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TAC 2010, Team K, Teango - GE SP SW RU | ||
Tags: Kanji | Turkish | Listening-Reading (L-R) | Swedish | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | Russian | German | French | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 meramarina Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5965 days ago 1341 posts - 2303 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Italian, French Personal Language Map | Message 82 of 185 01 May 2010 at 8:02pm | IP Logged | ||
This the the best mental image I've had all week! Quantum cows . . . that just might be the best thing ever!
I'll think of them when I'm feeling a little low and it will help, I'm sure. You should do the same, and you just might discover a whole new field of coping skills, because you haven't been put out to pasture just yet. Ruminate for a while about it, and perhaps everything will make more sense. Quark milk products confused me, too, but I tried some and they were good! Sorry about all the setbacks. Sounds like last year for me--my tutoring assignment ended earlier than expected and I could find nothing else. Then I got hit with the flu and was sick for half of the summer (I recover slowly from these things due to autoimmune dysfunction and the treatment for it). I ran out of money and got to experience the all-too-common American duty of Going Without Necessary Health Treatment, which is very, very painful, literally and figuratively. And I left my home and friends and many things I love and miss in order to relocate several states away to help my family, although I'm glad I could do this and it was ultimately my own choice. So, you see that there are good reasons for the depression you sometimes see in my log! Well, finally things are looking better for me, and they will for you, too. It is a fortunate side effect of misfortune to have more time for personal interests such as language study, although you must figure out how to do it on a quantum-cow budget (this must be a Statistically Improbable Phrase, as Amazon might say!). About my Spanish audiobook: I don't like self-help books very much unless they are very well-written, and I have not started this one, but it was a one-dollar bargain special and I could not resist that! Kafka is a good guy to turn to when life feels absurd. I reread Die Verwandlung last year in English translation with reference to the original German, but it wasn't a complete listening-reading exercise. I should do that; it would be good practice. But I fear insect revenge: they obviously know things that we humans do not know, with approximately 400 million years of evolution in contrast to modern Homo sapiens existence of only 250,000 million years. I respect the insects as life forms when they stay outside the house, within their appropriate ecological niche, but inside the house, well, they just better watch out. I have a lot of books. Edited by meramarina on 01 May 2010 at 8:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5554 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 83 of 185 05 May 2010 at 8:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the kind words everyone! Things are pretty rough at the moment, but I'm keeping my chin up and lucky juju bag close to my chest and hoping for the best in the weeks to come regardless.
@Buttons On a positive note, I've completed the first few seasons of Dexter now, which has in a bizarre way helped cheer me up tremendously. It's also given me a curious craving for pork sandwiches and an unhealthy interest in visiting beautiful palm-not-so-calm Miami. Cheers for the recommendation once again, and I hope that the wrist has healed up nicely now too. @meramarina My new quantum world is indeed a nebulous place, home to the weird and wonderful, where much remains so very uncertain and left to chance at the moment. Over the coming months, I'll have to tighten my belt a fair bit, no doubt, and pray that my budget doesn't reduce itself to a disappearing singularity. My dreams of croissants, wine and Gide by Lake Geneva have also taken a swan dive and may have to be put on hold indefinitely. In all honesty, I'm not really looking forward to returning to a one-pony village in UK where the principal attraction is a small duck pond and dilapidated bus stop, especially when there's a great big glittering ocean out there calling to me, but this may be the only place my girl can get her next (and most probably permanent) assignment. <sigh> I was sorry to hear about your own bumpy ride last year, and am really chuffed that things are starting to work out a bit better for you now. I hope this keeps on the up and up for you and leads to a whole new express train of positive choices and enriching experiences. Just watch out for any false gypsies bearing "lucky heather" in the meantime...[edit] ;) All these thoughts aside though, in order to dispel the clouds and light up a new beacon in the disparaging gloominess, I'm toying with the idea of doing something completely different and whacky with my language log for a little while (to help regain motivation and momentum), with a view to this leading me out of my current "bewilderness" and into a bright new episode in my Tales of the Unexpected. I can always return to my other languages later of course, but right now I need to crank a new language handle and study something afresh to get the motor started once again. So stay tuned... Edited by Teango on 06 May 2010 at 6:29am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5554 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 84 of 185 09 May 2010 at 11:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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PROGRESS IN German, WEEK 18/52 OF THE 2010 TAC CHALLENGE
SUMMARY Movies: 0.5 hours (part-way through "Mondscheintarif") TV: 1 hour (a couple of episodes of Stromberg) ———————————— Week Total: 1.5 hours LR Total: 133.2 hours Year Total: 314 hours WANDERLUST CONFESSION BOX No new updates here this week. TEANGO’S WORD/PHRASE OF THE WEEK "Mahlzeit!" (Enjoy your meal!) - I kept hearing this throughout Stromberg and wondered...yes...it's mealtime...but why does everyone keep stating the obvious here. I've since learned however that this is just another way to informally say "Guten Appetit!". You also hear a lot of "confirmation seeking" constructions at the end of sentences during conversion. Here are some of the more typical ones I've heard in German, all meaning roughly the same thing ("..., right?"): "..., oder?" "..., stimmt's?" "..., ne?" "..., gell?" [you hear this one a lot in Hesse] "..., nicht?" / "..., wa? [both shortened forms of "nicht wahr", I imagine] NOTES As things have almost slowed down to a standstill recently, and with motivation hitting rock bottom due to recent events, I've decided to take drastic action to try and kick-start some life back into