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2010 a Language Odyssey (Team H) - CLOSED | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6474 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 17 of 85 07 January 2010 at 9:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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In the seven days of the year 2010, actually mostly between the 4th and tonight, as I was in Poland until the evening of the 4th...
I did 1183 Chinese word or character repetitions in Anki. I studied 546 Chinese sentences from the 20,000 sentence file in Anki. I read a few chapters of 青春之歌, my latest Chinese reader. I listened to 23 Assimil Swahili lessons several times. I spent 7 hours on my French. I attended an Esperanto conference, where I spoke a lot of Esperanto with people from around the world, and I also spoke English, French, Italian, Chinese, Latin and even a bit of Arabic in rapid succession while organizing the aligatorejo. I also gave a 1 1/2 hour lecture in Esperanto about the book "Refuse to Choose" by Barbara Sher, which I got for Christmas and found very enlightening. I believe it may be very interesting for forum members as well - it's for people who have many different interests or projects and aren't sure how to fit them all into their lives. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6474 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 18 of 85 14 January 2010 at 8:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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Week 2
I did 1113 Chinese word or character repetitions in Anki. (on target) I learned to understand 280 new Chinese sentences from the 20,000 sentence file, obviously while reviewing the rest. (target: 50/day, I only did 40...) I also did some random reading in Chinese. I studied 3 new Assimil Swahili lessons while reviewing the rest. (on target) I studied 2 new Assimil Greek lessons and did an extensive review of the previous ones, also doing all the exercises up till lesson 18 again. I spent only 3 hours on my French. :-( I spent 2 hours on my Italian. (on target) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| annette Senior Member United States Joined 5510 days ago 164 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* | Message 19 of 85 15 January 2010 at 12:14am | IP Logged | ||
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Can you tell me more about your reader, 青春之歌? Is it text-only or are there also
vocabulary notes? And if there are explanations or definitions, is this in German or English or another of the languages you speak? I'm always very curious about readers and learning materials, especially with such intriguing titles. All my non-native materials have really boring titles like "A Reader for Students of Mandarin." I'm also impressed by your consistency and drive in reviewing Anki. I did keep up Anki reviews for a while but I rarely hit 1000 reviews a day! Jia you, o teammate :). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6474 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 20 of 85 15 January 2010 at 10:30am | IP Logged | ||
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Apparently 青春之歌 is a well-known novel in China, providing a background story to the Communist takeover, starting with the Japanese invasion. This reader from the series shortened the novel to a sixth of its typical length. Each chapter is approximately 1400 characters, with approximately 50 items of vocabulary (words + names) afterwards. Vocabulary is provided as e. g.
羞答答 xiūdādā （形） coy So the base language is English. The reader was published in the series "Easy Chinese Readings" by The Commercial Press, Beijing, 1983, and I picked it up while in Beijing. At the same time I also got another English-based book with easy stories, another English-based reader with a tale that is too Communist for me, and two French-based readers. I would recommend having solid knowledge of at least 1500 characters to read this if you've studied all the HSK compound words, or more if you've been focussing on characters, like I have. 三人行 was a much easier read and I can recommend that one as a first Chinese reading. It's published in Germany, so should be easier to get, and you don't actually need to know German as 95% of the vocabulary is explained in Chinese or with pictures. They really believe in the target-language approach. As for Anki... well, I've made it a habit for Chinese. The bad thing is that it's mentally quite exhausting and some days I don't do anything else for Chinese. The good thing is that I have very clear targets and an excellent way of controlling my progress. First I resolved to learn to recognize 3000 characters, and the Hanzi Stats plugin helped me keep track, as well as suggesting more characters to learn. Now, I determined that my understanding of Chinese, as well as my knowledge of compound words, should go through the roof if I can read at least 5000 Chinese sentences, so that's a new mark to test myself against, and somebody conveniently already provided a deck with 20000 Chinese sentences that the HSK authorities are using to illustrate each vocabulary item. I figure I can't go wrong with those, though I would probably be able to reach the target faster if I put in my own sentences. Then again, it would be more work and I couldn't be 100% sure of the meaning - the HSK sentences deck has revealed quite a few misconceptions. Edited by Sprachprofi on 15 January 2010 at 10:37am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| annette Senior Member United States Joined 5510 days ago 164 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* | Message 21 of 85 15 January 2010 at 10:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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Oh, okay, thank you. I am not too worried about comprehension. In my experience that
