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Serbian: B1 in 7 months | ||
Tags: Heritage Language | Serbian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| basica Senior Member Australia Joined 3529 days ago 157 posts - 269 votes  Studies: Serbian | Message 17 of 40 21 June 2015 at 10:49am | IP Logged | ||
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@radioclare, cheers :) will shoot you a PM at some point soon :)
@jinx, hope you enjoy your stay at my blog :) I've taken a few stabs at Serbian, and this is my first serious one in the sense that I've made significant progress compared to previous efforts - I got my eye on that B1 and I so can't wait to get there :) So you can imagine today was quite encouraging to hear the geed back I got. It was encouraging to hear after a casual lesson I had today that my speech has been improving which is sorta funny as I've started caring less and less about speaking grammatically correct because I value the transference of ideas with as least lag as possible - i.e. I've found that for me at least it's better to use wrong cases when I can't think of them than to stop and think of the right case or choose an entirely different construction which I know how to decline. So despite making less conscious effort to be right, I am nevertheless improving. Great news. That aside I have been finding it hard to keep my motivation with Glossika the last 2 weeks. Don't know why, guess I am just losing a bit of steam. I seem to have ups and downs with this sort of thing. My writing on Lang-8 is a perfect example of this - looks at this picture: 
I have been finding it ok to listen to Glas Amerike, it's currently being trialled as my replacement goal. I'm looking to switch my goal to watching around half an episode a day. I barely understand anything but for some reason it doesn't bother me as much as when when I watch a film or attempt to read a book. Speaking of books, I have acquired some and I am thinking of employing some "intensive reading" - this is another trial run to see how likely it will be I will keep this up but we'll see how we go. I will probably start taking a crack at it tomorrow. Will provide more details then probably. Edited by basica on 21 June 2015 at 10:50am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| basica Senior Member Australia Joined 3529 days ago 157 posts - 269 votes Studies: Serbian | Message 18 of 40 24 June 2015 at 12:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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OK, some good news - I've been given preliminary approval for time off at the end of the year to go over to
BCS! I still need to get the final seal of approval which by the sounds of it is merely procedural at this point. Assuming that it does get approved then I will be in the awesome position of heading over there sometime in November and having the ability to stay there for a couple months - I think besides getting a lot of quality time with my family, I'll also be getting an amazing opportunity to practice and improve my Serbian (communicating with them being a major reason for me learning it in the first place!). This is especially since my family there have little to no grasp of English so I'm very much in a sink or swim situation :P That being said, I have to sorta put my study efforts into overdrive :) I have about 130 days at the least until I head over which means I will hopefully have finished glossika's fluency 2 in that time. I am (unrealistically) striving to have 2000 words in my anki deck by then but I'd be happy with 1500. I'm a early midrange A2 and I hope to be B1 by then, but I know this is really pushing it and I really will just do the best I can to do a bit each day and get as close to it as possible by the due date. After all, the better my ability there the more I will get out of my experience there with my family. Anyways, aside from all this I decided to practice my cyrillic today - boy was it challenging! :) Here's a link to a photo of what I wrote, you can see the few times I accidentally reverted to latin script which were scribbled out :P Here it is :) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4576 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 19 of 40 24 June 2015 at 9:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yay, that's great news :) Sounds like a fantastic chance to get to know your family better and I'm sure you will come
back speaking amazing Serbian. I am very jealous, I think I need to find a Serbian family to adopt me ;) I have also found Cyrillic handwriting very challenging but if you do it regularly it does get easier. I got some handwriting paper and was practising for a few minutes every day for a while, which really helped me. Someone (I can't remember whether it was Serpent or nikolić - oops!) linked me to a really nice picture of the Serbian alphabet (here) so I currently have that bookmarked in my browser and if I want to write something in Cyrillic I pull it up on screen to refer to if I get stuck :) It's the handwriting style of letter rather than the block ones but might be useful for you as well. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| basica Senior Member Australia Joined 3529 days ago 157 posts - 269 votes Studies: Serbian | Message 20 of 40 28 June 2015 at 2:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the link, I've bookmarked it as well as at some point I suppose I should practice it more :P I'm a bit
lazy with it as I can read it and write it at the moment, just very slowly so it's very much at a "good enough" stage for me, especially since latin is used as well, it sorta removes the incentive to improve. I'll do it eventually though :) Anyways, I had a lesson yesterday with my tutor and an exchange today with my regular partner. Starting next week I might even be having a third partner, very exciting. I need all the speaking practice I can get! I had a very exciting moment actually both yesterday and today - those moments were when I realised I was able to communicate about topics which weren't just "My name is basica, I live in Australia and I work at X and my favourite hobbies are A, B and C". Of course it wasn't fluent and on a couple of occasions I had to repeat what I wanted to say, but overall it was great. For example, yesterday we talked about the differences between Serbia and Australia and today we talked a lot about how same sex marriage is now legal in the US and how it isn't currently in Australia and where we thought the trend was going. Now again, obviously I was nowhere near as eloquent as I am in English but at the same time I could say what I thought and why in a basic way and I loved it. It was really encouraging for me to see that both yesterday and today. What are things I need to work on? I am far weaker and listening to what people say and interpreting it. I think I will start focusing on having people tell me things, and then seeing if I can paraphrase them in order to improve my comprehension - of course vocabulary is the still the biggest obstacle in this arena but I think there is still room for improvement in this area without taking into account vocabulary. Anki is doing well, I'm getting close to 750 words now, which is about the halfway mark of my conservative goal. Very exciting! Lastly, I just came across this software http://lwt.sourceforge.net. It looks very promising. Still giving it a go at the moment, but will report more on it soon! At the moment I am trialing it with news articles from glas amerike (they have this print preview which is awesome as it just gives plain text). Let's see how this goes! Very encouraged at the moment! Quite pumped for the things in store! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| basica Senior Member Australia Joined 3529 days ago 157 posts - 269 votes Studies: Serbian | Message 21 of 40 01 July 2015 at 3:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Here is what the month of June looked like in its entirety. As you can see the ups and downs continued but in
the last couple days the downs were not going so far down at least. 
