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MithradatesTAC’14 - 鹊-Lobo-Yürükler-Rare | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| MithradatesG Newbie United States Joined 4217 days ago 30 posts - 36 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, French, Armenian, Turkish, Italian | Message 9 of 21 04 January 2014 at 3:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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TURKISH:
For the time being, Turkish is actually only receiving 15min a day. I'll hopefully increase this after my trip to Puerto Rico (although the trip might further fire my desire to work on Spanish...) I'm using the FSI Turkish course. This is actually my first time trying an FSI course. I have TY Turkish as a back-up (the mid-90s edition) and I could get a copy of le turc sans peine, but I've used Assimil before (to great effect!) and am feeling adventurous. I'm hoping the endless oral exercises will help cement Turkish in my mind as a spoken language. I often end up approaching languages as solely written creatures which retards my oral and listening abilities. ARMENIAN (Western): I intend to spend 20min-35min a day on Armenian. 20min working through a textbook. 15min twice or three times a week listening to a podcast. I'm using A Practical Textbook of Western Armenian (2007) by Haroutiun Kurkjian. I bought it in Glendale, CA at Abril Books (frustratingly, their website is down). It was originally written in French. In some respects, it resembles the format of an Assimil book. It has 72 lessons, each of which opens with a small dialogue with notes on grammar following. Each lesson contains one or more exercises and each ends with a shorter dialogue that previews the grammar of the following chapter. The characters in the dialogue are part of an imaginary Armenian family in Paris. I bought the book because it is accompanied by audio (a rarity for Western Armenian learning materials). Unfortunately it sounds as if they recorded the audio on a roof-top patio in the middle of Paris. There is the constant sound of car and truck traffic, air-planes and other things I can't place. On top of that, the audio is spoken at full conversational speed. I don't consider these two aspects of the audio to be problems anymore, however. If I can understand this audio, I can understand spoken Armenian under any circumstances. For these last several days I have been working on Lessons 35 and 36 of Kurkjian. I am taking my time and concentrating on understanding the audio completely before moving on. These chapters introduce the aorist of closed and irregular verb classes. The construction of the aorist is one of the more difficult parts of Armenian morphology, in my opinion. Perhaps in a later post, I can sketch out some the difficulties. Armenian is sometimes said to be agglutinative, which is true relative to some other IE languages, but "irregularities" in the morphology belie its synthetic origins (at least, that's my theory). ձը տեսութիւն։ 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5289 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes  Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 10 of 21 05 January 2014 at 9:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
That’s a great opportunity to test your Spanish and I bet it will also work as the perfect motivator to keep you studying pretty intensively in the coming weeks. Anyway, as a fellow Lobo I dropped by because I wanted to wish you good luck for TAC’14. ¡Buena suerte! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| MithradatesG Newbie United States Joined 4217 days ago 30 posts - 36 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, French, Armenian, Turkish, Italian | Message 11 of 21 11 January 2014 at 3:19am | IP Logged | |||||
¡Muchas gracias! It certainly is a good language learning motivator! I also really like learning a specific type of Spanish instead of a sterile Standard. Thanks for dropping a line! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| MithradatesG Newbie United States Joined 4217 days ago 30 posts - 36 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, French, Armenian, Turkish, Italian | Message 12 of 21 11 January 2014 at 3:21am | IP Logged | |||||
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A busy week that started out with some of the coldest weather I've ever experienced! That gave me ample reason to stay inside and work on languages!
