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What Expug is doing in 2015 (TAC n more)

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Expugnator
Hexaglot
Senior Member
Brazil
Joined 5154 days ago

3335 posts - 4349 votes 
Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento
Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian

 
 Message 153 of 364
08 May 2015 at 12:46am | IP Logged 
@Serpent: I'm not confused at all, they belong to different time slots :P

Best news of the day so far (10 past 10 am): I realized there are sites where I can simply crop-paste a portion of the pdf file I want to OCR. So, no more opening Paint, then saving, then opening again at newocr just for the sake of OCRing some texts. Things will go much faster now (yeah, it's much faster than pointing the smartphone's camera by using GoogleTrans).

I started watching Le Scaphandre et le Papillon yesterday without subtitles and I'm following just fine when I pay attention. Better than with Hero Corp, which is a series I'm familiarized with. So, I see this as a sign of progress.

I tried to work faster with things before leaving for solving the deal with the trip that never happened to BsAs, but it took longer than I expected and when I came back there was a lot to do, even correct things, and so I ended up missing a lot of things I was planning to do. At last I finished my daily parts of Poor Nastya, which are helping immensely with Russian. Plus one episode of Hero Corp, better than nothing.
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Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6585 days ago

9753 posts - 15779 votes 
4 sounds
Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish

 
 Message 154 of 364
08 May 2015 at 2:23am | IP Logged 
Haha. Before rereading the posts I wondered whether Cavesa was learning Turkmen.
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Expugnator
Hexaglot
Senior Member
Brazil
Joined 5154 days ago

3335 posts - 4349 votes 
Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento
Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian

 
 Message 155 of 364
08 May 2015 at 11:16pm | IP Logged 
Poor Cavesa; I was so much discouraged from Turkmen even from some of the greatest language geeks out there.

Yesterday turned out better than expected. I managed to watch 1 episodeof Hero Corp at home while my wife was preparing some snacks and I also listened to a new meditation video in French. Total over 1 hour for the French SC which is my most urgent task.

Estonians use bonfires in St John's day (June 24th), just like in the Northeast of Brazil, where I was born. Saint John's party is one of the things I miss the most from my hometown. It is much more friendly and culturally rich than Carnival. Here in the Southeast it is not even a public holiday, even though people do hold similar parties in June and July. Nothing like the parties in the Northeast in the actual date, where whole towns and cities get mobilized.

Today's lesson took me even longer. It didn't help the fact the texts had big pictures, and so I couldn't OCR the whole page at once. There was also a lot to do early in the morning. So I finished almost 2 hours later.

So I finished the book in Norwegian I read the best so far, Harlan Coben's I den skogen (=The Woods). I'm defnitely better at Norwegian now than I was in French when I started learning French actively. It is such a great feeling to notice remarkable progress. I don't mind the fact it took me 3x as much as the forum's average for reaching this...B2ish reading level?! in a Scandinavian level. I'm just happy with what I've got for today.

From CHina in kleinen Geschischten I figured out the reason tea has two etimologies. The one in the North and then Russian and Turkish is more loyal to current Mandarin: 'cha'. The South brought the 'te' which is used in most Western languages, like English, French, Spanish. Guess which one went to Portuguese?! Chá! Those Portuguese navigations...

Once again the best day of Georgian reading. I could understand what was going on through long paragraphs before reading the Portuguese translation.

I'm enjoying the film Keinohrhasen a lot and today I understood a lot from the dialogues. Hope to keep this trend of using subtitles in German and in a language I know.

The day ended up better than expected. The only main activities missing were Russian reading and Chinese tests from Goethe-Verlag. And only because I'm actually leaving earlier! Hope there is a nice weekend ahead and I may at least advance with the French Super Challenge.
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vonPeterhof
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4760 days ago

715 posts - 1527 votes 
Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German
Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish

 
 Message 156 of 364
09 May 2015 at 12:12am | IP Logged 
Expugnator wrote:
From CHina in kleinen Geschischten I figured out the reason tea has two etimologies. The one in the North and then Russian and Turkish is more loyal to current Mandarin: 'cha'. The South brought the 'te' which is used in most Western languages, like English, French, Spanish. Guess which one went to Portuguese?! Chá! Those Portuguese navigations...
This is actually a bit of an oversimplification. The plosive/fricative contrast here is less of a south/north split and more of a Min/all-other-Chinese-varieties split. The pronunciation "te" is from the Southern Min dialect of the port of Amoy (Xiamen), a major point of contact with European traders. The Cantonese pronunciation of the word is closer to "cha", so the English and the Portuguese borrowed that pronunciation via Hong Kong and Macao, respectively (although in English "char" eventually ended up being marginalized by "tea").
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Cavesa
Triglot
Senior Member
Czech Republic
Joined 4997 days ago

