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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 |  | |
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5558 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 9 of 185 09 January 2010 at 11:21am | IP Logged | |||||
Absolutely - maybe I should buy an HTLAL supporter's scarf and rattler :)
Thanks for this great link Adrean, I so want to start using it now but have bookmarked it for later (must learn patience)... Edited by Teango on 09 January 2010 at 11:22am 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 5558 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 10 of 185 09 January 2010 at 11:27am | IP Logged | |||||
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Hurra!...it's my birthday today. And how am I celebrating right now...that's right, with more passive German language listening and L-R (lol).
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6359 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 11 of 185 09 January 2010 at 4:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Happy birthday! Hope this will be the best year ever in your life.
Or as we say it: Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburstag! Joyeux anniversaire! Поздравляю с днём рождения! お誕生日おめでとうございます! 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 5558 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 12 of 185 09 January 2010 at 5:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Danke, merci, спасибо und ありがとう, メヂアリス君! ^u^ Edited by Teango on 09 January 2010 at 5:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| aloysius Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6242 days ago 226 posts - 291 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: French, Greek, Italian, Russian | Message 13 of 185 09 January 2010 at 6:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Happy Birthday Teango!
You seem to be doing fine with you German studying, and I am sure that you will soon be able to notice great progress in your comprehension. Living in Germany certainly is a golden opportunity, and you are obviously determined to make the best of it. I really like your list of L-R resources. I have listened to Der Vorleser, Der Tod in Venedig and Steppenwolf and they are all great, so I definitely think you should add the last one to your list. I will also listen to Das Schloß soon, in preparation for my Russian L-R. Just keep up the good work! aloysius 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 5558 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 14 of 185 09 January 2010 at 7:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
Cheers Aloysius, I've heard good things about "Steppenwolf" (doesn't Professor Arguelles read a bit of this aloud in one of his vids), so I hope I'll be able to fit it in too. 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 5558 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 15 of 185 12 January 2010 at 6:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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"Oh, Siddhartha!" - a mini milestone success
I've completed all 5 passes of Listening-Reading with my first German book today, "Siddhartha" by Hermann Hesse! In fact, it's my first ever attempt at L-R too. Altogether it amounts to 24 hours of pure L-R over the last 12 days so far, which is much slower than I'd planned but a postive start nevertheless. Time to celebrate...by starting the next book ("Der Tod in Venedig" by Thomas Mann)! 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 5558 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 16 of 185 14 January 2010 at 10:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
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PROGRESS IN German, WEEK 2/52
- L-R: 11.3 hours (Completed "Siddhartha"*** by Hermann Hesse! A little bit of "Der Tod in Venedig"***** by Thomas Mann) - Podcasts: 8.8 hours ("Schlaflos in München", Annik Rubens - "prima" resource) - Music: 14.1 hours (110 German songs in the playlist now...but like Oliver, I want more! - Movies: 3.6 hours ("Center Stage" and "Young Sherlock Holmes") - Facebook: 5-10 mins (hehe...well, I still learnt a word or two in the process) - Preparation: 1 hour (42 new "affengeil" German songs; added conditional colour formatting to my spreadsheets too - thanks for the great tip Doviende!) ------------------------------- Week Total: 38.7 hours LR Total: 25.4 hours Year Total: 80.4 hours WANDERLUST CONFESSION BOX - 63/2042 kanji (7 new kanji in the morning - Anki and Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji I". Was thrilled to find my giant laminated kanji poster arrived from the US today...already decorating the wall now...sugoi! ^u^) - Page 3/126 ("How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs" by Collier and Manley, using Hierowriter with "Manuel de codage" coding and Anki) - 119/1900 BSL signs (9 new signs before bedtime - "Communication Link") I guess most of us are in the same boat when it comes to "wanderlust". You see another language, you start playing around with it because it's bright and shiny like a new button, and thus begins the slow descent into neglecting all your primary less-lustrous-at-the-moment or lost-the-plot-on-a-plateau language goals. Having read "Siddhartha" recently, I've decided to adopt a more relaxed approach and not struggle so stoically against wanderlust anymore. Instead, I allow and confess a few light treats during the week to sweeten the pot, so long as they don't get in the way of my main TAC goals. My guilty pleasures are Japanese kanji (just basic meanings