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TAC My poor overwhelmed brain

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mick33
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5921 days ago

1335 posts - 1632 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Finnish
Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish

 
 Message 41 of 223
12 February 2009 at 4:07am | IP Logged 
AFR: Ek moet sê dat om te leer drie tale gelyktydig en ook probeer om goed te doen met my kollege klase is meer moeilik as ek het oorspronklik gedink. Om te eersaam wees, ek het hierdie week slegs 'n bietjie Afrikaans gestudeer. Daar is twee redes vir dit; eerste, ek wil basies Fins leer, en tweede ek kon nie laat Spaans gesukkel nie. Ek het Dinsdag 'n kort koerant artikel gelees oor nuwe paspoort reëls vir Suid Afrikaners wat wil om VK te reis, en Woensdag môre, ek het soms "scriptorium" werk gedoen. Ek behoefte nie my studeer plan te verander nie, net om dit te onthou.

ENG: Learning three languages at once is a little more difficult than I thought. This week, I've studied only a little Afrikaans. I want to learn a few basics of Finnish and I couldn't ignore Spanish. On Tuesday I read an article about new passport rules for South Africans traveling to the UK, and Wednesday morning I did do some scritporium work. I think I just need to remember my study plan.

NOTE: I would post a link to the article I mentioned above but I can't find it right now, maybe I'll find it later on.

Mick

Edited by mick33 on 12 February 2009 at 4:10am

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DaraghM
Diglot
Senior Member
Ireland
Joined 6148 days ago

1947 posts - 2923 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian

 
 Message 42 of 223
12 February 2009 at 6:14am | IP Logged 
mick33 wrote:
ENG: Learning three languages at once is a little more difficult than I thought.


I'm experiencing the exact same problem. It seems I can balance two quite easily, but the third always suffers.
1 person has voted this message useful



mick33
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5921 days ago

1335 posts - 1632 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Finnish
Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish

 
 Message 43 of 223
12 February 2009 at 4:52pm | IP Logged 
mick33 wrote:

NOTE: I would post a link to the article I mentioned above but I can't find it right now, maybe I'll find it later on.

Mick
I've found the link to the article about new visa rules for south Africans traveling to the UK here though I should mention that the article is in Afrikaans. I've also found some good information on the pronunciation of the double vowels, double consonants, and diphthongs in Finnish on one website:

http://donnerwetter.kielikeskus.helsinki.fi/FinnishForForeig ners/ch1-en/ch1-gr-diftongit.htm

My initial impression, which could be completely wrong, is that Finnish diphthongs are fairly simple, but the doubled vowels and consonants will still require more work and remembering that "aa" and "ee" are found in Afrikaans, Dutch and Finnish but are not the same sound.

Mick

EDIT: I had originally listed links for two websites in this post, but one no longer exists.

Edited by mick33 on 09 November 2009 at 8:45pm

1 person has voted this message useful



mick33
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5921 days ago

1335 posts - 1632 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Finnish
Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish

 
 Message 44 of 223
12 February 2009 at 5:00pm | IP Logged 
DaraghM wrote:
mick33 wrote:
ENG: Learning three languages at once is a little more difficult than I thought.


I'm experiencing the exact same problem. It seems I can balance two quite easily, but the third always suffers.
I understand completely. I occasionally think, usually when I'm very tired, that learning three languages would be so much easier if I stopped studying psychology, but I love psychology too much to ever let that happen. Therefore, the eternal balancing act will continue, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Mick

Edited by mick33 on 12 February 2009 at 5:04pm

1 person has voted this message useful



mick33
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5921 days ago

1335 posts - 1632 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Finnish
Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish

 
 Message 45 of 223
13 February 2009 at 2:46am | IP Logged 
Thursday was a little hectic for me; I responded to a poll in the general discussion room of this forum, I had to cut my usual 30 minutes of morning scriptorium work in Afrikaans to 15 minutes to do some last minute studying for the anatomy & physiology test I was taking at 10 am; then later in the evening I reviewed what I'd already learned about Spanish possessive adjectives. So I'm about ready for the 3-day weekend; Monday is President's Day, so no school YAY!!. I also think it's about time I added Iversen's word list method to my study routine, for Afrikaans anyway, just to reinforce the vocabulary I'm learning and hopefully I'll also get a vague idea of the amount of Afrikaans words I know. Before I forget, I found another good website that explains Finnish pronunciation http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/finnish.pronunciation.html so with the three websites and Teach Yourself Finnish hopefully I can get a better grasp of how Finnish should sound.

