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Kanewai 2015: Team Caesar | ||
Tags: Super Challenge | Catalan | Ancient Greek | Turkish | Polyglot | Arabic | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | Italian | Japanese | French | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4881 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 105 of 331 25 December 2012 at 9:15am | IP Logged | ||
Brah, your grinds are gonna be so much mo' ono than mine this Christmas! Though the proper way to do it, island style, is to take the missus surfing tomorrow morning. Mele Kalikimaka! And one more for the road: I stayed up to finish 8 femmes tonight. It's a musical murder mystery set in a country house on Christmas Eve. It's campy and candy colored, like a French John Waters. And if that's not enough: with Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, and Fanny Ardant. I've seen it before, and I'll see it again ... this is becoming one of my favorite "Christmas movies." Edited by kanewai on 25 December 2012 at 10:08am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5548 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 106 of 331 31 December 2012 at 11:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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"Kanewai and the Romantics" - did anyone ever tell you this would make an excellent name for an 80s group, brah? I'm feeling a wave of nostalia already. :) Edited by Teango on 31 December 2012 at 11:32pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4881 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 107 of 331 01 January 2013 at 2:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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I just made a deal with a guy at a NYE party - I'll teach him to surf, he'll help me with
French conversation. 2013 will show if this is a real thing, or if it was just the champagne talking. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Rout Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5704 days ago 326 posts - 417 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish Studies: Hindi | Message 108 of 331 03 January 2013 at 4:41am | IP Logged | ||
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Interesting blog. =) Hope the new year has delightful surprises in store for your Spanish (and your others, as well). Good luck to you and the rest of team Pax!
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4881 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 109 of 331 05 January 2013 at 12:07am | IP Logged | ||
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French
I finally started Les Misérables, Book 3: Marius, and was almost immediately frustrated by more of Hugo's tangents. There was one on gamin (which the English translates as "Street Arab," which makes me cringe each time), and one on royalist salons in the age of Napoleon, and it was like being cornered by a long-winded professor and I just wanted to scream, shut up with the tangents and get back to the story! Seriously, the first 15% of the book was all tangents, or about 45 pages. But now we're back to the story, and I've (almost) forgiven Hugo. I thought I might be impatient with the novel after seeing the musical (which was fantastic!), but there is so much more in the book that this hasn't been the case at all. In the musical, Marius is a student revolutionary, but there's nothing really special about his story. Well, in the book we learn about his royalist grandfather's hatred of Napoleon, his mother's affair with a soldier, his youth in the grandfather's salon, and his eventual discovery of his father's true identity. All in about 50 pages - the plot flies along fast when Hugo finally gets to it! And none of this, at all, makes the cut for the movie or musical! I also find that my reading comprehension has leveled up a notch. I still have a long way to go, but it's nice to feel some progress. I also started Harry Potter et la coupe de feu. I'll alternate, a couple chapters in Paris, a couple chapters at Hogwarts. Ancient Greek Greek was supposed to be an 'extra' language for me. I didn't have time to commit, but I thought I'd casually make my way through Assimil as part of the A. Challenge. That plan failed. The language is far too complicated to learn in an easy 30 minutes a day. I took time out to spend two long days reviewing past chapters, I made some declension charts to study, and then I finally picked up an old 1950's Teach Yourself book and did a couple chapters. I thought the contrast between the old-fashioned and modern methods was fascinating: 1950's TY: Thoroughly master grammatical explanations. Never be slack about looking things up. Use the cross references. If any piece of Greek seizes your fancy, learn it by heart. Work slowly, never passing on to new work until you have mastered the old. This will be hard. You will love it. Modern Online Advice: Greek is hard. Only five percent of auto-didacts succeed. Ergo: you will probably fail. Don't try to teach yourself. Take a class. 2010's Assimil: Don't learn anything by heart. Use the literal translation to help you. Listen closely to the recordings. Each lesson should take thirty minutes a day. Don't rush. I like Assimil, but I had to go back and do some good old-fashioned un-Assimil-like memorizing of texts ... I needed a more solid base in order to go on. I was too lost. Maybe we're too quick to dismiss some of the older methods. Although I also feel that my work so far with Assimil has made it easier to use the older books. Now, check out the dialogues! Teach Yourself Greek (1952), Chapter V Daphne began the work at once, but what should she see but a bull with the face of a misanthropic general! The image of the animal frightened the good girl so much that she couldn't utter a word, but held up her hymnal mid-air, which the animal swallowed thinking it was a gift of food. or this: Hector ... used to ride a cycle round the cenotaph, studying arithmetic and biology aloud and declaring that he was a mystical methodist. Then he tried cosmetics and strategy, contracted ophtalmia and chronic hydrophobia and turned a diabolical heliotrope color. Chapter 6 jumps right into using quotes from Aristotle, Plato, and St. John. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5326 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 110 of 331 05 January 2013 at 12:12am | IP Logged | ||
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Your posts have the strange quality of giving me the oddest cravings, and right now you are making me lust
after Ancient Greek. When I have not even mastered the alphabet of Modern Greek. I do not know how you do it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4881 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 111 of 331 11 January 2013 at 10:18pm | IP Logged | ||
folks like you have. Ancient Greek As per Ancient Greek, Solfrid, my advice is: Don't do it! Erase that thought out of your mind this very instant! Or else be prepared for it to become your main focus ... it is a greedy little language that will push all your other languages aside and demand all of your mental energy. I added it as a side project, something fun I could do for the Assimil Experiment that wouldn't take too much time away from my focus languages. Ha ha ha. The learning curve at the beginning is very steep, and instead of being a side project it is becoming my unintended focus. I'm hoping I can reach a plateau soon. Even though I feel a bit overwhelmed, this still feels doable. Working with grammar books alongside Assimil has helped a lot. And I need to remind myself that my goal is not to be able to read Greek fluently. My goal now is to be able to read the Iliad and Odyssey, and the Athenian dramas, in parallel text. That alone would be amazing. French Les Misérables, T3: Marius - OMG Hugo is such a wind bag sometimes. I want to reach back through the centuries, shake him, and demand that he get on with the story! 'Cause it's a great story. I've reached the section on "The Friends of the ABC" - the group of students that meet in the back of a coffee shop and talk themselves into staging a revolution. This was by far my favorite section when I read the book in High School. I really wanted to be in Paris fighting and drinking and arguing philosophy all night, not stuck in my little midwestern farm town. Harry Potter et la coupe de feu - I'm using the dictionary less and less for HP! FSI - Up to Lesson 19.4. The focus is on the subjunctive. I skim the lesson, attempt it on tape, skim it again, and do the tape again. It takes a week to finish each section, but it's been valuable. Spanish I was planning on doing Spanish for the upcoming 6W Challenge, but I don't have time to do intensive Spanish and still struggle with Greek. I want to do something to keep my Spanish alive, and it has to be something easy, at least for the immediate future. I can't quite read literature yet, even with the Kindle dictionary, and Assimil's active wave requires more time and energy than I have. So I just ordered two parallel text books: Alicia en el País de las Maravillas and Aura, a novella by Carlos Fuentes. I'm hoping that these will be fun, and enough to keep my Spanish from completely rusting away. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5201 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 112 of 331 12 January 2013 at 5:08am | IP Logged | ||
Your writing's so vivid; I'm enjoying your log, as ever. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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