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TAC 2011 - Team Ohana – Le Cinéma Rex | ||
Tags: Dabbling | France | 6 Weeks Challenge (6WC) | Immersion | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | English | German | French | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5335 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 161 of 198 03 August 2011 at 10:03am | IP Logged | |||||
I second that!!! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| joanthemaid Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5471 days ago 483 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, German | Message 162 of 198 03 August 2011 at 5:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
OK for me. ReneeMona, félicitations pour tes examens et au plaisir de lire tes posts! (congrats on your exams and looking forward to reading your posts) PS: none of my business, but don't you think it's time to change the status of your French to "fluency" (I'd even say advanced fluency)? Edited by joanthemaid on 03 August 2011 at 5:32pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5336 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 163 of 198 08 August 2011 at 12:32am | IP Logged | |||||
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Week 31 : August 1st - 7th
Despite an unexpectedly large workload, this week has been a very good one. Thanks to the 6WC, I think I'm finally getting the hang of the "study when you can, where you can"-method. I got several curious looks and bewildered head shakes from my colleagues this week because I was walking around muttering pronoun declensions or writing verb conjugations on my hand so I could study while doing something else. It worked though. I chose something new to memorize each day I had to work and by the end of the day, I knew it by heart. French Week 31 (48): 8 h. 30 min. 2011: 608 h. 30 min. It felt a little strange to be doing so little for French this week but I'm very satisfied with the little I did because I finally forced myself to work on my weaknesses instead of cowering behind my strengths. I've been emailing and writing on Lang-8 and I also did a lot of listing. I watched Le dîner de cons and was simply delighted to find I never got lost at all. I put on the subtitles once or twice because I felt like I was missing some of the finer details but overall, this was definitely a successful experiment. Incidentally, it is also a very funny film and I'm a fan of Jaques Villeret so it's awesome to think that I will soon be able to enjoy his work without subtitles. I also watched C dans l'air, which I really like because it deals with a wide array of subjects so it's easy to find an episode about something that interests me. They're kind of a challenge to follow though, because they speak quite fast about rather complicated subjects and sometimes one side of the table gets into a shouting match with the other side which makes things even more challenging but also more fun to watch. I watched two episodes this week (one about Marie-Anoinette and one about freedom of expression) and I plan to do the same thing again next week. I also want to get started on listening to the fourth Harry Potter audiobook, not because I think I need it but because it's the last audio book and I want to finish them all and also because I've forgotten a lot of the plot so it's time for a re-read. --------------------------------------------------------- 6 Week Challenge German: Week 1 Week 1: 21 h. 30 min. Total: 21 h. 30 min. Before I say anything else I have to say this: that twitter bot is fantastic! I've been working 9-hours shifts nearly every day this week and yet I still spent more than four hours studying every day because it is so addicting to add my scores to twitter and see myself moving up in the ranking. I'm constantly calculating how many minutes I need to overtake the person ahead of me and every time someone overtakes me, a red haze clouds my vision and won't go away until I have something German-related in front of me again. I never knew I was this competitive. Anyway, twenty-one and a half hours in the first week. That's pretty good. I had a bit of a slow start because I was travelling and working on Monday so I couldn't do anything (or rather, I could have done something but I was too tired to) but it's gotten a lot better since. I've created a new Anki deck (a very ceremonious occasion) which contains 333 words as of today and I've finished listening to six out of eight CD's of Michel Thomas' foundation course. I'm a little bit disappointed with it so far because it's been focusing on stuff like word order and vocab, which already comes quite naturally to me (though I have to be on my guard for little differences with Dutch that trip me up sometimes) and completely glosses over stuff that I need help with, like the cases. The students are also a little annoying, especially the woman, whose pronunciation is so bad that she sometimes sounds like she's speaking an interesting mixture of Dutch and English with a couple of German words thrown in there for good measure. She's nowhere near as annoying as the male Spanish student though, and it's easy to forgive her and the male student's mistakes by reminding myself that I have an unfair advantage over them. I haven't started on Assimil yet because I want to finish MT first but I will probably begin somewhere during the next few days. I also want to start L-R-ing the first Harry Potter book and perhaps start reading Der Kleine Prinz as well. --------------------------------------------------------- @Just a Dreamer: Thank you. I wish you the best of luck with your German as well! @Solfrid Cristin: I'm glad you agree! It seems to me that many of our team members are dealing with some pretty intense problems and/or languages so I think it will be good to have someone pop in every now and then to scream: "YES, YOU CAN!" :) @joanthemaid: Merci. En fait, j'ai changé mon profil pendant quelques heures la semaine dernière mais j'ai fini par le rechanger parce que ça n'a pas senti juste. Je suis plutôt contente avec les progrès que j'ai faits récemment mais je préfère ne pas changer mon profil pour de vrai avant que je sois sûre que je l'ai mérité. Edited by ReneeMona on 15 August 2011 at 2:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| nogoodnik Senior Member United States Joined 5570 days ago 372 posts - 461 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Modern Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew, Russian, French | Message 164 of 198 08 August 2011 at 5:39am | IP Logged | |||||
