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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 25 of 124 27 September 2010 at 10:31pm | IP Logged |
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Assimil: Up to Using French Lesson 10 (passive wave) and NFWE Lesson 85 (active wave). My progress has been slow and uneven because of my erratic schedule over the past several weeks (with all of the travel), but I am hoping that I'll be able to catch up this week. On Thursday, I am leaving for a tour of the national parks, so my schedule will again be pretty packed, but I anticipate lots of free time on the bus to practice my French and get up to speed.
UF still feels very slow and interestingly, some of the lessons overlap heavily with material from NFWE. I suspect that this overlap is intentional: in order to review previously-learned material while also adding new idioms, grammatically constructions, etc. At the moment, the review is reassuring, but I feel like the intense learning has not really begun. Moreover, given that UF is only 70 lessons as opposed to the 113 lessons of NFWE, I am hopinng that it gets more intense soon! FSI French: While cleaning house yesterday, I did a once-over of all of Unit 5, but I didn't pay much attention to the drills and as result, wasn't fully engaged. I think I will have to go back through the drills and really try to nail down the numbers, as this remains one of my weakest points. French in Action: Up to Lesson 30. I found that it helps if I watch the entire episode all the way through, and then rewatch the clip of Robert and Mireille's story over again -- after I've listened to Prof. Capretz's explanation. I'm generally catching about 70% of the dialogue the first time around, but more like 90% on the second viewing. Someone recently mentioned that Assimil is wonderful for training your brain to pick up expressions or vocabulary. I certainly agree with that. It seems that almost every lesson I study in Assimil is instantly put to use by the FIA videos. This makes me excited to go back to the beginning and rewatch all of the videos to see how much I've missed from the first few episodes! In addition to the above methods, I've been seeking out other ways to practice my French. Yesterday, I watched two episodes of Seinfeld with both the French audio track and French subtitles turned on. I could understand and follow along perfectly fine with the subtitles, but unfortunately, had a lot of difficulty understanding the audio -- especially since it did not correlate with the subtitles. I've also joined Conversation Exchange and have posted my profile seeking out conversation partners for French. I had my first language exchange today on skype, which was fun. We did about 30 mins of English and then 30 mins of French. I am embarassed to admit that my partner's English was far superior to my French, but I am hoping that someday, I will be much better. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 26 of 124 14 October 2010 at 8:32am | IP Logged |
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FRENCH:
Currently up to Assimil Lesson 25 of UF (passive wave) and Lesson 99 of NFWE (active wave). It's really amazing to go back to the earlier lessons and realize how many French words and sentence structures I've retained. Just a few weeks ago, Lessons 90+ of NFWE felt extremely difficult but now, after constant repetition and revision, they feel quite easy! I'm also up to Lesson 45 of FIA and Unit 7 of FSI French. The FIA videos have definitely gotten harder; even though I feel like I've been studing diligently every day and learning lots of words, I am having even more trouble following the dialogues than before. Namely, I think that the actors are speaking a bit faster and mumbling a bit more - certainly, characteristics of real conversation but also more challenging for listening practice! Since I came back from Paris in August, I've learned at least several hundred more words, expanded my grammar knowledge, and improved my listening ability. I believe my vocabulary is in the ballpark of 2000-3000 words, and I can say pretty much anything I want to say on everyday topics, albeit with some hesitation and lots of stammering. The funny thing is, a year ago, I would have been happy with this intermediate level of French (especially since, back then, I knew virtually no French at all). Certainly, I now know enough to get around in a French-only environment and muddle my way through most non-technical conversations. However, now that I'm at this intermediate stage in my learning, it feels rather dissatisfying. Watching French television and listening to French news doesn't feel like an accomplishment even when I can catch 50-70%, because I am painfully aware of the other 30-50% that I am still missing out on. Stammering through a conversation is frustrating, especially because it takes me twice as much effort to say something than it normally does in a language with which I'm more comfortable. Thus, I plan on revising my language goals a bit. Rather than getting French to an "intermediate level" and then turning to my other languages, I hope to spend more time broadening and deepening my knowledge of French. At least until I can comfortbaly hold a conversation entirely in French without too much struggling and until I can follow French television and newspapers, I will continue plodding along. In happy news, I've started broadening into some more "real-life" sources of learning. I've been listening to the RFI news in francais facile for the past few days, and they have been an excellent challenge for my listening comprehension. I've also arranged two Skype language exchanges with native French speakers that give me real life speaking experience. It's still kind of painful to speak real-time French, but I'm hoping that a few more weeks of Skyping will make the words come more easily. Edited by mike245 on 22 April 2013 at 9:18am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 27 of 124 26 October 2010 at 8:13am | IP Logged |