and writing), ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and BSL signs, all predominantly visual (i.e. they don't really conflict with L-R) and fun little time-fillers. This isn't a complete fix of couse, and I still need to keep my wits about me. Nearly every time I flick over to YouTube I'm greated with links to "Kavak Yelleri" on the front page, a fun-looking modern Turkish series. Also when I go out to the shops or for a walk into town, I tend to run into friendly Turkish people and wish I knew a few more select phrases other than just "teşekkürler" and "görüsürüz" (just check out those umlauts - fantastic!). I'm so very very tempted...must must resist! TEANGO'S WORD OF THE WEEK "Gebongt!" (Okey-dokey!), after a week it still makes me laugh. Last week's word was "der Schmetterling" (butterfly), I love the sound of this one. NOTES A little older, and hopefully a little wiser in language learning...I pulled back on the throttle a touch this week as I started to get headaches and needed to relax, it was a busy week overall and I didn't want to overreach. It felt good to complete the first book on my L-R list. I'm not sure how much better I understand German on the whole so far as it's early days, but on re-reading my 100 word test sections from "Qual" and "Der Vorleser", I found that my percentages have risen from 87% 13 days ago to 97% and 93% accordingly. This seemed a bit unlikely, so to make it a bit fairer and disregard initial "priming", I repeated the test with the first 100 unseen words from chapter 2 in both books and scored 94% and 88%. So some visible progress to be sure. Overall, I still don't grasp the meaning of lots of words and don't feel any profound awakening in my German skills (which is hard to notice anyway the higher up the fluency ladder you go), but I do notice a) I'm better trained now at guessing new words from context, b) I skim across whole phrases or skip ahead to the end of sentences more easily (important for those tricky German "whodunnit" verbs at the end of a bloated sentence), and c) I'm more comfortable with not understanding everything. I'm finding the next book in my list, "Der Tod in Venedig"***** by Thomas Mann, is totally out of my league. "Siddhartha"*** was a walk in the park by comparison! I know Mann is highly regarded by many as the cream of 20th century German literature, and I'd love to have a high enough grasp of the language to be able to understand why, but trying to follow these waves of turgid German prose along with an English translation is like an unfit Mr Magoo hopelessly scuttling after a squash ball in play. I've also discovered, much to my horror, that the German text and audiobook are completely different for entire paragraphs, and that the English translation I have by Martin Dröge is almost unreadable compared to the wonderful modern translations out there (e.g Michael Heim). After a valiant hour and a half of pain and misery dredging through these materials, I've decided to put it aside for now, acquire a more accurate German copy and order a decent English translation to be shipped for later study. If anyone can recommend an even better English translation, it'd definitely bring the colour back to my cheeks? I've decided to give a "difficulty rating" from now on for novels I've read or started to L-R, this is represented by the number of stars I add next to the title (e.g. see above). This is my basic scheme: 1 star * (very easy): children's fiction, adapted works and language readers. 2 stars ** (easy): pulp/contemporary fiction, teen literature, easy reading. 3 stars *** (average): conventional literature. 4 stars **** (difficult): literature that's particularly hard to follow in the target language due to theme, specialist vocabulary or author's idiolect. 5 stars ***** (very difficult): literature that's hard to follow in your own native language, not alone the target language. A little L-R tip: I find that counting all the new words I recognise on the 5th pass with a clicker-counter is really helpful in general. I knew I'd find a use for this little contraption one day! It's not only motivating to see progress at the end of each section, but changing the final activity a little makes the sprint to the end of the section that much easier. Incidentally, if you use ITunes and purchase an audiobook via their Store (as I did with "Tod in Venedig"***** recently), you may also find that not all novels are nicely cut up into listener-friendly 5-minute audio files. Some files are several hours long, and as it's Apple, they're also protected in the new M4B format. This means you can't easily put the files into other non-proprietary MP3 players or cut them up into manageable chunks using Audacity or Audioslicer software as you can with normal CDs you buy in the shops. My way round this so far is to rename the files M4A and keep updating the "start" and "stop" times as I L-R through them on repeat roughly every 5 minutes. Not an ideal solution and a little annoying to keep track of, but luckily the rest of my audiobooks are all in MP3 format. If anyone else has experienced this and has a good (but still legal) suggestion, that would be really helpful? In case you're also wondering, my embarrassing magical DVD collection so far is all I've got to hand that's dubbed in German...14 diverse (ahem) "classics" to be precise...I aim to buy some contemporary German-made titles when I'm feeling a little richer later in the year, and would appreciate any recommendations folks? Edited by Teango on 19 April 2010 at 5:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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