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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6472 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes  Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 177 of 265 08 March 2010 at 8:34am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't see how they can translate "die Runde" as a small amount of time...
The first meaning of "Runde" is "round" as in the first round of a match. It can also be used for anything roughly circle-like, such as a lap in ice-skating or a group of friends sitting around a table. If Teach Yourself Esperanto doesn't challenge you, then I'd highly recommend getting something that holds your interest better. For example the Kostenloser Esperanto Kurs, which is only 10 lessons but has a lot more to chew on per lesson, and also somewhat more interesting dialogs. Completing the Kostenloser Esperanto Kurs should leave you at B1 level. Alternatively, just study the more challenging parts of Esperanto grammar when you need something to sink your teeth into: the participles, corelatives and affixes. I found the study of affixes particularly fun, and you will need to be able to understand and use them automatically, subconsciously, in order to achieve a good level of Esperanto. Also see my set of affix exercises here. Yet another alternative would be to pull a Tolstoy and just start reading an Esperanto novel. You could use the Ilja Frank method to read Astrid Lindgren in Esperanto, or read Gerda Malaperis, a novel specifically designed to teach Esperanto basic vocabulary and grammar. Or just go straight for the good stuff - I can particularly recommend Fajron sentas mi interne (skip the Antaŭparoloj!), because it doesn't use uncommon word roots, but it does use affixes and other word formation tricks extensively; very good style. If you can understand this, you can understand any everyday or non-everyday Esperanto except for higher literature. Edited by Sprachprofi on 08 March 2010 at 8:35am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6144 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 178 of 265 09 March 2010 at 7:01am | IP Logged | ||
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Well I guess I'm back to posting whenever I feel like it. It seems too lifeless of a log if I just post with the bullet list once a week. So, here is my progress for today...
I typed up fifty more words of the Portuguese Frequency Dictionary into Anki, along with another thematic list (which also went into BYKI). Just now, I finished typing up the vocabulary from lessons nine through eleven into BYKI and Anki from Cortina Method Brazilian Portuguese, which I have been meaning to do for, oh, about two months. Thank goodness I did it though, because all these papers of random vocabulary lists are really cluttering up my desk area and bugging me. Now all I have here are the sheets from the vocabulary index of the French school textbook. During the first few minutes of my World History class and most of my French class (we were discussing "difficult" uses of the subjunctive, which happens to be used exactly like Spanish in this case, so I have no problems tuning out) I completed lesson six in Teach Yourself Esperanto. For such small lessons this book really packs in a lot of vocabulary! I totaled 93 words in BYKI for this lesson (a bit less, though, in Anki because of repeats). I still have to learn all of these words. I received comments on many of my Swedish translation exercises on Lang-8. There weren't too many errors for the most part (except for one of the more recent translations, which I failed miserably), and some were a bit subjective. I had to disagree with some of them, because it would not be true to the English. For example, someone who reviewed me said that gäster (guests) should have been gäst (guest), in the context of "and in this way he saved his guests"... I presume this suggestion and ones like it were made because they hadn't read the related beginning texts which I translate from Swedish to English, where in this case for example, it talks about all of the guests. In the translate-to-Swedish text though, it only mentions one of the guests, so that would be why. Some errors were punctuation, and some were typos (der --> det). Perhaps I should include the English text I'm translating, just to be clear... On a related topic, I found out from friends today that there are apparently a bunch of Swedish exchange students at my school...which leads me to wonder why I have not met a single exchange student at all this year. Their explanation to me was that it's because I take all advanced classes and the exchange students, since English is presumably not their native language, prefer to take the normal level classes. It's sad though, because like four of my friends said that there are Swedish exchange students in their classes... Today I learned how to count from zero to ten in Swahili! Look: sufuri, moja, mbili, tatu, nne, tano, sita, saba, nane, tisa, kumi I didn't cheat either, I promise. :) New kanji for today; up to #970: 他, 伏, 伝, 仏, 休, 仮, 伯, 俗, 信, 佳 47.5% through learning kanji. Only 107 more days until I will have learned all 2,042 in the book. Sprachprofi-- Thanks for all the links. I do enjoy working through the Teach Yourself Esperanto; the book is not what is boring me. Unfortunately, it is the language itself that is boring me. I like the concept of Esperanto and want to be able to speak it, but I seem to get restless with such easy languages and tend to lose interest. I do intend to read Gerda Malaperis after completing TYE, and I might do some of those other things too, but I am not sure. I think I am coming to a point in my language studies where I find it easier in fact to study more challenging languages just because these are the ones which I can really feel progress with (going into my Esperanto studies for example, I could already read an article and