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Muddling through in TAC ’10 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6451 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes  Studies: German | Message 89 of 95 11 September 2010 at 6:27am | IP Logged | ||
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A most impressive log.
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| annette Senior Member United States Joined 5510 days ago 164 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* | Message 90 of 95 17 November 2010 at 2:51am | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you. I only wish the amount of time I spend on language learning was as impressive as the amount of time
I spend on whining about it. ;) I dropped my Arabic course because I felt it was not teaching me much that was useful and was in fact damaging what little Arabic I have already learned. I still have a very hard time with listening comprehension (not surprising, considering that I have auditory processing issues), but I guess I will just have to work on that on my own time. Also, dialect. I have a few friends here who speak the particular dialect of Arabic I want to concentrate on or other dialects very similar to it, but I am not incredibly close with these friends. The fast pace of life here means that I have very little time to maintain friendships with people who don't live in my dormitory or go to classes with me, and I find that friendships with international students sometimes take more time and effort than friendships with other Americans because of the language and cultural barriers. Even though obviously these international students all have amazing English, sometimes when it comes to hang-out time, they would simply prefer to hang out in their native language and relax a little. And I don't speak enough Arabic dialect to have an engaging conversation in Arabic with them (I know, I tried!). I can muddle through in MSA, but I wouldn't understand what they say to me, and also a significant portion of my vocab in MSA is literary or archaic. Anyway, I now want to spend some time learning dialect (Shami/Levantine, mostly interested in Palestinian strains) but I'm really not sure where to begin. I am incredibly busy this week - in fact I should be working on a six page paper due tomorrow morning that I have yet to begin right now - but perhaps next week I will have a spare hour in which I could amass my resources. There is nothing to report about my other two languages except that, as always, I am exhausted. I love life at my college but I just have so much work to do every night. I barely have time for extra-curricular commitments. 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 91 of 95 17 November 2010 at 11:48am | IP Logged | ||
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Wee, Annette, glad you're still here!
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| annette Senior Member United States Joined 5510 days ago 164 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* | Message 92 of 95 18 November 2010 at 5:06am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the support :)
My old computer completely died back in September so my extensive catalogue of Arabic resources is now missing. I guess that will be my project for Thanksgiving break - come up with some appropriate resources and a basic plan of action. I missed the application deadline for independent language study at my university (didn't expect to need to use that resource as early as I would now like to), but I'll talk to administrators and see if there is a slim but existent chance to get around that. Probably not, but it never hurts to try and maybe get more pointers in the process. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| annette Senior Member United States Joined 5510 days ago 164 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* | Message 93 of 95 25 December 2010 at 9:05am | IP Logged | ||
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Ok, I thiiiink I might take the step of entirely dropping university classes (audited or otherwise) for Arabic in the
spring. I have a lot of other commitments, linguistic and otherwise, and kind of need/want to get a job as well. This means that I need to figure out how to squeeze Arabic into my schedule. Originally I was going to take advantage of university resources for something next fall, but I just started planning out around my major requirements and it looks like I might not have time for even that - or if I do, it'll be a tight squeeze, and I won't be able to take one of the survey courses I was eyeing from the anthropology dept. I'll plan that when I get to it. In the meanwhile, I may or may not be doing Arabic as a course in the spring, which isn't a big deal BUT it does mean that I need to get a lot better at doing things on my own time without other people to schedule them for me (such as in classes). And honestly, I'm not good enough at Arabic that I can just go listen to radio on my own and feel comfortable calling that "studying," as I would for Chinese. I could read with dictionary and call that studying - but I'm a slow enough reader that I'd really have to schedule time each day and force myself to sit down to that grueling process. I guess that's what most people do with self study anyway and it's probably time I learned some inward discipline. Apart from Arabic, I will almost certainly be continuing Chinese and my dead language academically so I won't worry about that here. Two new additions to my schedule: Ancient Greek - I haven't reviewed for about a year which means I've lost pretty much everything (I forget quickly). I don't have enough time to really buckle down to this, but I've found my old Euripides, etc, and my old textbook and I'm going to be reviewing some grammar and reading a little in the spring. I spent three years on it way back when so it would be a shame to not at least try to rejuvenate the old reading proficiency. French - I probably mentioned this already, but reading proficiency in French would be really helpful for me and make me a lot more competitive within my major. Actually, most other people in my major already have studied French and/or German because these two languages are pretty useful in the field. I went a non-traditional route with Chinese and Arabic, and although I don't regret it, it does mean that a lot of the academic work in my major is inaccessible to me. My new year's resolution isn't quite to "learn" French - again, not a lot of time - but I would certainly like to make some headway towards understanding it a little better in text. To be honest, I'm not quite sure what people do when they're specifically looking only for reading proficiency - I just stumble on only being able to read and not to speak by accident (hahaha). 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 94 of 95 25 December 2010 at 12:19pm | IP Logged | ||
You could try "French for reading". The book looks good, if only for people with no / very low level of French. I shall be focussing on Arabic this coming year insha'allah, like Mandarin was my biggest focus last year. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| annette Senior Member United States Joined 5510 days ago 164 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* | Message 95 of 95 25 December 2010 at 8:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks! I'll see if I can track it down. It looks like my university library has some copies, so I'll check that out when I
get back on campus! (I accidentally searched for it in the 'keyword' field instead of the 'title' first, leading me to lots of interesting and very random books in that language... motivation for studying harder!?) Good luck with Arabic!! It's such a beautiful & fascinating language. I know I'll be spending most of my time this year on Chinese again, but I'm hoping to make some time for a little pleasure reading in Arabic nonetheless. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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