Mick



Edited by mick33 on 13 February 2009 at 2:55am

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DaraghM
Diglot
Senior Member
Ireland
Joined 6148 days ago

1947 posts - 2923 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian

 
 Message 46 of 223
13 February 2009 at 5:47am | IP Logged 
mick33 wrote:
   but I love psychology too much to ever let that happen.


I think psychology is a perfect complement to your language studies. Are you thinking of specialising in any areas around language learning and SLA ? Or do you have another field in mind ?
1 person has voted this message useful



mick33
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5921 days ago

1335 posts - 1632 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Finnish
Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish

 
 Message 47 of 223
13 February 2009 at 11:10am | IP Logged 
DaraghM wrote:
mick33 wrote:
   but I love psychology too much to ever let that happen.


I think psychology is a perfect complement to your language studies. Are you thinking of specialising in any areas around language learning and SLA ? Or do you have another field in mind ?
My plan is to specialize in clinical psychology, but that could change.

Mick
1 person has voted this message useful



mick33
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5921 days ago

1335 posts - 1632 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Finnish
Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish

 
 Message 48 of 223
16 February 2009 at 5:48pm | IP Logged 
Friday I wrote that I was reviewing Spanish possessive adjectives. I'm still doing that today as the possessive adjectives are the first slightly confusing aspect I've found in Spanish. The possessive adjectives are confusing for one reason; "su". and its' plural form "sus", can correspond to six English words!!! These are: "his", "her", "its","your" (singular formal), "their" and "your" (plural formal). Thankfully, there is a way around this small problem, rather than writing "Son sus parientes" when I intend to write They are his relatives, I can write "Son los parientes de él".

I have decided to do my scriptorium work in Afrikaans using the Old Testament for a little while, because I wanted a little break from the New Testament. I started the first chapter of Isaiah Friday and I'm relying on dictionaries more than ever; there's so many unfamiliar words that I haven't got past the seventh verse yet. That's not a problem, I'm always excited about learning new words and Isaiah is a challenge in English anyway.

As for Finnish, I'm learning some more words to add to the list I posted last week and I'm wondering if I should start learning the different cases as well, since I can already see that Finnish nouns require case endings to be useful. I'm enjoying Finnish, but I'm still struggling to make coherent sentences aside from "Hei, minä olen Mick", and I can't quite figure out word order in sentences in any tense. I've already discovered that there are only four tenses, which is good to know, still this is making my initial "grammar overview" for Finnish take longer than I'd like. Maybe I'll need to modify my approach to grammar for agglutinative languages, since Hungarian and Estonian are also on my hit list.
mick33 wrote:

In describing my methods I should have added that one of the first things I like to do is look briefly at the basics of grammar in my target language. By basics of grammar I mean the following things;(assuming these features exist in the language) Pronouns, diminuitive forms, the simplest form of past, present, and future tenses, a little bit on the most commonly used cases, prefixes or suffixes, and how words are made plural, and then maybe attempt to construct my own simple; but hopefully grammatically correct sentence in each tense. I do this brief "overview" to get a vague idea of how the language might work at around the same time I began learning pronunciation by listening to music, though I add that the "grammar overview" is something I only spend a 1/2 hour on at first; then, after getting what I hope is a better grasp on pronunciation and some vocabulary, I begin deconstructing a few sentences by translating them to English using the target language's word order.


In studying Spanish, given the structure of the course I'm taking in school, I have not learned anything about the various past, future or subjunctive tenses yet. What I am getting is a good grounding in the present tense, I remember from high school that Spanish and, unless I'm mistaken, all the Romance languages have quite a few verb conjugations and perhaps it's better for me to learn the present tense first, even if it means I can't start on scriptorium work in Spanish yet. I hope to post a message in Spanish here by mid-March, but I make no promises.

Mick

EDIT: I'll be starting Iversen's wordlist method tonight, as I've finally read enough about it to actually begin doing it and I will report on my progress with the wordlists later on in the week.

Edited by mick33 on 20 February 2009 at 10:59am



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