my language studies. The idea is that I may be able to rekindle interest and get back on the straight and narrow by taking time out to do something very different for a little while and with the promise of a big reward at the end. Let's just call this my crazy motivational logic. So enough of the cryptic preamble...what I've actually decided is to put everything else on hold for a short while, and study Spanish for 1 month, leading to a holiday somewhere..well...fun and Spanish-speaking. This entails taking a break from my usual schedule, during which time I aim to carry out 2 very interesting language experiments. I'll continue to post logs here of course, which will reflect the weekly summary results of these experiments during this period. All the actual data however will remain in 2 separate experimental logs, detailed below. The first experiment, which I've aptly named "Fighting Windmills", will record my Listening-Reading (LR) activities over a fortnight with Spanish. I intend to do this intensely every day (i.e. 10 hours a day), for 2 whole weeks, and chart my progress at the end of each day in a separate experimental log of the same name. Similar to this weekly TAC log, I'll publish any findings in my own personal blog first (Travels with Teango), and then copy the details over to the forum so you can see how I'm getting on. This first experiment is really to test the LR method to the max with a new language I've never learned before, and more essentially, to put in the hours as suggested in the original fascinating post on LR by siomotteikiru, to see just how effective LR can be, and how far it can bring me in such a short time scale with a massive assault on exposure. It won't be exactly the same system, as I've tailoured it to my own needs and what I've discovered works best (after completing 130 hours of German LR so far this year), but I'll try to keep as close as possible to the original spirit and guiding principles of the post. I've wanted to do this for quite a while, I'll be honest, but work and other commitments always got in the way. The final inspiration to do this however came from a recent question on the efficacy of Listening-Reading:
I would certainly never imagine being able to learn a completely new language in one or two weeks to any great level, but it raises a good question, and it will be very interesting to see how far LR can bring my listening and reading skills forward during this fortnight. My second experiment, which I'm dying to nonsensically label "The Mark of Zorro" (but am very open to other suggestions of course), will simply continue where I leave off with the first experiment, and aim to bring my spoken and written skills in Spanish up to a better level to match my new listening and reading abilities over an additional fortnight. I'll once again aim to follow the good advice in the original L-R thread, whilst at the same time applying my own methods and ideas to bring about the best possible results for me. At the end of these two experiments, spanning roughly one month, I'll reward myself with a little holiday in some lovely Spanish-speaking corner of the world, where hopefully I'll get to enjoy the fruits of my linguistic labour and catch a few rays and sangrias too. I believe Spanish makes an excellent choice because I essentially know little or nothing of the language, and so will be starting from absolute scratch. It seems to be a very useful language to know and a popular choice amongst many language learners here, so I hope my notes on listening-reading and other learning activities may even prove helpful or informative for others. I'll agree it's not the most challenging language an English-speaking native could have chosen (i.e. it rates as a Level 1 language for difficulty in most schemes I've seen), but in terms of what can be achieved within two fortnightly experiments, starting as an absolute beginner, and given the availability of resources, I imagine it's far more realistic and rewarding. This is what I've added to my language profile for Spanish: "Initially tagging along with a few post-caravan family package holidays back in the late 80s, I've since enjoyed a couple of weekend getaways to Seville and Barcelona in more recent years. Apart from a few desperado tourist phrases however, I never really embraced the language and my knowledge is therefore sadly close to nada. It would be cool to learn it some time, along similar lines as Italian, and boost what I like to fondly refer to as my "fun in the sun" languages..." I'm going to do a bit of hard research now and hopefully I'll be able to find and order all the materials I'll need, with a view to them arriving by the end of the week (fingers crossed). And this little crazy side project is ideal timing on the whole, as I still have lots of project work to wrap up next week, but should be completely free to put in the necessary hours starting the following week. Edited by Teango on 10 May 2010 at 12:31am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6140 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 85 of 185 10 May 2010 at 12:12am | IP Logged | ||
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¡Buena suerte con tus estudios de la lengua española! Espero que tengas mucho éxito que te diviertas mucho con ella. A propósito, me gusta muchísimo el nombre “fun in the sun languages.” :)
Good luck with your studies of the Spanish language. I hope you find lots of success and have lots of fun with it. By the way, I very much like the name “fun in the sun languages.” :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5554 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 87 of 185 14 May 2010 at 10:19am | IP Logged | ||
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¡Muchas gracias a todos! Should I add "y todas" to the end of this phrase too (already confused you see, hehe)?
I'm really stoked about starting Spanish on Monday, and will put up a log here on Sunday with a bit more info and a link to the first experimental mini-log just beforehand. Nothing has arrived in the post yet, and I'm as giddy as a 4-year-old on Christmas morning, just waiting for that doorbell to ring now... Edited by Teango on 14 May 2010 at 10:19am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6355 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 88 of 185 14 May 2010 at 11:29am | IP Logged | ||
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Teango: Wow!!!!11
This is the most awesome remedy to your Kafkaesque situation you could ever come up with. Oh man, how I wish I could join you in your intense LR (lol, I bet you'll end up being interviewed in Spanish television after about 10 days). I'm also excited, so I guess I can join your 4-year old christmas club instead! ;D Para el futuro, muchachos! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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