3277 posts - 6779 votes 
Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1
Studies: Spanish, German, Italian

 
 Message 157 of 364
09 May 2015 at 4:09pm | IP Logged 
I don't visit a log for a few days and I learn such news about myself upon return. Guys,
sometimes you're scaring me :-D :-D Turkmen... hmm. Not on my hitlist but I've been
recently considering Turkish.

Btw, in Czech, it is "Čaj", so it's good to know I know a Portuguese word for free.
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Expugnator
Hexaglot
Senior Member
Brazil
Joined 5154 days ago

3335 posts - 4349 votes 
Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento
Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian

 
 Message 158 of 364
11 May 2015 at 11:55pm | IP Logged 
The weekend wasn't much productive (3 pages Russian, 50 min French) as I spent most of the time reading other stuff instead of languages. At least I found time to set projections for my Super Challenge stats by checking how many workdays are there before January. I'm about to enter my final 'day' of the French film part which means there are some 26 hours left for reaching the 150 hours. I really need to work on that and then on Georgian and German audio which are also lagging behind. Not much, though, as for these two I aimed for a half challenge. Btw, i've already reached my half challenge for Russian films and I'm about to do a full film challenge for Chinese. When it comes to reading, I'm comfortable about reaching a half challenge for Norwegian (60 pages to go) and German (229 pages to go) and with Chinese (I should read less than 4 pages a day on average and I'm currently doing 4 pages a day). As for reaching the half challenge for Russian and Georgian, I'd have to work much harder, over 7 pages a day for Russian and 9 pages a day for Georgian. I'm currently doing 5 for Russian and 4 for Georgian. So, I don't see this happen because I'm not reading any of them fluidly (I don't mean fluently, I mean fluidly, that is, no stop to at least figure out what's going on at the translation). SO, even if I devote myself to reading over 8 pages a day in those languages, it will consist of an automatism as I'm not able to absorb what I read yet. I may understand about 30% of Georgian and 25% of Russian which makes reading as few as 4 pages already tiresome, since I don't really know what's going on when I read. Was there any progress from the beginning of the SC until now? Surely there was, but I think I will only be able to do a reading challenge proper in the next SC.

Today I listened to Portuguese while playing some Papiamento from the Curaçaoan TV. A now extinct Brazilian air company had some sort of agreement with Insel Air, so the Insel Air manager spoke first in Papiamento and then the Brazilian guy spoke in Portuguese.

After the busiest days last weekend I managed to pay more attention to Helt Perfekt today. I'm starting to understand better what is being said.

Things also went well with Georgian reading. I'm almost reaching the point where I know few enough words to be able to just look to the translation once in a while for the unknown ones.

It was not one of the best days of reading in German but not one of the worst either. It turns out the topic itself is too dense and leaves me thinking, regardless of language. I need to read some fiction in German next, at least to check how I stand compared to Norwegian. I already read fiction in Norwegian with some 90% comprehension - except for the book I started today, in Nynorsk. Any thoughts on what to start with? If I don't find good translated fiction German I will have to go for some interesting books I have in German but am unlikely to find in Georgian or Norwegian. I'm always saving the best-sellers for minor languages. Someone suggested Erich Kästner, has anyone read anything from that? What did you think? I found a few English and French translations, which means I can read the German along.

Some Turkmen. I read the intro from Turkmen Language Manual and since I was already quite busy I decided to read only the first two competencies of the unit 1. It is still confusing to be using the cyrillic alphabet when I haven't mastered the pronunciation rules of the latin one yet, but I will keep going uncertainly since my goal is to become familiarized with how the language works and how it fits in the Turkic continuum.

No time for Italian. Better luck tomorrow.
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daegga
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Austria
lang-8.com/553301
Joined 4509 days ago

1076 posts - 1792 votes 
Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian
Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic

 
 Message 159 of 364
12 May 2015 at 12:09am | IP Logged 
In which language do you need the translation of German novels?
Here for example a list of books written by Wolfgang Hohlbein and the available translations:
http://www.hohlbein.net/downloads/HB_Uebersetzungen.txt

I liked "Hagen von Tronje", should be rather easy if you know the background story already (Nibelungenlied).

edit:
I'm curious: which nynorsk book have you started reading?

