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Sizen’s Deuxième 旅立ち | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4912 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 9 of 57 16 January 2014 at 9:06pm | IP Logged |
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Just saying Hi, and I'll be following you as a TAC team member. I'll check out un oeil sur la planète at some point.
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| enrdbrow Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4575 days ago 19 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 10 of 57 19 January 2014 at 12:37pm | IP Logged |
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Hi Sizen. You have a very interesting experience with French so far. I'm looking forward to following your log this year. Thanks for the link to Un Oeil sur la Planète. There are a lot of interesting looking videos in the series available on youtube. I'm going to return to those when the Super Challenge kicks off in May.
Good luck on your journey. DB 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sizen Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4342 days ago 165 posts - 347 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Catalan, Spanish, Japanese, Ukrainian, German | Message 11 of 57 19 January 2014 at 2:21pm | IP Logged |
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@g-bod Thanks for dropping by! I'm glad you enjoyed my link! I really want to just dive into learning Korean, but I know it would affect my other languages negatively, plus there might be other languages I want to study first!
@BonneVivante Nice to see you here again! Oh boy, I hope that Icelandic Air deal is still in effect sometime in the next 5 years. My family and I are thinking about doing a big trip to Portugal and Spain, or perhaps some other destinations, so doing a stop in Iceland before that would be heaven! Thanks for the link about Ancient Greek. I didn't realize it had such a diacritic! And I love using the "tu" question marker. I've used it less because there aren't any Quebecois around me, but I tend to use is more often with my dad. @Jeffers Thanks for coming to say hi! I've been enjoying your log so far! So many ideas! I hope my log will be able to provide you with some inspiration throughout the year as well! @enrdbrow I'm still on the fence about whether or not I want to a Super Challenge, but if I do, I hope we'll both be there for each other so we can recommend each other lots of interesting stuff! YouTube is my go-to source for hours of entertainment and education. There's so much ranging from complete lunacy to fascinating science, and it's all free! Definitely can't help but spending a little time there every day. Japanese Man, it's like Japanese is a foreign language or something. This is the first time I've come back to a language that I had a relatively good level in after 2 years of very little maintenance. There's so much that's been kept fresh in my mind, but at the same time, I feel like there's a larger distance between myself and the language than there used to be 2 years ago. It's hard to explain. I used to be able to express myself okay in Japanese, but now I have a hard time finding my words, even some of the simple ones. Reading is fine, but I've found that the reading of some characters takes a few seconds to come back to me. My Japanese is going to need a lot of work. I'm going to be mostly reading this month since it's Tadoku, plus reading is the easiest out of all the 4 skills for me. I'll re-familiarize myself with the language and then do more listening in February. Speaking of, does anyone have any suggestions for YouTube channels that produces 3-10 minute videos regularly or semi-regularly? Or quality podcasts for that matter. French A few things about the CES this week. Cyprien went to the CES and came back talking mostly about the silly stuff. I have to admit that the nVidia card sounds amazing though. The 3d printer/vehicle I could do without though. :P Then there was also a RDV Tech on the CES (my favourite technology news podcast). I don't feel that the main trends of this year's CES are as prout prout as Patrick says, though. I think my favourite thing to hear about was Mother (English). It sounds incredible. I don't have a house though, so it'll have to wait! I'm on vacation now and will be for the next 3 weeks, except I have a little business tomorrow. With all this free time, I'm finally catching up with some of the longer speedruns posted by RealMyop. I watched half of the speedrun of Yoshi's Island since it's 2 hours long. There's so much to see now, though, including the discussions on video games from this year's Stunfest. I remember only watching a few last year, but this year I'll try to follow them all. I just finished the French translation of La femme en vert that I mentioned in my last post. It started very slowly, but became quite absorbing by the end. I started to guess the end around half-way through the book, but the author started throwing in all these red-herrings and plot twists that my confidence crumbled and I wasn't so sure about how it was going to end for a lot of the book. In the end, I was more or less correct with my first