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TAC’14 German, Sokoły, jäŋe, Celts, 文言 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5523 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 17 of 22 12 January 2014 at 11:40pm | IP Logged | ||
My current thinking is to drill the uniliterals until you can recognize them in your sleep, to suspend the biliterals and triliterals until you encounter them in Assimil, and to learn the common determinatives using Khatzumoto's "Lazy Kanji" rules: Mark the card as passed if you can produce a word that's even vaguely related to the listed meanings. The determinatives are very general semantic classifiers, and there's no need to be precise with them. "Bras, des autres trucs comme ça" will do just fine. I learned the biliteral and triliteral readings using brute force reps and mnemonics. The mnemonics were fun: I mapped them back to the corresponding uniliterals, and used those images to make up stories involving cow stomachs, owls and snakes. But remembering the readings always felt like pulling teeth until I saw them in actual Egyptian text, at which point they became easy. Honestly, once a sign reaches the point where it's "that stupid bird with the funny throat that I can never remember," the actual work is mostly done. This is really about increasing your memory chunk size so each sign only counts as a single item towards the "7 plus or minus 2" rule, and not about getting 100% on every single reading. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4669 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 18 of 22 13 January 2014 at 12:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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I can totally recognize myself in your last paragraph's description, and particularly in the fact that birds are indeed a real pain to deal with: who would believe that 𓅠 and 𓅡 are not the same bird, the first one simply lowering its head...
But when I was talking of difficulty, it was of course for the multiliterals. When it comes to classifiers and uniliterals, they're respectively very obvious and very frequent, so that I don't really have much trouble remembering them. But anyway, it seems today I had a much higher retention rate than yesterday, and far less frustration. A few more days and I should get more efficient. And of course, I'm sure that once I actually go through vocabulary, it will all stick together. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5523 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 19 of 22 13 January 2014 at 3:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Moi, je déteste les signes 𓄿 (ꜣ) et 𓅂 (tyw), qui ne diffèrent qu'au niveau du bec la plupart du temps. À vrai dire, les hiéroglyphes sont un superbe système d'écriture, à l'exception de ces oiseaux. C'est un peu excessif, parfois :
𓄿𓅂𓅃𓅐𓅓𓅱𓅨𓅪𓅧𓅠𓅡𓅟𓅘𓅭𓅮 𓅯𓅜 …et j'en passe. Edited by emk on 13 January 2014 at 3:10pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4669 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 20 of 22 15 January 2014 at 9:39am | IP Logged | ||
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Two things:
1) I've now finished reading my second German language book ever (Deutsche Geschichte) which I'll comment on during my longer report. Now need to decide which second book I will read this month, probably Die Kelten, but also likely to be something else. 2) A few mnemonics to remember multiliterals in Egyptian. I've never liked Heisig when it came to making up stories to remember characters, and fortunately I discovered Heisig long after I had learnt a few thousand characters. So here I'm not relying on building stories, but generally on one of two things: a phonetic feeling, or a phonetic similarity with some other language I know. Here are all the mnemonics that I've been using for now. -phonetic feeling: Egyptian has these two sounds, the glottal stop and the voiced velar fricative, which are abrupt guttural sound: get punched in the stomach and you're likely to produce something like this. 𓉻, a spike, is ꜥꜣ: the sound you would make if you were hit by this spike 𓍯, a kind of lasso: get strangled by it and you'll make wꜣ! 𓌡, get hit by this harpoon: wꜥ 𓅷 chirps: ṯꜣ ṯꜣ ṯꜣ -phonetic similarity / pun: 𓍑, looks like a weed joint (in an ashtray): Jah > ḏꜣ 𓌰 used to cut nems > nm 𓍃: tame an animal and it can pull your sledge: tm 𓇒, bamboo shoots: they're very tender, very 嫩 (nèn) > nn 𓍲 and 𓍱: 𓍲 shows the North, 𓍱 shows the South: šn and šs 𓋾, a hockey stick: ḥqꜣ 𓄓: ox tongue: 牛舌 (niúshé): ns 𓐪: a tool used by masons, probably to measure a square (i.e. quadratic) angle: qd 𓄲: pẖr ou dbn; intestine is cheap (peu cher > pẖr) at Dubonnet's (or Debenhams, if you live in the UK..) Share yours! Edited by vermillon on 15 January 2014 at 9:43am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4669 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 21 of 22 04 February 2014 at 12:40am | IP Logged | ||
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January report first, and February below.