Edited by daegga on 12 May 2015 at 12:11am

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Expugnator
Hexaglot
Senior Member
Brazil
Joined 5154 days ago

3335 posts - 4349 votes 
Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento
Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian

 
 Message 160 of 364
12 May 2015 at 11:26pm | IP Logged 
@daegga: any civilized language, which for me could be English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian. Your suggestion will do fine, thanks.

I'm reading Det Store Nashornet by Rasmus Løland.

===========
Yesterday I added one more video of meditation in French, confirmed the improvement in my skills and added over an hour to the SC overall).

One lesson to go, the last review at E Nagu Eesti. I've already set a reminder to bring my new book Lehrbuch der estnischen Sprache tomorrow, so I have two chances as I'm planning to start on Wednesday.

I have been forgetting to do the Goethe-Verlag tests for Chinese. Actually I didn't have time on Friday, and tomorrow I was supposed to catch up by doing 6 instead of 3, but I forgot. I don't think I'm going to try and catch up because doing such tests in Chinese is always harder because I have to pass the mouse over the hanzi and confirm pronunciation and then select and drag the text character to the blank in the page.

Georgian starts to make sense. Better than Russian or Mandarin, sometimes better than Norwegian. It takes me so much less time than it used to, and it doesn't feel like a chore anymore. I'm starting to miss only 1-2 words per sentence, and sometimes I understand whole paragraphs. I still have to understand how perfect and pluperfect are actually used, it is all so confusing. I hope next time I review this part of grammar I will already have some real-textual usage in mind.Funny how I understand spoken Russian better and written Georgian better. Of course my spoken Georgian would be better if I had subtitles like I do for Russian. Which reminds me I should resume watching Kuxnya, and will probably do once the French Super Challenge is completed.

Before I forgot: at Georgian Newspaper Reader I read on how many of the literary and art works from the XII century in Georgia already had elements that would show up in Western Europe only in the Renaissance.

A good day of German reading as well. It will take me a couple of days till I finish the current book, and so I might start fiction, probably something on what was suggested. I really want to use my time for reading important stuff, but I need to learn more concrete vocabulary in German and so fiction will be more useful. Wouldn't it be asking for too much if I just asked for a contemporary German author that writes about daily life, like the French Guillaume Musso and Pierre Lévy? I'm learning so much from watching Keinohrhasen that I think I can only benefit from such texts. Btw, it's no coincidence that the book I'm currently reading in Georgian and that made me finally do some progress on the language is also a contemporary novel where all vocabulary matters. No prejudice against fantasy, middle age, war but I prefer to learn the most important first.

I wonder if Serpent has ever watched one of the thrilling matches from the local team Atlético Mineiro, a.k.a. Galo. People were watching Bayern x Barça and when Bayern scored, they (all Galo supporters) asked me how to say 'Eu acredito!". This motto can't be translated simply by "I believe it!", it's more like "We can do it".

And then I understand almost every sentence clearly when watching Poor Nastya. Reading is still something else, because it involves longer sentences and big descriptive words, but I'm also improving at this respect.I never meant to magically claim to speak any foreign language, anyway.

Hero Corp is over, long live Hero Corp. I will give no spoilers here. Season Fifth is supposed to be the last one. Well, now what? I've read good about the series H, but I suppose it is hard to search for and download it when it consists of only one character =D Really, I know it is possible to watch it streamed, but no can do for me. I am going for 'Fais pas ci, fais pas ça' and see how much I can understand. I'm really enjoying this new phase of understanding colloquial, slangish, spontaneous French reasonably well. Sometimes I simply can't believe it.

So, today I has Turkmen and Italian. I'm really enjoying Assimil Perfectionnement Italien's lessons and I plan to just start reading some non-fiction in Italian after I finish it. I still don't think I will have time for watching anything in Italian for the time being; the way things are now, it will only bring more stress. Today was a calmer day and I'm even leaving early. All in all, I think things will reach a much more reasonable pace from Thursday on when I will be doing another Estonian textbook which I assume will take me less time. I really need to resume my paragraph/dialogue writing because that was making the difference for Norwegian and Georgian. That should be my priority now and I hope I can at least accomplish this month's challenges in Norwegian, Chinese and Russian.


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