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| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4631 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 9 of 21 05 June 2014 at 4:58pm | IP Logged |
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Spanish
Watching an online stream from ESPN Latinoamerica of the French open womens semifinal. Will try to do same with the final and mens matches (well, might switch to a French stream if it's available). With the football world cup coming up and the French rugby team about to tour Australia there's gonna be lots of opportunity for listening practice, so long as I avoid watching the matches with other people. Best way to do this is have the foreign internet stream hooked up to speakers, and the local TV broadcast on screen, delayed to be in time with the internet stream. That way you get HD picture, TL commentary. Edited by AlexTG on 05 June 2014 at 5:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4631 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 10 of 21 06 June 2014 at 12:49pm | IP Logged |
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German
I'm now shooting through German Made Simple, reading silently. Lesson 10 of 43. I need to practice reading prose and build up my vocab. German grammar is all fairly transparent, I only need to understand it, not produce it. I've been reading German poetry for the last fortnight or so and I think it's great. Meets my tastes much better than the Spanish tradition, which I find a bit dry and long winded. I've been mulling over whether to start reading native prose. Given my low vocabulary I'm going to wait for poetry and German Made Simple to build up my word count first. I'd prefer prose reading to go smoothly rather than checking the dictionary every second sentence. Assimil's Perfectionment course would probably be overkill for my needs, though it looks pretty nice. Edited by AlexTG on 06 June 2014 at 12:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4631 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 11 of 21 11 June 2014 at 1:55pm | IP Logged |
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Japanese
I'm on page 292 of 571 of A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar. It has gotten me used to small Japanese font and so I've been able to start reading La lune et moi an anthology of haiku from the journal Ashibi with French translations. I just got through a really interesting section of A History of Japanese about the annotations historically used on works of Classical Chinese which allowed Japanese with no knowledge of the language to read them as if they were awkwardly written Japanese texts. Kinda getting wanderlust to learn Classical Chinese now... Edited by AlexTG on 11 June 2014 at 1:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4631 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 12 of 21 20 June 2014 at 2:07am | IP Logged |
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World Cup is eating up my spare time, I've altered my sleep schedule completly so I can watch all the
matches despite my time zone (matches at 2am, 5am, and 8am). I use the radio stations Futbol De Primera (Spanish, US) and Europe 1 (French, Belgium), both of which are broadcasting to Australia via Tunein despite the fact that they almost certainly aren't supposed to. Thanks to the DNS provider Unotelly I can also access the TV channel TF1 from France. Futbol De Primera is my favourite, completely over the top. Goooooooooooooollllllll. Europe 1 has very intrusive ads. When none of these broadcast I have to use illegitimate streams. For the astoundingly boring Iran-Nigeria match I used German commentary for the final 20 minutes, but couldn't parse much at all. I'm still getting through a bit of Japanese and German stuff each day, but only a very small bit. Not much time for any reading in other languages either. Edited by AlexTG on 20 June 2014 at 2:10am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4631 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 13 of 21 03 July 2014 at 3:54am | IP Logged |
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German
The ios/android trivia game "QuizUp" is now available in 5 languages: English, German, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. I'm using German and it's great reading practice as well as a vocabulary builder. I'd played it before in English and felt jealous of the people from non-anglo countries getting language practice. Now I can do the same mwahaha. And it doesn't even count as procrastination anymore! I'm up to chapter 25/page 134 of German Made Simple Japanese Finished A History of the Japanese Language. Page 392 of A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar. Edited by AlexTG on 03 July 2014 at 3:56am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4631 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 14 of 21 05 August 2014 at 10:00am | IP Logged |
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German
Chapter 33 of German Made Simple. I intended to bang through it, but now I'm going less than a chapter a day. Ah well, slow and steady. I've started reading Parlons Allemand from the publishing house L'Harmattan. It's just a hodgepodge of interesting information about the German language and people. It assumes the reader already possesses a decent amount of linguistic knowledge. I'm not sure who they think their target audience is, especially given the name. I've found it a great read so far. Japanese Page 500 of Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar Started reading Assimil's Le Japonais, and I'm up to dialog 19. All very easy for me so far. French I read Petit traité de versification française by Maurice Grammont. Provided me with some good insights into the functioning of the language at its highest level(poetry). I completely disagreed with the author on his views on how to adapt the rules of versification to the modern language. Especially given he seemed to just take as a given that "the modern language" equals "how we educated Parisians speak". Erg. Edit: just looked up the author, and found out this book was written in 1911 even though the copyright page says 1965. I suppose then, to be fair, he was thinking of a very different modern language than I am! I'm reading Le capital au XXIe siècle by Thomas Picketty. I've never read any economics in French so I was expecting to have to pick up a bunch of new vocabulary, but it's quite transparent if you already know the English words and generic French vocabulary. Edited by AlexTG on 05 August 2014 at 10:12am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4631 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 15 of 21 11 August 2014 at 1:29pm | IP Logged |
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Japanese
I'm about to finish A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar. It's improved my Japanese immeasurably. Not only are the explanations clear and concise, but the book leans heavily on example sentences. On average there are more than five sentences per page, over 573 pages. Reading this book means reading over 2865 sentences in Japanese. That beats Assimil by quite a bit. The content words used in the sentences are varied throughout, so you're picking up new vocabulary as you go along. The new words are also generally repeated soon after being introduced and then later in the book as well. So you don't just get a word and then never see it again, rather you get a form of spaced repetition. A small group of words were used a lot and are now burnt into my brain. That's okay, sometimes you want to just focus on the grammar. EDIT: Just to be clear, the vocab is still super basic, this is not the resource to build up your vocab size! The grammatical words are, as the name indicates, organized alphabetically rather than by concept. So, following an 80 page grammatical overview, the first entry is "ageru¹", a way of saying "give", the next entry is "ageru²", on the use of the same word to mean "do x for someone". Only later on in the book do you arrive at the other ways of saying "give" and "do x for someone" (which to use depends on level of politeness and frame of reference), though they are mentioned briefly in the "ageru" entries. I'll take a bit of a break, maybe finish Assimil, maybe start reading some non-poetry native material before moving on to A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar which looks to be of equal quality. One thing to note is that the sentences aren't interesting in any way. But that seems to be a common factor among all Japanese learning resources. Edited by AlexTG on 21 August 2014 at 9:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| AlexTG Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 4631 days ago 178 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Latin, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 16 of 21 21 August 2014 at 9:26am | IP Logged |
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Japanese
Assimil: Lesson 28 I'm reading the first volume of Death Note. This is my first piece of native reading material yay! I've got hard copies in both Japanese and English, using the English as a parallel text. I'm not bothering to check the dictionary for bits I have trouble with. German My learning of German and Japanese were supposed to be staggered so I was at different stages, but German has caught up quick smart. Jeez make your language a bit harder Germans!(:P) German Made Simple: Chapter 37 I was reciting poems to myself in the shower last night and thought of the eight line poem "Die Kürze" by Friedrich Hölderlin. I was able to remember a bunch of separate bits from it, cause it's awesome. So today I've been working on getting all of it down in my head and hopefully it will stick. In which case, it will be the first German poem I'm able to recite by heart (and hoh boy is it German[read:bleak]). Edited by AlexTG on 21 August 2014 at 9:36am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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