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Homogenik TAC 2012 Polish Team Żubr | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Homogenik Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4826 days ago 314 posts - 407 votes  Speaks: French*, English Studies: Polish, Mandarin | Message 105 of 115 13 October 2012 at 3:51am | IP Logged | ||
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I finally finished my polish vocabulary review and can move on to the last few lessons of my book. Finally! With all
the things I have to do, it took a long time. It mostly took a long time, I think, because I like to go through my recently purchased dictionaries. My eye slips through the entries and I keep adding new words to my Anki deck. I try to use more and more my native dictionaries, trying to understand the definitions in polish. I think that must be quite helpful in the long run and it's certainly more interesting. My chinese class is going well. I keep progressing and the whole experience is amusing. It's going at a nice rhythm, especially considering we're learning to write and speak at the same time (some classes, I know, teach both separately). I love writing in chinese :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Homogenik Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4826 days ago 314 posts - 407 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Polish, Mandarin | Message 106 of 115 15 October 2012 at 4:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yesterday, I worked obsessively on putting up a proper chinese Anki deck with the vocabulary I currently possess.
It's only 298 words or characters (some entries are combination of characters obviously) but since I can write all of them, I consider it pretty good. I can recognize and use more words than that but I only include the ones I can actually write. As for my polish deck, which I've been building for a while now, I'm up to 4432 words or expressions (and I include derivatives like verbs, but no conjugations, and their corresponding adjectives, adverbs, and so on). I have no specific goal in mind as far as quantity is concerned, this is just a way for me to keep working on vocabulary building without too much administration. Anki has the merit of simplicity and I certainly like that. I find it to be something easy to do each day, even for only 10 minutes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Homogenik Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4826 days ago 314 posts - 407 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Polish, Mandarin | Message 107 of 115 23 October 2012 at 3:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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I bought a few chinese books lately. I ordered the 现代汉语词典 (Xiandai hanyu cidian), which is a
classical chinese only dictionary. It didn't much but a few pages are cut. I'll try to find some transparent glue to fix it. I also bought a chinese grammar book but I forget the title now. It's also all in chinese. I won't be able to use it right now, but later it should come in handy. On impulse, last night I bought the Dictionnaire kuaisu shunchang. Chinois - français. Les caractères chinois tout naturellement accessibles by Roland Sanfaçon. The first time I saw it, I was skeptical. But yesterday I decided to look through it at the library and I was convinced : it is amazing. I have never seen another dictionary like it for chinese. It's very complex and complicated to understand at first because it's completely unfamiliar and unlike any other chinese dictionary. What makes it amazing is the huge amount of useful information it features (of course for french speakers). It translates only from chinese to french, contains both simplified and classical characters, features many different translations (unlike the dreaded Larousse chinois-français dictionary...). But that's just basic stuff. What's special is that each entry notes the order in which to write the character (for instance, 华 is accompanied by 人七十 and basic but detailed order of traits explanations are put at the end of the book). Also, pinyin is included as is the radical. The main way to search for characters is not by pinyin but by the characters themselves. It postulates that by identifying the first two parts of a characters, one can find the character they are looking for very quickly. I tried it last night after a while of reading the intro and parts of the book and it seemed to be working very well. I'm not familiar with it yet though but I expect to be soon. The dictionary also features a pinyin index if one wants to look for a character in the traditional way. It also features an index to look for characters based on the radical, as most dictionaries do. That's the great thing about the dictionary : it covers every ground. It also groups the same characters together. Many of those have different pronunciations and meanings and are thus separated in other chinese dictionaries. Here, when you find the character for 数, you find both shǔ (to count) and shù (number) together. Of course, 数 isn't that confusing, but other cases are. As for criticism, at first glance I would say the font chosen and the printing is subpar, which is a shame. Of course, it does not feature a français-chinois part, but that's hardly important as other dictionaries do this fine. I supppose it's more an intermediate, advanced dictionary, but even though I'm not there yet, I find it fascinating and absolutely exciting. Edited by Homogenik on 23 October 2012 at 3:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Homogenik Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4826 days ago 314 posts - 407 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Polish, Mandarin | Message 108 of 115 23 October 2012 at 10:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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I found (finally!) an English-polish and polish-english dictionary for the dictionary.app Mac application. I got it here:
http://mysite.mweb.co.za/residents/clasqm/mac-os-x-dictionar ies/east-european-languages/polish.html There really is a lack of good polish dictionaries for Mac though. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Homogenik Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4826 days ago 314 posts - 407 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Polish, Mandarin | Message 109 of 115 08 November 2012 at 5:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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I had my first chinese exam two weeks ago and I got my results yesterday. I had 100% so that makes me less
nervous about that class. I enjoy it although it does seem to be a little slow for me, that's only because I had already begun chinese before. I'll continue on the second level next session and it should be more challenging. The teacher is fine actually. I thought she was a little disorganized at the beginning, but she's cool and amusing. The textbook we use is full of errors though so that's annoying... I'm taking notes and I'll send a letter to the Department when I'm done. As for polish, I'm getting kind of swamped by my Anki deck which refuses to clear up. There's always at least 300 words a day. And I have so many leeches, it's horrible. But I don't give up on that. I'm finishing up my workbook lessons and can't wait to move on to another. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Mooby Senior Member Scotland Joined 6107 days ago 707 posts - 1220 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Polish | Message 110 of 115 08 November 2012 at 6:35pm | IP Logged | ||
Ja też !! My main Anki deck was 800+ cards overdue this morning. Glad you're making progress. Tak trzymać 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Homogenik Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4826 days ago 314 posts - 407 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Polish, Mandarin | Message 111 of 115 09 November 2012 at 6:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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Oh my, 800, now that's just a depression waiting to happen ;)
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Homogenik Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4826 days ago 314 posts - 407 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Polish, Mandarin | Message 112 of 115 14 November 2012 at 3:14am | IP Logged | ||
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Well I've come to the realization that I've gotten better at both polish and chinese. I've started to read Anna
Prucnal's biography (my friend whose house I stayed at during my trip in Warsaw bought it for me), its polish edition, and although I don't understand everything (far from it), I get most of it, enough to follow whatever is being told or described. At the beginning, I started searching for every unknown word in the dictionary like a mentally afflicted dope (I have enough of that on my resume for now), but now I just go through sentences and pages without opening a single other book or website. I read and that is all. That's how you learn anyway. It's impossible to get anywhere in a book with any speed while looking up everything. I think it's normal to understand by supposition what many words mean and that's what I intend to do (that's what I do anyway when I read Proust in french...). And I love Anna (and met her personally once) so that makes the reading even more interesting. As for chinese, I did a lot of work today but it hardly felt like it. I just wrote sentences using certain verbs, such as 去，要，想 and so on, with a verb or a noun (which sometimes changes the meaning, as for 想 which means either to want to do something or to think of someone), and it made for a great review of all or a lot of the vocabulary I have learned until now. It made me feel more competent and I'm really glad to be able to write what I can in chinese with a certain ease (I feel like I write easily what I know and that's comforting). Also, I've grown accustomed to using dictionaries and looking for chinese words and characters in various ways. I actually enjoy that too much and have to keep from looking up words and adding them to my Anki deck. Time to time I go the a local store owned by chinese people and talk a few words in chinese (just hi, thank you, goodbye, and so on). That always feels rewarding no matter how little it seems objectively. I really surprised the cashier when I say 谢谢 您. It was probably too much because 您, as I understand it, is restricted to very official situations and might have seemed overly polite in the circumstance but it was funny (in my head). Edited by Homogenik on 14 November 2012 at 3:18am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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