CHINESE: I've continued my tripartite schedule: 15min listening; 15min reading; 15min speaking (following a textbook). I've finished part 3 of 舌尖上的中国. It's utterly fascinating, I highly recommend it. I have to look up quite a number of words related to food production that I probably would rarely, if ever, need to say myself (氨基酸 - amino acid; 犒劳 - to reward with a feast). However, it is very good listening practice since I find the topic so interesting. I'm also happy to discover that the subtitles greatly help me understand the spoken word: I didn't used to read Chinese so quickly. The book Chinese 24/7 is proving to be quite full of useful vocabulary. The book introduces the reader to the less formal Chinese that's actually spoken by most people in China. However, the audio that accompanies the book is spoken by voice actors who speak very proper Putonghua... SPANISH: I'm happily progressing in my Spanish. It's been so long since I've actually stuck to a daily language-learning schedule that I'm astonished at the noticeable progress I'm able to make. Some of this may simply be that I'm reactivating the Spanish I once knew. Although I'm certainly not getting every word, I'm successfully following most of the conversations in Borinqueando, the Puerto Rican TV show I'm using to localize my Spanish. I've finished Module I of the DLI Headstart for Puerto Rico and begun Module II. The exercises in Module II are quicker and I'm enjoying the challenge they now present. An amusing anecdote: On Borinqueando, they interviewed a Puerto Rican teenager who won a worldwide Hispanophone oratory contest. Unsurprisingly, she spoke very clear and proper Spanish. Then they asked her a question about her family and her connection to Puerto Rico and she immediately slipped into a heavy Puerto Rican accent. TURKISH: I'm really enjoying learning Turkish! I'm still in that early stage in which the language seems easily comprehensible. Soon I'll learn how much I don't know. I'm in Lesson 3 of FSI Turkish. I know I'm supposed to spend more time on each lesson, but if I listened to the 10sec dialogue for three hours (the recommended daily listening dosage) I would pull my hair out. However, I really enjoy the lessons. I've decided that one day a week, I'm not going to follow my schedule and instead engage with each language in some free form manner. This week for Turkish I watched several short videos on the strangest assortment of topics from Deutsche Welle Türkçe. The DW Türkçe Youtube channel is full of them. I could only understand a stray word here and there, but I want to hear the rhythms of the language. ARMENIAN: I've been chugging away at my Practical Textbook of Western Armenian. I'm up to lesson 38 out of 72. I'm taking it slowly and trying to understand every word and phrase effortlessly. This requires me to go quite slow, indeed. The speed of the speakers varies from chapter to chapter, but they were talking quite quickly in chapter 37... I watched several videos on Youtube from Radio Sevan (Lebanon). I was happy to find that I could partially follow some of the conversations. Armenian is spoken rather quickly in most of the media for native speakers that I've found. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| renaissancemedi Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Greece Joined 4300 days ago 941 posts - 1309 votes Speaks: Greek*, Ancient Greek*, EnglishC2 Studies: French, Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 13 of 21 11 January 2014 at 7:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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I also like FSI, and I think you are using it well. Three hours of repetition will have the opposite results, as you say: instead of wanting to learn, wanting to run for your life!
I also listen to a lot of Turkish to get the rythm. It seems like good strategy. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5108 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 14 of 21 11 January 2014 at 12:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've never heard of Chinese 24/7, sounds interesting. Turkish is unfortunately a language
I still don't have the time to learn now, but I'll get there. And I bet you chos Western instead of Eastern Armenian because it's the most common one in the diaspora. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| MithradatesG Newbie United States Joined 4217 days ago 30 posts - 36 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, French, Armenian, Turkish, Italian | Message 15 of 21 11 January 2014 at 5:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thank you for the encouragement!
I chose Western Armenian because it's the dialect spoken by part of my family. Historically it has also been the dialect of the diaspora in the West. However, in the US now I'd say Eastern Armenian is quickly eclipsing it. In fact, Western Armenian in Los Angeles is beginning to pick up features from Eastern Armenian (such as marking the accusative of animate objects with a genitive/dative form). I do want to learn Eastern at some point but I need to get my Western to a much higher level first... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Silbermond Diglot Groupie United Kingdom xuexisprachen.wordprRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4298 days ago 64 posts - 79 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 16 of 21 17 January 2014 at 4:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think the 15 minutes per skill you've got there is an absolutely brilliant idea and one I'm probably going to have to adopt myself at some stage, because I spend way more time on my textbook than I should, and not nearly enough time on listening/speaking. And as you point out with your textbook, it's better to do something you find interesting even if parts of it may not be as useful, than to do something entirely practical that's also really boring! :D 1 person has voted this message useful |
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