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What Expug is doing in 2015 (TAC n more) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5161 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 305 of 364 07 October 2015 at 10:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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Another morning of language exchanges. Over one hour in English/Italian/French voicechat, then voicechatting in English with a Malaysian, then chatting in Italian and even French. My Italian partner suggested me to read a book in Italian while she'd read the same one in English. She suggested The Alchemist. We'll see. I found it in Italian, though I'm afraid it may be abriged, as it's only 84 pages long. Italian seems so transparent that I won't even bother with the Portuguese original, even more so that it is a translation for Portuguese, so the concepts throughout the book might be familiar anyway and dealt with in Italian mostly with cognates.
Finally I had a better day with German listening-reading. I see some breakthrough coming along. German is still being neglected when it comes to output, just like Georgian. In the case of German there's an aggravating factor that I don't read extensively on it either, apart from some chat or forum messages. So I might be better than I think I am an unaware of it. Another tip for keeping the ball rolling (time management). If you're about to interrupt your studies for whatever reason, better leave a task that is already running on, or at least ready to start. Like when I'm going to have a snack but I decided to start the German film first, even if for a couple seconds. When you are back you won't lose time trying to remember where you stopped (the video file is paused where you stopped) and thus you won't risk surfing away while you try to remember it. I really couldn't find either English or German subtitles for Ausgerechnet Sibirien, the film I started watching today. I had to make do with machine-translated subtitles into English from Romanian. The result is not that bad - better than Russian-, and the audio volume is not as low as most of the German movies I play, though slower than average. What matters is that I can understand the German at least phonetically and compare it to the subtitles for rounding up the meaning. I once (or maybe twice or more) said I wanted to learn Russian in order to read Russian classics and to use Russian-based textbooks. Where do I change my language-learning mission? Actually just the comedy series are worth any effort on learning this difficult language. So, Kazakh. I think I'm better off with Kazakh than with Uzbek or Turkmen in terms of resources, even though most of the Russian courses from the Yürükler roster are dead links now. Since I like to start with audio on those dabbling languages, I'm going to take an Youtube lesson by Maksat Imangazi. The idea is to take as many as I can stand each day. Since today I'm behind schedule I'm going to start with only one. Once those lessons are over (24 videos of about 3' I assume) I will retake the same path fro Uzbek, with Peace Corps lessons as far as available then the Colloquial Kazakh Mini Course (same as the Uzbek one). I have the actual Colloquial Kazakh by Routledge somewhere but the idea is always to refrain from using the most comprehensive resources during this dabbling phase. I also registered to the great http://soyle.kz which would be a waste to be used at this dabbling phase anyway. I'm more and more convinced of the possibility of having huge discounts from one Turkic language to another, though definitely not on the extent of the Scandinavian ones. So far the grammar is genuinely turkic and the phonetics sound more friendly than Turkmen's one, though there are some vowels that I haven't met yet, at least when I looked at the Omniglot chart. Found time for Italian, not much else. I'm skipping Futurama in German and only going for it when it's really calm. It's better to habe time for smaller tasks like the Kazakh lesson, Assimil Perfectionnement Italien, Duolingo Norwegian, Chinese Skill when I'm in a hurry than to spend at least 20 minutes on Futurama (notcounting pauses for looking up words that may bring into distraction at other stuff) when I'd have already watched stuff in German the same day. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5161 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 306 of 364 08 October 2015 at 11:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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My French output is definitely a bit rusty, not as good as it is supposed to be after so many years. I have to practice more speaking but also writing. It's time to keep writing, working on the most accessed islands to get rid of the most obvious mistakes and sound natural. Time for fine-tuning after all.
