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Ellasevia’s TAC 2011: Team Ohana | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6144 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 145 of 392 03 March 2011 at 12:11am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Alles wat het Nederlands betreft is alleen maar heerlijk, mijns inziens. Ik hou van het uiterlijk van de schrijftaal, vooral de dubbel klinkers en ‘ij’, en zijn uitspraak is ook heel leuk! Elke keer dat ik iets in deze taal hoor of zie, ben ik weer aan het stuiteren en hand-wapperen (dat doe ik ook heel vaak). En wat leuk dat jouw nieuwe Assimil boek ook vandaag binnengekomen is! Zoëven heb ik mijn kopie van La Pratique du Néerlandais in de brievenbus gevonden. Au, dat klinkt wel dat het heel wat pijn deed. Toen ik zes jaar oud was, reisde mijn gezin naar Frankrijk. Toen we in het zuiden waren (we hadden al Parijs en een stad in het centrum van het land bezocht), ben ik ook een paar meter hoog van een speelstructuur (play-structure?) gevallen en ik heb mijn sleutelbeen gebroken. Daarom mocht ik in de zee niet zwemmen toen we daarna naar Griekenland reisde, omdat ik een gipsverband moest dragen. Dankje voor de verbeteringen van mijn Nederlands. Straks ben ik aan het leren met mijn nieuwe boek! Edited by ellasevia on 03 March 2011 at 2:05am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5337 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 146 of 392 03 March 2011 at 12:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
"Kopie" betekent niet helemaal hetzelfde als "copy" maar heel letterlijk "iets dat gekopiëerd is" dus als je zegt dat je je kopie van Assimil hebt ontvangen klinkt het alsof iemand diens exemplaar voor je onder het kopieerapparaat heeft gelegd. Mijns inziens klinkt een beetje ouderwets maar dat vond je niet zo erg toch? :)
Het lijkt me echt afschuwelijk om in de zomer (tenminste, ik neem dat het in de zomer was) in Griekenland te zitten en niet te kunnen zwemmen! Ik heb ook een keer iets gebroken (m’n arm) maar gelukkig was dat in de herfst dus hoefde ik niet in de brandende hitte met een gipsverband rond te lopen. Maar ik heb er wel een handje van om ziek te zijn terwijl ik op vakantie ben. Tot nu toe heb ik twee vakanties in Italië en één in Egypte deels gemist omdat ik met koorts op bed lag. Heel irritant.
Graag gedaan. Ik ben vandaag ook begonnen aan m’n nieuwe boek, maar ik ben nog een beetje aan het aftasten hoe het precies in z’n werk gaat aangezien het de eerste keer is dat ik Assimil probeer. Hoeveel lessen doe jij per week? Edited by ReneeMona on 03 March 2011 at 12:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6144 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 147 of 392 05 March 2011 at 9:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Quarter 1: Swedish, Persian, Dutch   
Week 9: February 26 – March 4 Total Study Time This Week: 25.25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 175.5 hours Average Study Time This Week: 3.61 hours/day Average Study Time in 2011: 2.79 hours/day 
New color for March! Record week! I finally managed to break 25 hours of study time in one week (previous record: 23.5 hours), although I didn’t get around to German or Swahili this week, sadly. This success in hours is partially due to the fact that I had almost no school on Tuesday or Wednesday of this week, and had all morning to study and very little homework. Next week is exactly the same, so I’m excited. The other reason is that I’ve been able to purge some of the copious amounts of idle time that I spend doing nothing at all (literally). However, in doing so I have realized just how much this wasted time really amounts to and I have a long way to go yet before I can be completely efficient. But I digress. I did lots this week, and I’m quite liking March already!  SVENSKA
Total Study Time This Week: 6 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 34 hours - Assimil Lessons 55-59 (passive wave), 5-10 (active wave) - Translated a song, listening to music - Swedish Radio I actually exceeded my goals for Swedish by an hour this week, so I’m very happy about that! As it is now unofficially “Swedish Month,” my motivation for the language is soaring and everything seems to be going very well. I worked through several Assimil lessons this week in addition to listening to Swedish radio simultaneously in the background. Even in the background though, I could tell that I was picking up so much more of what was being said than just a few months ago – whole sections were intelligible to me at times, which was a huge thrill. While I was studying an Assimil lesson and listening to the radio a song came on that caught my attention and I really, really liked it. I immediately stopped what I was doing with Assimil and recorded part of the song and its information at the end with my microphone and was able to look it up. I found it along with the Swedish lyrics and translated the entire thing and I decided I liked it so much that I found another album by the same person and bought it straightaway (and am listening to it right now). This is really unusual for me because I usually listen to the same handful of songs for months and months at a time. So now I have some Swedish music to listen to. :)  فارسى
