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Evita’s TAC 2008 - Finnish | ||
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| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6551 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes  Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 41 of 51 05 October 2008 at 3:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's Sunday night and I'm really excited about my Finnish studies again. For a while there all that grammar stuff was weighing too heavy on me and I lost the enjoyment, I was only thinking about how hard it all was. I spent about 2 hours yesterday and 7-8 hours today on Finnish (yes, almost the whole day!) and here's what I did:
I created the word list in my notebook to help me with case studying. For now there are about 35 words that end in a vowel or n, l, r, t and I must still add the -s words, I'd say about 10-15. I'm going to review the list regularly and I hope it will turn out to be useful. I found the "Talk Now! Learn Finnish" CDs on the internet and downloaded the first one. I wasn't too impressed but it had audio so that was good and I could use it to practice recognizing numbers. I also had the "Teach Yourself Finnish" audio on my computer but it wasn't much good without a book. I thought about buying it but finally found it here. That's a great resource I've added to my Finnish collection. The emphasis there is on communication and it's a bit different approach than in my book. They're going to complement each other nicely. I already worked through the Intro and Unit 1 listening to each audio at least twice and now I'm in the middle of Unit 2. I was able to go that fast because most of the vocabulary and grammar was already known to me. However, there were also some things I hadn't learned before, for instance, I didn't know how to say "How are you?" in Finnish. Now I know (it's Mitä kuuluu). And it really helps that I can listen to the dialogs, I'm very happy about this course. I didn't touch my book at all today but I should finally finish lesson 7 tomorrow. As a result of all the new input I got, I made a lot of new Anki cards. The total now is 389 with about 20 cards unseen. Making 500 cards was my first goal and I can't wait to reach it. I could cheat and put in numbers from 1 to 100, then I'd be a lot closer :) But no, I won't do that. I also visited this site for the first time today, it is Finnish news for foreigners in simple Finnish language and spoken very slowly. I listened to the 2nd October podcast and I could follow it very well, I mean read the text along with the speaker. But I didn't understand almost anything, only some random words like 'ministeri' and such. I think I'll come back to this site now and then and at some point I'll start translating the articles. Perhaps in a month or so. One unforeseen difficulty for me regarding the Finnish pronunciation is a double vowel followed by a double consonant, for example, minuutti or liikkeen. Such combinations don't exist in Latvian. I have no problem pronouncing uu or tt but together they are a problem. I'll have to listen carefully to my audios to find out what's the best way to say it. And finally - a random thing I noticed a couple of days ago. You know, Finnish has a lot of words where there are two letters 'i' next to each other. When I write them in my notebook, they look like 'ü'. I don't know how long it will take me to get used to that, not to mention that it feels extremely weird to be writing two i's next to each other, I've never done that before in my life. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6551 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 42 of 51 07 October 2008 at 4:26am | IP Logged | ||
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Tuesday.
I spent little time on Finnish yesterday because I was tired and didn't want to study. I reviewed my Anki cards dutifully and then spent about 20 minutes rereading the grammar in lesson 7 of my book and trying to do some exercises. But my brain simply didn't want to work. Hope for better luck today. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 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 43 of 51 08 October 2008 at 4:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Congratulations on your progress!!!
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| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6551 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 44 of 51 09 October 2008 at 6:46am | IP Logged | ||
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It's already Thursday and I've made little progress this week - mostly because other obligations (some of them unexpected) keep me from studying Finnish. The only thing I've been doing consistently is reviewing Anki cards and adding new cards. A couple of days ago I read an article about how you're not supposed to become a slave to your SRS application and I'm happy to report that I've been managing my Anki reviews very well for the past week or so. I review some cards in the morning before going to work and do at least two review sessions in the evening. Usually there are not more than 20 cards so it takes less than 5 minutes. I like working this way, it keeps me from getting bored and feeling the pressure.
What else did I do? I read through LJ lessons 8, 9, and 10a. There's a lot of new vocabulary, I haven't put it in Anki yet. I also finished unit 2 of TYF (Teach Yourself Finnish). No new material but it's nice to review and listen to the dialogs. About my book - I did a couple of exercises from lesson 7 but it's still not finished. I just want to get it over with (hopefully tonight). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6551 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 45 of 51 11 October 2008 at 3:17am | IP Logged | ||
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It's Saturday morning and lesson 7 from my textbook is finished. I read the last dialogs on Thursday and did the final exercise yesterday. However, my biggest difficulty the last few days has been working with Anki. Not that I've avoided opening it. No, it's actually the opposite, I've been putting in too many new words, about 10 a day. This doesn't seem like a high number but the problem is that I didn't study those words, I just put them in and expected myself to remember them. Well, I couldn't memorize many of them and I had to press 'Completely forgot' more often than not. Anki says that I reviewed 68.7 cards a day on average for the past week; this number shows how many times a single card was repeated. In order to try to get out of this situation, yesterday I wrote 10 words on a piece of paper and took it with me to work to look at them all day long. I think it helped.
Anyway, the card count is 428 now and they've all been successfully reviewed for the moment. I started Unit 3 of TYF yesterday (it's about numbers and telling time) and I expect to finish it today. I listened to the dialogs without reading them first because I wanted to practice my listening comprehension, especially the numbers. It was a good idea, I should do that more often. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6551 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 46 of 51 13 October 2008 at 10:08am | IP Logged | ||
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It's Monday. I finished unit 3 of TYF although there were some problems - some of the audio didn't correspond to the written text. The text is from 1995 and it uses the old Finnish currency but the audio is newer and uses euros. Consequently, all the numbers are different. Oh well.
I'm struggling with my motivation a bit at the moment but next week should be great because I'm going on a business trip to Finland and I'll have access to newspapers and TV and (gasp!) live Finnish people. I don't think I'll talk much, if anything at all, because my level is still much too low for that but maybe I'll find someone to practice with. By the way, I finally finished the Genitive list. I'm thinking maybe to create a separate Anki deck for learning Partitive but I'll give myself a little bit more time to learn it with my current methods. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Leopejo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6108 days ago 675 posts - 724 votes Speaks: Italian*, Finnish*, English Studies: French, Russian | Message 47 of 51 13 October 2008 at 12:24pm | IP Logged | ||
Perhaps you won't understand much of spoken Finnish, as everybody speaks with "slang". Probably you already know that instead of minä olen, sinä olet you'll hear mä oon, sä oot (or local variations), and so on. This is not to discourage you, on the contrary. Once your "official Finnish" is good, it won't take much to get used to the "slang" one if you have to. Instead newspapers and news on TV use the written Finnish you are studying. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6551 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 48 of 51 19 October 2008 at 3:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's Sunday night and I've done very little studying of Finnish this week. Tuesday was the first day I didn't review Anki cards at all. I tried to catch up later in the week but it's been difficult because my work required more attention than usually. I have 80 cards to review at the moment. I added only 10-15 new cards during the week.
I opened my textbook several times, reread the grammar part, tried to memorize the sentences and read the first text of lesson 8 about what people in Finland usually eat during the day. There were many new words in that text (mostly food names) and I think I've only got halfway through it. I'll be taking all my Finnish study materials with me to Finland tomorrow and I'll try to review cards on my other computer if I can figure out how to use the Anki synch feature. Leopejo, I definitely won't understand much of the spoken Finnish :) But that's not my goal at the moment so it's ok. I hope I'll do better in half a year's time. If being in Finland doesn't get my motivation up high again, I don't know what will. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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