assumption, but it was still very worth reading. I loved the way the book was written: two analog stories, one in the past and one in the present. What was really great was how the author mentions the names of all the characters from the story in the past very sporadically. I didn't even learn the name of the woman until the very end of the book! You'd think this would be frustrating, but it was actually pretty tastefully done in my opinion. Anyway, the next books I will read are from La trilogie des fourmis by Bernard Werber. This was a suggestion from one of my friends when I asked him for a fiction series and I don't really know what to expect. From what he's told me, this Werber guy is revered in South Korea and Russia. Who knew? A few days ago was also the first episode of What The Cut of the year! It's kind of like =3 with RWJ if you know what I'm talking about... Basically, 3 ridiculous videos and commentary. Often very funny, but explicit vocabulary is often used as well. And the videos are often... weird, to say the least. Definitely not for everybody. Spanish and other languages My brother bought me Maika for my birthday and I finally got around to downloading her today. I'm pretty excited, but feel that I'll need to review some music theory and Spanish phonology before I get down to using her. I've also been listening to some of the songs that people have been publishing in all of her languages: Meiga e Abusada (Portuguese), Cor Fort (Catalan), Error (Spanish), etc. She's even got a Japanese voice bank (which has a heavy Spanish accent, but is kind of cute in its own way). My final question would be does anybody know of any music courses (free or otherwise) that I could follow in Japanese, French or Spanish? English is my last resort, but I would also accept suggestions for it. Otherwise, I've been feeling a little vloggy lately. Does anybody follow any regular vlogs in French or Japanese? I would love to get any suggestions. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sizen Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4342 days ago 165 posts - 347 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Catalan, Spanish, Japanese, Ukrainian, German | Message 12 of 57 25 January 2014 at 6:26am | IP Logged |
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Japanese
I've been pretty bad with Japanese, not going to lie. I think I need to diversify my activities a little more. All I've been doing is reading one manga and after a few days, I feel like taking a break. Going to perhaps pick up another anime and look for a podcast to listen to. French The highlight of my week was the discovery of TV5 which I originally saw mentioned in Christianoo's TAC thread. Thanks Christianoo! Of course, I went directly to the Canadian website and watched an episode of Des écoles pas comme les autres, a Canadian production about very unique schools. This episode talked about a school in Nova Scotia that takes its children to the sea on a one year trip around the world, studying regular courses like math, astronomy and the rest, as well as how to maintain a boat and navigate out on the sea. The other school was a Maharishi school of transcendental meditation. They practice such mediation during 2 hours every day on top of studying the basics of Sanskrit. The also emphasize choice in subjects like math, where it is important to separate oneself from the problem to take an outside look at it. L'épée Légendaire is back after a month long absence. I really missed this show because it's one of my favourite Quebecois shows that talks about non-serious subjects. More importantly, and still in the world of podcasting, I listened to a wonderful episode of NipLife on motivation. There were a lot of interesting points such as not imagining yourself succeeding, but imagining the benefits of succeeding in your goals. I always fall pray to this bad habit, so I'm going to try to keep myself from dreaming too much. I highly recommend giving this episode a listen if you're having a hard time sticking to your goals. I spent quite a bit of time on YouTube looking for new channels and my search proved to be fruitful. The first stop was channels about movies, of which I found two: Le Fossoyeur de Films and Karim Debbache. The first talks mostly about new movies that just came out, at least lately. I really appreciated his episode about clichés. The second is more about films that relate to video games, and is a little more comic. His episode on Final Fantasy was excellent and brought back a lot of memories for me of when I was ~10 and I saw the movie for the first time. Even back then I was impressed by the graphics which were done without performance capture. Also, I loved the fantasy world created by Hironobu Sakaguchi. Of course, I was young and naïve and didn't notice the flaws of the movie, but I think it'll always keep a special place in my heart despite its flaws. I paid another visit to RZO and discovered that many new shows had been added to their repertoire! Lately I'd been feeling that I didn't have enough Quebecois in my life, so this was perfect. My two new additions are both related to video games, again. (Yeah, I'm on vacation so I'm having a little more fun than usual. :P) Testeur