Georgian is the biggest struggle: I still don't even have the necessary vocabulary to allow me to flip back and for comfortably through the text and translation; it doesn't help that the novel i'm reading now has overlong, blocked paragraphs that spread through 2, 3 pages. I'm afraid Georgian will be surpassed by Estonian it things go this way. I also suffer from the lack of comprehensible audio material: no subtitles, no dubbing, I'm watching a series in Georgian-only and it's a struggle to watch them and pay attention when you can't understand, and I can't keep focused for more than a few seconds. Ideally, I'd do sentence decks for Georgian, but I don't have time for that without sacrificing my schedule. I don't know what to use either. I really need to start reading short texts intensively and then decide what to do next. Same goes for Norwegian. For this, I'd have to sacrifice time from my extensive reading, say, three pages less extensively so I can do 1 intensively. But then I'm not enjoying the current novels that much for Georgian or Norwegian, and I'd rather they ended quickly. So, it's a sort of a vicious circle. Right now I'm going to watch a TV series in English, something I'm not doing that often, and if there's enough time I will read something intensively in Georgian. I need to get a list of non-ficiton texts with translation, maybe wikipedia will be my crutch. Georgian tells me all the time how the lack of good resources and the pioneering in learning a language charges a high price. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5158 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 306 of 415 02 September 2014 at 9:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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Finished Basic Course in Estonian. It is my first FSI-like course and I must say it's very comprehensive. Not my favorite type of course but I learned to adapt, even if in the end I didn't overlearn it, I just went through it. Still, since it is almost close to a B2, I may be close to an A2 now. I don't like long lessons and I think there could be real translation exercises, but I'm happy with the clear way grammar is explained. The audio is not very much helpful, though, because it's not natural.
Now I realized I don't have that many textbooks to use. I'm gonna save up Manuel d'Estonien as one of my last stages before delving into Estonian-German then Estonian-Russian then monolingual textbooks. Gonna do Tuldava's textbook next then. IT seems I don't have that many resources left, so I have to work more intensively on these so that I don't incur in the same mistakes as with Georgian - skimming through textbooks before I've mastered enough and then being completely lost when I get to native materials. I'm at least a bit more relieved that there are three online courses for Estonian. I think I can make it, I did get a good grasp on syntax from Basic Course in Estonian. Yesterday I read my first news paragraph in Georgian intensively. It was much easier than reading long pages in a novel! Even more so that GT isn't doing a bad job for Georgian now. Today I'm busier, had to go to the bank and spent some time, but I hope I can read another paragraph even if that isn't enough to count for the SC. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5158 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 307 of 415 03 September 2014 at 10:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Tuldava's textbook started. I'm confident it will improve my knowledge of Estonian and give me an initial command. It has some untrasnlated text to practice at the end of the chapers, and I expect to OCR it and translate it with GT.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5158 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 308 of 415 03 September 2014 at 11:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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And now I finished my first news item in Georgian. I can't listen to the audio, unfortunately. No workaround for the moment, other than getting the iOs app to work again or previously downloading the clips at home. Anyway, I must say even though I read an article from the Culture section it still isn't the most appealing text. I'm not following the reasoning of going through graded material. Nevertheless, I better stick to the news instead of starting a new, easier novel before finishing the current one.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5158 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 309 of 415 04 September 2014 at 10:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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I just fulfilled a long wish and bought Spoken World Croatian. My order also had a Georgian textbook in Russian (a new one, not one of the oldies you can find online). I'm not going to start with Croatian before I'm done with Italian, Spanish and Esperanto (which I didn't even started), but it's going to be my second Slavic language almost certainly.
Finished Død Snø. Not suitable for evenings. Not many dialogues either. THere's part 2 to come and then I have to compile a list of films or try to watch series without subs (which maybe is too soon). I restarted watching Pride and Prejudice, in Chinese and French. It is much easier than the non-fiction book I was skimming through. And I gain some pages for French, too. I realized that when it comes to Chinese textbooks with pinyin and OCR, it's wise to copy-paste portions of the texts and make them 'interlinear'. Several texts have the traditional text after the simplified one, which makes pinyin and translation stay for many pages away. So, I just select portions of the file and paste them in a more presentable way. I also do this with Chinesepod's files but they are still too 'advanced'. The sentences are long and built in a way not so common for texbooks. Today was busier, so I may not read any Georgian articles, even though I downloaded the audio from home. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5158 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 310 of 415 05 September 2014 at 11:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm about to finish Modern German and I must say this Modern {insert language here} Grammar: A Practical Guide series by Routledge is outstanding. It's not just morphology, it also tells about conversation fillers, it really deserves its title. Here's an excerpt:
"Keeping the channel open 117.1 Even when someone carries a conversation for a fairly long time, he or she does not speak in a monologue (see 121). There are a number of words and phrases a speaker can use in a conversation to ‘keep the channel open’" 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4836 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 311 of 415 07 September 2014 at 11:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for bringing the Modern Grammar series to my attention, Expugnator! I just discovered they also exist for Russian and Japanese, so I'll try to get hold of a copy of both.
Do you also use the workbook or how are you working with it? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5158 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 312 of 415 07 September 2014 at 11:53pm | IP Logged | ||
Well, thanks to my obsession for book completion, I decided I am going to finish the Student's Book first and then work on the exercises all at once. Seriously, I left the exercises for a later time because I want to use them more as a checklist for which aspects I have learned and which ones I am missing. But this I am doing for German, a language I am more forward at. If it were Russian i would actually do the exercises first. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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