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Bookworm’s adventures-TAC15 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5001 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes  Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 169 of 217 02 July 2015 at 7:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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Good to be back after a few days filled mostly with sleep.
News! I passed my pathophysiology exam. One more (and a horrible one, truth be told) and I might even get a few weeks of holidays. Since then, I've been mostly sleeping and feeling ill. Really, my lifestyle is nothing to recommend to anyone. I am finally getting better, not sure whether the hot summer is helping or hurting. :-D But I am finally back to my studies of the last subject to kill (or get killed by/with) and of my languages (even though I did some bits during the last week, as the right procrastinator). So, bits from the last week: Fr: -watched dubbed version of The Maze Runner. Quite good. I've read the plots of the book trilogy and I am not tempted to read it, even though I'll probably watch the other two movies when they are out. +1 movie to the ASCR -watching Kaamelot slowly, in the short breaks from anything. It is awesome. And I am again getting used to French. -I need to finish some of the books in French, preferably finish the ASCR finally. My DALF C2 certificate is here!!! I was really surprised. I had been told most people who pass get quite balanced results of the two parts as it is not that common to have above 40 of any. So, my expectations were something like 25 to 33, with the oral being better. Nope. ÉCRIT Compréhension et production: 16/50 ORAL Compréhension et production: 42/50 Domaine de spécialité: Sciences Well, I was a bit disappointed with my writing, truth be told. The more that I have no clue whether the problem was my grammar, my style, or the proper form. Really, I wish there were some model solved papers posted, like those for DELE exams. I just don't know what to work on for my future French use. You know, even the task was quite far from those in my preparatory book. I wish the Alliance realized how much it should learn from Cervantes and fast. De: dormant but on my desk already. I need to move it further again. I've recently listened to a few songs by Lacrimosa with German and Spanish dubs and I learnt quite a lot and was surprised I could understand some bits here and there. Es: Did only a little grammar, I need to work on it. Finished reading the last Harry Potter! Really, those books are awesome. There are very few books I enjoy reading over and over again and Harry Potter is among them. I love the stories, the characters, there are so many of my own memories tied to the books as I am one of the many children who grew up with the books. The Spanish translation is really enjoyable. Just a thought about translating: the proper names. The czechs tend to translate all the names. Sometimes it is just charming (such as Kantůrek's translations of Terry Pratchett with all those names), sometimes it just turns out wrong (I didn't like viteál as horrcrux). The spaniards just leave the names as they are. It is often ok but in some places, I think a native Spanish child may miss a joke or two. Well, the balance is hard to find obviously. Ru: Hey, my newest language was chosen! One of the main reasons was the availibility of native input, the russian ocean among the pirate seas, the fact Serpent, Via Diva, Cristina and Teango are among my favourite htlalers and so on. The bad thing is that Russian books tend to be quite expensive (why? the font is quite ugly, the paper is of worse quality etc.) and my heart bleeds when I think of Swedish (but I need to move my German further first), Polish (Sapkowski, Grzedowicz, Kossakowska, Lem, I love you all but I'll need to wait for our more personal meeting), Italian (I need to move the Spanish to the C levels first). So, how have I started: I reviewed the azbuka, I've learnt the individual letters in cursive as well as I think that is an integral part of learning. Even if I happen not to write it, I will surely need to read it sooner or later. A question. How do you connect the same letter? there is "ll" in my surname, how do I write it without creating an "m"? How do I connect "e" to others? And how do I type azbuka? The last one I'll google asap. Reading Russian won't be much of a trouble once I get some practice. Today, I plan to look deeper into the pronunciation. My chosen course hasn't probably been mentioned on htlal before: Učebnice současné ruštiny I've used Spanish books of the same series, they are really good. The conservative structure combined with modern language (as the authors say in the preface and don't lie) is something I really like to follow, it is a kind of a no nonsense appraoch. The first volume should lead to C1. Well, of course I'll need lots of other sources and practice to ever get that far but I don't think the authors are lying, Russian is bound to be easier than some other commonly learnt languages. I still don't know about the dialogues, whether they are good, informative and entertaining, I'll tell you when I find out. There are other resources I plan to use (a huge, translation based grammar exercise book, I saw a really good looking more advanced grammar with workbook on amazon, some Czech based vocabulary books, pons guides to conjugations and declinations) but I haven't got them yet. Any recommendations will be welcome. I've looked into some monolingual courses as well but didn't like them much. There were only three or so series in the bookshelves and neither looked that good. After all, I shouldn't need that much beginner material, at least I hope so. My first Lukyanenko has been waiting in my bookshelf, since the moment it was on sale. Edited by Cavesa on 02 July 2015 at 7:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6589 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 170 of 217 02 July 2015 at 10:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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Awww, I'm honoured to be among your reasons to learn Russian!!!!!
Азбука is the book children are supposed to learn to read from, with a section for every letter. (I think it's called ABC-book in English) The alphabet is алфавит :))) And if you meant how to type Cyrillic in general (rather than specifically the word azbuka), that would be кириллица :) Hard to explain the connected letters, I hope you can find some examples online. Yay about pathophysiology btw! And hm interesting French score ;/ hope you'll figure out what they didn't like. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5001 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 171 of 217 03 July 2015 at 1:10am | IP Logged | ||
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I meant how to write in cyrillics on my computer, I must have expressed myself totally wrong :-D I'll probably need to stick notes to my keyboard after switching it to cyrillics, so that I can learn to type.
