344 messages over 43 pages: << Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 18 ... 42 43 Next >>
Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 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 137 of 344 06 December 2012 at 9:39pm | IP Logged |
I don't :P
and thanks for the link...i prefer to read about Brazilian football in Portuguese though:P
1 person has voted this message useful
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5445 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek
| Message 138 of 344 07 December 2012 at 12:01am | IP Logged |
L'Egyptien
I alluded last time to struggles hitting a lot of people including kanewai. The retention just wasn't there. I wouldn't care about this if I could still stumble through the exercises, but I couldn't. So I retrenched. This week, I returned to week 2 and I have been doing a daily Scriptorium exercise for the full text of each chapter, in Egyptian hieroglyphic. This is actually the way I worked through Hayes' Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts. I'm now finding things sticking better. In particular, I've found that I can look at the notebook where I'm doing the Scriptorium exercise and sight read what I've written. I had hoped to be past "nefer hentiche pen" (This garden is beautiful) and "iw-wn rem em mw" (There is a fish in the water) by now. That said, the structures at least have started to sink in without a lot of explicit grammar study and the writing is coming not by virtue of careful penmanship exercises repeated but by writing the language down to say things, so in that sense it's still Assimil. It makes me wonder, though, if Assimil shouldn't use slightly different directions for languages you're learning to read than those you learn to speak.
1 person has voted this message useful
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4887 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish
| Message 139 of 344 07 December 2012 at 1:16am | IP Logged |
I retrenched too! Just a day ... I spent an hour yesterday transcribing the noun and verb
charts, and copying some of the exercises. I didn't try and memorize them, but writing
them out helped imprint some of it a bit better. Today's lesson was much easier in that I
can now recognize a few more patterns in the dialogues.
I think I'll work in a weekly scriptorum session too. I want to follow the 'method' as
closely as possible, but we also all need to find out what adjustments we need to make it
work.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Marishka Newbie United States Joined 5246 days ago 25 posts - 56 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French, Dutch
| Message 140 of 344 07 December 2012 at 3:49am | IP Logged |
Dutch With Ease Update
Lessons 29-35
Finding enough time for my Assimil project continued to be a problem this past week, so I tried adding an extra day to my study schedule. Instead of doing 7 lessons in 7 days, I did 7 lessons in 8 days.
I worked out great! I was able to get everything done, even the drills--all 667 sentences. And by taking dictation from the audio again, I retained so much more than I did on the previous group of lessons.
There's just one problem. In addition to all the activities that make up each lesson--listening, reading, repeating aloud, writing the sentences, and doing the exercises and drills--the instructions this week said to:
- Keep listening to former lessons whenever you have the opportunity.
- Read over the neuter nouns of each lesson as often as you can.
- Go back over the expressions in previous review lessons regularly. They are important because they illustrate idiomatic characteristics of the language.
Oh dear. I have dutifully added all the neuter nouns to my list as they have appeared in the lessons, but have not spent any time reading over that list. And I have barely had time to finish the lessons at hand, so I haven't revisited the audio or texts from any of the previous lessons.
What to do? Today I printed a copy of all the neuter nouns from the first 35 lessons. I watch a 30-minute news broadcast every evening, so I'm going to mute the sound during commercials and use that time to memorize these neuter nouns before the second wave starts in two weeks.
And speaking of the second wave, I've decided to split the passive and active lessons, doing a passive lesson one day and the corresponding active lesson the next day. That way, on active lesson days, besides doing the English-to-Dutch translations, I'll have time to do a thorough review of each lesson, paying close attention to things like the idiomatic expressions. I may even do a second round of the drills. Or not. :-)
1 person has voted this message useful
| melkior79 Newbie Japan Joined 4629 days ago 16 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Latin, French
| Message 141 of 344 07 December 2012 at 12:05pm | IP Logged |
New French With Ease Day 27 Lesson 23
I had a really busy week last week and missed 4 days of Assimil and am kicking myself.
I got back on the horse. I don't have time to catch up now so I will continue the pace of one lesson per day. I don't think I will miss anymore during the challenge now as the busiest part of my schedule if over.
I am following the method I set out before.
I get my pen out a bit more and try jotting down notes or sentence constructions as I come across them. These notes are not systematic, they are just scribblings.
Anyway, I like many others am feeling restricted by this method but I believe that Assimil works and patience and daily study are the keys.
