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AlOlaf Danskdeutsch Challenge Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| AlOlaf Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 491 posts - 617 votes  Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Danish | Message 25 of 74 02 August 2015 at 12:33am | IP Logged |
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@ Fasulye and Expugnator:
I'm really glad to hear from you guys. I've been feeling strangely like a refugee posting here lately. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| AlOlaf Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 491 posts - 617 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Danish | Message 26 of 74 05 August 2015 at 4:07am | IP Logged |
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Week 15
Hours recorded in the last week, with total hours in parentheses: Danish: 10.9 (93.7) German: 0 (9.4) Combined hours to date: 103.1 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| AlOlaf Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 491 posts - 617 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Danish | Message 27 of 74 08 August 2015 at 8:01pm | IP Logged |
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I'm nearing the 100 hour mark in recorded Danish. Some time ago, I vowed to do something rash if my Danish still sounded ridiculous after reaching this point. Well, it's quite possible that I do in fact still sound ridiculous (I can’t really tell), but I'm also pretty sure I've made progress since starting this little project, so I won’t give up and switch to Norwegian or do anything crazy like that just yet. Later on I may make up some absurd new challenge designed to expedite my acquisition of Danish, but for now I’m staying the course: 300 hours recorded Danish and German by the end of the year or bust.
At the moment, I’m putting pauses in the audio of Speakdanish (a course I bought on the Internet a couple years ago) because I think I'm ready to try to mimic something fast and conversational. Speakdanish's listening comprehension-oriented dialogues are spoken more rapidly than the made-to-repeat-after monologues of Dansk udtale for begyndere and Dansk udtale i 49 tekster, the two Danish-produced pronunciation courses I've been working with. At the same time, Speakdanish has less daunting content than the even more rapidly-spoken mix of dialogues and narration in my German-based course, Av, min arm, which has proven discouragingly difficult to parrot. Hopefully the Speakdanish material will help me make the transition from the easier Danish-made courses to the mondo challenging German-produced one. It'll probably take me a week or more to put all the pauses in Speakdanish (it'd go faster if I didn't have to work or sleep), but I think it'll be worth it. In the meantime I won’t be able to record much of anything. Danish pronunciation is my top priority right now because it seems to be the most difficult aspect of the language. A close second is listening comprehension, so I listen to spoken Danish in the car constantly. I‘ve been through Anne Franks Dagbog twice, as well as the first Harry Potter audiobook and part of the second. I also pull the audio off funny Danish Youtube videos (Live fra Bremen and Normalerweize are fertile sources), make cds out of them and add them to the mix. I’ve slacked off reading and writing in Danish, but I want to get back to them as soon as I can get a good foothold on the pronunciation. Wanting to read out loud in Danish was what actually sparked this pronunciation mania. I’ve derived a lot of benefit from reading out loud in German, so I tried it in Danish, only to discover how easy it would be to develop an incorrect pronunciation that, engrained through repetition, would be extremely difficult to unlearn. With German, once you know the sounds of the alphabet and a few consistent rules, you can look at an unknown word and pretty much tell how it’s supposed to sound. This is definitely not the case with Danish. The number of vowel phonemes is sobering, and being able to tell them apart (and, ideally, reproduce them correctly) is non-negotiable, but the written language looks deceptively simple and gives no indication that it represents such a complicated array of sounds. As for German, I’ve neglected it frightfully. A German guy who lives in my city invited me to a barbecue at his house next weekend, where there’s likely to be a bevy of native speakers. I hope I don’t make a fool of myself. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| AlOlaf Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 491 posts - 617 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Danish | Message 28 of 74 12 August 2015 at 4:25am | IP Logged |
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Week 16
I put pauses in my Speakdanish audio and listened to myself repeating after it just long enough to become thoroughly demoralized. Now I’m thinking about going to Munich in December to take the GDS again. Hours recorded in the last week, with total hours in parentheses: Danish: 1.3 (94.9) German: 0 (9.4) Combined hours to date: 104.3 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| AlOlaf Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 491 posts - 617 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Danish | Message 29 of 74 17 August 2015 at 2:18am | IP Logged |
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It’s no coincidence that my idea to go to Germany and retake the GDS took form just as I hit a brick wall with Danish last week. I suspect the part of my brain tasked with protecting my psyche feared the imminent collapse of my Danish project and activated some kind of powerful failure acknowledgement avoidance mechanism, causing me to abruptly channel all my energy into organizing a substitute undertaking that, though redundant and possibly pointless, offered more likelihood of a successful outcome. At least that could explain why I suddenly began, like a sentient puppet, to make plans to do exactly the same thing I’d done in 2012: take a two-week super-intensive C2 course at the Goethe Institute and sit the GDS at the end. Only this time it would be in Munich instead of Frankfurt.
