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Geoffw in TAC2015: RU, HE and Friends | ||
Tags: Football/Soccer | Yiddish | Hebrew | Dutch | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | Russian | German | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| VivianJ5 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4260 days ago 81 posts - 133 votes  Speaks: English*, French | Message 161 of 251 06 January 2014 at 7:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm really interested in your method of language learning with Harry Potter, especially since it's not too difficult to
find both written translations in the languages I'm interested in, and unabridged audio as well. I've purchased the Dutch audio for HP, as well as the Italian (for a future language challenge!), and am looking forward to having just enough Dutch to give it a go. I find typical language books, with the stilted dialogue and introductory vocabulary, so boring that it makes it hard to stick with it. When I taught English, back in the day, I tried to get the students reading real novels as quickly as possible, since they could at least choose books they had already read in their own language (English books that had been translated), or find something more interesting than the course book. Plus they could read books which were as easy or as challenging as they wanted, as long as they were reading. Since they were already in an Anglophone environment (this was in the U.S.), they got tons of reinforcement from watching TV and speaking to Americans. I'd love to replicate that for myself in Dutch... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4686 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 162 of 251 06 January 2014 at 7:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
In a current thread on learning to read russian literature, my Dutch TAC teammate Jeff linked to this old thread, and I thought post 7 was especially interesting:
So basically, what I'm doing here is: first, an abbreviated round of his step one, in which I take wikipedia articles (which are written at a simpler level) about the story and dump them into google translate, giving myself the prescribed side-by-side translation. I think I pretty much skip his step 2, and then go straight to a combination step 3 and 4 on HP. For Dutch, I followed this with extensive reading first of a book that I hadn't read, but that my wife had read (in English), and I would talk to her about it after each of the first few chapters to verify that I was following the story. By the end of the book I was confident enough to move on to The Hunger Games (which I hadn't seen in movie form nor read previously) and did pretty well. Most mainstream fiction and non-fiction are now basically accessible for me. I haven't moved on to more exalted literature in Dutch yet, and I know my vocabulary is indeed still a bit weak for that, but this is a roadmap for one way I could try to get there. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| 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 163 of 251 07 January 2014 at 6:04am | IP Logged | |||||
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| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4686 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 164 of 251 08 January 2014 at 4:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Cross-posted from the Катюша team thread, incorporating teammate milesaway's suggestions:
привет! меня зовут джеффри. еще не очень хорошо говорю по-русски. чуть-чуть лучше читаю. мне очень нравится изучать языки. В этом году, Я надеюсь улучшить свой уровень русского языка. Dutch intro still to come. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4686 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 165 of 251 09 January 2014 at 6:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The Harry Potter onslaught continues unabated. In Гарри Поттер и Орден Феникса I've now read as far as page 122. (Harry is just
about to head to the Ministry of Magic for his disciplinary hearing.) However, I've been cheating. The protocol I described above involves first reading the relevant section in French, and then reading the same section in Russian. But I've been doing it backwards, reading it first in Russian, and then in French. The reasoning is simple: I'm enjoying reading it in the Russian and I don't want to wait. But then I keep saying to myself "ok, ok, I'll catch up in the French too, after all, I'm still working to improve French for its own sake." From a pedagogical standpoint, I miss far less (in Russian, at least) when I do things the other way around. But I'm following well enough, despite the huge vocabulary gaps, that it's not just a slog, but giving me reps on known and semi-known words, while teaching me the occasional unknown word. I'm also slowly getting a better intuitive sense of the declensions, but that's going to take a long time, I can tell. I've slowed down a bit on the intensive portion of this project because I'm trying to concentrate on the January tadoku. This at least has helped me to start doing better on my anki reviews, because I have slightly less than the 20 new words a day. My hit rates have gone way up. Probably a sign to add more words. Slow and steady (but not too slow, if possible). If I keep up the current pace, I can plan to hit 1000 entries in two or three months, which would be a mighty fine result (that's a 3k-4k / year pace, and doesn't count words learned outside of anki). New challenge of willpower: I've gotten my hands on both a physical copy of Гарри Поттер и Кубок огня as well as an mp3 audiobook of the same. The temptation is to switch over and do intensive reading along with the mp3 audio. Positives should be obvious: better mapping of sounds and stresses to the written forms, faster reading speed and additional decoding clues from the reader's tone, pacing and mannerisms. Negatives include having less time to puzzle out guessable unknown words and especially losing the rhythm I've built up with my current book. If I only had another 100 pages I'd just say wait, but I have another 700 pages, so it could take a while. Something else to ponder. Under the heading of book acquisition, I recently navigated to this bookstore, and was pleased to discover that they had a number of books available at fire sale prices. In particular, a number of translations of Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series were available for at most $0.99 each. Shipping to the US was $5 for the order, plus $1 per item. There's a lot of chaff in there, but it's worth searching through their stocks to see if anything you're interested in is on their 94.038% discount list like it was for me. Edited by geoffw on 09 January 2014 at 7:42pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4686 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 166 of 251 12 January 2014 at 4:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
I just received my box of books from Russia-Online:
This giant pile of books cost under $23, delivered, of which more than half the cost was for S&H. The Harry Potter book was the only one that cost more than a dollar. The Terry Goodkind books were actually 2-part novels, so each separately bound volume was about $0.50. I am not about to have an excuse that I have nothing to read in Russian. Edited by geoffw on 12 January 2014 at 4:02pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4686 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 167 of 251 13 January 2014 at 3:27am | IP Logged | |||||
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It so happened that I saw a few minutes of the classic movie "Miracle on 34th Street" tonight, which included a scene where the man
going by the name Kris Kringle and claiming to be the "real Santa Claus," all the while also performing in the role of store Santa at Macy's, meets a recently arrived Dutch girl who speaks no English. He speaks Dutch with her briefly, and they sing a song in Dutch together. In the movie, there is no translation provided. I was able to catch all but one word, as it turns out. Well, one bit I had to hear twice, I suppose. You can watch the scene here, and a translation of the scene can be found here. The word I didn't know is the first word in the song after Sinterklaas, in case you didn't guess. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4686 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 168 of 251 13 January 2014 at 6:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Cross posted from the Team Oranje thread:
Hallo. Mijn naam is Geoff, en ik studeer al anderhalf jaar Nederlands. Ik ben ermee begonnen omdat ik wilde een spraak studeeren dat ik snel kon beheersen. En dat gebeurde-- wat lezen betreft, tenminste, en misschien ook met mijn luistervermogen. Inmiddels heb ik ook een beetje experimenteerd met schrijven in het Nederlands, en heel weinig gepraat. Het zou niet te veel overdreven zijn om te zeggen dat ik KAN schrijven en praten, maar men moet er toevoegen, ik kan "een beetje." Dit jaar wil ik nog meer vooruitgang maken. Hello. My name is Geoff and I have been studying Dutch for a year and a half. I started with it because I wanted to study a language that I could master quickly. And that happened - as far as reading is concerned, at least, and perhaps also with my listening ability. Meanwhile I also have experimented a bit with writing in Dutch, and have talked very little. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that I CAN write and talk, but one must add, I can do "a little." This year I want to make more progress. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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