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FRENCH
Currently up to Lesson 33 of UF (passive wave) and Lesson 111 of NFWE (active wave). My progress has been really slow because I've been distracted, but hopefully I can hit the books hard this week. UF is getting harder and I believe that the voice actors are speaking faster than in the earlier lessons, so I just have to remind myself that I should not expect to learn everything perfectly the first time around. I think towards the end of NFWE, I was trying to memorize each dialogue during the first wave, which was more doable because the language was easier and I had just come back from two weeks of daily formal instruction in Paris, but now, the passive wave is getting hard again and I'll need to scale back. I'm also up to Lesson 49 of FIA and Unit 9 of FSI French. For FIA, I ordered the actual DVDs and am finding that they are much more enjoyable than watching the low-resolution videos from my iPod. I have been watching each video twice, one through with the explanations and then once again, after I have reviewed the transcript in the book. It's been very helpful! I am a bit sad though that I am almost at the end of the series. Alongside Assimil, this has been an extremely pleasurable and almost effortless way to learn French! I can't really say the same about FSI French, but I do think that the drills are helping me a bit. I must confess that I don't pay much attention to each exercvise but I do feel like word order and other details are sinking in a bit better. Hopefully, I can get up to Unit 10 by the end of next week, but progress is slow because I've only been doing the drills at the gym, where I get less bored with them. I've also decided to pick up with Living Language Ultimate French again. The dialogues are embarassingly bad, but the grammar explanations seem solid. I quickly sped through Units 6-10 in the past three days, and I'm hoping to cover 1-2 units a day for the next week. Most of it should be review, but it's nice to go back and explicitly learn grammar rules that I've subconsciously absorbed through Assimil. I did find time to watch a movie in French over the weekend, but was disheartened to find that I could barely follow the language, even with the English subtitles helping me out. The problem, I think, is that my ear isn't accustomed yet to the speed of real spoken French and the huge amount of slang that French people use. I am sure that when I chat with French people, they consciously or subconsciously slow down a bit, use slightly easier vocabulary, and stick to topics that I am familiar with. I know that when I speak to foreigners in English, I have the habit of lapsing into this kind of speech too -- enunciating better, using less slang, and speaking a bit slower than I do with friends or other native speakers. However, with movies, TV shows and radio broadcasts, the speech is not slowed down for foreigners, making it much harder. Hopefully, with some more practice, I'll get there! SPANISH In the interests of maintaining and improving my Spanish, I signed up last week for Spanish lessons through Skype. Because I don't have much occasion to use Spanish in my daily life and because there are so many similarities between Spanish and French, I was worried that I would quickly forget my Spanish. Furthermore, as I learned through my experiences with German, it's much easier to maintain a language than it is to try to recover it! The school is based out of Mexico City, but my teacher is from Cuernavaca. She is really nice and very chatty, which makes conversing with her very easy. We've had a few sessions so far, where we've talked about everything from my interests in traveling to good luck charms to cultural differences between Mexico, the US, and various Asian countries. The good thing about having a real teacher rather than just a language partner is that I feel like our classes are better structured to compel me to talk about different topics and, in the process, review and learn new vocabulary and grammar constructions. She's been extremely helpful, for instance, in pushing me to practice some of the more difficult constructions involving the past perfect subjunctive, differences between the imperfect and preterite, and using the subjunctive to express uncertainty and non-reality. I can tell that I tend to have my "on" days and my "off" days. During some sessions, Spanish just rolls off my tongue, and I have almost no problems remembering vocabulary, conjugations, etc. Other days, I find myself struggling to recall even basic