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Slow Learning: FR, HI, ancGR TAC 2015 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 4088 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes  Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 105 of 164 29 November 2014 at 2:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Congratulations Jeffers on getting accepted to the program, and on all the progress! Very nice Hindi sentence. Could you remind me again what the dot in the second letter of your name means?
How do you pronounce college in Hindi? Technically
Edited by Gemuse on 29 November 2014 at 2:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4915 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 106 of 164 29 November 2014 at 4:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
The dot changes the hard "p" sound into an "f" sound. It is often ignored in print, and some words which take it are often pronouced both ways. Other words like सफ़र (safar- voyage) would not be pronouced without it, like सफर (saphar), as far as I can tell.
I suppose I could have written: कॉलेज. That would have given an more English "a" sound. I don't know how else to write the "e" sound though. Any other suggestions? Thank you for you comments, Gemuse. Here's a question for anyone about Lang-8. What do you do when a native speaker gives you wrong corrections? For some reason, someone corrected half of my मैंs to में. I know a lot of people pronounce it that way, but then why only correct half of them? I suppose I will just ignore it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 4088 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 107 of 164 29 November 2014 at 6:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Thanks. I tried remembering if I knew that fact at one point, but I could not recall one way or another :(
The "e" unfortunately is written as you wrote AFAIK. It's hard to translate some English sounds into Hindi. 
I guess a lot of people (including me), did not properly master the nuances of sounds and spellings, so you have to take spelling corrections with a grain of salt. Spelling just wasn't a big deal (unlike English), as the way we pronounced, we wrote. I remember one incident in a Sanskrit class where someone asked the teacher what the difference between one letter and a modified version of it (like the ph, f thing) was, and when the teacher explained none of us could even hear the difference. Quite unfortunate. Edited by Gemuse on 29 November 2014 at 6:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| PeterMollenburg Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5482 days ago 821 posts - 1273 votes Speaks: English* Studies: FrenchB1 | Message 108 of 164 31 December 2014 at 5:06am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Hey Jeffers,
You've done very well this year with your French Jeffers. A consistent year with consistent effort in French. You've been the most helpful and resourceful team member for me on our French team, so thank you for your input and assistance. I'm sure I'm not the only one that would feel that way. Thanks Jeffers, well done for 2014, and good luck for 2015! PM 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4915 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 109 of 164 31 December 2014 at 4:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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YEAR END SUMMARY FOR 2014
French I planned to work on four courses this year: New French with Ease I finished the passive wave, haven't touched it since. I bought Assimil Using French this year, and I'll get into that soon. I also bought an old copy of French Without Toil, but I'm not sure how much I'll use it. FSI I hoped to finish French 1, but just did units 7 & 8. I'll probably pick this up again, but I have other courses to be getting on with. Pimsleur nearly finished with French III. Sadly, my local libraries don't have French IV. Hugo I'm on chapter 9 of 12 of French in 3 Months. It's a good review, and I plan to finish the course soon. After that I will definitely use the Hugo Advanced French course, which looks very good because it is focused on interesting texts. Vocabulary I started the year with about 1200 words from the Routledge Frequency Dictionary known pretty well via my Anki deck. I'm now up to 2220, so I entered and learned just over 1000 words. That's not very impressive in reality, because I probably knew over half of them already from other courses and from cognates. But vocab study is only a small part of my study time. If I had really pushed myself, I could have easily learned twice as many words, but I think my time was better spend on other things. I do plan to get to around 3000 in the frequency dictionary in the coming year, and then I don't know if I'll continue with it. French Watching According to my Super Challenge page, I've "watched" 120.7 films in French. Most of that time was taken up with audiobooks and the like. Here are a few of the better TV series and films I watched this year: Boulevard du palais Still my favourite policier series. The series has finished on TV5 Monde, but I hope sometime they'll start it again from the beginning. Un village Français Quite a good series, but it is inevitably getting more and more depressing. I've watched from series 1, and I'm halfway through series 4. Petit Nicolas A really enjoyable film, even though most of the humour is predictable. Besides these highlights, I've enjoyed re-watching a few of my old favourites: Amélie, Rien à Déclarer, and Le Dîner de Cons. I have to shed a tear because my favourite documentary show, Les villages de France, isn't being shown in TV5 Monde anymore, and I can't find a trace of it anywhere on the net, not even a mention (except old listings on TV5). French Listening I've listened to a lot of audiobooks that I have the books of. I usually listen a few times, then read the book, then read while listening. I've also discovered podcasts recently: L'avis de Marie is an excellent podcast for advanced beginners, lower intermediate. Geared towards A2/B1, Marie talks about interesting topics in biweekly episodes of about 13-14 minutes. Each episode has a transcript, and for the more recent episodes, the trancript is highlighted sentence by sentence as she speaks. Her speaking pace is a bit slow for me, but it has been really useful for listening to French on a variety of interesting topics. I think having listened to these will really come in handy if I ever get conversational. I've listened to the first 35 episodes (of 133), most of them twice, totalling about 14 hours of listening. The good thing is that I have about 95% comprehension when I listen to these podcasts. Au coeur de l'histoire is a well-known podcast on HTLAL. I started listening to it at the beginning of the Christmas holiday, and have listened twice to 8 episodes of about 40-45 mins-- about 10 hours in total. The host really