January Report This has been a pretty successful month. I haven't reached all of my goals but came close enough. I've also had a surgery last week, which made me abort some of my plans, and the recovery is keeping me from doing everything I wish I would do. Anyway, here's a quick summary of my January goals along with comments and statement of completion. Deutsch: I read 1 book out of two (the biggest), and things came in the way. Luckily, I now have a lot of free time on my hands and can finish reading the second book. Reading about German history was really interesting, especially as the book was very well written. This gave me tons of vocabulary to goldlist and I still have some backlog to process these days. I've completed my goal for Assimil, the lessons are very interesting and really formative when it comes to developing spoken German. I have covered ~800 cards of my B1 deck, vs goal of 600. It's much easier than I expected since I still remember so much of it, so I'll just finish it earlier. I have written only one report in German this month, vs 2 initially planned. I'll use the surgery as an excuse. Magyar: I have completed Assimil and kept reviewing it, which was my only goal. The daily amount of cards to review has now fallen under 100 cards and my mature card success rate is ~85%, which is better than I would have though. Now I need to plan the next step. Polski: I have completed my goals as well: learnt a few hundred words and paid particular attention to retroflexes vs palatals, done a few lessons from the old Assimil, and finally I've done lessons from Basic Polish: this last one has really been helpful in structuring and systematising my knowledge of grammar, and now I notice grammatical details every day in my Anki reviews: this has also led my mature success rate to go from 79% to 83%. Hopefully it will continue like this. 文言: I did read 孝經, but only once. It is a very short book (100p) and if you skim through the commentaries, it could probably fit in 8 intensive pages. It was not particularly interesting, I would say, hopefully the next one will be better. Arabic: Covered the 5 lessons. It's getting more interesting, now touching the present tense, the future of nouns... Perhaps there is hope for this book, after all. Breton: Only did 3 lessons. They're much bigger than any other Assimil course I've done until now, and therefore take me longer to process. Egyptian: I'm now pretty comfortable with the 200+ basic signs and have covered 10 lessons of Assimil. Ready for the next step, but not much time, unfortunately. Italian: Did the 10 lessons. 24 more to go, will probably take 3-4 months. Norwegian, Spanish, Minnanhua: I did maintain them. Goals for February So as I said last month, this is the opportunity for me to re-evaluate my studies, change direction, try new tools and drop activities I've been doing for too long. Since I'm in Scotland recovering from surgery (and not able to carry weights), I've had to leave most of my books in London and will study accordingly. This is an opportunity for me to work on my toolbox: One of my goals for this month is to look at subs2srs, to learn how to use it, to see if there's a bit of scripting that needs to be done around it to accommodate my personal preferences and finally to start using it, perhaps with a German film first to make things easy. Another tool that has been on my "to learn"-list, recommended by emk, Anki's image occlusion plugin for Hieroglyphs (and who knows, perhaps for other things, haven't really thought about it, though): this will let me go through Assimil Egyptian the same way I go through other languages: a bit of streamlining will help it become less of a burden in my weekly routine. I'm also finally starting that online course for Android apps: I could have learnt that before, but this is a good opportunity, and I like the pace of the course. Perhaps I'll finally get to write some code in a few months... Now turning to specific languages. Deutsch Since I introduced everything last month, I'll keep it short. Course: I don't plan any more to finish the course by the end of May, but rather December: lessons are long, so I'll take my time, and I also want some time to do other things (like reading and watching movies). Vocabulary: Continuing with my old Anki deck, around 700 cards per months rather than 600. It will take me the rest of the year to complete it anyway. I'm also goldlisting everything else and do not plan to use Anki for those words outside of the B1 vocabulary for now. My guess is that using gold list along with a lot of exposure will just do the trick. It has to, anyway, because I can't afford to spend more time on this. Reading: I'll read quickly Die Kelten (which was my second goal for January), which is very interesting so far, and then will consider what should be next. Probably something about Hungary, as a part of my goal to use German to learn about things I know nothing