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Language Log of the Solocricket | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| solocricket Tetraglot Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3668 days ago 68 posts - 106 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Italian, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Icelandic, Korean, Polish | Message 9 of 30 24 February 2015 at 1:33pm | IP Logged |
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Update:
ICELANDIC Fell off the wagon for a few days there! I stopped keeping meticulous track of my hours/minutes of Icelandic, so I suppose the 6WC is a no go for me. I'm still going to do a mini-challenge for myself and see where I am by March 14-15 or so. I made a slight error and skipped Anki reps for almost a week... And, as anyone who uses Anki knows, after adding 50 cards a day, that turned out to be a bit of a disaster. I had almost 500 cards due a couple of days.... But no problem! As of two days ago, I got the reps down to 0, and I hope to add more cards today. Unfortunately, I finished the Hippocrene book, and the Teach Yourself book and another textbook I received, by Stefán Einarsson, are both very old. Both have a dry format, and the example sentences each contain a lot of words that are unfamiliar. I'm going to have to rethink how I'm going to use Anki for Icelandic. I've still been reading my novel about 5-10 minutes a day, not looking up any words. This gives me a better feel for the sentence structures of the language and reinforces the vocabulary I've learned. SPANISH I'm reading the first book of Trilogía del malamor on my Kindle. It's a young adult book, so it's easy and enjoyable to read. The plot's kind of silly though, and the writing isn't too fantastic. I find I'm more likely to read Spanish on my Kindle though. I've also been watching a ton of kids' movies in Spanish on Netflix. I love how with Spanish, at least in the US, I can very easily get content and media. Can't say the same about Icelandic :D FRENCH I finished a young adult book, Le chaman du désert by Tamora Pierce, a book I've read a couple times in English. The reading level made reading easy and fun, so maybe after a couple more easier books, I'll go back to attempting the classics. JAPANESE I've been reading some manga here and there, but nothing too much. OTHER I'm thinking about trying some Portuguese, to balance out the difficulty of Icelandic, but we'll see! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| solocricket Tetraglot Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3668 days ago 68 posts - 106 votes Speaks: English*, French, Italian, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Icelandic, Korean, Polish | Message 10 of 30 13 March 2015 at 12:52am | IP Logged |
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Update:
Sorry to see the comments that got posted on March 4 are gone, but I was too lazy to ask about getting them back... ICELANDIC I've been adding some sentences to Anki from https://notendur.hi.is/gt/sag navefur/sagnavefur.htm which has been good practice. I've also been doing some vocabulary decks on Memrise (thanks, commenter that disappeared!)-- common verbs, common words in general, and animal names. SPANISH I've been doing the most with Spanish lately. I found a pen pal from Peru via Conversation Exchange and I've written several emails over the last couple of weeks. It's interesting how I understand so much Spanish, but when it comes down to activating it, there are a lot of simple things that slip my mind. But that's not proving to be a lot of trouble-- activating and thinking in Spanish is coming easily. I've also been writing small journal entries in Spanish for myself. I'm hoping to find a Skype partner for Spanish to get a little more practice in. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| solocricket Tetraglot Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3668 days ago 68 posts - 106 votes Speaks: English*, French, Italian, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Icelandic, Korean, Polish | Message 11 of 30 17 March 2015 at 3:17am | IP Logged |
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Update:
ICELANDIC Finally making some notable progress with Icelandic! I've been feeling as though I've been hitting my head against a wall when it comes to Icelandic, what with the mixture of a lack of resources + my first non-Romance language, and a harder one at that. Learnign Spanish right after French certainly spoiled me. It's been difficult to stay motivated, and I've left Icelandic slide more days than I'd like to count.... But a couple nights ago, I decided to try to read a bit of Sér grefur gröf, and I could pick out tons more words than I had been before (I didn't look at the book for more than a month, possibly). And today, I've found that I could understand a good percentage of the dialogue over a couple pages, since that language is a lot simpler than the straight prose. I'm definitely a lot more motivated now! On the studying side, I've decided to try and work through Icelandic: Grammar, texts, glossary by Stefán Einarsson and see where that gets me. It's a comprehensive book, but old fashioned (think I've mentioned it before), and I think the some spellings are older as well. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4039 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 12 of 30 17 March 2015 at 10:00pm | IP Logged |
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Actually Icelandic is your second Germanic language ;)
Good luck with this beautiful and fascinating ancient language! I tried and failed miserably (but I will retry) but I hope you can succeed! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| solocricket Tetraglot Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3668 days ago 68 posts - 106 votes Speaks: English*, French, Italian, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Icelandic, Korean, Polish | Message 13 of 30 22 March 2015 at 2:33am | IP Logged |
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@tristano-- thanks for the encouragement! Icelandic is definitely worth retrying!