One unexpected Papiamento word in a meaning I hadn't found yet, I wonder where it comes from: "Rei ta kiko a resultá" = Gues what resulted. "Rei"usually means 'king' (Iberian cognate), but also line, queue, row. In Dutch it's 'raden', not sure it is a cognate. Talked a bit in Italian and French. Georgian and German still lagging behind in terms of exchange, which means I should invest on writing at lang-8 and italki. "Clear Midsummer's Night' works fine here, which means I can keep watching it and expect good results. Paraguayan Guarani on Duolingo, that's simply fanyasyoc! I just wonder how the register will be like...it seems there is a lot of code-switching between daily spoken Guarani and Spanish. Got back to Futurama after some days. Good to notice my comprehension is higher now, and I barely have to look up the unknown German words I read in the subtitles. I must admit I'm enjoying learning Kazakh from video lessons, even though it's no more than 10 new words in over 3 minutes. It just seems the language feels more alive. Duolingo Norwegian's chapter on internet was neat! I thought I could just stick around with English words but I was happy to learn proper Norwegian names. 'Redigere' meaning 'edit' a post/entry is a bit hard to get used because 'redigir' means to write in Portuguese. See on esimene kord ma proovin kirjutada siin eesti keelt. Ma hakkasin eesti keele õppimise mai 2015. Eesti keel on väga huvitav. See on kindlasti raske, aga ma juba õppin raskem keelde: näiteks gruusia, mandarini ja vene keelde. Kas te teate, kuidas nimetatakse veebileht, kus saab loobuda igal eesti nimisõna igal juhul? Ma olin seda üks kord näinud, aga unustasin, kus see oli. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5161 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 307 of 364 09 October 2015 at 11:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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It was difficult but I managed to find one meditation video in Mandarin. Most of the videos called "meditation" are just sounds, without the guided voice-over audio. This will help enhance my comprehension as well as my stats for the video part of the SC, at which I hope to reach 150 hours (full challenge), even though I had aimed for a half challenge which I finished long ago. Currently at 138 hours, but at only 10 minutes a day, which is my current pace, I wouldn't have made it before the end of the year.
Accomplished language textbook: Naljaga Pooleks 
It's time to say goodbye to 'Naljaga pooleks', a textbook that has the best dialogues I've ever used. They involve daily situations like watching a footbal match, printing a file or getting stuck inside an elevator. There are grammar explanations at the audio, all in Russian, but it was not my focus anyway, as I had already gone through a lot of textbooks before and I recommend leaving Naljaga Pooleks for when you are at the A2 stage so you can make the most out of its content and start to notice some nuances of the language. There is also a popular song at the end of each lesson, though I admit I didn't make the most ouf of them because the machine translation of lyrics into English isn't good. The song in the final lesson is from the band "Genialistid" which I used to listen to several years ago. I remember having listened to this song before, "Kohtumine" (meeting), though the one I'd listen to the most was "Anna mulle end", which thanks to studying Estonian I later realized it had nothing to do with a person called 'Anna', it meant "Give yourself to me". There was no Google Translate when we started researching music from all over the world, so we were most often left clueless as to what the titles of the songs meant. We played "Anna mulle end" on clubs quite a few time. Now I'm going for an enhanced phrasebook, Eesti-Vene Vestmik, by Asta Õim. Reading a phrasebook helps me acquire some active skills. At least that was what happened with Papiamento. I didn't receive any corrections for yesterday's Estonian writing on italki but I asked a friend to correct in on IRC. Here is the corrected version:
I was referring to the Eesti keele süntesaator which I had already mentioned and so did Chung before. I could have looked it up at one of the blogs I used to follow, but then I wouldn't have another subject to write about. "Ausgerechnet Sibirien" is becoming interesting. I'm starting to understand better the subtitles. If only I had a TV series, then I could keep training my ears till I could get rid of subtitles. So I'm still carrying on my insane project on L-Ring Russian with a text that doesn't mach the audio plus the English original. Until yesterday I was panicking, but today I'm starting to read fast enough to kinda read both texts at once while the text is being played. Or rather, I read the English, I understand the Russian audio better and better and I can figure out the text.I'm still lagging behind in the text, I admit, and sometimes just skipping some excerpts, but I'm impressed with the progress after 6 days. The use of two different texts that are the translation of the same common English source reminds me of Bakunin's tecnique for having native speakers retell a story. An example of stuff people who are more experienced with language learning may acquire more easily: I just read the sentence "mi disse d'iniziare il mio lavoro con un'analisi storica". When I read the sentence my attention already focus on the usage of the preposition 'di' for introducing direct speech. I don't need to read a grammar that explains it to me and I may even be reading an ordinary text and come across this type of sentence and this will be enough for me to learn this rule. You learn to pay attention to specifici features of the language. One of the things I pay close attention to is how the language forms most of the subordinate clauses and whether there is a preference for nominal clauses or for serial verbs. The project of writing more in my languages, especially the ones not benefitting from language exchanges, is coming into life. I admit it took longer than I expected it to, but I managed to write a paragraph in Georgian. No time left for other languages. I wrote a little about the holiday and then I remembered the Prompted Daily Output Challenges. I started from the first prompt (the one about wether it's more important to be smart or personable: ორშაბათს არ ვიმუშავებ. დღესასწაულია. ბავშვების დღეა ბრაზლიაშია, ამერიკის აღმოჩენის დღეაც, მაგრამ მიზეზი რომ არ ვიმუშავებ ის არის, რომ 12 ოქტომბერი ბრაზილიას წმინდა მფარველია. მიზეზზე არ ვაწუხებ. მთავარია რომ დრო მექნება და ალბათ გავემგზავრები. ზუსთად ერთი წუთი წინ ტექსტი ვკითხულობდი და ვფიქრობდი, რა არის უფრო მნიშნელოვანი, თუ ჭკვიანი ან მოხდენილი გახლავართ-მეთქი? მგონი ისევე ჭკვიანი და მოხდენილი ადადმიანი ვარ, ჰაჰა ვხუმრობ. სიმართლე ითქვას, ჭკუა მნიშნელოვანია, მაგრამ უფრო მნიშვნელოვანი სათნოებები არსებობს, მაგალითად შებრალება, თავმდაბლობა და მოთმინება. I may get back to the same subject and write more in another language, also because I plan to test some techniques involving output which I maybe should use a thread for, but I'm happy I could write this one now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5161 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 308 of 364 13 October 2015 at 1:47am | IP Logged | ||
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This weekend I didn't read much in Georgian but at least I watched two episodes from 'One and a half summer' and now I'm close to reaching my goal of a full video challenge (150 hours). Only with 10 minutes a day from Monday to Friday that wouldn't be possible). I also watched one episode of Pastewka (German) and the episodes from Side om side (Norwegian) that were available. Today is a holiday and I'm trying to study as far as possible.