about. I may use Ungarn in der Nußschale for instance, but that will take me well into March. Writing: I will try to write two reports here entirely in German. I find it to be good practice, and since I'm going to write anyway, at least it's a good use of my time. I don't really feel like writing essays as if I was assigned to do it. Listening & Speaking: No specific plans. I watch podcasts on Youtube. Generally nothing very clever, but it's ok, if I can combine leisure with German, I'm happy. Summary (aka tldr): Reading one book (120p) and starting another, 6 lessons of Assimil Perfectionnement (->20), writing 2 reports, review 700 vocabulary cards, keep gold lists relatively on time. Magyar Now that I have finished Assimil, I'm a bit out of resources, and that's usually when I start falling apart, not knowing where to go. A quick fix to this is to consider that vocabulary acquisition is the next most necessary step: I've bought Hungarian vocabulary for English speakers - 5000 words and will start from there. Honestly, it appears to be a pretty cheap word list (not indicating which cases a verb govern, for instance) and I will have to supplement it with look-ups to examples. Even though it's far from perfect (and perhaps even pretty poor), I haven't found a better source to guide vocabulary acquisition in Hungarian, so I'll go with it for now. I also need to do something else: I want to be successful in Hungarian, not just Assimil-successful. This month, I'll try to work on writing three conversation "islands", so as to have something ready to get out of my mouth, should I ever meet a Hungarian person. I haven't decided on what the content of these islands would be, but the first one will probably be some kind of personal introduction. I will also try to read a bit of Hungarian here and there, but no specific commitment. And finally, if everything goes well, I'll try to plan ~5 days in Hungary (Budapest is big enough to require 5 days I suppose?) in late March/early April. Summary: Learning ~450 words, writing 3 islands, look up in my grammar anything unclear, so as to consolidate my grasp of grammar. Polski I'm happy with last month's progress in Polish: before that I was at a stage of constant failure, and now I can see the failure rate decreasing. I have a better understanding of grammar, albeit pretty rudimentary, and best of all, I have a clear path to improvement: learning some grammar and some vocabulary. It's normally not the way to go, but since I have this nice deck of sentences, grammar+vocabulary are two necessary things: I've always found sentence cards to be the best, and they've been doing me a lot of good for Norwegian, Breton, German and Hungarian, but for Polish not so much. Even though I can recite many cards by heart, there's something about them that is wrong: they don't offer enough coverage of declension paradigms for me to get a good grasp of them. Very often, the only form I know of a word is the one I have seen in the card sentence, and I haven't paid attention to what the nominative would be, and it seems easier to decline nouns starting from nominative rather than another case (I'd have to work out what the nominative is, first). So that's for vocabulary acquisition, but also for grammar, since often I have no idea what an ending is for, and coupled with lack of vocabulary knowledge, I can't say if that noun is a genitive or accusative, singular or plural etc. Anyway, the good news is that I just need to go through this, pay more attention, and I'll progress. As for Hungarian, I'll also try to work my way through three islands, because it's completely unacceptable that I've spent so many hours on Polish and couldn't even really introduce myself. (ok, I could, but I want to do it naturally. I didn't even know what was the instrumental of Francuz until yesterday...) Summary: Cover 12 lessons of Polish grammar. Learn 450 words. Write three islands. 文言 This month, I'll read 尚書, the Book of Documents. It's 300 pages, but there's a lot of commentaries. This will require much more discipline than last month's target. I'm not sure I can actually pull it off, but I will try. Other languages Arabic: Maintain and do 5 lessons. (->35) Breton: Maintain and do 6 lessons. (->28) Egyptian: Maintain and do 10 lessons (->20) Italian: Maintain and do 6 lessons. (->82) Norwegian, Spanish, Minnanhua: Maintain. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4245 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 22 of 22 04 February 2014 at 1:42am | IP Logged | ||
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Congratulations on finishing Assimil Hungarian. It's been giving me all kinds of trouble. It's a really fun course, but probably the steepest learning curve I've personally come across with Assimil so far. Edited by YnEoS on 04 February 2014 at 1:43am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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