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Kerrie’s TAC ’12 Team Žá / Romantics Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5327 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 217 of 236 13 December 2012 at 9:12pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
That's funny. My girls want to move to the US and take me with them :-) Otherwise your Norwegian would be absolutely fluent in 8 years if you start now :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5388 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 218 of 236 13 December 2012 at 9:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think children look at things through different eyes than adults do. They don't have to think about bills, taxes, insurance, school districts, and all that fun stuff. Someone else gets to do all the work for them. :) Of course, Anna would argue that her 10 minutes of homework every day is hard work, so what do I know? LOL You guys could come visit, even if you don't move here, though. :) Edited by Kerrie on 13 December 2012 at 9:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5327 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 219 of 236 13 December 2012 at 9:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Ditto :-) How old are your girls again? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5388 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 220 of 236 13 December 2012 at 10:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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They just turned ten. Your younger daughter's only 13, right? Maybe you should send her here for the summer. That would give me a good incentive to learn Norwegian. LOL Oh, but then she would have to suffer a hot and humid Michigan summer. That might be too much for a Norwegian girl. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5327 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 221 of 236 13 December 2012 at 10:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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13 going on 19... I'm not even going to show her this, because she would sell both her parents for a chance
to visit the US, and I want her to learn Spanish first. I don't think the heat would be a problem, though. She s used to Almeria which is also pretty hot. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5388 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 222 of 236 13 December 2012 at 10:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Haha. Anna is 9 going on 15, I totally get that. :)
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| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5388 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 223 of 236 17 December 2012 at 12:46am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Looking back over the past year, I'm both proud of myself and disappointed in myself. If that's possible. :) I started out with huge, unreachable goals. Who can go from zero to fluent in seven languages in twelve months? I think that setting high goals is a good idea, because it makes you reach for something. But maybe mine were a little too high. I think I overestimated my ability in all of my languages, too. I am a passive learner. I like to read, watch movies and TV shows, and understand. It's not my goal to speak, at least not principally. Except I realized during the year that that's not really true. I am a shy person. I'm not sure that's the right term, but - like a lot of people - I have social anxiety, and talking to people I don't know freaks me out. A little. So Benny's idea of "go out there and talk to people!" doesn't work for me. This is one thing I have to work on, because I *do* want to learn to speak my languages. On the other hand, I accomplished a lot. A LOT. I worked my way through Assimil's Spanish with Ease, French with Ease, Using Spanish, and Using French. I'm almost finished with Italian with Ease. (Fingers crossed that I can still finish it this year!) For Spanish, I finished the two Assimil books, but then I jumped ship and started watching movies. I gained a new appreciation for foreign films. I've watched 35 films for the Super Challenge. One of them I watched in Spanish with Spanish subtitles. It drives me nuts, because I can't understand spoken Spanish well enough to watch without some help. But they were Spanish subtitles, not English ones. That's some serious improvement over where I was last year. I think the Super Challenge has pushed me from "studying" a language to "using" it. I might not be speaking it yet, but if I can sit down with a 700 page book in Spanish and get lost in it for hours... it was a book I tried reading last year, and never got past page three. It was too hard, and I thought I would never be able to read it, and now I am reading it, without blinking an eye. :) It's frustrating, though. I read with a notebook, to write down vocab I don't know. In about 150 pages of this book so far, I've come up with about 2000 words I don't know. What? Some of them are words like leeches, bracken, elms, pickled herring, and mottled. But some of them are simple words like squatting, groaning, pickles, and snoring. And the more I read, the more I realize I don't know. It's extremely satisfying to sit down and read a book in Spanish, but it's also disheartening to realize I have *so* much more to learn! One of my goals for 2013 is going to be to get my active vocabulary to 15,000 words. I have no idea what I know now, but I have a feeling I will come up with that many new words in my reading for the Super Challenge next year anyways. :) I've also gotten through about 1300 pages of reading for Spanish this year. On one hand, this is sad, considering I want to read 100,000 pages by the end of 2013 for the Super Challenge. The Super Challenge is almost 40% over, and I'm nowhere near 40% of the way through with the reading portion. Realistically, though, that's a lot of pages for a language I am still working on, so I'll be happy with my accomplishments so far. I'm nowhere near where I want to be, but I am a lot further along that I was a year ago. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5388 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 224 of 236 17 December 2012 at 12:52am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I have also made huge strides in French this year. Looking back, I was not even close to a B1 (reading) and A2 (active), which is what I thought a year ago. [I kinda feel like a fraud. LOL] I think I was closer to a high A1 passively, and a negative something for active. I worked my way through both Assimil programs passively, but never did an active phase. This is one thing I want to do next year with my French, at least with French with Ease. I am not sure I want to do it with Using French. That book was a bitch, if I ever saw one. I will probably pick and choose lessons from that one to shadow, though.
I'm kind of lost on what to do with French, now. Assimil active wave, for sure. I *need* to fill in all the holes in my grammar, and will probably work through a grammar book like Practice Makes Perfect. I don't anticipate those will be a problem, though. Just like Spanish, I need to build up my vocabulary. If I learn 25 words a day, that would be close to10,000 words at the end of next year. I think I am going to make vocabulary a focal point for French next year, too. French has difficulties for me that are very different from Spanish, though. The pronunciation is really hard for me. Not to reproduce, but to hear. When they talk, it seems like half the sentence is swallowed up. (I know, there is a certain amount of that in any target language.) I want to especially work on listening comprehension for French next year. This follows nicely with the Super Challenge (of course). I've been watching TV shows dubbed into French (Ghost Whisperer and Medium, most recently), and I've noticed that I am understanding a lot more. I always watch with English subtitles, but I can *hear* the words and how they go together a lot better, if that makes any sense. This is very different from this past summer (July and August) when I watched a number of movies in French and didn't understand much. It's not anywhere near where I want to be, but it's a far cry from where I was a year ago. So far, I have 48 films done for the Super Challenge, and I expect that number to be closer to 60 or 70 by the end of the year. Another faucet of French, which makes me realize how much I've learned, is that I can use Assimil French-based courses with very little problem. I've used the Croatian, Turkish, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese Assimil courses, and I've found that the French doesn't phase me a bit. There are some times when I have to look up a word or two, but that's not a big deal. The fact that I can do that now is really amazing. For Italian, I am almost done with Assimil's Italian with Ease - I have about 20 lessons left. Italian is so close to Spanish, but it's so different. It's really weird. Realistically, I've learned a lot of Italian. When I watch movies with subs, I can understand what they are saying. I've watched about 35 Italian films for the Super Challenge, mostly over the summer. I am going to wait until I finish my French films (and my Italian Assimil book) before I go back to Italian films. But I look forward to it. I think I will be understanding a lot more when I do. Those are the three languages I did the most in this year, and I made really good progress in all of them, although more in Spanish and French than in Italian. Edited by Kerrie on 17 December 2012 at 12:56am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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