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TAC 2011, Team KEN, Teango

 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log Post Reply
130 messages over 17 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 7 ... 16 17 Next >>
darkwhispersdal
Senior Member
Wales
Joined 6042 days ago

294 posts - 363 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Ancient Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Latin

 
 Message 49 of 130
16 March 2011 at 10:59pm | IP Logged 
Teango wrote:
@ellasevia
Thanks. I hope to go one better later this year...Irish!


Or you could choose welsh because it has a dragon on it.
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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 50 of 130
17 March 2011 at 3:56pm | IP Logged 
@darkwhispersdal
Already one step ahead there...it's currently biding its time in my secret wanderlust cave, waiting for the right moment to fly out into these logs after Irish in the misty-hilled future (lol).

@Medialis
It's so true - it just takes the smallest of excuses to fall for another language these days hehe. And green is no doubt a good positive colour to include in the ranks!

Good luck with your Russian stress test with Master and Margarita next month, by the way. I'm a little confused though (probably just a lack of sugar right now as I haven't got round to having lunch yet)...you said that this will be the first time you LR Russian with an aligned text?

Edited by Teango on 17 March 2011 at 4:11pm

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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 51 of 130
17 March 2011 at 11:37pm | IP Logged 
Wishing everyone a happy St. Patrick's Day here on the forum!

Edited by Teango on 18 March 2011 at 3:44am

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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 52 of 130
18 March 2011 at 9:26pm | IP Logged 
PROGRESS UPDATE, WEEK 11

SUMMARY

RUSSIAN

Active study: 3 hours (study-and-click: Евгений Замятин, "Мы" )
Total active study this year: 67 hours
Current estimated reading level: B1

Other activities this week:
- 4 hours of Russian music in the background
Total for other activities this year: 17 hours

WANDERLUST CONFESSION BOX

Although it's not technically wanderlust, and forms part of my goals for this year, I've been tinkering around with kanji this week. As I never got particularly far in the first place (say no more a couple of hundred kanji), I've decided to start over properly and learn 1 new kanji every time I take a little break. Writing kanji out on the whiteboard and ticking off new characters on my wall poster will also encourage me to get out of the office chair and stretch my legs a bit.

For this purpose, I've drawn up a workflow and posted the first few pages of my initial kanji cross-reference table on the back of the door of my study. My goal is to follow the order of the main characters and primitive elements set down in Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji" (which also links in with my wall poster and online flashcards on the "Reviewing the Kanji" website), but to substitute the main keyword as given in the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary. When I come across a kanji that is unique or contains unknown elements so far, I'll turn to my copy of Henshall's "A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters" to get a better picture of how it evolved and draw on this information when writing down the keywords for my story to remember the kanji.

TEANGO’S WORD OF THE WEEK

"душа в пятки ушла" (his heart sank), but the literal translation is even more ironic - "his soul went (or perhaps more poetically, departed) into his soles". :)

NOTES

I'm slowly recovering and getting back into the swing of things, so this week I've been taking things nice and easy. :)

Edited by Teango on 18 March 2011 at 9:30pm

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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 53 of 130
20 March 2011 at 1:13am | IP Logged 
Teango wrote:
Good luck with your Russian stress test with Master and Margarita next month, by the way. I'm a little confused though (probably just a lack of sugar right now as I haven't got round to having lunch yet)...you said that this will be the first time you LR Russian with an aligned text?


Ahh. Sugar. A student's best friend!   :)

Yeah, it's actually true. Whenever I've LRed Russian in the past: Kafka, Dostoyevskij and others, I've only used monolingual Swedish translations as reading materials.

I can just imagine the progress I could have gotten if I'd used aligned texts..But the good thing about the physical books was that I could carry them around and read whenever I felt like it.