Alpha, a really informal show about old games, is really good for my casual Quebecois French, and Je Joue Le Jeu is just a really cute show about old Famicom games that were never imported to Europe or North America. I'm very impressed by the effort that Guillaume puts into the latter show, especially since he just started making videos recently. On a more serious note, I found an interesting channel on YouTube chock-a-block full of documentaries. I watched an episode on La Réunion, which, to be honest, wasn't very interesting, but the channel has so many videos that I'm sure I'll be able to find something nice. There are also related channels with movies and series, it would seem. Finally, I started watching a playthrough of Skyward Sword by a Swiss YouTuber. It's fun to hear words like "nonante", "huitante" and "septante". Fun French Absurdities Otherwise, I decided to research a little quirk of the French language that had been bothering me for a while: the gender of the word "gens". "Sizen, you're crazy," you tell me. "Gens is clearly masculine." Well, kind of. First of all, let's clarify something. In Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, the same word is "gente" which is feminine. Even in Catalan, it's "gent", feminine. Why does French seem to be the only one who's masculine? Honestly, I don't know how the change occurred, but there are still artifacts of a feminine "gens" from looong ago. From what I've gathered, "gens" is still partly feminine in some respects. Maybe you've heard such constructions as "de belles gens" before. But then, you're immediately put face to face with other constructions that are bound to cause confusion; "tous ces jeunes gens". "Tous"? We just had the feminine and now here's the masculine. Unsurprisingly, French has a set of rules, filled with exceptions, that dictates the gender of "gens". If the adjective directly preceding "gens" has a different form in the masculine and feminine, then gens is considered feminine. Eg.: "de belles gens", "de bonnes gens", "de joyeuses gens". If the only adjective before "gens" is "tout" then it's considered masculine. However, if an adjective like those mentioned above is interposed between "tout" and "gens" then it's feminine and if an unchanging adjective is placed in between, than "tout" stays masculine. E.g.: "Toutes ces belles gens" but "tous ces gens" and "tous ces jeunes gens" (Oh boy, here we go) If adjectives are placed both before and after "gens", and the adjective directly preceding "gens" has different masculine and feminine forms, then then all adjectives before "gens" are feminine and all adjectives following "gens" are masculine. However, if the adjective directly preceding "gens" does not have different forms in the masculine and feminine, then all adjectives are considered masculine. E.g.: "Toutes ces belles et bonnes gens courageux" but "Tous ces beaux et braves gens courageux" (Ohhhh boooooooy) These rules apply equally to adjectives that start a sentence and pronouns. E.g. "Éreintées, toutes ces bonnes gens sur lesquels j'avais fondé de grands espoirs n'ont pas pu accomplir la tâche que je leur avait confiée" but "Éreintés, tous ces braves gens sur lesquels j'avais fondé de grands espoirs n'ont pas pu accomplir la tâche que je leur avait confiée" Finally, (oh noooooo) if "gens" is followed by a complement using "de", then everything stays masculine. E.g.: "De sérieux gens d'affaires" and never "De sérieuses gens d'affaires" More information on gens. There's also a great description in the Antidote French Dictionary. This isn't even the only noun in French with a flexible gender. There are three other words: orgue (organ [instrument]), délice (delight) and amour (love). What's odd is that the gender isn't flexible in the respect that one can chose which gender is to be used, rather it has to do with the number. In their singular form, all of these words are masculine, but put make them plural and they're all feminine. "Un grand orgue" but "des grandes orgues" "Le grand amour de ma vie" but "mes folles amours" "Un vrai délice" but "Les grandes délices" So yeah, gender, it's confusing. Edited by Sizen on 25 January 2014 at 6:27am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Sizen Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4342 days ago 165 posts - 347 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Catalan, Spanish, Japanese, Ukrainian, German | Message 13 of 57 06 February 2014 at 6:52am | IP Logged |
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Just a quick update. I've been a bit busy and not focusing on my languages very much this past week or so because I will be going back to Canada soon and have lots of things to prepare. Plus, I've been going out with my friends a lot because I probably won't get to see any of them for a long time. The good thing is that some of my friends here are French and Japanese, so I have been practicing my languages a bit all this time! Anyway, point of the story is that I won't be coming back with a regular sized update until sometime after February 12. I was hoping to have all this cleared up before the beginning of the year, but I just have to deal with it now. Sorry all for not being very active lately.