isn't problematic unless I'm doing a super close "I want to know by heart every single character in the text" reading. I personally go to readers for the provided vocabulary lists. I can stick exclusively to the vocab list and learn how to write/speak the terms (which is my main problem, as opposed to how to read/understand), and if I get confused I can quickly flip back to the text portion to locate the word in context. I guess I could read native material and look up any unknown words one by one, but I'm lazy and vocab lists generally tend to focus on "important" vocabulary, which is nice. None of that looking up some stupid complicated character with two possibilities for radicals and multiple meanings in both and then after 10 minutes I finally reach the correct definition and find that the word is so specific or unusual that it actually has no practical freaking use for me and really isn't even that important for my understanding of the text and I've completely wasted my meager time, dammit!!! Can you tell I'm still bitter? Ha. One more question, do you find the HSK sentences useful? Do you think the level veers towards basic or advanced? I believe I know what sentence pack you're talking about and although I haven't downloaded it, I have been considering doing so. Edited by annette on 15 January 2010 at 10:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6474 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 22 of 85 21 January 2010 at 11:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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Week 3
I did 1087 Chinese word or character repetitions in Anki. Yay, maintenance time is slowly decreasing now! I learned to understand 225 new Chinese sentences - I would have made the target of 350, except I inadvertantly copied an old file over the current one and I've been stuck in reviews ever since. I also did some random reading in Chinese, working with the Chinese subtitles for "Mamma Mia", which are surprisingly easy except for the names. I spent 3 1/2 hours on my Swahili, but I'm still on Assimil lesson 26. See below. I spent 3 hours on my Greek. I spent 6 hours on my French, only one hour short of the target... I spent 1 hour on my Italian. -- I found that my previous strategy for Assimil wasn't working so well. The things is that I never heard anybody say what to do about the exercises, whether to do them in the passive or active phase. Technically they require you to use the language actively, but I thought it would be silly to do them at the same time as you're already translating entire sentences. So I went for the middle and creating a bunch of waves for my Swahili: 1. passive wave, just understanding the main dialog and reading the explanations 2. lagging 10 lessons behind: exercise wave, ensuring that I understood everything by working with the exercise sentences, trying to understand them without help. 3. lagging 20 lessons behind: fill-in-the-blank wave 4. lagging 50 lessons behind: active wave Well, by schedule I've done 6 lessons in the fill-in-the-blank wave now and I realized that I make way too many mistakes. So I've stopped this approach now and I'll try to do the exercises just before moving on to the next lesson. Once I'm done with the backlog, that is. It keeps bugging me that I could input Swahili words into Anki and I wouldn't forget so much. However, I promised myself to use this time as a test of the Assimil method, so I will really try to pull through Assimil Swahili without resorting to any other means of study. My Greek is not really representative because I already studied Greek long before Assimil, I just use Assimil as consolidation there. Also, using an Assimil course for a Romance language would distort the picture because I know other Romance languages already and I can understand 80-95% of the others already without any lessons. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6474 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 23 of 85 29 January 2010 at 2:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Week 4
My maternal grandma passed away this week and I took a last-minute trip across the country to be with my parents because of that. What's more, I caught a stomach virus while there. I only spent 4 hours on Mandarin and 2 hours on French, so I have not made progress and I'm even a bit behind on Anki repetitions. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6146 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 24 of 85 29 January 2010 at 2:13pm | IP Logged | ||
I'm sorry to hear that. :( I hope you feel better. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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