sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5389 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish
| Message 97 of 336 12 November 2012 at 12:42am | IP Logged |
Something came up yesterday so I wasn't able to get to my Irish lessons for the week but
I have some extra time on Monday so I ought to be able to pencil it in. I wish there were
an Irish Memrise deck with audio then I could get that in. I'll hunt around for some
relatively simple Irish material with audio to put in LWT.
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emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map
| Message 98 of 336 12 November 2012 at 1:43pm | IP Logged |
sctroyenne wrote:
So Pimsleur II isn't so bad about the whole you're an American businessman asking a local woman to go for a drink thing. But sometimes Pimsleur is trying to turn me into a creeper. I want Pimsleur to teach the phrase "Take a hint":
Man (you're playing the man): Do you want to go to the movies with me?
Woman: I don't know. I have a lot of things to do.
Man: What things? What things do you have to do?
Woman: I have a lot of work.
Man: But tomorrow is Sunday. You have a lot of work to do on Sunday?
Woman: I also need to buy something.
Man: What do you need to buy?
Woman: I need to buy t-shirts.
Man: I know of a store but it's far from here. We can go together in my car. |
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Wow, she's totally not comfortable in that conversation, but she's too over-socialized to tell him how she really feels. And he treats dating like a door-to-door missionary trying to argue someone into joining a cult. The clincher is really the "You have a lot of work to do on Sunday?", where he's trying to use her polite, face-saving lies to badger her.
If this were an Assimil lesson, that woman one would get one more line of dialog. And it would be both hilarious, and at his expense.
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tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish
| Message 99 of 336 12 November 2012 at 1:58pm | IP Logged |
Speaking of funny dialogues and chicks - there's one in Assimil Russian where two people
are discussing how someone's nephew got married to a rather plump woman, and she's unsure
and believes he'll drop her like a stone. So the other person advises her "not to go on
any bridges, lay flowers at the memorials, etc and the cat's in the bag".
"Won't she take offence?"
"Main thing - explain it to her tactfully..."
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sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5389 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish
| Message 100 of 336 12 November 2012 at 6:50pm | IP Logged |
emk wrote:
The clincher is really the "You have a lot of work to do on Sunday?", where
he's trying to use her polite, face-saving lies to badger her.
If this were an Assimil lesson, that woman one would get one more line of dialog. And it
would be both hilarious, and at his expense. |
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Yeah that line really stuck out to me when it was prompted. And yeah, that's one of the
strengths of Assimil over Pimsleur - there's a sense of a storyline. Though Pimsleur has
some implied storylines if you read into it (which you'll end up doing as it's not
terribly exciting material). I'm at the point where they talk about their kids so not
expecting anymore aggressive flirting but I may be surprised.
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sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5389 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish
| Message 101 of 336 15 November 2012 at 10:19pm | IP Logged |
On track to finish Pimsleur II tonight meaning I should still be able to finish level III
by the end of the month. I also just signed up for italki's November challenge:
http://www.italki.com/language-challenge/ and scheduled my first lesson for tomorrow.
Given that there are plenty of teachers at the $10 and under range that means I'll get
50%-75% of my money back if I complete the challenge. I'll need to average one lesson
every other day to complete it.
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garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5205 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish
| Message 102 of 336 16 November 2012 at 12:51pm | IP Logged |
sctroyenne wrote:
On track to finish Pimsleur II tonight meaning I should still be able to finish level III
by the end of the month. I also just signed up for italki's November challenge:
http://www.italki.com/language-challenge/ and scheduled my first lesson for tomorrow.
Given that there are plenty of teachers at the $10 and under range that means I'll get
50%-75% of my money back if I complete the challenge. I'll need to average one lesson
every other day to complete it. |
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Damn, I wish I had heard about that challenge earlier... they kept that one quiet, I didn't even get an email about it although I'm an italki member. Not great timing though, November's such a busy month and I'm not quite convinced that I could fit in eight one-hour lessons in the next two weeks.
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sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5389 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish
| Message 103 of 336 17 November 2012 at 1:44am | IP Logged |
Had my first session today. It went pretty well - my first experience conversing in
Spanish for an hour. Even with 24 hours notice the teacher had conversation topics
prepared focusing on different areas (self-description, present, past, future,
conditional, giving opinion, etc). I found that with a paid conversation partner there
to guide me I could say a lot more than I thought I could. I spoke pretty slowly
overall, had some hesitations while figuring out how to say stuff, was limited to
saying basic things a lot of the time when I found I didn't have the language, and used
the rising, "questioning" inflection in my voice a lot. But on the bright side I
managed some pretty "advanced" statements (thanks mostly to help from French/English
and he didn't have to correct me very often. I'm a sort of mixture of beginning and
intermediate where I know some advanced things while completely stumped on basics. And
despite the initial discomfort of talking to strangers over Skype I can see that this
will be a great resource for conversation practice. Knowing that your partner is
willingly speaking to you to help you takes the anxiety off trying to speak to natives
"in the wild". I now have my next three sessions set up - we'll see where it will take
me!
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sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5389 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish
| Message 104 of 336 17 November 2012 at 9:01am | IP Logged |
I have Por ella soy Eva streaming over Hulu on my TV and it looks great. The subs/closed
captions are better than on TV/On Demand and it's much easier to repeat specific sections
than on On Demand. I would love it if there were a way to download the subtitles... I
found ways to do so on Youtube which opens up other possibilities for me but I'd love to
have them for this show seeing that I'm currently watching it.
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