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January Dutch Challenge (EVERYONE!) | ||
Tags: 6 Weeks Challenge (6WC) | Dutch | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| thistledown Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5164 days ago 14 posts - 38 votes Speaks: English* | Message 129 of 172 20 January 2011 at 1:51pm | IP Logged | ||
awww, schoenewaelder, that's brave of you! Well done, you!! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5560 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 130 of 172 20 January 2011 at 3:07pm | IP Logged | ||
Thank you. Once you get over your initial inhibitions, it get's very easy. I am now shameless. Do try! 
I stole this image from street-smart language learning Edited by schoenewaelder on 20 January 2011 at 4:46pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5986 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 131 of 172 22 January 2011 at 8:55am | IP Logged | ||
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My sleep schedule has now somewhat stabilized, and during my normal waking hours I only have about 1 hour of feeling sleepy, so my productivity has gone up. I've also taken on the challenge of trying to get in 10 hours of LR time daily, as recommended originally by atamagaii when describing her L-R system, which has further increased my productivity. I'm not always reaching that goal, but I'm definitely getting in more hours than before. In total I've clocked over 90 hours of Dutch since January 1 (with about half of those hours in this past week).
I still feel dissatisfied with my listening skills, but Dutch is starting to feel a lot less foreign. It feels comfortable to listen to it most of the time, but I seem to lose a lot of comprehension when there are too many "G" sounds in a row...maybe they're just the strangest sound to my ears, so I don't match the sounds to the words that I've seen because I associate them with an English/german sort of G sound. I anticipate that more listening will cure this (and probably listening without reading, in particular). I just did another vocabulary self-test. This time I used a 704-word selection from somewhere in the middle of the 2nd Stieg Larsson book. I chose this book because I know there's some pretty advanced vocab in it, much more than in Harry Potter, giving a more realistic estimate. Out of 704 words, I had good knowledge of 678 words, giving me a score of 96.4%. I also had good comprehension of the text this time...in fact it felt nice to read, so I might be able to make an attempt at the "arguelles airplane test" soon, which was one of my stated goals. This somewhat surprised me, since in the past few days it's felt like I've been making zero progress, despite getting dozens of study hours in. The problem is just that the overall percentage recognition is only going up a tiny percent even though lots of new words have been learned, so it's hard to notice without computing some statistics like this. Therefore, for further projects I think I'll administer these self-tests more often, to keep up my motivation. Another bit of motivation was to write down all the unrecognized words and look them up afterwards. I noticed that there were several "unknown" words that I should have guessed from German, such as "onderzocht" (untersucht), "buik" (Bauch), bestaan (bestand), etc. This means that there's still plenty of low-hanging fruit left to pluck, if I keep working at it. Since I'm currently at about 400000 words read, I'm now pretty confident that once I hit 1 million words read, I'll be at a very satisfactory reading level. This mirrors my experience with German, where I was already at quite a decent level of comprehension by the 400000 word mark, and very happy with my results after 1 million words. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5986 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 132 of 172 22 January 2011 at 9:27am | IP Logged | ||
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ok, I just stumbled upon something that I find incredibly hilarious. Here's a line from Dutch Harry Potter, followed by the matching English line:
'Misschien gelooft hij pas dat ik dit niet voor de lol doe als ik m'n nek gebroken heb of ‐' "Maybe he'll believe I'm not enjoying myself once I've got my neck broken or -" What surprised me here is that Dutch appears to have a legit word "lol" meaning "enjoyment/fun", and also a phrase "voor de lol"! For those not familiar with English internet slang, there's a phrase to do something "for the lolz", where lol refers to "Laugh Out Loud". Can any Dutch speakers confirm this? This seems too funny to not have developed from the internet usage, but it's in this actual translation of Harry Potter, so I'm not sure. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6142 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 133 of 172 22 January 2011 at 10:48am | IP Logged | ||
I'm pretty sure it's true. That expression is even used in Teach Yourself Dutch and I've seen it used a lot. I was a bit horrified when I first encountered it, though, because I hate that abbreviation in English, along with other Internet and text language slang. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hobbema Senior Member United States Joined 5741 days ago 541 posts - 575 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Portuguese, French, Dutch | Message 135 of 172 22 January 2011 at 1:41pm | IP Logged | ||
doviende, I like your technical approach to LR and learning vocabulary. That makes a lot of sense to me. I spoke Dutch in my dream last night! Nothing earth shattering, it was Assimil-esque phrases like "Dat is mijn boek.", and "Dit is mijn situatie.", and "Zo luidt een bekende gezegde over Holland." Nothing earth shattering, just phrases regurgitated from Assimil and DLI drills. My dreams fade from memory quickly, and I'm pretty sure that I wasn't addressing a hall full of Nobel Prize winners, or discussing "Relativiteitstheorie" van Einstein (from Assimil Les 20, believe it or not). In fact, in my dream, the people were faceless, and the situations didn't make any sense, but the words were Dutch, and I knew they were Dutch, and I was speaking them. I think I've come to a realization, that the (seemingly) senseless repetitions and mind-numbing drills of Assimil and FSI might actually work, and that whatever sequence of neurons in the brain fire to produce sentences and speech, and also memory, that these same sequences over time will bounce to the surface when we sleep, and maybe that's a step in internalization. Or maybe once again I'm overanalyzing everything. But I still think it was pretty cool. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jvv Newbie Netherlands Joined 5509 days ago 18 posts - 22 votes Speaks: Dutch* | Message 136 of 172 23 January 2011 at 7:58am | IP Logged | ||
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Apparently lol in the meaning of enjoyment/fun has been in use since 1897 http://www.speld.nl/2007/12/13/lachen-om-lol/ . Edited by jvv on 23 January 2011 at 7:58am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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