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What Expug is doing in 2015 (TAC n more) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| 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 217 of 364 26 June 2015 at 11:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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My June Challenge for Team Sleipnir is finally on. I worked on it this morning. Things I observed on the process itself, prior to any judgement from natives:
- I put myself on a rush to record, as if I was paying for file length. I hesitate and pause a lot when thinking about what to say, but when I know what to say I say it all in a rush. I should try to articulate more clearly the way I should probably try to do in my native language when speaking to an audience. After all, I have even worked at the radio. If I try to articulate more clearly I will then have more time for reflecting upon vowel length and even remember the tone of the words and collocations I'm used to hearing. My exposure to the spoken language so far would allow me that. - My Norwegian needs activation, and that's that. It needs activation through activation, not more input in o0rder to produce more output. If I found a speech about myself in Norwegian which would encompass the same precision and expressiveness that I would have made myself in my native language, I would probably understand everything about that. So why can't I make such speech in Norwegian myself? Because I need to activate the words I can already recognize, most of the times almost instanly. At this point I'm aware I'm already doing some output. I should practice the most common islands. I shouldn't worry about writing something novelty all the time, but rather do some sort of graded writing, i.e. writing a little more of an island each time, incorporating the corrections and trying to add more nuances as I become more comfortable with the topic. I started to wonder why Estonian needs an impersonal imperative, but then I remembered of all the impersonal wishes we make with the subjunctive in Portuguese. So it's nice to have so many options in tenses for rendering uncertainty in Estonian. Things went better with Georgian L-R today, despite the sentences and paragraphs still being long. There were times I got lost, though, as of not knowing where I was in the text. Maybe in a few months when I'm done with those stories I will find an audiobook that has a translation. It doesn't make sense to download one of the classics with no translation, because if I can understand the classics when reading them I won't need L-R anymore. And this is rather one of the final steps in understanding, not a middle one. Breakthrough of the day: I can understand what's going on at Karl & Co (without subtitles) when I pay attention. Georgian reading went smoothly. There are still some words I'm not paying much attention to, but as I learn new words the more awkward-looking ones are becoming the only ones remaining so I dare learning them. With Papiamento, I looked up two words: ferwagt and bòltu. I think it is important to share these words with people who are learning languages. I personally am not immune to this:
I think now I enjoy the process as I work on my languages each day, but I'm still a bit too obsessed with goals. The more I 'learn to learn' and to enjoy what I'm doing, the less the goal seems irrelevant. I am far from reaching the level of 'goalless' learners out there, but I'm much less obsessed than I used to. If I still were stuck at the stage I was 3 1/2 years ago when I only dabbled in being a polyglot, I'd be totally stressed about reaching some goal. Now that I reached most of my goals I feel more relieved. I try to control the 'clock-time' on a tight leash, but at the same time I'm certain enough about where I'm heading and the possibility of achieving what I want that I quickly forget this timely stress and get back on the 'now'. Maybe that's why I write so much here. I feel like each day is unique, not just a step into 'C1 in French', 'B2 in Norwegian', 'B1 in Georgian' but a learned experience in itself. Fridays are shorter days and today specifically was busier, so, no time for Kuxnya. I'm about to say goodbye to Turkmen and I'm somehow relieved. Will start gathering my resources for Uzbek during the weekend (usually only the audio is missing). Edited by Expugnator on 26 June 2015 at 11:35pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5250 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 218 of 364 27 June 2015 at 1:16am | IP Logged | |||||
If I could vote for this post a thousand times, I would.
For those who don't speak German or Portugues, I'll render the English translation of the Portuguese, because I think it is important: "If we insist too much on this goal, perhaps because we may be seeking happiness, satisfaction or a more complete sense of the interior self- we stop respecting The Now. And it (The Now) is reduced to a mere step toward the future, without any intrinsic value." I have been noticing that you have been enjoying "the now" more and more lately. I came to this a while ago when I read Leo Babauta's (of zenhabits) take on Achieving without goals and The best goal is no goal (not talking about global goals). Not that I am suggesting this to you, expug, but it may be of interest to others. You're doing great on your own! To me, living 'mostly without goals' means I don't let the goals limit me. I just learn, and, I very much enjoy "the now". Expug, you have "hit your stride" "cê tá atingindo um ponto decisivo e avançando rapidamente". É mara! Continue assim! Edited by iguanamon on 27 June 2015 at 1:22am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| 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 219 of 364 27 June 2015 at 6:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hehe I knew you would find this interesting, iguanamon, this is what you say and believe after all. I'm far from being 'zen', not in real life either, as I have to fight for the right of not being goal-obsessed or goods/estate-obsessed or money-obsessed, but this is always a nice horizon to look at and try to improve at one's own rhythm. As I expected, I may reach B2 in several languages at once in some months, so it is merely a matter of order of doing things. I preferred to start all at once and work little by little at each of them, instead of taking, say, 1 full, intense year at each. It's more often a matter of personal choice than of right or wrong. Most important, as you say, is that now it has turned into mostly fun instead of the stress of the beginning and of the plateaus I bumped into on the way.