As I kinda discussed in radioclare's thread, I sorta have a routine going on at the moment - which is really great but I am finding it hard to fit more things into it. I have thankfully managed to make writing everyday the latest in my daily things to do, but I do feel I need to add some more formal study in, or at the vert least some reading. Will try to figure that out tomorrow. Might start doing something like a paragraph a day of a news article and see how I go. Aside from this I now have this interesting experience where one of my exchange partner's has weaker English than I do serbian. As a result we mostly converse in serbian. To be fair though, their comprehension is very high, they just have very poor active skills (they say this of themselves and attribute this to the way English was taught in school). Not being able to rely on English to get the point across with them is definitely one of those sink or swim type moments and definitely helps! Concerning Glossika, awhile ago I was a bit down on it and I think that was mostly related to the fact I was getting lazy with it, and ironically my laziness was making the process longer. By not actively listening, attempting to shadow as it's being played, or prior to it being played, the amount of time I was spending was about 2-3 times the length of the file (which means about 60-90mins to round to the nearest 30min block). When I am not being lazy and attempting to memorise the sentences and shadow, the amount of time spent is 1.5 times the length of the file (approx 45mins). I want at some point to go over the 100-150 or sentences I was really lazy with at some point, but once again face the problem of "fitting" them into my schedule. Aside from this, I have well over 800 cards in Anki and I think I'll probably reach 1000 by next week. I might even hit 3000 cards by the time I go over there at this rate, I'm sounding a bit crazy I know but let's wait and see. For now I'll still be definitely happy with 1500-2000 words. I'm already feeling like I might survive there on my current meagre vocabulary (feeling positive at the moment :P ) so I think doubling it will definitely be a step in the right direction! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| rtickner Diglot Groupie AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3511 days ago 61 posts - 95 votes Speaks: English*, GermanB2 Studies: French, Spanish | Message 22 of 40 02 July 2015 at 5:36am | IP Logged | ||
Great progress. Thanks for your suggestion about daily writing on Lang-8, am now following suit and expecting to see good things as you have.
Come on, 3,000 cards, you know you want to! Think about all those new words just begging to be learnt! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| basica Senior Member Australia Joined 3529 days ago 157 posts - 269 votes Studies: Serbian | Message 23 of 40 02 July 2015 at 9:04am | IP Logged | ||
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I wasn't sure if I should have responded on your blog or mine, I figured it better to
leave my long respond here :) Yes, what I've been told (more than I have noticed personally) is my production has improved, even spoken production ( but I do have on average 2hrs of speaking practice a week which obviously helps too). One of my exchange partners commentated that I was making far few case errors and I was nailing the persons/genders when using verbs in the past tense (they take on gender in the past tense for some reason - highly annoying but I digress). In terms of written production, the amount of effort to say what I want to say has definitely dropped. For the first week writing 100 words would easily take me 30mins, and usually more when I spent time looking up vocabulary I wanted to test out. My average now is about 15mins, including time looking at vocabulary. I also spend very little time on checking my cases and so forth and I produce less errors now than when I initially started. I should probably be better with that, but I gotta admit I'm very lazy :) I do look forward to seeing what impact it has for you, hopefully you notice it polishes your production as well :) Regarding anki: Hehe, I am continually adding cards in, and I am learning 20 a day, so as long as I add more than I learn I think I might just end up reaching that goal. Will be very exciting to see what results are in store for me at that point :) Note: An update from me coming a bit later today or tomorrow - just more anecdotes on progress made :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| basica Senior Member Australia Joined 3529 days ago 157 posts - 269 votes Studies: Serbian | Message 24 of 40 02 July 2015 at 2:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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So, another anecdote of improvement that I wanted to share was regarding a forum post someone had written
to me. At the time (about 3 months ago, about a month after I had started) I had to use google translate to begin to understand it was nearly completely opaque to me. Today when I came across it I understood almost everything. As you can imagine, it was another thing to help me see my progress and it was really encouraging to see! :D Really looking forward to seeing what it'd be like in another 4 months! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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