Update: ICELANDIC I've been riding my recent boost in comprehension for all it's worth :) I've made a point to try to read around ten pages of Sér grefur gröf each day, and that´s going well, especially with dialogue comprehension. Listening comprehension is still lagging behind-- I can´t catch more than a couple words at a time when I´m listening to news radio or tech podcasts (my listening of choice). I´ve still been doing Memrise, although the straight vocab lists without any context are kind of tripping me up. I could be wrong, but it seems like Icelandic has a lot of homophones as well as a lot of synonyms for a ton of words. So these word lists on Memrise will give me one word (kista) with the definition 'box', followed by another (stokkur) with the same definition. This is happening a lot with a wide variety of common words, so I´m not liking how Memrise can make reviewing these synonyms difficult. I´m still sticking with it, especially with the plainly titled 'Icelandic words' list, but we´ll see how it goes. Within the next week, I want to start writing on Lang-8 on a frequent basis (hopefully there are Icelanders on there willing to correct me!) Finally, I´ve been studying grammar and getting used to the noun case endings, just so that I can recognize them better in context. I´m not wild about memorizing grammar tables, so I´m not doing that yet, but it might come to that if I want to get the language more active in a shorter period of time than I did with Spanish and French. SPANISH Not much new, I just started watching the Netflix series 'The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt' dubbed. I was pleasantly surprised it was dubbed in Spanish, since most of the TV shows on Netflix only have English audio. It´s mildly entertaining, so hopefully it´ll get my comprehension a little better! I´ve also been writing to my pen pal which really helps my vocabulary. The last email I sent took half an hour to write with all the vocabulary I had to look up (including, but not limited to, mortgage foreclosure (ejecuciones hipotecarias) and zoning laws (leyes de urbanismo). I probably sound like the dullest language exchange partner on the planet, but she asked about my job, so I had to explain :D FRENCH Reading La Voleuse de livres by Markus Zusak. My goal is to speed up my reading and get the 600 page book done by the end of March. It´s a loan from my brother, and he wants it back.... Additionally, I´ve recently watched the movies ´Tomboy´ and ´Haute Cuisine.´ The former was a little slow for my taste, but I really enjoyed Haute Cuisine! OTHER I really want to start another language, but the wanderlust is preventing me from sticking with anything. I´ve thought about Portuguese, Mandarin, continuing with Polish, and German, but I´m not so sure yet. It doesn´t help that I took out library books today on Serbian and Norwegian, and that I bought enough texts in Latin that it would be really nice to learn that one. I think Latin could be a suitably relaxed side project alongside adding another language... but there are also finite hours in the day, which puts a damper on my plans! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| solocricket Tetraglot Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3668 days ago 68 posts - 106 votes Speaks: English*, French, Italian, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Icelandic, Korean, Polish | Message 14 of 30 30 March 2015 at 2:42pm | IP Logged |
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Update:
SPANISH Spanish is going very well. Writing emails in Spanish really does activate my vocabulary and help me think in the language. Still watching The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. I also want to find a vocab list for legal Spanish-- I'm an attorney in the US, and I think knowing the Spanish vocabulary for legal concepts will help my marketability as a Spanish-speaking lawyer. FRENCH I've read ~400 pages of La Voleuse de Livres, but I've read the book twice in English, and half a time in French, and towards the end, there are about 200 pages of sloooooooooow plot, so I'm going to stop here and move on, although I might read a book in Spanish before another in French. ICELANDIC I've been taking a small break from this language because of a touch of burnout :) The lack of resources is really getting to me. I'll pick it back up this week or next. ITALIAN I haven't written about this since my first post! I'm doing Anki sentences for this to activate the passive vocabulary I can understand (I understand a lot thanks to French and Spanish). I have some Italian friends, and I texted one of them in Italian the other day. It's really fun to spot the relationships and differences between Italian and the other Romance languages. KOREAN?? My Icelandic burnout has resulted in wanderlust, predictably. I'm giving in, of course! Actually (as stated in previous a previous post), I've been wanting to add another language for some time, and I also want to learn a non-Romance language. I've bounced back and forth between Chinese, Japanese (which Ive done some work on already), Arabic, Hebrew, etc. etc. etc. I think I'm deciding on Korean! East Asian languages are attractive to me, and Japanese would seem an obvious choice, since I kind of own a pile of books in Japanese; however, I've pushed myself so hard at Japanese at various times within the last five years that I think I've given Japanese a sour taste for me, so I'm going to let it fallow for a bit. As for Korean, I've had a longstanding interest in North Korea (of all things...), and I think I might like to work for a charity having to do with that situation someday, and Korean language skills would be helpful. More recently, I've gotten into k-pop. Not to mention, I have several Korean picture books at home :D I don't know how serious I'll be taking Korean, especially with Icelandic,(and, of course, I might switch languages for the nth time..) but I'm going to try it out for a bit and see how things go! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| solocricket Tetraglot Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3668 days ago 68 posts - 106 votes Speaks: English*, French, Italian, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Icelandic, Korean, Polish | Message 15 of 30 19 April 2015 at 4:58am | IP Logged |
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Yeah, so I shouldn't post on new languages I might be learning, because I chronically
jump ship so many times. And then I hide from embarrassment. Korean isn't happening right now (though I'm still interested in it!) but I did manage to buy a couple Yiddish textbooks online about which I am VERY excited. I won't say I'm learning that, or any other unrelated language, and I'll just see what I stick with. ITALIAN I've been sticking to Italian! I'm studying this one in a very relaxed way. I do Anki reps every day, and I add 20 or so cards almost everyday. Whenever the mood strikes me, I listen to a podcast or watch a cartoon. Very fun. SPANISH I read La Teorema Katherine by John Green over Easter weekend, and I finished The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt a bit before that. Now, I'm reading Divergente, and I'm slowly watching the Arrested Development dub on Netflix. I really like having 20 minute episodes to watch-- it's easy to get done! With Spanish, I've been thinking about setting some more exact goals. It's looking likely that I'll be moving to California in August or September, and I really want to be able to easily interact with the Spanish speakers there. I'm already planning on attending a Spanish language church :D In terms of job prospects, I want to comfortably be able to pass any proficiency test employers might ask of me. In other words, I want to get my Spanish very strong by then. I think a conversation partner is the way to get there partially, but that method hasn't been working out well for me on the language exchange sites. ICELANDIC Still languishing, but I'm going to get back into it this week. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4039 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 16 of 30 20 April 2015 at 1:48pm | IP Logged |
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Ciao, sii forte! L'islandese e' una bellissima lingua. E' difficile impararla in poco
tempo ma sono sicuro che puoi ottenere buoni risultati se riesci a lavorare un po' tutti i giorni. In bocca al lupo! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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