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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 220 of 364 29 June 2015 at 11:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Not much done at the weekend, as I travelled on Saturday evening. I only watched one episode of Pastewa on Saturday, read 5 pages of Russian on Sunday and listened to meditation in French on Sunday night. I shouldn't worry that much about the German part of the challenge anyway, because even if I stopped watching additional video everyday I would reach the half-challenge on time. I'm also comfortable about Norwegian. Georgian is a bit behind but I do watch Kuxnya now and then.
Speaking of Norwegian, I finished L-Ring Jo Nesbø's Hodejegerne. It was a nice, useful exercise. For my next book, I decided to do what I had in mind before, which is using Norwegian audio and Portuguese text. I think it will be useful because it will force me to pay even more attention to the audio, perceive how differently Norwegian and Portuguese build the same situations, in terms of word/clause order. I believe this is the type of listening exercise my Norwegian needs now. I will be counting this as audio, so, one less reason to worry about the audio part. It's no big deal if I won't log in some pages for Norwegian through the next few weeks, because I've already reached the reading part of my Norwegian half-challenge. Finished Insurgent. Thriled about the final part, Allegiant (yes, I'm aware of the spin-offs and the trilogy by Four, but I'm still at the main trilogy). Maybe I can read faster this time because 4 pages a day is an enthousiasm-killer. That is one of the reasons I keep saying I need my Russian to get better asap. I forgot to prepare all the audio for starting Uzbek on Wednesday. I already have it for the most important textbook, but then I'm not sure I'd like to 'spoil' it by now because I may get serious about Uzbek in the future. So, maybe I will do the same with Turkish: pick a more common textbook with shorter lessons. For the audio I can do some GLOSS lessons. I checked and I have almost all the textbooks mentioned, but almost none of them has audio. I have a lot to catch up at the forum, so no Kuxnya or outpiut today either. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| 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 221 of 364 01 July 2015 at 1:52am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm about to finish the Estonian grammar. Will keep it as a reference. I think I need more practice now, but I'm also tempted to go into native material. I will check my Russian grammar-translation textbooks to see if there is any of them which won't bring me much trouble. If I find one, I will go for it. If not, I will do the texts with audio from Naljaga Poleks, for which I don't have translations and so Google Translator will have to do the job. I think I need to take some web resources for Estonian, short ones. For example, the TED Talks. I think I'm gonna benefit from working with these short videos on calm moments at home.
I've finished 'The Shoemaker of Tbilisi' and that leaves me with 3 out of 6 Georgian stories at citybooks. I don't expect to be able to read comfortably after the last three stories, i.e. I'd need more L-Ring after that, but with less common languages we have to be prepared for this, for running out of resources while things are about to start to 'click'. It's all going well with L-Ring Norwegian with Norwegian audio and Portuguese text. I'm paying a lot of attention to the Norwegian audio and I'm understanding almost everything. What I'm enjoying particularly is the time i'm gaining, because at about 13 minutes I cover 10 pages. It took much longer when I was L-Ring. Just did my final Turkmen lesson, from GLOSS. Tomorrow is already time for Uzbek. I will probably start with the old Colloquial Uzbek course (not from the Routledge series). I've watched the new episodes from Learn Norwegian Naturally. They are supposed to have subtitles, but since they can't be activated on Youtube, I had to watch them without subtitles. It was a nice exercise because I realized I could understand almost everything as it was spoken clearly. The first time I tried those videos I couldn't do without the subtitles. There was time for Kuxnya today, I enjoyed it a lot. No output, though. I was quite busy all day long and I didn't even have an idea which language to write in. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| 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 222 of 364 02 July 2015 at 12:08am | IP Logged | |||||
Accomplished Language textbook: Short Stories by Soviet Writers
I have mixed feelings about this book. Most texts were way over my head even with the English text, that is, I'd hve to look up nearly all words and thus the learning wasn't enjoyable or efficient. Some texts had so much vocabulary related to ships or forests which I won't need or don't want now. Towards the end, there were some more interesting stories with more dialogues, which I started to enjoy. My level also improved a bit. Anyway, I wanted this book to increase my SC score and it did this well. Now I'm going for 'I read Russian', at the same spirit. Only that the stories are short, funnier but have no parallel texts, only a glossary with the most difficult words being listed at the same line of the text they are located (and this I find quite practical and innovative). Let's see if this will represent some improvement on my level. I started reading my 4th story about Tbilisi (out of 6), შეწებებული კიდეები/Where Edges Meet. This one is much easier. Shorter sentences, more down-to-earth vocabulary, a whole story that is more interesting. The author writes about the allergy the city he was born in causes to him. It's not even a single text, but a sucession of short chronicles. As I wrote the word 'sucession', something came up to mind. I think 'sequence' or 'series' or even 'chain' is used more often. But then I thought about the Portuguese word 'sucessão' which isn't the most used word either - it would be 'sequência', just like English. So, when I wrote 'sucession' I didn't just make a 'calque' by using a not-so-common Latin word in English. On the contrary, I would have used the same word in my native language because that is what I had in mind, the concept of 'sucession' and not of 'sequence'. And now that I think about it, I understand that I chose one over another because 'sequência' reminds me of