Funny, I thought the same thing until I did a second read. Yes we can sounds like a great motto, though. and Renee Mona, I am looking forward to working with you for the remainder of the year :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5336 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 165 of 198 16 August 2011 at 10:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Week 32 : August 8th – 14th
This is probably the most scandalously overdue update I´ve ever written and I´m sorry if I kept anyone waiting (probably not but you never know). I´ve been extremely lazy and listless for the last couple of days and my language learning has been the first thing to suffer from this, possibly because it was one of about two things I was actively doing before this. But let´s move on to the good news. I apparently spent 40 hours studying this week, which is almost six hours per day. I had all this time because I was feeling under the weather for most of the week and then got really sick on Friday so I spent a lot of time in bed being bored. I could have done even more because I did nothing at all on Friday and hardly anything on Sunday. The downside is that I’m now kind of tired of studying, which is a feeling I have not previously encountered and that I have no clue how to deal with. I think I may be heading for a burn-out, which is not good since school is starting back up again in a couple of weeks. French Week 32 (49): 10 h. 2011: 618 h. 30 min. While going back and forth between French and German this week, I came to the wonderful realization that French is much easier to understand than German. This may seem like a no-brainer but for a long time my greatest frustration in my French studying was that even with all the practicing I was doing, I could still listen to something in German that I’d never heard before and understand it so much more easily than French. But after months of daily practice, French sounds wonderfully clear and understandable to me now (even when I can't understand it) whereas listening to German sometimes reminds me of trying to listen to a radio program through a lot of static. The difference really becomes clear when I compare watching TV, which I never do in German and which is therefore very hard. French TV is still challenging to understand as well but at least I don't feel exhausted from over-pricking my ears after ten minutes. Not much else to report for French. I've let my writing slide a little bit because it's just boring but in exchange I've started reading again. I'm now a couple of chapters into Manon des Sources and added another two books to the long line of books gathering dust in my language closet while they're waiting for me to read them. The problem is that I'm very optimistically buying all these classics by Hugo and Proust and Flaubert while meanwhile I still sometimes read entire sentences or even paragraphs without gathering anything from it at all, so I keep putting them off until I can read well enough to enjoy them. --------------------------------------------------------- 6 Week Challenge German: Week 2 Week 2: 30 h. Total: 51 h. 30 min. I'm getting a little scared of my study times, so much so that I haven't added any for German in over two days. But that's all for next week's update, which will probably be a lot less impressive. I finished Michel Thomas early this week so I've already started forgetting what I thought of it. I remember finding it annoying but not nearly as annoying as the Spanish one. However, I do think it's worse than the Spanish one, because it teaches a lot less. The Spanish one taught all the verb tenses and, I feel, a lot more words but the German one spends forever on word order, only briefly teaches the past tense and a bit of the conditional and never mentions cases at all. Since that's exactly what I had hoped the course would help with, I was a bit disappointed because I didn't feel like I'd learned all that much in nearly eight hours. Thankfully, I think I'm starting to make sense of the cases for myself. I spent about fifteen minutes every day studying and memorizing a set of inflections and I try to pay extra attention to them when I watch films and TV. I think it's starting to pay off because after a couple of days of this I started correctly guessing the form of the article or pronoun that would be used in a sentence I knew was coming up. Small progress but for someone who spent three years studying German in high school and never got this far, it's quite encouraging (and a sad reminder of how much my high school language classes sucked but let's not get into that). I've also started listening to Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen, which has a better narrator than the French ones but the story is so familiar and the narrator speaks so slowly that I quickly gave up on reading along and took up playing spider solitaire while listening. I actually think that these audio books may be the proof that Romance languages are spoken faster than Germanic ones because while the German reading speed does not sound unnaturally slow to me, every recording is at least twice and often three times as long as the same chapter was in the French and Spanish versions. Maybe that's why I don't feel like I'm getting anything but vocab out of this exercise so far. So that was this week. I didn't write anything because I was uninspired but I did have some mini-conversations with my German colleague and my parents. Speaking happens quite easily but lack of vocab is a problem, as is lack of idioms and standard phrases. That's why I want to start working from my French - German phrasebook this week, which will hopefully be useful for both languages. --------------------------------------------------------- @nogoodnik: Thank you for stopping by and commenting. As I've said before, I am really excited about our team and I hope we will all be active in each other's logs and support each other, since I think the teams are the best thing about this challenge. Good luck with your languages! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5335 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 166 of 198 18 August 2011 at 12:06am | IP Logged | |||||
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I am so proud of you ReneeMona! You not only have funny posts, but you actually manage to get a lot of studying done as well. Good job!