I'm about to finish Linguaphone Russian. Lessons are longer and with 1-2 unknown words in each. Today I understood quite a lot from Karl & CO's episode. Usually I have trouble concentrating but the dialogues are starting to become more transparent and so less effort is required to keep following the story. Comedies on a fixed setting are hard because people speak usually fast, there's much more dialogues than in films and there are less visual clues as for what is happening in the story and there is not a linear movement in space which would help figure out linearity in the story. So, any progress in this series or in the one I watch in Georgian is to be celebrated. I couldn't pay much attention to the Georgian series though I suspect I could already understand a lot. The funniest part was when the main character received a call and said that he didn't know whether he was at home or at work. The cable sinal went down when I was about to proceed to the Russian series, right after I finished watching Clear Midsummer's Night (a good day by the way with a high level of comprehension). I went for the listening-reading instead, because that wouldn't require internet, and I'm happy with my improvement in reading both languages and listening as fast as possible, while understanding more and more. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5161 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 309 of 364 13 October 2015 at 11:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's been a good day for Norwegian. I understand much more than usual from Karl & Co as well as from the novel. I think Duolingo is helping activate the language as well. Maybe it's time to try writing paragraphs again, as I don't have much chance for speaking the language other than text-chatting a few sentences each day.
I started watching "Entre les murs". I was supposed to watch it without subtitles, but the audio is a bit low and for noisy environments I will probably miss on a lot. Though as the film goes on I start to think I could be able to understand well enough without subs anyway. Practicing both Russian at Speaky/Desktop and Chinese at HelloTalk/Smartphone can be real mental gymnastics. I almost wrote "Wo xianzai zai gongzuo" to a Russian. There is that aspiring Chinese teacher who writes and speaks a lot (audio messages). It's thrilling but at the same time it's quite rewarding to be able to understand more and more each day. On the other hand, I don't like it when people contact you through one medium just to ask about your other social network contacts. Speaky is more than appropriate for language learning, one can make video calls and there is a nice correction tool. Now that I'm getting to some of the last episodes I have of Futurama in German, I have to say my project to keep watching it in Russian is cancelled. I figured out the number of episodes that get dubbed into other languages doesn't match with the original number of episodes for each season, so each dubbed season has much less episodes. The names don't match either. So I'm going to stop at the end of the 4th season of the German series. Maybe I will buy DVDs from further series in German. Won't start with Russian anyway. I still have to decide what to go about those 20+ minutes I'm going to have when I finished the German season, but I'm by no means short of German input to have to replace it with something else, as I'm doing 10 pages L-R and 10 minutes film. Even if I plan to replace Futurama with something else in German, that had to be a series, which I can only stream and so only from home. I don't think that's critical for the future of my German. What I need is more conversation practice and a little bit of extensive reading. I'm really short of materials for Estonian. At least to make the transition A2-B1 passively. Ideally short texts with audio. I ran into some news podcasts but news aren't my favorite source in whichever language. Onthe other hand it seems there are more Russian textbooks than I thought. Maybe they are on the line of Naljaga Pooleks and so I can keep progressing in the same rhythm. Oh I forgot about the European Comission books, like "Farms are fun" and "Would you drink your wastewater?". They are ideal for my current stage. I think I should perhaps get back to the Yandex translation at least for Kuxnya. Today's subtitles were terribly translated. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5161 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 310 of 364 15 October 2015 at 12:08am | IP Logged | ||