talks fast, and so sometimes my comprehension is below 50%. The topics are interesting to me, so I listen well enough to know what is going on. But for this reason, it's not as much fun as L'avis de Marie for me, but I'm sure it will help with my listening comprehension. French books (Mostly read on Kindle, with assistance of the popup dictionary). The Le Petit Nicolas series has been a regular companion over this year. I've read Le Petit Nicolas, Les vacances du Petit Nicolas, Les bêtises du Petit Nicolas, Le Petit Nicolas et ses voisins, Le Petit Nicolas s'amuse, and Le Petit Nicolas, c'est Noël !, most of them several times. My reading comprehension has really grown, and picking up a new volume of these stories is always a treat. I read the script to Amélie intensively twice, then once through again for good measure. It was a good exercise, but not as enjoyable as other reading I've done. Les orpailleurs by Thierry Jonquet has been a real challenge, but an enjoyable one. I got it because Le boulevard du palais is based on the characters in it, but I knew it was going to be a challenge. Most pages I have to look up a dozen words or more, and almost every page has a word that's not even in my Kindle dictionary. Sometimes I've really struggled to get more than the gist of the story, particularly some long descriptive passages. I'm about 2/3 of the way through it, and the story is becoming more compelling (although I put it aside for a week to read Le Petit Nicolas, c'est Noël for Christmas). I've also read a lot of readers, which have been very useful, if not as interesting. I planned to read a lot of BDs in French, but for some reason they haven't drawn my interest as much as things like Le Petit Nicolas. Maybe I'll start tackling my pile of BDs this year? Hindi I haven't studied as much Hindi as I planned to this year, but I did a lot over the summer holidays. The most important books I started working on were: The Intermediate Hindi Reader by Usha Jain. This is an excellent book: beautifully hardbound and full of text. There are 21 readings, from simple to quite difficult, each with a running glossary after the story (words which won't be glossed again are marked with an asterisk). The accompanying CD has audio for all the stories in mp3 form, read very well by male and female voices. There are no exercises, which is a good thing, but some notes on the text would have been welcome. I've only read the first few stories, because I was waiting to finish: The Routledge Intermediate Hindi Reader. This is an easier book to get into for a beginner than the Usha Jain reader. It has 20 stories, but they are mostly just a couple of pages, so I've counted a total of about 50 pages of Hindi text. The rest of the book is taken up with notes on the text and language (useful), exercises (not so useful), and glossaries (useful). The audio is available for download from the book's web page, as well as word docs with English translations. The audio isn't perfect, and it's only read by a male voice, but it's still good overall. I've listened to the whole audiobook 4 times, and I've worked through 14 chapters. I've also read 18 children's books, many of them twice, and टिनटिन - काला द्वीप (Tintin - The Black Island). I'm about halfway through टिनटिन तिब्बत में (Tintin in Tibet). The discovery of Tintin in Hindi was a real delight. They are actually still quite difficult for me, but I try to limit myself to 1 or 2 dictionary lookups per page. Hindi films (Just the films I'd strongly recommend) Talaash was one of the best films I watched this year. It is about a police officer investigating a mysterious death, while dealing with the tragic death of his own young son. I enjoyed it enough to watch it twice. Good soundtrack too (I'm listening to it right now). Special 26 was a fun film along the lines of Ocean's 11. And I rewatched 3 Idiots for probably the 4th time. It is still one of my favourite Hindi films. According to the Super Challenge statistics, I've watched 28 films in Hindi, and read 3.3 books. My goal was to complete a half challenge in Hindi, but I'm not sure I'll complete the reading half of it. EDIT: I forgot to mention that I listened twice through Assimil Le Hindi sans peine. It would have a pretty steep learning curve for beginners, but it was good for me. Sometime this year I'll use the French based text, thereby working on both languages together! Ancient Greek I've not done as much work on Ancient Greek as I had hoped. I signed up for a half Super Challenge for Ancient Greek, but so far I've only read 1.2 "books" (60 pages) and "watched" 1.6 "films" (148 minutes). The reading was from the New Testament: the three letters from John and the first 10 chapters of Matthew. The "watching" is from an audiobook of the same readings. I was hoping for an audiobook of the Greek New Testament with good Erasmian pronunciation, but the accent on the audiobook I have is strongly American on the vowels although otherwise broadly Erasmian. The worst thing about it is that the author reads without any feeling for what the text is saying. It's like he's reading from the phone book. Oh well. I doubt I'll get my half challenge this year, but I'll keep chipping away at it from time to time. Edited by Jeffers on 31 December 2014 at 7:22pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7211 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 110 of 164 31 December 2014 at 5:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Thank you for posting your 2014 summary Jeffers. You have a lot of interesting things going on. I also
learned about some new sites like, Au couer de l'histoire. It seems like getting caught up in the topic would be a great way to engage the subconscious language learning device that some sometimes talk about. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Mohave Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Mohave1 Joined 4013 days ago 291 posts - 444 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 111 of 164 01 January 2015 at 2:25am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Congratulations on a very successful 2014! Seeing it listed out like that, you have really accomplished a lot
this year! I've greatly enjoyed reading your log -- and all the great resources you share. Looking forward to being on the same French team with you next year -- and to an equally successful 2015! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| PeterMollenburg Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5482 days ago 821 posts - 1273 votes Speaks: English* Studies: FrenchB1 | Message 112 of 164 01 January 2015 at 8:45am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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A diverse range of materials that you have covered during the year Jeffers! Thanks for another useful link too
with L'avis de Marie 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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