more order, similarity, while 'sucessão' just means the stories are placed, juxtaposed one after another. That makes me wonder: how often does the writer pick a less obvious word that conveys some nuance and the translator switches to the most common and obvious word, thus removing most of the nuance the author intended? Tip: I see this happen all the time in the book I'm reading in a Georgian translation in parallel with a Portuguese translation. It happens either way, more commonly so in Georgian, though (the original being in English). The reading speed at the Norwegian audiobook starts to feel too slow, and this is great! That means my comprehension has been rising steadily. The exercise is still quite useful, but in the end I might increase the audio speed and let go of the Portuguese text. As things are now, I can understand almost everything regardless of the text. |I read four pages from 'Allegiant' in Russian, this time less painfully. I'm willing to read more, but I don't want to face burnout given that I'm doing so much after that which used to be my final task of the day. I'm still hoping that my Russian improves enough by the end of the year so that I can read extensively and follow a story. Started UZbek through Colloquial Uzbek. It uses a transcript from Cyrllic, so it has nothing to do with the new Latin alphabet, which I hope to meet next resource. My first impression is that it looks much less 'ugly' than Turkmen with all its diacritics, and more regular and more like Turkish as well (maybe even more regular than Turkish). One of the busiest days. No Kuxnya, no output again. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| 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 223 of 364 03 July 2015 at 1:52am | IP Logged | |||||
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So, I finished the grammar pdf. Now I'm 99% sure that what I need is a grammar-translation textbook, preferably one I haven't studied yet. So I'm going for УЧЕБНИК ЭСТОНСКОГО ЯЗЫКА by A. VALMET, E. UUSPÕLD, E. TURU, a) because it has OCR and so I can just copy-paste the Russian parts I don't understand and throw them at GT; b) it has short lessons. It also has translated exercises but I won't be able to use them, because there is no answer key. Unless I just post it at lang-8 or i-talki, but I tried to do this with Georgian once and it didn't help at all.
I also started 'I read Russian', so far, so good. It is practically an extensive reading, as there is no translation and I miss a lot of words that aren't in the glossary. The German audiobook started to sound low already. I have the impression my comprehension took a leap both at the individual word coverage and, the most important, at the sentence level (more important given the uniqueness of the German syntax). Today ones probably one of the days I worked the most above all. I barely made it till Bednaya Nastya, and nothing else. At least I enjoyed everything I did. I have the feeling Russian will start to 'click' when I start doing L-R. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| 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 224 of 364 03 July 2015 at 11:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Trying to recover from yesterday. So much pending, to read, to answer, to catch up with. Hope today is a calmer day. Yesterday while at home I still managed to read from 'Allegiant' in Russian and two pages from Chinese, extensively. I'm really happy and optimistic about how much I could understand from reading extensively in Chinese. I didn't even pick up the newest tablet with iOs 8, instead I kept reading from the old tablet which is the one I bring to work.
I started reading from Учебник Эстонского Языка. It has quite good grammar explanations. If you are quite comfortable with Russian, I even recommend you to make it one of your first Estonian textbooks (right after Tuldava's and before 'Basic Course in Estonian', for instance. I didn't stay longer at each explanation because I'm more or less familiar with them - after all, I just finished reading a pdf grammar. What motivated me the most was the good understanding I had of the Russian explanations, so I expect this to cause me less trouble than in the previous Russian textbooks I've used. I decided not to read the whole introduction at once, but I still managed to add 15 Russian pages for the Super Challenge. I had forgot that 'I read Russian' is ocr'ed. In fact, I wasn't using it because the text has stress marks which usually get messed up, but this time Google Translate is dealing better with that. So it's all a matter of throwing the whole text at Google Translate for the missing words (it's important to combine both the GT translation and the vocabulary because GT not rarely confuses some words, especially in more narrative/literary contexts). With this reading from Estonian, the one from 'I read Russian', the Russian soap-opera and the translated novel I'm starting to get into the flow for Russian. Hope it produces results and help me towards my goal of understanding written Russian. This is a week of new beginnings. I've started watching Le grand soir, which seems interesting. The main guy goes to some suburb (in the American sense, I think). Might be the first time I see some French-speaking suburbs. Just for the record:
In Georgian, I started reading the second volume of the trilogy yesterday. Today came along quite easily, 2-5 unknown words per paragraph. Still not enough for reading intensively or for reading more than 4 pages a day, far from my goal, but encouraging. I read quite quickly, btw. Enough to catch up with my usual time for the other activities. I was trying to add Estonian to italki so I can start posting there my answers to the exercises from the textbook in Russian, but I can't seem to be able to add new languages. Will I have to remove one language in order to add another one, just like with lang-8? The world doesn't seem to be ready for simultaneous learning. The day didn't turn out as productive as I had expected. At least I could read the missing posts from the forum. Time for a short Colloquial Uzbek lesson, at least (next one is an actual, long lesson). From what I could notice, Uzbek forms negatives similarly to Turkish. It seems to lack the 'schwa' vowel or any other central typical of the other Turkic languages I've met so far. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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