Total Study Time This Week: 4.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 33 hours - Assimil Lessons 45-50 (passive wave), 1-7 (active wave) Motivation has jumped right back up for Persian too – I just had to look at the French translation of some of the things I’ll be able to read in Persian near the end of the Assimil course and I was suddenly very eager to continue with Persian just from the prospect of someday reaching that level of comprehension in a language in which I didn’t know a single word seven months ago. Despite this I didn’t manage to meet my goal of five hours for Persian (just 15 minutes short, darn!) but I think the time I did spend was well-spent.  NEDERLANDS
Total Study Time This Week: 6.25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 37.75 hours - Dutch With Ease Lessons 76-84 (passive wave), 26-36 (active wave) - La Pratique du Néerlandais Lessons 1-2 Like I wrote about in my end-of-February post a few days ago, I finished the passive wave for Dutch With Ease this week and right on cue my copy of La Pratique du Néerlandais arrived in the mail on the next scheduled Dutch study day. I was walking back from school and saw the package sticking out my mailbox from half a block away and started running and screaming with joy (and bouncing, naturally) to go retrieve it. The lessons are a LOT longer than in Dutch With Ease (actually, about the same length as the lessons I’m doing now for my Swedish Assimil book) so they take much longer to get through. The texts seem to be mostly about the history, culture, or economy of the Netherlands and Belgium so it should be quite informative in that respect in addition to the Dutch it teaches. As for the audio, I could hear a difference in the accent of the actors (they’re Belgian), but I couldn’t quite figure out what the differences were. It just sounded off. Maar dat is toch goed, niet waar?  Français
Total Study Time This Week: 1.5 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 6 hours - Lots and lots of vocabulary This week I finally forced myself to input all of the French vocabulary which I’ve been collecting from my various Assimil courses into Anki. There was a ton of it because I had been letting it accumulate (out of simple laziness) for weeks. If this is any gauge of how much there was, it took me the full hour and a half to put it all in. I also intended to be listening to French radio at the same time for listening practice, but I couldn’t tear myself away from the Swedish music. I also meant to write a composition of some sort to post on Lang-8, but I didn’t get around to it. I’ll probably do that tomorrow.  Deutsch
Total Study Time This Week: 0 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 7 hours [none] I didn’t do any German study this week, but I wanted to talk about it anyways. I had to give my presentation on Matthias Grünewald in my class today and I’ve decided that these presentations are just not a good gauge of my speaking abilities. I really hate having to do presentations because I don’t like speaking in front of people (much less in a foreign language where I’m paranoid about saying things incorrectly) or having people look at me, and I just freeze up. Thankfully my class is only about nine people and several of them were absent today, but it was still terrifying. I felt like I couldn’t say anything right and it was just horrible. I had to analyze some of the artist’s paintings in German in front of the class, which is not something I’d be comfortable doing in English, but somehow I managed to mumble my way through it with horrible German grammar and pronunciation. I came out of it seriously doubting my linguistic abilities in German, so after school I had to speak to myself in it (alone) for a while to assure myself that I was in fact capable of doing it. But the same thing even happens when I have to speak in front of people in English, so I think I just have problems with speaking. I feel completely comfortable expressing myself through writing but speaking is something altogether different.  Română
Total Study Time This Week: 1.25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 8.25 hours - Teach Yourself Romanian Lesson 10 (+ BYKI) - Writing in Romanian I continued to work from lesson 10 from TY Romanian this week and finally finished it and began to study the vocabulary in BYKI. In case I haven’t mentioned this already, I decided to hold off on Assimil for a while in Romanian and Polish until I can advance a little further in some of the other courses. For the writing that I listed above, I think that was just writing to Mirab3lla here in my log… I should probably write something to my friend in Romania soon though.  Ελληνικά
