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WingSuet’s log (TAC 2015 - Team Rätsel) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| WingSuet Triglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 5348 days ago 169 posts - 211 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: Cantonese | Message 65 of 116 07 August 2012 at 12:11pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I guess it really depends on whether you study all languages every day and how much. If you only manage to study one language ten minutes or less a day because you spend more time on the other languages, then you won't progress much at all. That's been the case lately for Cantonese, which is why I started missing spending all my time on Cantonese, which I did before. I'm trying to spend equally long time on all my languages, but I usually only have time for two long study sessions a day and Cantonese is the language that usually suffers.
I find that learning the pronunciation of the character helps me remembering what the character means. When trying to read texts in characters it makes more sense to read them out with their pronunciation so that you'd be reading in that language, rather than just translating right away. When I was in Hong Kong I could sometimes understand character combinations I had never seen before by reading them out loud and realizing I had learned the word before, only not the characters together. For example, I knew how to say "airport" in Cantonese, but didn't know how to write it. I did know the characters separately, so when reading the pronunciation 'fei1 gei1 cheung4' I understood it means 'airport'. Does that make sense?
Yeah, that's one downside to Memrise, I'd also like to skip some words that don't seem very useful, but many of them are. I like having two sources where I find new words. Using native material is certainly more interesting, but there are also many difficult words which you still need to know to understand the texts. Also, even though I understand the easier words when I'm reading them, I can usually not remember them out of context. Memrise allows me to really learn those easy words and not just understand them passively. Reading in German is actually not too difficult right now. I read a book in the language before and that really increased my reading ability in the language. I can usually guess what many words mean even if I haven't seen them before, especially if they are similar to my own language, Swedish. But I still need to look up a few words in each page, but I always do that afterwards to not interrupt my reading. I haven't used subtitles in my target language much, so I can't really comment on whether it's easier or not. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| WingSuet Triglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 5348 days ago 169 posts - 211 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: Cantonese | Message 66 of 116 21 August 2012 at 12:07pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I'm going on vacation for a week, so I won't have much time for language study. I'm
going to bring my book in German though and I have dialogues in Cantonese on my mp3 so I hope to get some studying done at least. Here is what I've been doing the last couple of weeks. Cantonese I've now finally finished with all Teach Yourself units. It feels great to finally be done with it! I've now started on Colloquial Cantonese and finished the first lesson. These lessons are shorter than in TY and there are fewer of them so I should be able to finish this course quicker. I've also finally started going through the Chinese characters that I used to know again. I've reviewed about 300 of them so far, still more than half to go :P. Spanish Not much done here, I've continued my deck on Memrise and seen about 1000 cards so far, only 3000 to go... German I've seen all the cards from my deck on Memrise, now I just need to harvest them all. I'm thinking about starting another deck, but I need to decide which one first. I've ordered a grammar book that I need for my course this autumn, thought I would go through some of it before I start as I've forgotten a lot of the essentials. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| WingSuet Triglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 5348 days ago 169 posts - 211 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: Cantonese | Message 67 of 116 13 September 2012 at 8:34pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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And that was the end of the 6 weeks challenge. I ended up on 24th place in the target
language part with 2197 points (36 h 37 min), and 27th place in the all languages part with 3367 points (56 h 7 min). I'm pretty happy with the score, this was my best challenge when I didn't have language classes during the whole challenge (only a few classes the last week). So the German course started last week, one whole semester with only German, yay! :D The teachers started the semester by speaking nothing but German on the first introduction day. I was a little surprised, but I think it's really good! This way we get to really hear the language a lot and get used to it. I understand most of what they say (except for the first history lesson, that one was tough!), but I noticed that I'm horrible at speaking! Hopefully I will get better at that soon... We only have classes three times a week, but we got a lot of homework! I need to read two short stories in German by Monday, do homework for the grammar course by Tuesday and read a chapter in the German history book by Wednesday. Especially the history book is very difficult. But with all this exposure to the language I should be able to learn a lot during this semester :D 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| WingSuet Triglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 5348 days ago 169 posts - 211 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: Cantonese | Message 68 of 116 16 November 2012 at 2:10pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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It's really about time for an update, but at least it's learning German that has made
