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Cristina’s way TAC 2013 TEAM MIR/SPARTA | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5393 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 57 of 248 06 January 2013 at 11:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
That might make you rich in Egypt, but #1) How would you get them home? and #2) What use, exactly, would a million camels have in Norway? I think I would ask for a more globally accepted form of payment. Besides, you shouldn't be selling your daughter off yet. She's only 13. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5224 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 58 of 248 06 January 2013 at 11:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Congratulations on a very strong start, captain!
While i wouldn't discuss a superior officer's decision to make the pilot walk the plank, I'd recommend having someone as replacement at the helm before you actually do so -- we're all on the same boat and, in space, no one can hear *us* scream ;)
About the subject, I'd be inclined to think the opposite. Thinly veiled 'political' pamphlets can have an entertaining side as well, but they should never be aimed for children's consumption. Anyway, do you mean without English or Russian subtitles? Edit: and Kerrie's right -- you'll probably want to be paid in a more convenient way and you'll probably get a better price a bit later -- can't you wait? ;) Edited by mrwarper on 06 January 2013 at 11:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5332 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 59 of 248 07 January 2013 at 12:31am | IP Logged | |||||
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@ Kerrie: I would not sell her for all the camels in the world, but apparently the going rate is between 200-500
camels, so I figured a million camels would be too steep a prize for anyone. I strongly suspect that the offers are more to give the tourists a thrill than actually a serious bid anyway. @mrwarper: I am reconsidering the plank thing :-) I mean without any subtitles of any kind. 99% of the films I have do not have any subtitles, so I just watch them and try to understand from them what I can. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4663 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 60 of 248 07 January 2013 at 12:39am | IP Logged | |||||
It's really great that you could finish that book, even if you didn't like it. That's impressive. :-) I liked Flaubert in translation years ago, so maybe I will give him a try in French now. And I have an English translation of Madame Bovary (which I have never read), so I could always use that if I got stuck. Still probably too advanced for me yet, though. Edited by tastyonions on 07 January 2013 at 12:40am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5224 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 61 of 248 07 January 2013 at 12:55am | IP Logged | |||||
I asked it the wrong way. When you say 'doing it without subtitles can be puzzling' I immediately think it's less puzzling for you with subtitles on. And then the question is, when you do use them subs, is it Russian or English? I was wondering because you've said plenty of times reading Russian isn't very easy for you but I'm not sure how well I'd do watching a film in foreign language A with subtitles in foreign language B. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5332 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 62 of 248 07 January 2013 at 2:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
Obviously I prefer it with subtitles in a language I actually understand, but given the choice between no subtitles and Russian subtitles, I would take the Russian subtitles. Yesterday I tried watching 21 Jump Street in English with French subtitles. It pysically hurt. Not to mention the fact that my daughter called me a pedophile for saying Johnny Depp was hot. "How can that be, I protested, he is 49 years old!" "Yes", she said, but he was young in the film". "So was I at the time", said I. "Yes, but you are old now". Grumph... That's what I get for trying to show them some of the series from my youth. I should have know that this was an unwinnable one. @tastyonions: Yes, I was quite happy with myself for finishing that book. I can not count how many times I have tried to read it, and just not been able too. If you liked it in Englsih I would have a go at it in French as well - it is not difficult as such, it is just full of superflous words. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5332 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 63 of 248 14 January 2013 at 4:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
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JANUARY 7TH TO JANUARY 14TH
This has been - a weird week. I have done lots of Russian lessons, lots of talking Spanish, lots of French series and lots of listening to Greek - but very little in the way of formal studies. RUSSIAN This has been "Russian class week". I have a very erratic Russian class schedule. I can do 5 classes one week, then go 18 months without any classes at all and then do 20 classes in one month and 4 the next. It is usually connected to my work, which also tends to be a bit chaotic, so it is very difficult to be consistent with a couple of classes a week. This week I have however done 13 classes, with two different teachers, so I have almost had an overdose. You may wonder why two different teachers - well that is partly because I am getting a little bored having the same one for so long, and also in order to get the repetition I need. I can then do some of the same material with both, and appear just a tad less stupid to at least one of them :-) I have also worked a lot on LanguageSponge's challenges. They may not seem all that challenging in the beginning, but when you cannot write Russian at all, it takes quite some time to do them. I have found them intensely motivating, and I feel like I learn more by doing them than almost any other activity I can do. I am definitely going for the title of Tsarina here - one baby step at the time :-). I had a massive disappointment on Saturday, because I had planned to see "War and Peace" with my sister - the 7 hour Soviet version which is supposed to be the supreme one- that they were showing at a film club in Oslo. We wanted to make sure that we would get tickets, so we went the day before the showing, only to be told that all tickets had been sold out two days before. Whoever would have thought that there were that many people in Oslo who would be willing to sit through a 7-hour film in