Whilst I wanted to stick to just 30 minutes per day (up until now I have used a timer)
I am now going to allow myself to listen to past lessons over and over during "dead time" in the day. Ie on the bus or train or walking to work.
I too feel frustrated by limiting the techniques and time of study but that was the point of the experiment to me. Plus I don't really have time to do more than 30-40 mins per day.
Plus the book calls for memorization of vocabulary items. This however is not possible to if I study a lesson per day and stick to a 30 minute time limit.
Still I will focus more on "getting a feel" for the language and seeing how the English and French text correspond so my brain can map French out..
I hope to persevere in this experiment
Everyone
Bon Chance
2 persons have voted this message useful
| 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 142 of 344 07 December 2012 at 1:44pm | IP Logged |
Le Breton sans Peine (until lesson 35)
What I have learned so far is that the first mutation is really popular. It's not just
triggered by articles but also by half the prepositions, possessives and verbal
particles: and it can make words a little hard to understand sometimes just because
you're getting c'h instead of g, g instead of k, v instead of m, etc. Pretty much
everything forces a mutation, which also means dictionaries are nigh-on useless because
the basic form is practically never found in a text thanks to those mutations.
Oh well, c'est la vie, hein?
Furthermore I have learned to conjugate the verb "to have" in full in the present
tense, I can conjugate pretty much all verbs in the present tense, the habitual tense,
a sort of passé composé form, the progressive tense, and that's it. Time to learn some
more tenses such as a future or an imperfect or a conditional. I know they exist, let's
do this.
Oh I can form imperatives too.
Furthermore I have learned how to use the particle -se which is an epithet indicating
this or that. It's the only thing you use for demonstratives, so, in true Breton
fashion, it's really easy.
That means I am lacking three important grammatical things to speak fluent Breton:
1. Sufficient vocabulary
2. A handle on the other common verbal tenses
3. The mutations that are missing.
Furthermore I don't get any speaking practice, but it's an endangered language. C'est
la vie.
Edited by tarvos on 07 December 2012 at 1:45pm
1 person has voted this message useful
| Marishka Newbie United States Joined 5246 days ago 25 posts - 56 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French, Dutch
| Message 143 of 344 09 December 2012 at 5:01am | IP Logged |
I recently ordered a Dutch Complete CD Course from Linguaphone that was on sale for $119. I thought that it might be a good follow-up course to my Assimil course. It arrived a few days ago, and I finally got the chance this afternoon to look it over.
It comes with 3 books and 8 cds. I flipped through the book containing the Dutch transcripts of the audio and was surprised to find that I could easily read most of the dialogs, even though I've only done 37 lessons of Assimil--I'm not even halfway through the course! After completing my Assimil course, this Linguaphone course is going to be a piece of cake.
I'm certainly going to remember this the next time Assimil throws some convoluted sentence at me. You know the kind I mean--by the time you work your way to the end of the sentence, you've forgotten the first part. For anyone currently struggling with anything in Assimil, take heart! You are likely learning more than you think you are.
One of the texts in the Linguaphone course is a book of supplementary exercises, which corresponds to some of the audio on the cds. The introduction explains that the characters in the core material are from Amsterdam, while the scene changes to Belgium in the supplementary material, so those voices mostly have Belgian accents.
When I read that, I realized that I have no idea what kind of accent is used on the Dutch With Ease cds. Does anyone know? Bueller?
2 persons have voted this message useful
| sabotai Senior Member United States Joined 5880 days ago 391 posts - 489 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French
| Message 144 of 344 10 December 2012 at 1:05am | IP Logged |
Chinese With Ease
I may be the first casualty as I'm throwing in the towel. It's gotten to the point where it's no longer enjoyable. I feel overwhelmed by the lessons now as I'm just not absorbing enough of each lesson to carry over to the next. Perhaps if I were completely ignoring the characters, and only focused on listening, I'd be making more progress. But I wouldn't want to do that anyway.
I learned what I needed to learn with this experiment. It was a great motivator to get me to do what I had thought of doing for awhile. Good luck to every one else.
4 persons have voted this message useful
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum - You cannot reply to topics in this forum - You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum - You cannot create polls in this forum - You cannot vote in polls in this forum
This page was generated in 0.4531 seconds.
DHTML Menu By Milonic JavaScript
|