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Lorren’s Language Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Lorren Senior Member United States brookelorren.com/blo Joined 4243 days ago 286 posts - 324 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Danish, Irish Studies: Russian | Message 121 of 212 27 June 2014 at 10:43am | IP Logged | ||
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Back to work tomorrow. I finished reading the article that I was reading on wild cats, and ended up having to look up 13 words. I did recognize some words that I had looked up in the past, like the word for cubs.
Reading is getting a lot easier. I think that I get more understanding out of the paragraphs as I read them... even if you know what all the words in a sentence mean, sometimes it's still hard to picture what the meaning is. That's getting a little easier. I have one more article in December's magazine before I can start reading January's. There are many interesting articles to read; I just wish that I could understand them faster. I suppose that that will get easier over time. Even as it stands now, reading is so much easier than it was when I was reading my first issue and could only manage about a paragraph at a time. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lorren Senior Member United States brookelorren.com/blo Joined 4243 days ago 286 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Danish, Irish Studies: Russian | Message 122 of 212 28 June 2014 at 8:19am | IP Logged | ||
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I had a little bit of time after work, so I finished reading December's National Geographic, and started on January's. I only went through the first section where they have little articles, and a bunch of pictures with captions. Between the article and the first section of the magazine, I had to look up 17 words, including words that mean essential, overfly, throne, chapel, wild boar, and goddess.
Even though I generally don't look at a magazine until I read the one before it, I was thinking that perhaps I'll want to take a look at them when I get them, because there's a section that talks about meteor showers and other cool astronomical things that are going on that month. One of the new articles is about the Olympics in Sochi, Russia. I did watch the Olympics, but it will be nice when I am able to get to the point where I am less than six months behind. I know that I will get to the point where I can read easily, without having to have a Google dictionary with me. I think that I'm going to put CNN in Español on while I get some work done. I'm doing some designs on Zazzle which doesn't take much brain power... the work I'm doing at the moment is basically go to the product, change a color, publish the new product with the new color, change a few words, publish, and then move on to the next product. I have a video recorded called La Guerra Fria that I want to watch at some point (that I recorded off CNN in Español), but I want to be able to concentrate a little bit more on that. This way I'll be able to kind of kill a couple birds with one stone. Perhaps I should watch Frozen en Español the same way... it's not like I don't have the whole movie memorized in English and it would be hard to understand. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lorren Senior Member United States brookelorren.com/blo Joined 4243 days ago 286 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Danish, Irish Studies: Russian | Message 123 of 212 29 June 2014 at 8:31am | IP Logged | ||
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Today I managed to read one very short article (paragraph-length) on drugs in Africa. I had to look up 5 phrases like narcotic, Horn of Africa (I wasn't sure if it was translated to a specific country or not), and catinona (which I had to Google because I didn't know what it was in English). So even though 5 words in two paragraphs isn't that great, it's not that bad considering that one of the words that I read I didn't even know in English, and it was on a topic that I've never read about in Spanish before.
I did all of today's Anki words today. Since I've had a lot of new words lately, some of them are just hard to get into my brain. It took me a while to do. The downside to getting a lot of reading done is that it leads me to look up a lot of new words. I do want to start catching up on my backlog of magazines, although the new word thing does cause a dilemma. I'm sure that there is a level that will have me catching up with the old magazines, while not having too many new words. Of course, the more that I learn, the fewer new words I'll run into and the more I will be able to read quickly later on. I had the chance to use Spanish at work again today. We had a guest come in, and I heard him speaking Spanish to his friend. So I said a few things in Spanish to him, interspersed with English for stuff that I didn't know in Spanish. He was getting married, so I told him "congratulations on your wedding" in Spanish. I saw his wife later, and I told her the same thing. He was checking in earlier than his wife, and he asked me in Spanish whether he could check in for his wife. I thought that was pretty cool that I didn't have to ask him what he meant. I probably didn't catch every word that he was saying, but I knew what he was asking partly from his words, partly from his gestures, and partly from inferring what he was asking because I get a lot of people asking the same question. I seem to be at the point where I can express simple ideas, like "congratulations on your wedding" without much trouble. Grammatically, I probably sound like the Spanish equivalent of "Can I has a cheeseburgers?" but they know what I'm trying to express. There's a lot that I can't say, but I continue to get better. Additionally, I think of my Spanish in a way like the Japanese tourists that used to come to America a lot. They could speak English, often with horrible grammar, but you really didn't hold it against them because English obviously wasn't their first language and you knew they were trying to communicate with you. Tomorrow's my Friday (yay) so I hope to get more done tomorrow. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| AmyinBrooklyn Senior Member United States Joined 4043 days ago 87 posts - 122 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 124 of 212 30 June 2014 at 1:40am | IP Logged | ||
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Hi Lorren -
Love the idea of reading Nat. Geo for Spanish practice. I wondered if you had a link to subscribe. The only one that I was able to find was $350. Were you able to find anything more reasonable? Thanks! Amy 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lorren Senior Member United States brookelorren.com/blo Joined 4243 days ago 286 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Danish, Irish Studies: Russian | Message 125 of 212 01 July 2014 at 11:08am | IP Logged | ||
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I had a hard time finding out how to subscribe, just as you did. The $350 rate you saw was probably in pesos, which came to about $26. You can get a year for $23.99 in US dollars (much more reasonable). I don't even think that that web site will even ship to the US. The edition that I get is published in Miami, and is primarily sent to people in the US, Puerto Rico, and Dominican Republic.