So my reading comprehension was built by doing Scriptorium and reading parallel texts. The LR somehow managed to put a Russian voice on the words even though they were not present during the actual LR sessions. -LR magic. :)


I did this with Japanese too, but got stuck at a certain point where I couldn't progress any longer with monolingual reading materials (was too hard to sort out the words from the sentences). So the last 10 months I've used aligned texts for (almost) all my Japanese LR.
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darkwhispersdal
Senior Member
Wales
Joined 6042 days ago

294 posts - 363 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Ancient Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Latin

 
 Message 54 of 130
21 March 2011 at 11:59pm | IP Logged 
Teango wrote:



TEANGO’S WORD OF THE WEEK

"душа в пятки ушла" (his heart sank), but the literal translation is even more ironic - "his soul went (or perhaps more poetically, departed) into his soles". :)



I love that phrase thanks for sharing

Edited by darkwhispersdal on 22 March 2011 at 12:00am

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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 55 of 130
25 March 2011 at 9:15pm | IP Logged 
PROGRESS UPDATE, WEEK 12

SUMMARY

RUSSIAN

Active study: 5.2 hours (study-and-click: Евгений Замятин, "Мы" )
Total active study this year: 72.4 hours
Current estimated reading level: B1

Other activities this week:
- 3 hours of Russian music in the background
Total for other activities this year: 20 hours

JAPANESE

Active study: 1 hour (writing kanji and learning their meanings)
Total active study this year: 3.5 hours

Other activities this week:
- film (1.5h): Dave Boyle (director), "Big Dreams Little Tokyo"
- film (2h): Hirokazu Koreeda (director), "After Life"
Total for other activities this year: 5.5 hours

* Overall hours this week: 12.7

WANDERLUST CONFESSION BOX

I took a little peak at Old English this week, in the faint hope that it wouldn't be too far removed from Middle English and therefore a breeze to study on the side. Oh, how wrong I was! Even with knowledge of other related languages such as Scots, Swedish and German under my belt, any examples I tried to read through in Anglo-Saxon were about as clear as medieval wattle and daub. Even the grammar itself seemed to share much more in common with highly inflectional languages such as Russian than with the works of Chaucer and Mallory. And to think of it, this is probably a good thing, in that it will at least keep me out of trouble for the time being (well, at least until I get curious and watch Beowulf again).

TEANGO’S WORD OF THE WEEK

"Мальчик с пальчик" (Tom Thumb) - a legendary little fella no bigger than the size of his father's thumb, and incidentally the first fairy tale ever printed in English. There are many similar stories across the world of thumb-sized characters listed in Wikipedia, including le petit poucet (France), der kleine Däumling (Germany), Issun-bōshi (Japan), Thumbikin (Norway), Pulgarcito (Spain), Piñoncito (Chile), Palčić (Serbia), Patufet (Catalonia), Kleinduimpje (Netherlands) and Hüvelyk Matyi (Hungary).

NOTES

Still recovering...and no doubt victim to a little study inertia after my recent illness too. I did find a lot of encouragement however in Professor Arguelles' recent video lectures on language learning and my teammates' posts, and I enjoyed catching up on Steve Kaufmann's interviews with other polyglots over the week.

I'll try to follow a couple of the Professor's motivational tips next week by i) using a mirror to talk myself out of slacking off whenever the temptation arises, and ii) trying to study a basic minimum amount every day and marking this down on a big wall calendar to progressively get into the habit of some form of consistent study.

Edited by Teango on 25 March 2011 at 9:45pm

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 56 of 130
27 March 2011 at 1:22am | IP Logged 
You seem to be gaining some nice momentum now. Watching good movies sounds like a good recovery plan.

Thanks for sharing the link to the Professor's new vids! I had completely missed most of his new lectures.
It's always a joy listening to him, because he says awesome things like:

"how to go about getting the habit of doing just about anything on a systematic regular basis"

-and I find myself nodding my head frantically: Yes! More! More!

Edited by M. Medialis on 27 March 2011 at 1:23am



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