In the space of a day, I applied online for the course and the exam, asked off from work for two weeks in December and scoped out flights. Not once did I stop to think that I was about to spend a great deal of money and blow all my vacation in order to do something I’d already done before. I blotted out the fact that there was nothing in the world I wanted more than to reach a level in Danish that would allow me to hobnob English-free in Denmark and Norway, and that booking a trip to Germany would necessarily cause my single-minded self to drop Danish and plunge 100% into German for the rest of the year, a setback that would almost certainly jeopardize my dream of reaching the desired level of Danish in my lifetime. Deep inside, I knew I was bailing out on something very important to me simply because the going had gotten rough, and that I was throwing myself into a big, fat, instant gratification diversion in hopes it would keep me from having to admit to myself that I’d given up. But what an attractive big, fat instant gratification diversion. That night, I had a series of vivid and disturbing dreams and woke up the next morning feeling vaguely uneasy. I looked at my phone and there was an email from the Goethe Institute saying they weren’t offering the super-intensive C2 course anymore, but they could sign me up for C1. I won’t be doing the course or the exam. I really don’t know why I wanted to take the GDS again. It’s stressful as hell. I hope to go back to Germany someday, but in the meantime I’ve got lots of Danish to learn. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| AlOlaf Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 491 posts - 617 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Danish | Message 30 of 74 19 August 2015 at 6:13am | IP Logged |
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Week 17
Since I decided not to go to Germany, I took this week off from work to make an all-out assault on my most difficult Danish pronunciation practice recordings. I've scheduled sessions with two Danish Italki teachers, one on Thursday and the other on Friday, to see if they think I'm getting anywhere with it. I’m also using the time to try out German Italki teachers located in places like India and New Zealand, where the time difference is great enough to make weekday evening sessions possible. My German friend’s barbecue from last weekend, which I thought would be a great speaking opportunity, proved to be teeming with anglophones, and politeness precluded any lengthy German conversation. Hours recorded in the last week, with total hours in parentheses: Danish: 8.9 (103.8) German: .7 (10.1) Combined hours to date: 113.9 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| AlOlaf Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 491 posts - 617 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Danish | Message 31 of 74 27 August 2015 at 5:20pm | IP Logged |
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Week 18
The two Italki Danish teachers I had sessions with last week both gave me very positive feedback, so I guess the record-yourself-repeating-after-the-native-speaker-over-and- over-again approach is working for me. Hours recorded in the last week, with total hours in parentheses: Danish: 9.0 (112.8) German: .1 (10.2) Combined hours: 123.0 Edit: Sorry to post the same thing twice, but I was trying to edit out the space after the second to the last hyphen and accidentally quoted myself and then generated a second post, which I had to delete. I then tried copying and pasting the same post again, but for some reason the space showed up again in exactly the same place. Please pardon my OCD. Edited by AlOlaf on 27 August 2015 at 5:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| AlOlaf Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 491 posts - 617 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Danish | Message 32 of 74 02 September 2015 at 6:26am | IP Logged |
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Week 19
The 1TB external hard drive I've been storing my recorded jabber on is full, so I bought a new one with 5TB. That should last me awhile. I recently got the complete boxed set of the Danish TV comedy series Klovn on DVD. I’ve seen 13 of the 60 episodes, and so far it's really funny. Too bad there's only English subtitles. Since I ordered it from Denmark, I thought there'd be Danish subtitles for the hearing impaired, but no such luck. I guess I'll watch the whole thing (25 hours plus extras) with English subtitles, and then see how much of it I can understand with no subtitles at all. I finally gave up waiting for a German version of the new Assimil Danish course to come out and ordered the French version, which is the only one currently available. I won't be able to understand the instructions, but since I’ve already worked through Dänisch ohne Mühe, I should be able to infer quite a bit, and I’ll have a built-in excuse for not doing the active wave. It's mainly the audio I'm after, anyway. If it’s good, I'll put pauses in it and add it to my jabber arsenal. Guess I’ll find out in a few days when it gets here. I want to thank daegga for posting a link to this new edition, because otherwise I wouldn't have known it existed. Hours recorded in the last week, with total hours in parentheses: Danish: 8.0 (120.8) German: 0 (10.2) Combined hours to date: 131.0 1 person has voted this message useful |
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