http://www.televisapublishing.com/ will get you to where you want to go. I found that address by buying an issue off eBay, and there were ads in the magazine. If you prefer the digital edition, you can buy that from Zinio. I do like the print for this magazine. Today I read a short, two-page article about a dog breed that was owned by the Aztecs. I had to look up 9 words, including native, underworld, buffoon, slave, and ally. Yesterday I read about using trash to make energy. Today going through Anki took a lot less time than yesterday. There were so many words that I just wasn't remembering... I spent most of my Spanish time going through Anki. I remembered about 75% of the words today (I'm pretty picky about which words that I say that I know... if I'm even slightly off on the definition I practice it again). Going through the words again, I was able to get most of the rest of them. Today was one of those days where the reading just seemed to click. It helped that a lot of the words that were new to me were easy to figure out, like Centroamérica, funeraria and generación. I love how many of the words that I have to look up are more challenging words. I'm still a ways away from getting to the point where reading Spanish is as easy as reading English, but I'm a heckuva lot closer than I was a year ago, where reading a paragraph was a challenge. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4136 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 126 of 212 01 July 2014 at 2:01pm | IP Logged | ||
THANK YOU for this! I assumed that it would just be for the US, but they accept Canadian addresses as well. I wonder if there's a catch? It seems surprisingly inexpensive! I think that I'm going to subscribe to National Geographic and Muy Interesante. Muchas gracias! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lorren Senior Member United States brookelorren.com/blo Joined 4243 days ago 286 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Danish, Irish Studies: Russian | Message 127 of 212 02 July 2014 at 9:08am | IP Logged | ||
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De nada! I'm glad that they will ship to you as well. I doubt that there's a catch to it... the English version of National Geographic goes for $15 in the US. It seems to be a pretty average price for a magazine subscription, which is of course cheaper than buying it in the store because they know that they can count on you to read it every month.
Today I read a short article about starfish, people traveling to Dubai to work, and a paragraph on a small, marmot-sized creature that shares many characteristics with elephants. I also started the cover article of this issue, which is about the Kayapo people that live in Brazil. It was about four pages (not really counting the pages which just has pictures and a paragraph describing the paragraph). I had to look up 21 words, including words for fish hooks, fog, light and dark (google translate gave a word that I didn't understand so I had to have it simplified for me), and some names for birds that I had to look up in Wikipedia because I didn't know what they were in English. I'm learning more synonyms for some words that I already know, like yesterday I looked up a word that meant wind, but it wasn't the viento that is more common, or even aire. Anki was manageable today. There's been quite a few days where it was just too much, so it's nice to have this manageable amount. Not sure that it will stay this way as I get more reading done, but I suppose that I could watch Forrest Gump or Frozen in Spanish for a few days in that case, which would give me a couple of days to learn the words and keep the Anki words at a manageable level. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lorren Senior Member United States brookelorren.com/blo Joined 4243 days ago 286 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Danish, Irish Studies: Russian | Message 128 of 212 03 July 2014 at 10:34am | IP Logged | ||
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Today I had the day off, so I got a lot of work done, both with my business and with my Spanish study. I finished reading about the people living in the Brazilian jungle, which was quite a lot of pages. I looked up 6 words, including words for betrothal, rigmarole, piranha, rattlesnake, and interwoven. For some reason it seemed like more than that though.
I realized that it's been a long time since I've done anything with Russian. I spent a little bit of time working on that. I only went through one review lesson, but it's better than nothing. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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