understand 60% or more of it; with Japanese it is not so at all) and I am just finding them more fascinating anyways. "Easy" languages like Spanish or Esperanto will never be as interesting to me as more challenging ones like Japanese, Swahili, Russian, or Arabic. English and Spanish were not really my own choices, and neither was Greek, but Portuguese, and French (and Italian) were just practices, I suppose, for the more challenging projects in the future (up next: Russian, but not until I get some room in my schedule!). Well, I hope this made sense. Tomorrow and Wednesday are testing again at school, so it starts an hour late and we only have two classes per day (Spanish and math tomorrow, PE and optional study period on Wednesday). Unfortunately, they don't allow you to write after you finish the exams, so I will probably end up doing school reading instead of language reading. However, in the morning I shall be doing lesson two from Teach Yourself Improve Your French, and perhaps I will find the time to type up the Swahili vocabulary... ANKI STATISTICS: ESPERANTO: 910 FRENCH: 1942 GERMAN: 1070 GREEK: 1486 ITALIAN: 900 JAPANESE: 441 PORTUGUESE: 1353 SPANISH: 1425 SWAHILI: 180 SWEDISH: 1077 TOTAL: 10,784 Reviewed 1013 cards in 1.05 hours today. EDIT: Adding how many reviews in Anki done and Swahili numbers. Edited by ellasevia on 09 March 2010 at 7:15am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6472 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 179 of 265 09 March 2010 at 9:11am | IP Logged | ||
You make sense, but I still recommend looking into the challenging parts of Esperanto. Try reading "Fajron sentas mi interne" and your comprehension will only be 30% or so, then you might feel it worthwhile to look into word formation and all the ways that the author uses the language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6144 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 180 of 265 10 March 2010 at 7:10am | IP Logged | ||
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Anki is saving my language studies and killing them at the same time. It takes so long to just sit down and do all the repetitions every day! And if I don't feel like doing it one day, it piles up so I have to work even longer the next time! It's so annoying, but without it, I would be forgetting so much more vocabulary. But between it and reviewing kanji, I almost have no time in the morning for actually studying and after school I'm just not productive.
And speaking of not being productive (I wrote that little intro this morning, now I'm writing at night), guess what today was? Well, it could have something to do with me being lazy in general and that these lessons from TY Improve Your French are so incredibly long! I think I will have to have two weeks per lesson--that is, one Tuesday to go through the lesson and pick out all the vocabulary, and the next Tuesday to learn it all! I just finished going through the lesson, but I wasted a bunch of time this evening. Some of that was due to homework, but some was just...nothingness. Hm... Whom can we blame here for that? It's all my dad's fault--he gets home from work too late so we eat dinner late and I'm not able to think clearly after school until we've eaten apparently. Ha, there. Oh, but I wanted to mention that Lesson 2 in the TYIYF book is funny because it is about myths and realities about the French people and entails a dialogue which is essentially a huge argument over whether France is better than every other country or not... Very amusing in my opinion. New kanji for today (to #980): 依, 例, 個, 健, 側, 侍, 停, 値, 倣, 倒 And my new Swedish and French books arrived today, and I looked through the former a bit, but since we didn't eat until 7:00 (context: I eat lunch at school at about 12:30, so I go about six and a half hours without a meal, so I just can't concentrate, plus we were doing tests all morning), I didn't have time to do anything. I did load the audio onto the computer and listened a bit. And I found some audio from a Norwegian book that I gave to one of my friends a year and a half ago and was listening to that too. I surprisingly to could understand the Norwegian better than the Swedish. And speaking of friends, it looks as though another friend is going to start a Scandinavian language, either Norwegian or Danish. It's pretty cool because we all sit next to each other in our French class (well, I sit in front of one of them and they sit next to each other) and we will have our "Scandinavian language row". Yes, nonsensical but amusing. (Can you tell I'm tired?) Anyways, I was originally thinking, bleh, she shouldn't learn Danish because Danish is ugly, but then when she listened to it, I think she said she liked it the best out of Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish. So I suppose that between the three of us (remember, one friend learning Norwegian too--interestingly sitting in between us, just like Norwegian being linguistically in between Swedish and Danish) we will have Scandinavia covered. :) I am going to stop writing before I write any more nonsense. God natt! (Oh right, it's Tuesday. I mean, "Bonne nuit!") ANKI STATISTICS: ESPERANTO: 910 FRENCH: 2137 GERMAN: 1070 GREEK: 1486 ITALIAN: 900 JAPANESE: 441 PORTUGUESE: 1353 SPANISH: 1426 SWAHILI: 180 SWEDISH: 1077 TOTAL: 10,979 EDIT: Adding in kanji, Anki, and fixing a silly typo. Edited by ellasevia on 10 March 2010 at 7:14am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6144 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 181 of 265 11 March 2010 at 6:03am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, today was interesting. I had a bunch of confusion about time this morning, thinking it was later than it was, then thinking it was earlier, and back and forth. I accidentally started leaving for school an hour early and started walking up the street before I realized that I didn't have to leave for another hour.