words like "autopista" or "ganancias." I think most of the problem is lack of practice: not only have I not had to speak any Spanish for years, but I've also not used my Spanish to talk about much other than very simple day to day stuff or literary topics. Pushing my use of the language to include new topics has been challenging because I now have to use words I've casually absorbed over the years through listening and reading, but never have had occasion to use in real speech I've purchased 30 hours of classes, which should take me well into middle of next year. I know that this isn't a perfect substitute for intense self-study, but I am hoping that it at least allows me to maintain my language skills and, hopefully, expand my active speaking abilities. GOALS I only have one more week of vacation before I start my new job, so this is the final stretch before things get busy. I am hoping to get through Lesson 40 of Assimil UF, Unit 9/10 of FSI French, and Lesson 20 of Ultimate French. I'm temporarily putting FIA on hiatus until I get further in my other French materials, so that I have more time to beef up my vocabulary and grammar base. As a break from Spanish and French, I've also decided to listen to Assimil German with Ease, which I recently purchased. So far, I've listened to the first 35 lessons, and the speakers go painfully slow, but it's nice to review and refresh. I am not actively working on German at the moment, but I am hoping that listening to these lessons will help jog my memory and keep the vocabulary/grammar fresh, so that when I return to the language in the future, it won't be completely forgotten. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 28 of 124 30 October 2011 at 8:28pm | IP Logged |
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It’s been a little over a year since my last post, but I am reviving this language log
to continue to keep track of my progress with language learning. Time flies. Shortly after my last entry, I started a new job, which left me too busy and intellectually exhausted for language learning. For several months, I was too burnt out to do anything other than work and sleep, but now that I’m better adjusted to work, I’ve found myself better about to carve out time for languages. This past year was not entirely wasted from a language learning perspective. At work, I’ve worked on a few small cases where I’ve had to talk with clients in Spanish about various issues, which has kept some of the language fresh in my head. And about four months ago, I began reviewing my Portuguese and French in preparation for a trip to Portugal, Spain, and France. I completed all three volumes of Pimsleur Brazilian Portuguese (from the library), listened to roughly 30 lessons of Assimil Le Nouveau Portugais Sans Peine, and also dove back into Assimil Using French and RFI’s Journal en francais facile. My efforts were pretty successful. When I arrived in Lisbon, it took about a day to adjust to the continental accent, but after a few days, I could understand everyone well and had recovered probably 80% of my previous oral proficiency. In France, I was back to roughly the level I was at during my last stay in Paris (in August 2010), which was enough to get by and have satisfying if somewhat stammering conversations with people, and understand most discussions on various everyday topics, as long as people spoke clearly. I didn’t feel that there was any interference between my Spanish, Portuguese, and French during my trip, although in Paris, there were still moments when I had to force myself not to speak German. For some reason, I think because of the similar “r” sound, I have more interference between French and German than with any of the other Romance languages I’ve studied. I don’t really have a plan at the moment, but I would like to just take advantage of opportunities each day to improve my languages and study where and when I can. At the core of this, I hope to finish Assimil Using French in the next several months and continue listening to RFI Journal en francais facile, but also use other methods and study other languages as I feel like it. Thus far this past week, I’ve been doing the following: French: I am working through 3-4 lessons of Assimil UF each week, and am currently up to lesson 41 (passive wave) and lesson 3 (active wave). I am listening to RFI Journal en francais facile every morning (2-3 times) and reading the transcripts when I have time. I am also listening to the “On the Go” recordings for Living Language Ultimate French Beginner-Intermediate, and am up to Lesson 12. I also got a basic grammar workbook, Practice Makes Perfect: Complete French Grammar, which I have been working through slowly. It’s helping me to solidify my knowledge of verb conjugations, an area that Assimil doesn’t really emphasize at all. Spanish: I have been reading Spanish-language articles everyday on the train to work, downloaded to my mobile phone from ABC.es. I write down any words I don’t know, and plan on uploading them to Anki in the near future. I probably get through roughly 2-4 short articles every day, which helps keep my knowledge fresh. Portuguese: I’ve downloaded several free Brazilian news applications to my phone, and I try to read a few articles in Portuguese every week (2-4). I am not actively