I hope to find some examples. I found awesome videos showing the individual letters but those with whole words were a bit different from my questions. I'll probably need to look further into the issue. I just found out my Anki account had been deleted due to inactivity and I got a panic attack. Fortunately the support website is totally awesome. Really, those 25 euro were well invested, I wish all the language learning product creators took such care of their customers. I've just finished watching Kaamelot:livre I tome I. Totally awesome! I wholeheartedly recommend the series and thanks to emk for mentioning it! It's great, I keep laughing really often. I got used to the language really fast, even though I am still lost when someone speaks with full mouth ;-) +2 movies to ASCR Speaking of it: updated counts of my superchallenges: German-still dormant. Spanish: after adding the last Harry Potter book: 74 movies and 79 x 50 pages, that's approximately 3 quarters of the challenge. ASCR (advanced super challenge residuals, alias Cavesa's madness): English books: 8490 pages left (a few hundreds are waiting for me to finish the books) French books: 6370 pages left (the same note as above) French movies: 27 left 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4282 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 172 of 217 03 July 2015 at 5:40am | IP Logged | ||
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¡Enhorabuena! Did you find that the DALF is kind of like the DELE, where it reminded
me more of one of the university exams, just doing mock papers and trying to figure out why the answers are so and such over and over? Also how is the difficulty compared to what the C2 table sites? One of the reasons that I am hesitant to sit C2 until after at least a few years, not only is the stress and money, but it is a lot of work (and more stress) to keep studying over and over on top of other stuff to do, especially with mock papers. I did a lot of that, since secondary school into university and it is quite stressful, as we all know. But with your score, I think that you did very well. I always felt like C2 entailed being close to perfect (although many have told me that accent is not important as long as one is understood), and I do not feel close to near-perfect in any language. But you are an inspiration for we all. How do you feel during the speaking section? I used to get extremely nervous as a child speaking in front of others, and this in my own native language. I have been known to fail oral presentations in English because I would freeze on stage and/or just forget what I was supposed to say and cannot think. Fortunately this is not so often now, and actually I am less nervous when I speak foreign languages. How did you find the environment in your exam? Did you get nervous? Also interesting that you started to learn Russian. I just started this week, although I only just yesterday just finished a bunch of stuff on the alphabet, something that is actually easier since I studied this for fun back in 1994 as a child from an old language book about the USSR that my mother bought in the 1980s, so everything just came back. The Cyrillic alphabet is a pain to type on the Latin keyboard. I have tried it a few times and it is maddeningly annoying. I use US-INTL for accent marks. Unlike the Greek keyboard, whose alphabet corresponds to Latin sounds, i.e. d = δ, g = γ, f = φ, s = σ, on the same keys, I get this on the Cyrillic keyboard: d = в, g = п, f = а, s = ы, so you can see that there is absolutely no connection. I have a friend who is learning Russian and is probably around B1 by now, and he says that the only way that he can type in Russian is to bring up the pop-up keyboard on Windows and click the Cyrillic letters into a text. This is however, now so annoying when you consider that those who must type in Chinese characters, if using Mandarin for example, must type in the pinyin with the marks like á or à for tones, then bring up a pinyin-character matching dictionary thing and click on that for the character to show up in a text. Cantonese users need to use something like that except with Wade-Giles, which gets even more complicated. Even worse is having to search by radical of the character and look on a drop-down box to find the character, then repeat for every word. So one sentence is a bunch of clicking. In this way the Cyrillic alphabet is not as cumbersome... Edited by 1e4e6 on 03 July 2015 at 5:54am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Amerykanka Hexaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5163 days ago 657 posts - 890 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Polish, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian | Message 173 of 217 03 July 2015 at 6:09am | IP Logged | ||
I had a similar experience this spring. I was snowed under with homework and I received an email saying that my Anki account was going to be deleted. I completely freaked out and set aside all my homework until I had resolved the situation. Not much takes priority over school, but my decks created with hundreds of hours of painstaking care certainly do. I'm just glad a Anki sent me a warning email! Also, as regards Harry Potter - I love the Spanish versions. 3 and 4 are the only ones I've read in Spanish, but it was so much fun and I might read 5-7 later this summer if I have time. In general I have liked the Spanish translations of current English teen/YA fiction; Hunger Games was very good, too. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Elenia Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom lilyonlife.blog Joined 3848 days ago 239 posts - 327 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Swedish, Esperanto | Message 174 of 217 03 July 2015 at 9:01am | IP Logged | ||
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Massive well done on the pathopsychology, and also well done on choosing your next language (My heart weeps a little that it's not Swedish, too ;) )
I've dabbled in Russian on and off - although I kind of gave up after realising that I wouldn't just be able to pick up Master and Margarita and read through it using Brute force... But it's still sitting on my shelf, so Russian is still an option. I'm slowly collectiong resources. During my dabbling, I installed the Cyrillic keyboard on my phone, and sometimes even used it! If you have a touchscreen phone that will let you do that, it might be worth giving it a try. It'll help you get an idea of the keyboard layout, although it is by no means perfect, and you'll have to rely a LOT on trial and error if you don't manage to get keyboard stickers before you need to type. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6589 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 175 of 217 03 July 2015 at 9:19am | IP Logged | ||
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There's a keyboard layout that matches the Latin one too. Not sure what it's called etc, will investigate if needed. I think I read about it on HTLAL, actually :D
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4699 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 176 of 217 03 July 2015 at 9:53am | IP Logged | ||
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That's the one I use, actually.
2 persons have voted this message useful |
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