I have started the Michel Thomas Vocabulary course in Russian, and I keep thinking of you calling the Spanish participants dumb and dumber, but since I would probably take the role of dumbest myself, I am not going to complain. Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 18 August 2011 at 12:07am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5336 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 167 of 198 23 August 2011 at 12:04am | IP Logged | |||||
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Week 33 : August 15th – 21st
French Week 33 (50): 7 h. 30 min. 2011: 626 h. This week hasn't been very great because I was too tired and burned-out to do much for most of it. I'm especially disappointed with my study time for French because I feel bad about neglecting it, even though I know I'm allowed and even supposed to be focusing on German. I don't even remember what I spent those seven and a half hours doing. However, I do remember what I did not spend them doing: watching native films, reading books, writing or speaking like I should have been doing. That's something that needs to change so for next week I am setting myself the goal of only studying French through reading. I managed to do a lot of reading during my last couple of weeks in France because there was nothing else to do so I hope restricting myself in this way will yield some more impressive results. --------------------------------------------------------- 6 Week Challenge German: Week 3 Week 3: 28 h. 30 min. Total: 80 h. After almost three days of no studying whatsoever (I'm pretty sure that's a personal record), I finally got back into it when I discovered that my DVD box of season three of Grey's Anatomy (I was obsessed with this show back before it started sucking) has both French and German audio. Jackpot! I watched the entire third season (that's 25 episodes of 40 minutes) in two days, which is kind of scary and obsessive when I think about it now but it was fun and good practice at the time. Unfortunately, none of my other Grey's DVD's has German audio so this will have to be a one-time thing, which is probably a good thing. I also started reading Der Kleine Prinz but I got stranded after a couple of chapters because I was bored and because underlining and looking up words takes so much time. I'm also still reading Harry Potter but getting bored there as well. I really think I've read this book way too often. I can tell when a part of a sentence is missing or when a character's line is ever so slightly altered. I also started entering sentences from my phrasebook into Anki. I´ve never worked with a phrasebook before but I´m rather liking it so far. Every chapter is devoted to a particular grammatical difficulty, which is first explained in a couple of sentences and then illustrated with around twenty example sentences. The sentences are useful without being boring and interesting without being .. well, boring. I also added a couple of sentences I found on Tatoeba. I finally checked out that site a couple of days ago after seeing the name being mentioned a couple of times and it is fantastic! And so addicting too. After a couple of hours I had already added over three hundred Dutch translations. I'm still figuring out how it works, though, because some things are a bit mystifying to me, like the 123 sentences I apparently "own". --------------------------------------------------------- @ Solfrid Cristin: Thank you so much! I don't think there's anything wrong with complaining about MT students, even if you think you're not doing so great yourself. I'm sure I wasn't actually that good at Spanish myself but the students are supposedly stupid on purpose to make you feel smart so complaining about them only proves the efficiency of the course. Besides, despite all your claims to the contrary, I still refuse to believe your Russian is bad because it goes entirely against the image I have of you. :) By the way, I love your new profile photo. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6143 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 168 of 198 23 August 2011 at 12:21am | IP Logged | |||||
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Um...36 hours is hardly a bad week. You're doing great!
Your German phrasebook reminded me of my Japanese sentence pattern book. Aren't those just the most exciting things ever? There's something about typing up random sentences in a foreign language that's just so entertaining... Oh, and Tatoeba really is fabulous...and addicting! I started translating a few sentences on there one night and before I knew what had happened three hours had gone by. I think that site should have a little warning saying "Use responsibly." 1 person has voted this message useful |
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