working on Portuguese now, but I am hoping that by keeping my reading skills up, I can passively maintain my knowledge. Cambodian: Since Yale now offers the audio tapes to Franklin Huffman’s Modern Spoken Cambodian for free, I’ve downloaded the files and purchased the book from Amazon. I have been listening to the tapes most mornings during my commute to work. I am not following any structure or active studying, but would one day like to improve my knowledge of the language and attain some basic fluency. I’ve only gone through about 5 lessons (out of 30 lessons total), but have learned a few new words. The drills are very easy so far, but I imagine it’ll get harder as I push past my comfort zone. Edited by mike245 on 30 October 2011 at 8:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 29 of 124 21 November 2011 at 5:44am | IP Logged |
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French: Currently up to Lesson 50 (passive wave) and Lesson 13 (active wave) of Using
French, Lesson 25 of Ultimate French: Beginner-Intermediate, and Unit 9.8 of FSI French. Work has been super busy this past month, so I haven’t had much time or energy to study, but I’ve slowly plodding along. Around Lesson 47, the Assimil lessons became significantly longer and harder, but I’m hoping that by the time I get to the end of the book, I’ll look back and find those lessons easy. I am not spending too much time on Ultimate French, but it’s extremely helpful for reviewing grammar and gaining some additional vocabulary. I’m focusing mostly on the audio for Ultimate French and FSI French (rather than using the books), but I think they are really helping. I’ve also been listening to the easy French news on RFI every day, and have noticed that my listening comprehension is slowly improving. Now, I can understand roughly 90% of the newscasters, although my understanding of the comments is still extremely weak (those tend to be poorer sound quality and much higher speed). German: There is a chance that I’ll be going to Austria or Germany next year for vacation, so I’d like to reactivate my German. I’ve started out by going through the first 25 units of Assimil German with Ease (doing both passive and active waves at the same time). So far, it’s been pretty easy, but Assimil German is not as interesting as Assimil NFWE was. Maybe it’s because I’m not a real beginner, but even at Lesson 25, the rate of speech seems extremely slow. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 30 of 124 05 March 2013 at 6:50am | IP Logged |
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It's been more than a year since my last post, but I'm now reviving this language
logbook to track my latest learning efforts. Due to unforeseen but happy circumstances (life happens!), I now find myself living in Hong Kong, where I'll be for at least the next five months. My previous job didn't leave me much time for language study, but for the near future, I’ll have plenty of time to pursue my hobbies and interests. And what better place to learn Cantonese than here in Hong Kong? Of all the languages I've studied over the years, Cantonese has been a fairly low priority, mostly because of its difficulty and the fact that I haven't really "had" to learn it. So even though my partner is a bilingual native speaker and I have heard it spoken around me for much of the past eight years, I've never learned more than a few words here and there (mostly food and small talk). But now, I've decided that I want to reach some level of conversational ability in the language, especially if I want to be able to speak to the locals. I've amassed a few Cantonese resources to work from: (1) Sidney Lau's six volume Beginning/Intermediate/Advanced Cantonese series, (2) Hugh Baker's Teach Yourself Cantonese, (3) the Beginning Cantonese and Intermediate Cantonese Grammars from Routledge, and (4) several Greenwood Press books, including Intermediate Cantonese and A Fung Shui Master. Additionally, for at least the next two months, we’ll be staying with my partner's mother, a chatty woman who is committed to speaking only Cantonese with me, so I'll have regular conversational practice with a patient native speaker. And needless to say, I have unlimited access to Chinese-language movies and television programming here in Hong Kong. My long-term goal is to reach a solid B1/B2 level in spoken Cantonese by end of summer. I would like to be able to converse colloquially in the language and watch television shows with decent comprehension. Right now, I'd guesstimate that I am at a high A1 or low A2 level, with a vocabulary of approximately 1000 words. Short-term, I hope to get through the first two volumes of Sidney Lau's Cantonese series and the first volume of the Routledge Grammar series by end of April, studying at least 2 hours per day. I'll focus on the spoken language first, and will keep track of all new vocabulary words for study on Anki (with romanization). I don't plan to learn to write Chinese, but I eventually want to learn to read. For now, I am going to read the characters in the Sidney Lau books but will not actively study characters. Of course, this immersion exercise wouldn't be fun without a challenge. At the end of March, my partner and I are taking a week-long trip to Paris, where we will be meeting up with friends. My partner doesn't speak any French, so I will need to refresh my dusty French knowledge before we go. Therefore, in addition to immersing myself in Chinese, I plan to review my Assimil lessons daily and, time permitting, work on some FSI drills and listening to RFI podcasts in preparation for the trip. For today: I am studying Unit 7 of Sidney Lau and reviewing Lessons 25-30 of Assimil NFWE. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 31 of 124 07 March 2013 at 6:25am | IP Logged |
