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One Week Challenge | ||
Tags: Time to learn | Beginner | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| zhanglong Senior Member United States Joined 4930 days ago 322 posts - 427 votes  Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 57 of 70 24 December 2011 at 3:11am | IP Logged | ||
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Coming to the end of this particular challenge, I realized a few things.
1) Russian is not as "hard" as Cantonese, at least in terms of available learning materials. 2) Russian is still "hard"! Just like any language, Russian is complex and can offer endless opportunities to learn and grow, even if you are a native speaker and you are only studying Russian. 3) Pimsleur makes it so easy to *sound* like a native, even if you have no idea what you are saying or why you are saying it. 4) Learning the little bit of Russian I do have now, cost me a great deal of time and energy, but if I don't maintain it, it will disappear shortly. 5) There is no substitute for a native speaker, an immersive environment, or audio examples. Learning to speak a language through a book is like learning to swim in the desert. 6) Since the U.S. will be hitching rides to the International Space Station on Russian spacecraft, a new requirement for all Astronauts will be to learn Russian. 7) I will slow down the pace of Russian learning and see how long I can continue learning it as a past-time. It's a fun break from the frustrations of tonal languages, but I know that Russian is complex in different ways. Not easier than Asian languages, just different. 8) Maybe I will join the Russian TAC group or start a new thread for Russian in this forum. 9) True A2 level speaking is not possible in a week, of course, but I learned a lot more Russian than I would have, had I not raised the bar so high. In my humble opinion, Pimsleur and a good phrasebook can allow you to mimic and parrot a certain limited range of language that gives the illusion that you are more advanced. I may be able to hold my own in a five minute conversation with a native speaker, but a half hour? Not. quite. yet. Thank you for all of your suggestions and tips. They were so useful! До свидания! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Emily96 Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4429 days ago 270 posts - 342 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Finnish, Latin | Message 58 of 70 25 March 2013 at 3:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm tempted to try this, but for a language like portuguese that would be easy considering the languages i already
know. Unfortunately spring break just ended and i don't know when i'll next get time off... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zhanglong Senior Member United States Joined 4930 days ago 322 posts - 427 votes Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 59 of 70 25 March 2013 at 4:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've since thought that a "One Week Challenge" is useful for a language that you're already studying.
Since many people here are self-learners, we often have to create our own curriculum, find our own materials, set our own goals, and create our own signposts along the way. It's a lot more work than just taking a course somewhere, but it's actually very rewarding to be in complete command of your own learning experience. Having said that, setting reasonable goals is essential to success. I've thought that setting a one-week goal of learning how to use a particular feature of a language, or more importantly, learning how to do a particular task, is very doable in a week. You can say "In 7 days, I will be able to order a meal in a restaurant" or "In 7 days, I will learn how to use the subjunctive to talk about hypothetical situations". As long as it is task-based, rather than textbook chapter-based, it will seem more interesting and valuable. Just my opinion, though... 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 60 of 70 25 March 2013 at 6:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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Reminds me on almost the only article I enjoyed from Benny.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Emily96 Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4429 days ago 270 posts - 342 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Finnish, Latin | Message 61 of 70 26 March 2013 at 12:08am | IP Logged | ||
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Interesting article. I agree that it would be useful to break down exactly what you wish to accomplish in the seven
days, however i really hope that it will not take me a week to learn how to order in a restaurant... or even to use the subjunctive. I feel that either of these could be learned in an afternoon. I'm tentatively setting my one week challenge to begin on thursday, april 18, because i have no school on that friday, and would have three days in a row to devote almost entirely to portuguese. Unless some all day commitment comes up for that weekend, i think it would be perfect. That means i need two things: a native to test me at the end so i'll have some idea of how far i've come and a bunch of material to use! So far all i've got is the BBC website - http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/portuguese/ . Should i start a new thread about this? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zhanglong Senior Member United States Joined 4930 days ago 322 posts - 427 votes Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 62 of 70 26 March 2013 at 6:36pm | IP Logged | ||
That would be a good idea; my suggestion? Call it "One Week Challenge - Portuguese" or some such. Best of luck! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| LangOfChildren Tetraglot Groupie Germany Joined 5428 days ago 82 posts - 141 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Swedish Studies: Mandarin, Japanese, Thai, Russian | Message 63 of 70 26 March 2013 at 9:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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Like the great Siomotteikiru — PBUH (peace be upon her :) ) — I believe that it's possible to learn a language in a week. I do not have proof (yet), but it is my dream to find the method that lets me accomplish this goal.
I'm surprised nobody suggested L-R (Volte only mentioned having used it for learning the Cyrillic alphabet). If you can manage 12 hours of study per day, that means you can get ~80 hours of study done in a week. Almost all of this would be spent doing L-R I think. I will have the chance to work on a language full-time for 4-5 days soon. I'll be going with a language I have no prior knowledge in. I'll report back if anything interesting happens. In any case, I wish that people stopped saying "You can't do it in a week". It doesn't take a "savant" (which Daniel Tammet might not even be) to accomplish such a feat. Rather, it takes love and lots of exposure. (Yes, I know, you have heard that a thousand times before.) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Emily96 Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4429 days ago 270 posts - 342 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Finnish, Latin | Message 64 of 70 09 April 2013 at 5:26am | IP Logged | ||
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Here's the link to the new thread i've just opened:
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=35686&PN=1&TPN=1 Thanks for the encouragement LangOfChildren! 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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