Total Study Time This Week: 1 hour Total Study Time in 2011: 7.5 hours - “Greek lesson” / wasting time / reading This week’s result for Greek is quite pathetic. At my lesson with my grandmother this week I think I did some Greek in terms of reading and such, but I don’t think I really got much out of it. Most of it seemed to be a waste of time on pointless activities and vocabulary lists. I wanted to read a bit out of my Greek Harry Potter book when I got home to make up for the lake of substance in my lesson, but I decided to do some French and Dutch first and then it was too late. I’m counting the time spent as study time anyways.  Polski
Total Study Time This Week: 1.25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 15.75 hours - Spoken World Polish Lesson 2 I tackled the second lesson of Spoken World Polish this week, which was about family members. I actually knew most of the family member names already because I had added them into my Anki deck as part of some thematic vocabulary earlier in my studies. I just have to study the remainder of the vocabulary for the lesson and then I shall be done and free to move on to lesson three. Polish is fun. :)  Русский
Total Study Time This Week: 1 hour Total Study Time in 2011: 8.5 hours - Linguaphone Russian Lesson 3 I continued onto the third lesson of Linguaphone Russian this week. Um…yeah. I don’t think there’s much to comment on yet because it’s still quite boring in terms of the subject matter of the lessons (describing a family in a room). Oh! But Russian was the cause of my having to speak Portuguese with my US history teacher today. That sounds weird, but it makes sense, I swear. Shall I tell the story? Okay, story-time! We were working in small groups researching topics and my group’s topic happened to be the first Red Scare in the US after the Bolshevik Revolution, and I was assigned to research the Bolshevik Revolution itself for background. For that reason and also to amuse myself, I attempted to write “Bolshevik Revolution” in Russian at the top of my paper (I guessed Революция Большевиков; I have no idea if that’s right but probably not). When my teacher came to check on us, he saw that and asked if it was Russian, and then if I am learning Russian. I answered yes and he asked what else I was learning, because I had also opted to give a presentation in French last semester because I was more comfortable doing it if I knew most people wouldn’t understand me (don’t ask). Now like I explained under the German commentary, I really don’t like speaking in class or with people I don’t know well so I’ve spoken to my history teacher fewer than ten times over the entire year. Oh, and he’s from Portugal, by the way, and I sort-of had been meaning to speak with him in Portuguese since the beginning of the year but I was too shy to approach him. Anyways, he had asked me what else I was learning so obviously I wasn’t going to list all eleven of my current target languages because that would just seem ridiculous, so I chose a few of the ones I speak better and said Spanish, French, and Portuguese (forgetting until the words left my mouth that he’s Portuguese himself). I then realized what I had done to myself and was obligated to speak with him in Portuguese, which was extremely awkward. I had the whole freezing up thing happen again (like with German) and probably mangled everything I was trying to say, besides the fact that we were speaking two different dialects (I Brazilian and he European). Nevertheless, he seemed fairly impressed and surprised, but it was still not pleasant in the least. I blame Russian for having caught his attention. (Are you people wondering yet how I have managed to make any friends at all? Very good question, actually.)  日本語
Total Study Time This Week: 2.25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 11.75 hours - Smart.fm vocabulary (not quite 200) I tried to get through the next 200 words/sentences for the Smart.fm Core 2000, but I didn’t have time to with everything else I had to do. I’ll try to finish those along with the next 200 this weekend if I can. A couple questions about the Japanese I encountered: 彼はその詩を用いて自分の気持ちを伝えた。(He conveyed his feelings through poetry.) 彼は歌で自分の気持ちを表現した。 (He expressed his feelings in song.) What exactly is the difference here between 用いて and で? Would it still be correct to write “彼はその詩をで自分の気持ちを伝えた” and “彼は歌用いて自分の気持ちを表現した”?  漢字
Total Kanji Reviews This Week: 210 reviews Total Restudied Kanji This Week: 37 characters Total Restudied Kanji in 2011: 343 characters I was making a kanji study list using kanji.koohi.com for my teammate in the Japanese competition I’m going to do next month and was happy to see that I was able to recognize all but one or two of the kanji involved immediately although they were spread all throughout the RTK book. I can probably still read and recognize the majority of them still, but it’s writing many of them myself that I have difficulty with after my long hiatus from intensive kanji study, and that’s why I’m going back through all of them with kanji.koohii. OTHER  한국어: Relearned the Korean alphabet (한글) (mostly)
 Português: Read a story in Portuguese
I’m about to fall asleep on my keyboard now, so I’ll deal with preparing the graph tomorrow morning and post this then. God natt! !شب بخير Goedenacht! Edited by ellasevia on 06 March 2011 at 11:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ruskivyetr Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5483 days ago 769 posts - 962 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Russian, Polish, Modern Hebrew | Message 148 of 392 05 March 2011 at 10:39pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Ellasevia:
I've had to give multiple presentations in my German classes in school (again, easy A ;). Normally when I speak in German, I rattle away like a native speaker (despite my writing looking like literally translated English XP); however, the pressure of the presentation caused me to think in English, which is what I do when I write in German (it's a habit, which is why my English shows like red in blood in my written German). I could barely utter a sentence without a grammatical mistake, which I would then feel stupid about making, and then go back and repeat the entire sentence, making me feel like I couldn't speak a language that I had once been bilingual in. In my opinion though, "class presentations" don't really give a good overview of your conversational abilities. You are forced to speak informatively, without any input from another speaker, making production exponentially more difficult, even for a native speaker. It takes practice to become eloquent at giving a speech on the spot, even in your native language. Whenever I give a school presentation, I always have notecards that have bullet points highlighting what I want to say, even though I am normally very talkative and able to express my thoughts very eloquently. It has nothing to do with language skill. Your written German is very good (much better than mine). Even though you hesitate here and there and make a few mistakes in your spoken German, you speak extremely well (and not an average rating, this is from someone who is very picky about spoken German). You definitely deserve a B2 rating in German, and you shouldn't let any test (I don't care if it's a TestDaF or Goethe B2/C1 exam) or class presentation make you think otherwise. Edited by ruskivyetr on 05 March 2011 at 10:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Kounotori Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5346 days ago 136 posts - 264 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Russian Studies: Mandarin | Message 149 of 392 05 March 2011 at 11:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
You could say "революция большевиков" but it would then literally mean "Revolution of the Bolsheviks". If you want to form compound nouns such as "Bolshevik revolution" in Russian, then the first constituent of the phrase always has to be in an adjectival form (strange but true). Thus, Russians would rather say "большевистская революция"*, which is the direct equivalent of "Bolshevik revolution". The same rule applies to other compound nouns, such as "leather sofa" (кожаный диван, and not кожа диван, or even worse, кожадиван). *Actually, they'd rather use Октябрьская революция, but let's not quibble... 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5351 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 150 of 392 06 March 2011 at 10:01am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Ellasevia
After reading your story about your Portuguese History teacher, I was wondering which of your languages you actually get a chance to use in face-to-face conversation or even on skype? Off the top of my head I remember I know you've had the opportunity in Spanish, French, Greek, Swahili, German, Japanese and Portuguese, but what about Swedish, Persian, Russian and Polish? I'm sure I've left something out as your list is so long! Are there any languages that you've never had th opportunity to speak? I imagine Polish and Persian would the most likely of those. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| LazyLinguist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5605 days ago 105 posts - 125 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 151 of 392 06 March 2011 at 3:33pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Ellasevia,
I rediscovered HTLAL a couple weeks back after a 6 month or so absence. One of the first things I did was spend a good hour reading your log all the way through. You are a massive inspiration and a demonstration of the possible capabilities of people when they put their mind to it. I really enjoy your log and look forward to every update. Very good luck with all your studies, LazyLinguist 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5695 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 152 of 392 08 March 2011 at 10:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hey Philip, I have a random question for you. I've heard you rave about El Internado, which sounds like a totally awesome show. I'm looking forward to watching it when I eventually start Spanish! My question is, do you know which accent they speak in on that show (if it's any particular accent at all, and not just "general")? The reason I ask is that I'm considering going for a neutral Latin-American leaning-towards-Colombian accent when I do start Spanish. Muchas gracias in advance! :)
1 person has voted this message useful |
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