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CANTONESE
I’m wrapping up Unit 7 of Sidney Lau today. Each volume contains 10 units, so the units are fairly long and dense. Currently, the pace is still pretty slow, but I expect it to pick up once I graduate to the intermediate volumes. There are a lot of drills, which is great, but I think it would be better if there were audio prompts à la FSI so that I could practice my aural comprehension. Nevertheless, I feel that I am getting a good grounding in the past tense. At a rate of one unit every 3-4 days, it should take me approximately 7 weeks to get through the remaining 12 units in the Basic Cantonese volumes. One challenge I am currently facing is the need/desire to say things beyond the limits of my limited grammatical knowledge and vocabulary. I have resolved not to use any English when speaking with my partner’s mother (her English is pretty poor, anyway). Although I am generally capable of communicating basic ideas and using simple sentence structures, anything more complicated than that inevitably results in terribly mangled or sometimes incomprehensible sentences. For instance, today, I tried to explain to her that when she returns to the US in a few months, she will need to go in-person to renew her driver’s license, since her last two renewals were by mail. A simple point, perhaps, but without the proper knowledge of phrases like “driver’s license,” “in person” and “by mail” it was extremely frustrating and required a lot of circumlocution. Nevertheless, I am sticking to it in the hopes that after a few weeks of this, the words will roll a little more smoothly off my tongue. In some ways, I am trying to recreate aspects of my study abroad experience more than ten years ago. Back then, I arrived as a 19-year college student, with just one semester of German under my belt, for a six month stay in Germany. For the first three months, I lived with a talkative host mother who patiently but steadfastly refused to speak English to me or understand any English words that I attempted to use with her. I still remember those first few miserable conversations we had, when I was forced to sit with my dictionary and look up each word I wanted to say. For weeks, I went to sleep almost every night with a headache as my brain was exhausted from listening to and processing so much German. But after two months, I was able to speak with relative ease, and after four months, I was able to secure an office internship where I worked and spoke exclusively in German. By six months, I could say pretty much whatever I wanted, and I could read novels and watch television with good comprehension. Aside from one class in German (4 hours a week for those first three months), I learned the language outside the classroom. Looking back, I think that the immersion experience was most helpful to me because I had already learned much of basic German grammar and crucial vocabulary before I arrived in Germany. Although my time in Berlin greatly improved my spoken fluidity and my vocabulary and solidified my knowledge of the grammar I had learned prior to going to Germany, I don’t think I really learned or assimilated much new grammar during my time there. Even the grammar that I did learn in German classes in Germany, I didn’t really use much because whenever I was in situations where I really needed to use German, it was all spur of the moment. That’s the thing about learning in a real life setting – people generally aren’t waiting to you to find the perfect way to say something or correct you if you get it wrong. There are people waiting behind you in line at the store; there are phones ringing and errands to run; there are friends waiting to add their two cents to a conversation. Here in Hong Kong, I’m mindful of trying my best to avoid fossilized errors or fossilized limits to my knowledge. I came to Hong Kong with a pretty limited knowledge of Chinese. So structured “book” learning is going to be important. I can’t just rely on real life situations to get me up to speed. I know that learning grammar is going to be a slow process, even in a language like Chinese, which doesn’t have traditional Western-language tenses, cases and moods. And I know that I still have to learn a LOT of new idiomatic expressions and vocabulary before I can comfortably follow up with a real life conversation. But hopefully, a combination of book learning and real-life immersion will be enough for me! FRENCH I have been reviewing Assimil NFWE daily, in five-lesson chunks. Each day, I've been listening to the recordings, then translating the lessons from English to French, then reading the notes and reviewing the French versions to confirm my understanding and the proper translations. It's been a great iterative process, and I feel