Russian? GREEK In Greek I am mostly listening to Pimsleur again and again, not getting over the total beauty of this language. I am on lesson 5 now. I like Pimsleur because it makes you speak - and gives you the feeling of actually getting somewhere. I have also done a little Michel Thomas - currently still at lesson 4, and I have started looking at lesson 3 of Assimil. I also discovered to my delight that I could easily write Greek into Anki on my PC. I thought that this would not be possible, because I do not have an external keyboard in Greek, but it turned out that writing Greek is a piece of cake, since almost all the letters correspond to ours on the keyboard, (same sound / same letter) and the few which do not are easy to remember. I was also delighted to get "Teach yourself to read and write in Greek" this week, so I am diving into it with all my enthusiasm - I think I have read about 20 pages by now. I like it, but one of the things it said puzzled me. It said that the reason why there were so many letters and combinations of letters which were pronounced the same, was that many Greek words sounded the same but had different meanings, and you needed different spellings to keep them apart. That sounds totally illogical to me. I would think it made more sense that what is today the same sounds (the many ways of spelling e and i for instance) was once upon a time different sounds in previous versions of Greek, and the words have simply kept their old spelling. So we do not have different spellings for the same sounds in order to keep the words apart, but we have the same spelling for different sounds because the pronunciation has changed/been simplified. Am I totally wrong here? FRENCH I am still making my daughters watch a variety of French series - so I have also watched 2 episodes of "How I met your Mother" and 6 episodes of "Castle". Not intellectual, but the masses of input I am getting did wonders for my French last year, so I go on. As long as I do it as a family activity I have to watch something the girls want to see, and that rules out most original French material. Either the content is of no interest to them, or I can't get it with English subtitles. ITALIAN/GERMAN All is quiet on the Eastern front :-) SPANISH Since I did not get to see War and Peace I decided to accept an invitation from my Peruvian friend to bring a Romanian friend over for coffe. When we got there she had a Cuban friend there, and they had prepared dinner, so the afternoon visit which started at 4.30, ended up being a full evening thing which went on until 1.30 in the morning. We laughed and we shared stories of all possible sorts. With Norwegian friends there are som subject matters you simply do not touch, but before the evening was over we had touched, discussed and analyzed most topics relevant to 4 women between 40 and 50. I could not help thinking how strange it was to sit there, one Romanian who had grown up under Ceaucesco, with lack of food and commodities, and always scared of the Securitate, one Peruvian who had grown up in a wealthy family in Lima, I who grew up in the 60ies, when Norway had still not become a rich country, and where most of my nice dresses came in a package from my cousin in America, but who had always had enough food on the table and who have never experienced any political unrest and one who had grown up under Castro eating only one proper meal a day, had suffered persecution and had ultimately had to flee her home country. We heard stories of the practise of Santoria from Cuba including leaving dead hens at the graveyeard at midnight and laughed so much that I do not know how we did not choke. It is hard to imagine 4 more different backgrounds, and I was the only one who knew all of them when the evening started, and yet because we are all fluent in Spanish, we could talk like we had known each other all our lives, and we had a fantastic time. And whenever someone start saying that all we need is English, then evenings like this are what tells me that learning other languages is important too. These women all speak English to some degree, and a bit of Norwegian, but we would never ever had had that kind of connection if we were to use English only. With some other conversations I had in Spanish during the week, it was quite satisfactory linguistically. As well:-) We even did a bit of Norwegian, because they are all struggling with the pronunciation. It is tough to go from Spanish to Norwegian, particularly when languages is not exactly your hobby. At the same time it is so important to them, that I am considering to give them some tutoring. They all struggle either in their professional life or to get into professional life because of their problems with the pronunciation. Language This week Russian 13 hours 30 min Greek 5 hours 20 minutes French 3 hours 20 minutes German - Italian - Spanish 10 hours 40 minutes Arabic - Norwegian - Language Total ; Russian 17 hours Greek 17 h 20 m French 15 h 50 m German 0 Italian 0.30 & nbsp; Spanish 22.10 Arabic 1.10 &n bsp; Norwegian 0.30 I have no idea how much I will get done this coming week, since I am on holiday in Egypt - it could go both ways. I am obviously bringing a ton of study material, but since I am going alone with my daughter I do not know how much I will actually get done. I have bought both her and me a portable DVD player on the January sales for 70 dollars for the two of them, so I am trusting that I will get to see some Russian films. Good luck to everyone in their studies this week! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| modus.irrealis Bilingual Triglot Newbie Canada Joined 5876 days ago 29 posts - 37 votes Speaks: English*, Greek*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Danish, Turkish | Message 64 of 248 14 January 2013 at 4:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
No, you are right. Ancient Greek was extremely rich in vowels and diphthongs and the modern spelling still reflects that. If you're interested, a good book is Vox Graeca, which gives the reconstructed pronunciation of Classical Greek, but importantly also explains the evidence for it. But for some reason, there has traditionally been quite a bit of resistance among Greek speakers to the idea that Greek pronunciation has changed. Maybe it's just because you have an unbroken tradition of reading ancient Greek that has changed along with the changes in pronunciation of the spoken language, but it's weird that even some scholars continue to insist that the pronunciation has not really changed at all. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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