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| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4850 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 14 of 57 07 February 2014 at 1:38am | IP Logged |
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@Sizen - Don't apologize for that. I often go through time periods when I am just too busy to be active here. (I'm finishing up one of those periods now.) So it's no problem. Just post when you can. Edited by kujichagulia on 07 February 2014 at 1:39am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sizen Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4342 days ago 165 posts - 347 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Catalan, Spanish, Japanese, Ukrainian, German | Message 15 of 57 15 February 2014 at 12:12am | IP Logged |
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Oh snap, I've officially passed the 100 post mark and have made senior member status! It's only taken 400 days...
So I've finally made it back to Canada, unpacked, reconfigured my desktop, etc. I've still got a few things to do: I need to open a new bank account and get a haircut (the latter being of utmost importance as I haven't had a trim in 5 months). All in all, I'm feeling pretty good about everything though. Japanese Unfortunately, I don't have much to say about this, then again I don't have many updates for any languages. I did have a conversation with my Japanese friend in a mix of Japanese and English. I found out that conjugating 大丈夫 (daijoubu) into だいじょばない (daijobanai) is totally a thing now (yeah, you have to drop the u in jou). Some days I feel like Japanese is one of the fastest changing languages if not the fastest, and changes like this make me even more confident in my claim. French Been chatting in French a bit more lately. I also talked with my father after having been awake for more than 26 hours without sleep and did surprisingly well, considering I haven't been keeping in contact with French as much over the past 2 weeks or so. I also found a free music course in French that I've started but haven't yet finished. It's great to finally know the French version of all the musical terms I studied in English back in middle and high school. Portuguese, Italian, Catalan I've gotten back into studying these a little more seriously lately and have been really enjoying it. I'm using EuRom5 and I do about an hour a day five times a week. I start with 30 minutes in one language (Portuguese, for example) then move onto another language for 30 minutes (Catalan) and then the next day I rotate (Italian, then Portuguese). I've been taking more serious notes, reviewing them and listening more carefully to the recordings so my understanding has improved greatly. I still find Italian to be the hardest for me since it's kind of in a group of it's own, but it's coming along slowly but surely. Spanish A part of me wants to start working on this language again just to improve my vocabulary. I might also study it in University so it's not a bad idea. University Going to be applying to Université Laval and Université de Montréal, which is starting to scare the bejeebers out of me since I'm starting to doubt my French skills, but I don't think I'll improve as much as I'd like to if I don't go. Either way, I'll be studying linguistics of some sort and will need to study one or two other languages and I've been thinking about which to study for a while. If I got for pure linguistics, I'd like to take the Spanish focus with German as my secondary language. I've really wanted to study a Germanic language for a year or so now and now that I have some German friends, it would be silly not to study a bit. Otherwise, if I major in modern languages, I'd be more interested in looking at languages that I know nothing of. The only modern languages offered of which I know nothing are Russian and Arabic, and since I have no real interest in Arabic, Russian would be my second choice, German being the first. It looks like I might be focusing on French, as I'd be in a francophone university, while teaching myself more Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan and Japanese (with no real heavy-set goals) on my own and Russian and German at school for the next few years. All I really want is to be able to read at the same level as my Spanish right now in all the Romance languages, speak a competent level of French along with manageable Japanese and basic conversational German. Russian would just be for the linguistic knowledge of the language. Which, to me, doesn't seem like too tall of an order. I mean, I'm looking at speaking one language fluently (already close), two others for basic conversations (one of which is already pretty good), four more related languages for basic novel reading (one of which is already there) and one more for barebones understanding, and I have about 3.5 years to do it. I think it's a lot more realistic than the things I've said before. Otherwise, I'm caught up on the French teams' logs and will be catching up with the Japanese team over the next few days. Sorry for being so inactive lately, guys and gals. Edited by Sizen on 15 February 2014 at 12:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sizen Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4342 days ago 165 posts - 347 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Catalan, Spanish, Japanese, Ukrainian, German | Message 16 of 57 01 March 2014 at 12:41am | IP Logged |
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Wow, I'm alive! It's been a pretty fun past 2 weeks. I've been seeing some friends that I haven't seen in ~7 months and also getting back down to business.