like this layer of review is helping me to catch a lot of details that I missed back when I studied French with Assimil the first time around. Back then, I was so concerned with trying to understand the recordings, grasp the phonetics and grammar, and learn the deluge of vocabulary, that I didn't really focus on the notes, which often provide helpful details about conjugations, usage tips, etc. For instance, I think the first time around, I didn't note that "plutôt" can also be used to mean "rather." Now, I think those little details are starting to sink in, which should help improve my French knowledge, rather than just refresh it. If I go through five lessons per day, I should be able to get through the remaining 70+ lessons before we leave for Europe at the end of the month. If I finish early, I will probably move on to FSI drills or Ultimate French. However, as the lessons get longer and the vocabulary more challenging (and a bit more esoteric), I might revise my pace in a few weeks. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6821 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 32 of 124 10 March 2013 at 2:25am | IP Logged |
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CANTONESE
I am mid-way through the Unit 8 drills for Elementary Cantonese. This unit covers “potential moods,” including the words for “to be able to,” “may,” and “can”: “hó yíh,” “dāk” and “nàhng gau.” The last is an example of learning a word that you’ve previously never noticed, and then suddenly feeling like it’s everywhere. When I first learned the phrase two days ago, I asked my partner if it was still in common usage because I had never heard it before – and he informed me that people still use it to be “be able to.” The following day, I heard my partner’s mother use it twice! I’ve also gone back and revived Anki for my vocabulary flashcards. Many years ago, I used it, but eventually quit after getting overwhelmed by the seeming thousands of flashcards that I had to learn every day, especially if I skipped a day or two here and there. Now, I’ve learned my lesson and set a limit of 20 flashcards per day per language. So far, I’ve got Cantonese, French and Spanish flashcards, with the latter two containing just words that show up when I listen to RFI broadcasts or read the news online. Cantonese so far has 287 vocabulary words. I’m also slowly using CantoDict to add traditional Chinese characters to my Anki flashcards, so that I can slowly absorb the writing/reading system. I actually prefer this to Pleco, which I believe is only available for Mandarin. I would prefer to learn the Cantonese characters for now. FRENCH I am now up to Lesson 55 of NFWE. My retention of the vocabulary and the lessons is still very good, but my memory is still very context-specific. For example, when back- translating a lesson, I can still readily recall the vocabulary words and the grammatical constructions. But when it comes time to use the word or the grammatical construction in real life, it’s just not there. I think that my knowledge is somewhere between active and passive knowledge, and I think it’ll take some practice before I can really master these expressions. I’ve also started back up with RFI’s journal en francais facile. I used to listen to these podcasts at the gym, without the scripts, so that I could just get used to listening to the sounds. I think I’ve gotten to the point where I can actually distinguish almost all of the words when listening, but I am still not able to process the information fast enough to get all the meanings. Listening several additional times help, but it is still hard since the podcasts are long (and cover many topics) compared to Assimil’s short, pithy lessons. Yesterday, I listened to four podcasts, first with the script and then without the script, and added the 10 or so words I didn’t know to Anki. OTHER LANGUAGES I’ve decided to put all the rest of my languages into “maintenance” mode, so that I still get some exposure to them without having them interfere with my Chinese and French studies. For me, this will mean: (1) for Spanish, reading one news article in Spanish each day and adding vocabulary to Anki, (2) for German, reviewing my Langenscheidt Basic Vocabulary flashcards on the metro and time permitting, listening to podcasts of Schlaflos in München, and (3) for Portuguese, listening to at least one podcast of Café Brasil each day. The latter two podcasts are wonderful language learning tools. Schlaflos in München is at just the right level of listening comprehension practice for me, since Annik Rubens speaks clearly but at a realistic, conversational speed. Café Brasil is also great because it covers so much interesting material and mixes it with music and musings. In many ways, it reminds me of This American Life, which I also love. Yesterday, I read two articles on El País online, listened to the Café Brasil podcast on Brazilians working in Japan (and vice versa), and a few old Schlaflos podcasts discussing the launch of a new podcast program and lamenting the embarrassment of riches resulting from having so much podcasts and not enough time to listen to all of them. Edited by mike245 on 14 March 2013 at 8:05am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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