So I completed two entire Ultimate Italian lessons this morning. That's about all I had time for somehow, but I think it may have been partly to do with the fact that I was much too intimidated to start doing Anki or kanji reviews. I think both programs conspired to drop a huge pile of reviews on me today to make me miserable. I had between 50 and 100 reviews in Anki per language, plus between 20 and 30 new cards for each. In regards to kanji, there were something like 75 reviews and I sadly failed most of them. My failed list reached 99 at the highest, but I have now reduced it down to 80. In addition, I learned today's new kanji, which were rather easy, thank goodness. New kanji (to #990): 偵, 僧, 億, 儀, 償, 仙, 催, 仁, 侮, 使 For some reason I have made myself think that I'm not allowed to do any other language study until I finish the Anki and kanji reviews, so I sat around after school reading on here not doing anything, because I was scared of having to go through all of that. It is really tiring. After testing was over and I finished reading out of my history textbook, I instead pulled out my Spoken World Swahili book and began going through lesson two. I had extensively shadowed the dialogues already and had happily understood most of it without ever seeing it written. As I was reading it at my desk, I could hear the peoples' voices in my head from having listened to it so much. In PE, we went on a walk because my teacher was feeling lazy so I did some more shadowing of that. I also looked a bit more at my new Swedish book, but not very much. I have included doing one lesson of that as one my goals for this week. Right now it's nearing the time where I should go to bed, but I shall see if I can't type up at least one of the Swahili vocabulary lists for lesson one (for one of the books). It would be nice also if I could preview my German lesson for tomorrow, but that may or may not happen. While I'm listing things that would be nice, I'll mention how it would be nice if I could get myself out of bed tomorrow morning at 4:00 and work on languages and homework before school (I concentrate really well in the early morning once I've woken up). Well, I shall include my Anki stats and get back to work. I'll update this is if I get anything else done before I go up to bed. ANKI STATISTICS: ESPERANTO: 910 FRENCH: 2137 GERMAN: 1070 GREEK: 1486 ITALIAN: 972 JAPANESE: 441 PORTUGUESE: 1353 SPANISH: 1426 SWAHILI: 180 SWEDISH: 1077 TOTAL: 11,055 1,245 reviews in 1.3 hours Buona notte a tutti! Usiku mwema! --Philip EDIT: I did manage to type up the vocabulary for Spoken World Swahili lesson one and I learned it all in BYKI. 63 words of vocabulary. Actually a bit more, but after going through some of lesson 2, I saw that much of it was repeated in that lesson and it didn't have as much, so I have saved it for that. Going to bed now. Edited by ellasevia on 11 March 2010 at 6:59am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6144 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 182 of 265 11 March 2010 at 6:11am | IP Logged | ||
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Random comment: the English language has a lot of w's. It's bothering me.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6144 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 183 of 265 12 March 2010 at 7:07am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm going to split today up into two sections: before school/at school and after school. One was incredibly productive, the other was just the opposite.