me so busy! As I've said before, I'm studying German full time at University, and I feel that I've made so much progress! From the first week when I could barely introduce myself and had forgotten all vocabulary, to now when I can discuss the content and message of books and hold a long conversation in German! :) And all this in only a few months! I wonder then what another year of German studies can do! Yesterday I had an oral exam in the literature and the conversational module and was approved in both, and I almost reached the higher grade (there are only two approved grades at the University in Sweden) :D It was such a relief, as I was terrified before the exam! I got some really good feedback too so now I feel more sure of what I can and can't do in the language, and my teacher told me she believes I have a lot of potential! One thing I need to approve is my grammar when I'm speaking, my grammar is so much better when writing. Somehow when I'm speaking I'm so concentrated at remembering the words and getting my point across that I don't have time to worry about the right case and article. Advice would be appreciated on how to deal with this! I also got back the result from the German history test (to be written entirely in German) and was really pleased to be approved there too with 60 points out of 75. I was a little tired of German and not sure of my abilities before this, but now I feel so much more motivated and confident and eager to learn more! I also found some good German Rock music, I haven't managed to find any before and it really helps me with the motivation! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| WingSuet Triglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 5348 days ago 169 posts - 211 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: Cantonese | Message 69 of 116 03 December 2012 at 11:59am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Only two weeks left of my German course, I have still two exams to write: Translation
and grammar. I guess there isn't much to prepare for the translation exam as I don't know what text we will have to translate. I could practise some vocabulary and hope that it will be the right one, and I could study some grammar. That way I'd be preparing for my grammar exam at the same time. So this is what I've been doing the past week: Mandarin and Spanish Just been keeping up on Mnemosyne, 1-3 minutes per day is enough to go through all the cards. Cantonese I've tried catching up on all the cards on Mnemosyne. Once you stop going through them and you have hundreds of cards waiting for you, it's harder to actually get it done. Still got about 300 to go through and 100 to relearn. German 8.18 hours Well, this is where my focus has been of course, since I have so much to do for my course. This week I have been reading the book Scherbenpark by Alina Bronsky for my course "Litterature for young people". I find the book really good, mainly because of how it's written, although I don't think it's really for young people. We only had a week to read it, so I didn't have time to finish it before I had to hand in a one page report on it. We had to pick a scene or a character in the book and explain why it's an important part of the book. This is the third analysis of this kind we did in this course, the other two books were "Rico, Oskar und die Tieferschatten" by Andreas Steinhöfel and "Die wilden Hühner und die Liebe" by Cornelia Funke. I also watched Pocahontas in German :) At first I kept comparing the voices to those of the Swedish version that I grew up with, and thus kept complaining about them not being as good as the Swedish ones, but once I stopped comparing them in my head and started concentrating on the German voices, they were actually not that bad! Although John Smith really sings terribly in German :P I found it not too difficult to understand, although I had some help from already knowing many of the lines in Swedish. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| WingSuet Triglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 5348 days ago 169 posts - 211 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: Cantonese | Message 70 of 116 12 December 2012 at 10:48pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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In a few days I have my final exam in German, so I’m sitting down to study some
Cantonese :P Maybe that’s not the smartest thing to do, but after all this time studying only German, I really miss the nice sound of the tones and the beauty of the Chinese characters! I found my old notebook that I've been writing in since when I first began learning Cantonese. It was really a trip down memory lane! At the beginning I had written down notes on Pimsleur, which was the first program I used to learn Cantonese. I immediately noticed a few mistakes, but by then I didn't really know how to transcribe Cantonese, and I had to guess the tones. I've updated it a few times since then, but some mistakes are still there :P I had lots of notes about Chinese characters and even lyrics to a Cantonese song. It was fun to go back in time and remember my little obsessity ^^. Back then I was so into the language, more than I've ever been in a language! It made me think what a waste all that time would be if I didn't keep at it. So now I've put on my favourite Cantonese band Soler and sat down to review the characters once again. :) Oh, I forgot to tell you how my translation exam went! We had to translate a Swedish text into German. I think I did okay, hopefully it will be enough to pass. I already know some mistakes I did and there were a few words that I didn't know and couldn't work my way around, such as "boot". But still, I think I did good, but I'll know for sure when I get the results. Edited by WingSuet on 12 December 2012 at 11:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| WingSuet Triglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 5348 days ago 169 posts - 211 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: Cantonese | Message 71 of 116 17 January 2013 at 9:02pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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TAC 2013
This will be my first update for TAC 2013. Yesterday we had an introduction to the German university course, continuing from last semester. We met our new teacher, who is from Germany, and she seems really nice! This semester we will practise translation, grammar, conversation and writing essays. We will also study history of German literature, fonetics and history of the German language, all of which I'm really looking forward to! We'll also be reading NINE books this semester: Kleiner Mann - Was nun? by Hans Fallada Effi Briest - Theodor Fontane Homo Faber - Max Frisch Die Leiden des jungen Werther - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Bahnwärter Thiel - Gerhard Hauptmann Jugend ohne Gott - Ödön von Horvath Das Urteil und andere Erzählungen - Franz Kafka Kleider machen Leute - Gottfried Keller Der Vorleser - Bernhard Schlink The first book, Kleider machen Leute, we have until Tuesday, but it's only about 60 pages, so it shouldn't be a problem. This semester I'll really try not to fall behind in my reading like I did last year. Edited by WingSuet on 21 January 2013 at 11:59am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| BAnna Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4619 days ago 409 posts - 616 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Turkish | Message 72 of 116 20 January 2013 at 6:59pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Please let us know how you like those books. Sounds like a great class! Welcome to Schnitzel, BTW.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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