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I am still concerned about Estonian. I found 4 books in total from the European Comission which will keep me busy for several weeks, but I'm still not sure which is the better strategy to follow now. I think bilingual reading of native-like materials at this stage would be overwhelming and I don't want to make the same mistakes I made with Georgian, Russian and Mandarin. I would like to try one paragraph a day so I could read as intensively as possible and increase the amount gradually. Problem is the source: I don't want to read news. I would like opinion articles about daily life or perhaps short stories from blogs. It doesn't have to be for children either, because many children stories have obscure vocabulary that isn't prioritary. The resource I'm using now is an Estonian-Russian conversation guide which is fairly comprehensive, maybe too much, which means there are up to 20 sentences for each theme, like greeting, asking about someone on the phone, picking the phone, asking you someone is, saying you're fine, saying you're normal, saying you're not so well etc. I'm really keen to starting with texts. Yesterday I tested one of the subtitled Youtube videos and they are too fast for me. I don't want to waste those precious resources on a stage where I barely can figure out a word from them. I learned my lessons with my previous languages and Estonian is a sort of an experiment for getting things right. Once again my greatest difficulty is making the transition into native materials as smooth as possible, as there aren't that many learner-friendly resources for this stage. I can keep using monolingual textbooks or Russian-based textbooks further on, but that's not the point and I noticed the vocabulary is repeating a lot among textbooks. Estonian does lack a podcast learning series with more consistent vocabulary.
The film "Entre les murs" is actually a French class to teenagers. It's great to learn natural dialogue but also to learn the explanation on some vocabulary, register, even the imperfect of the subjunctive. Reviewing some resources, it seems I still need to study lessons from courses such as the one from Oneness, for Estonian. Maybe I should try working on it when I finish the phrasebook I'm working on. SBS podcasts are still out of my league. I'd have to listen to the podcast in English and then in Estonian, a sort of a parallel listening which wouldn't be much practical. There are no transcripts. I just found the novel "220 días en una nave sideral". It's simple sci-fi. I read the first sentences in the Estonian translation and it seems easy to follow. I could be using the original in Russian, but that would be too confusing, so i'm happy to have found a Spanish translation. Approaching the end of the 3rd season of Kuxnya. Yesterday's episode was boring but today's one brought up my interest. As I have no transcription for season 4, I wonder if I should keep watching in Georgian or instead in Russian or both to see if I catch something. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5161 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 311 of 364 15 October 2015 at 11:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think it's not a bad idea at all to keep studying a phrasebook. Even if I'm not using all the 'nice to meet you' equivalents, the more I read the more I'm likely to actually retain something. Besides, since the sentences on a specific topic have basically a core meaning with a few words being replaced, it works almost like drilling. Sentences like "Please allow me to introduce my colleague" or "May I introduce my friend" are like the same thing being retold in different contexts/situations/registers, a bit on the side of what Bakunin pictures for his studies.
I traded off my morning headstart for nearly an hour of Skype conversation with a Russian, in English first and then long 15 minutes of me trying to say a word. At first he was speaking really hard, but he slowed down a bit (though not too much) and started translating, and so I could understand most of it. Speaking is another issue, but at least this was an important start and now I can build some islands upon it. The bad news is that I still have to study textbook Russian, Georgian, read Chinese and French, which these days I used to do before getting here. Almost an hour behind, but let's see how it goes. I'm glad I at least finished Chinese before lunch. They style of Dan Brown's books is very colloquial, with plenty of dialogues, and so I'm learning important expressions in Mandarin. I don't know what's happening, whether I'm spending too much time struggling to speak other languages such as Russian and Chinese, but Georgian is really lagging behind. I feel less motivated when I'm reading and I have trouble paying attention to the soap opera. I don't have the impression I'm making progress in terms of conversations. Perhaps I need to find a language partner because I believe my Georgian is still better than my Mandarin, leave alone my Russian, yet I'm practicing so little Georgian. Duolingo Norwegian was really stressful today, it took my almost one hour to reach 190 XP (the two chapters I had schedule to do). Well, at least there are no long chapters anymore and I am going to finish in a few days and thus have free time again (that is, unless I start another course but that one will probably be for a new language and so I won't care that much about finishing that quickly). Chinese Skill, the Mandarin equivalent, is almost over, but this I can only work on in the new device, so only late in the evening. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6904 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 312 of 364 16 October 2015 at 5:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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Wow, Dan Brown in Mandarin. Impressive and inspiring!
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