French I've been a bit all over the place here, but I've continued listening to podcasts as they come out. I've also taken the time to look into some Quebecois TV series to keep myself occupied in my downtime. I rewatched Tu m'aimes-tu and have recently started Les Rescapés, which will unfortunately be taken off of tou.tv tomorrow. It's a bit of an odd science fiction series where the main characters are thrown into the future in the middle of a police investigation regarding an unknown arsonist. I didn't really think I'd get into it because science fiction isn't my favourite genre, but the story doesn't revolve too much around the supernatural part of the story and is more axed on the family adapting to the future and finding the criminal in the future. Highly recommended. (At least so far) I've also applied for university and need to take the TFI to prove my level of French. Of course I'm worried, but all I can do now is work harder and hope for the best. I'll probably take the exam on the 22nd of March. Japanese I've been watching Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood with my brother, along with 屍鬼 (Shiki) on the side. Watching with subtitles is truly the best! I had always preferred watching the episodes raw, but now that I've started using subtitles it's so much easier to look up expressions and words that I don't understand! I need to find some novels to read and have been considering 精霊の守り人 (Serirei no Moribito) because it probably won't be much more difficult than Another. As soon as I'm done with the textbook I'm currently studying, I think I might start working through some textbooks that me and my brother have but that I haven't finished. I feel the need to do some drills and to put the vocabulary I'm learning to use. Hopefully I'll be able to start with this the week after next. Catalan, Portuguese, Italian I'm coming to the end of EuRom5 and have to say that it's truly an excellent textbook. I think it would be a little difficult for somebody who has only studied or only knows one Romance language, but for somebody with a good knowledge of one and a basic reading knowledge of another, it's pretty easy. Italian has been the only language that's taken time to get used to as a larger percent of the vocabulary doesn't match up or is too hard to guess the root of when compared to the other Romance languages (I would assume someone who knows Italian would have the same trouble I'm having, but with French). I think I also made it harder for myself by following the instructions given at the beginning: don't study individual words. That's silly. Why did I do that? When I got to the 10th text of Italian, I could feel that it was lagging behind Portuguese and Catalan, by a lot, so I started paying more attention to individual words and my Italian's now catching up. Still far behind, but acceptable. As for Catalan and Portuguese, my knowledge of Spanish has been a great help. I already feel pretty competent in Portuguese and am tempted to study it for 20 minutes every day during the months leading up to university. It's a pretty attractive language for me, as well. Parts of it remind me of Canadian French, which makes it a little special. Then, my Catalan reading skills, while not as good as Portuguese, have surprised me a little. I really like the feel of Catalan, though. It's almost as if I'm reading Spanish with a bit of a French twist. Spanish I'm not sure if I'll need this language for university or not, but there's a chance I might choose it as my foreign language for my linguistics program, so I'm probably going to be doing some L-R or something now and then just to boost my vocab. That's it for now! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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