I was able to get up at 4:00 this morning (yay!) and finished all my Anki reviews, all my kanji reviews, learned my new kanji, did one German lesson and entered the vocab into BYKI and Anki and learned it in BYKI, typed up two French vocab lists into Anki, one Spanish list into Anki. All of that before I had to leave for school at 7:00, taking into account time for morning routines and reading for half an hour on this forum. Hooray. New kanji--to number ONE THOUSAND!!!!! (Yay, I'm halfway there!) 便, 倍, 優, 伐, 宿, 傷, 保, 褒, 傑, 付 In my world history class we had a work period due to my teacher accidentally bringing the wrong materials. I had already finished the work due for that class, so I finished lesson two in Spoken World Swahili and translated a text. Later on in PE, I shadowed the first dialogue of Beginner's Swedish in a way similar to one that Professor Arguelles described: - read the text in Swedish while listening to the Swedish, no repeating - read the text in English while listening to the Swedish, no repeating - read the text in Swedish while listening to the Swedish, shadowed it - just listened to the Swedish audio and shadowed It was really effective, because I could understand only a tiny bit going in and I understood almost effortlessly afterward. I shall have to try this more often. After school, everything changed. I think it all has to do with what I do as soon as I get home, in today's case was not productive. I ended up just reading stuff mainly on this website for several hours and didn't even start homework until about 7 or 8 (bad Philip!). Then I kept telling myself that I would do some study, and to my dismay saw that there was a whole new set of a few hundred Anki cards that had expired while I was at school. I wish that it would just make all those show up in the morning (like Reviewing the Kanji does) so that I don't get duped. Well, I spent more time reading and not doing anything. But I think this is also due to getting little sleep last night and not being able to concentrate. Two positive things for language happened after school: 1. I typed up most of the vocabulary for lesson 1 of Teach Yourself Swahili. 2. Learned more about the CEFR levels through THIS website which has speaking examples for A2-C2 and THIS ONE, which has text examples. I thought about maybe taking one of these exams this summer. By doing this, I refined my standards and understood the whole system better, as explained in my post HERE. Well, I can barely keep my eyes open and I think I'll go to bed. I'll see if I can get up at the same time tomorrow, or perhaps a bit later since it's Friday. ANKI STATISTICS: ESPERANTO: 910 FRENCH: 2163 GERMAN: 1105 GREEK: 1486 ITALIAN: 972 JAPANESE: 441 PORTUGUESE: 1353 SPANISH: 1514 SWAHILI: 205 SWEDISH: 1077 TOTAL: 11,226 492 reviews in 27.43 minutes Edited by ellasevia on 12 March 2010 at 2:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6144 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 184 of 265 13 March 2010 at 8:48am | IP Logged | ||
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Technically it's Saturday now because it's 12:35 in the morning as I write this sentence, but I'm writing about what I still think of as today, which was Friday.
So, it was not a very productive start because I did not in fact get up at 4:00 as I hoped, but instead at 6:00...a slight difference. And for some reason when I get up later (or sleep longer) I feel more tired and groggy for most of the day. I also had to wear my glasses today instead of contacts and I find that putting in my contacts helps to wake me up. Okay, enough excuses, now onto what I did. This morning I only had time for a bit of Anki review. At school I reread this story we were reading in my Spanish class called Emma Zunz. When I had first started to read it, I had gotten little sleep and had been doing the tests all morning, so I was not even able to understand the extremely basic stuff. I assumed the material was simply too difficult and did not think that perhaps my brain just wasn't working. So I remembered that I had a Spanish reader that someone gave me a year or two ago and this was the first story in it (I remembered because I had started reading it a long time ago). It was one of those parallel texts and so I just read the English. I understood the words but still had no idea of what was going on until my teacher explained it to us in class. Then, as I said, I reread it today in Spanish and referring to the English as needed and it was a lot easier, be that because I had already read it in English or because I wasn't brain-dead at the time. Well, I intend to go through the story this weekend and glean all the vocabulary from it, of which there is plenty. After school my grandmother did a Greek lesson out of the Νέα Ελληνικά book. It has a section called "Τώρα στην Ελλάδα" ("Now in Greece") which is a cultural description. It used to be in English, so no problem but not it's suddenly in Greek (as of a few lessons ago) and it uses some pretty complicated vocabulary that even my grandmother, a native speaker has trouble explaining. It has neither a vocabulary list for it nor a translation, so we have to work our way through it really slowly and it's really tiring (because we also usually have arguments about my vocabulary lists because she often does not understand that in these lists you have to put adjectives in the default form, which is to say masculine singular, even if that form is rarely used for a specific adjective). When I came home from there I ended up not going straight to language like I had planned, but instead talked with my family and we watched a movie. Then I came and did my kanji reviews, learned my new kanji, and did most of my Anki reviews (all except Italian and German). NEW KANJI (to #1010): 符, 府, 任, 賃, 代, 袋, 貸, 化, 花, 貨 ANKI STATISTICS: ESPERANTO: 910 FRENCH: 2163 GERMAN: 1105 GREEK: 1486 ITALIAN: 972 JAPANESE: 441 PORTUGUESE: 1353 SPANISH: 1514 SWAHILI: 205 SWEDISH: 1077 TOTAL: 11,226 (no change) 874 reviews in 55.7 minutes 1 person has voted this message useful |
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