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TAC ’15 French Spanish Celtic Adv Study | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5387 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 121 of 336 14 January 2013 at 2:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
That's awesome. Merry Christmas. :) I love my Kindle for that, too. I try to have a notebook with me when I read, and just write down the vocab I don't know, then put it into Anki. I've also found that it's easier to find foreign language books (in general) for the Kindle than it is to find paper books in the US. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5383 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 122 of 336 14 January 2013 at 7:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks. For me it's a nice break from French literature which can get pretty heavy and sometimes bleak (at least the stuff I have lined up to read). 1 person has 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 123 of 336 04 February 2013 at 5:38am | IP Logged | |||||
If you'd like an even lighter break from heavy French literature, come and join us on the Pax thread for some songs and music! We're trying our respective hands at a group activity which Kanewai suggested. See post 105, 108, and on. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5383 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 124 of 336 03 July 2013 at 11:44am | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, hello everybody! It's been quite a while now. Got sucked into some personal
projects and spent more time away from browsing internet forums (which can be considered a good thing). I got two "promotions" at my job (starting the new position in a week or two) so not too shabby I'd say. On the language front I haven't spent a lot of time formally studying but I've been maintaining through reading, language meetups, etc. Last week I bought a couple magazines in Spanish and with access to a dictionary I can understand almost 100% without any difficulty, without a dictionary it drops a bit but I definitely can understand the gist. I spoke Spanish at a general language exchange meetup and didn't do too badly. Understanding a full speed native speaker in a bar was challenging, though. I will definitely need to practice verbs some more, though. I've banked a good amount of paid time off and I was thinking of my different options for using it. I discovered that I can do a two week Spanish immersion trip to Guatemala for around $850-$950 which isn't too bad. Though sometimes I feel bad about spending any money at all... I'm thinking of concentrating this month on Irish, which has been pretty neglected. There are a few fledgling Irish study groups that are trying to drum up interest so I'll try to check them out and follow a regular course. Apart from that I've discovered meditation. As language learners we like to think about how much studying and immersion we can cram into our day but it's important to take some time every day to rest the mind. It helps a lot for concentration and focus among other things. So sometimes it's good to turn off the radio, movies, MP3 players, etc. Just be sure to replace it with mindfulness rather than with mindless TV or other distractions. Hope everyone has been doing well! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5383 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 125 of 336 04 July 2013 at 3:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Oh, need to mention a great resource I got for Spanish:
ie=UTF8&qid=1372944425&sr=8-1&keywords=laugh+and+learn+spani sh">Laugh and Learn Spanish It has a lot of useful information, even in the "beginning" section (you need to have more than a beginning level of Spanish to work through this level without a lot of difficulty). It's based off of For Better or for Worse comic strips which is actually a good choice for learners as it has a lot of everyday language used between family and friends. Too bad they don't have it for more languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5383 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 126 of 336 28 September 2013 at 2:07am | IP Logged | |||||
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Another quick update. I've been busy adjusting to being a day person again after my
promotion at work. A downside to my new position is that I don't really get downtime in which I can read and browse the internet which means fewer opportunities to study throughout the day. I can listen to podcasts though, thanks to my new iPhone, but I have to be doing a pretty mindless task in order to be able to devote my full attention to it. I've started volunteering with a refugee organization as an English language tutor. I've been matched with a woman from Burma (she's Karen) whom I meet with every week for a couple of hours. It's pretty challenging since as a refugee in a pretty precarious position she doesn't have access to all the useful resources the internet and TV has to offer. I'm looking for cheap ways for her to be able to immerse herself the rest of the week that don't require a computer or TV. I saw that they're planning on having the polyglot conference in Montreal and NYC next year and I'm thinking of going. I've been wanting to go to Montreal for a while now and I get fairly generous vacation time so why not? But if I am to attend I feel like I don't want to have to put an asterisk by my Spanish and Irish since I'm definitely still just learning. A year is plenty of time to level up in both and maybe even acquire some foundations of another language. I've been going back and forth regarding which language I want to focus on, but thanks to finding this resource I've decided to focus my study on Irish for the next three months (at least). It looks like just the thing to spoon feed me the language the way I want. It's really easy to listen to the audio clips over and over again and gives me pretty clear targets. If I were to add another language, Portuguese is definitely on my short list. But now that I'm teaching A Karen woman from Burma, I'm also toying with the idea of pursuing at least some Karen or Burmese. There are very few Karen resources but it looks like enough to give myself a token amount of knowledge of the language: http://karenkonnection.org/Say_It_in_Karen.php3 and http://ktwg.org/Library/KTWG%20Karen%20Language%20Course.pdf . And it would be really cool to be able to write in the really cool Burmese script. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5383 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 127 of 336 28 September 2013 at 7:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Did some research into Sgaw Karen. There are obvious difficulties: the rarity of the
language, the lack of commonalities with English or Romance languages, the lack of courses or materials, the script, the tones, etc. Here are some descriptions:
And information on the Burmese script: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/burmese.htm I've found some pretty good guides that were developed initially by missionaries and later refugee aid groups (in addition to the ones I posted above, I also found A Grammar of the Sgaw Karen which looks like a good breakdown: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks09/0900201p.pdf). Grammatically it doesn't look like the hardest language to learn and the phonetic system seems pretty straightforward. There's no Pimsleur or Assimil that will spoon feed the language to me but I think I can take the audio and written materials available, split them up to put into Anki (or other tools) and start learning the alphabet and basic words and phrases. Any tips for approaching a language project such as this? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5383 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 128 of 336 29 September 2013 at 2:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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As for Irish, I found another handy tool that will be very encouraging: a Gaeilge IPA
Anki deck. The phonetic system is hands down the most intimidating part of the language at the beginning and this ought to help me make more sense of it. The deck seems to present the information very well and has pictures and audio. Unfortunately there isn't one for Karen but I think I can make one with the materials I have which will be my first step in the language. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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