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Ellasevia TAC 2013 – Teams Divan and Alef | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6140 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 1 of 24 27 December 2012 at 7:18pm | IP Logged |
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Ellasevia’s TAC 2013 – Teams Divan and Alef
Hello and welcome to my new TAC log for 2013! (Here is my TAC 2012 log.) For those of you who don’t know me, I’m an American exchange student studying abroad in Croatia. In August, after spending a year in beautiful Hrvatska, I’ll return to the United States to begin studying linguistics at university. In the meantime, I’ll be exploring a colorful selection of languages this year on my own, trying to resume the steady study rhythm that I used to keep in some previous years. This year I’ve chosen to join two teams: the Croatian Team Divan and the Middle Eastern Team Alef. As such, Croatian and Persian will be the highlights of my studies and will be given special emphasis. In the past I’ve set far too many lofty goals for myself, which always resulted in me coming up short at the end of the year. This time around, I’m going to try setting minimal long-term goals and instead focus on the short term. At the beginning of each month I’ll create a list of smaller, concrete goals for each language that I’d like to accomplish by the end of that month. The only yearlong goals I’m going to set forth are that I would simply like to improve in all of the languages I’m studying, and work more on reading in my target languages. I’d also ideally like to spend at least 550 hours on language study in 2013, because that works out to a nice average pace of about 10.5 hours per week, or about 1.5 hours per day. And now, to introduce the languages I’ll be working on in 2013:  Hrvatski
I began studying Croatian a little over a year ago, in preparation for my exchange year in Croatia. I moved to a small town here on the northern coast of Croatia in August, and have been happily living and experiencing the Croatian way of life and culture since then. I’ve had the opportunity to travel all over the country, and I must say that I absolutely love it here. At this point I can speak fairly freely and fluently in Croatian about anything that I need or want to communicate, but not necessarily correctly or naturally. This year I’d like to focus on perfecting everything I know and bringing it up to a higher level, especially my active skills. I want my Croatian to be as good as possible before I leave the country this summer.  فارسی
I’ve been studying Persian on and off for about two and half years, but each time I begin studying it again I essentially have to start from scratch. I’m very interested in Persian/Iranian culture and history, as well as that of the Middle East in general, so I figured I could start off with one of the region’s easier languages since the mere thought of Arabic gives me a headache. I’ve forgotten most of the Persian that I used to know, but this year I’d like to revive my knowledge of the language and then expand on it, hopefully for the last time.  Kiswahili
Like Persian, I have been studying Swahili on and off for nearly three years but have forgotten almost everything I used to know of the language. I first started learning Swahili in preparation for a trip to Tanzania in 2010, and have since fallen in love with the language and the country. Along with Persian and Croatian, I’d like for Swahili to be one of my main focuses of 2013, and hopefully I’ll be able to regain what I used to know, and more.  日本語
Japanese is one of my favorite languages, and I have been studying it on my own for about three and a half years, in addition to having taken two years of Japanese classes during high school. Since graduating I haven’t spent much time on Japanese or had any opportunities to use it, so my skills have begun to fade. I’d like to reverse that trend this year and bring my Japanese up to a reasonable level of fluency again if possible. The one specific, yearlong goal that I’ll set for Japanese is to finally get a decent, solid grounding in reading and producing all of the 常用漢字 (jōyō kanji; about 2000 everyday use characters).  Suomi
Finnish for me is an extremely aesthetically pleasing language in both spoken and written form, and I have wanted to learn it for quite some time. I first started studying Finnish in June 2011, but didn’t continue past that August. I picked it up again last February for Sprachprofi’s Accelerated Finnish Challenge, but didn’t really continue to study it beyond the end of the challenge. So, this year, I’d like to take on Finnish as one of my main study languages with the intention of keeping up my studies all year long so that I don’t have to start over again later.  Nederlands
I fell in love with the Dutch language the year before last, and because of its straightforwardness and closeness to German I was able to learn it to a decent level relatively quickly. Recently I haven’t done quite as much with it as I should have and have lost some of what I used to know. I intend to restore my Dutch to the level it was once at and continue to make progress with the language with year. I’ll be in Belgium briefly later this year so hopefully I’ll be able to get in some Dutch practice and maybe even find something to read…  Ελληνικά
Greek is my family’s heritage language and I have been studying it for about almost seven years, although I have been exposed to it since early childhood. I often speak it with my grandparents, and with other relatives whenever I travel to Greece. Lately I haven’t been able to use it much and so it’s getting rusty, but luckily I’m going to spend a few weeks in Greece this summer after leaving Croatia, so I’ll hopefully be able to bring it back up to a good level, and will also try to find some Greek reading material there.  Deutsch
I’ve been studying German on my own for the past four years, plus two years of classes in high school. In that time I’ve managed to reach a respectable, functional level in the language, but I’d like to push it even higher, particularly when it comes to reading in German. I’ll be in Austria and Germany later this year, so maybe I’ll be able to find some reading material there.  Français
I began studying French nearly five years ago, and it continues to be my favorite Romance language, tied with Romanian. French isn’t a huge priority for me this year, but I’d still like to spend some time on it to maintain my level and improve it a bit. I’ll also be in France and Belgium later in the year and hope to be able to practice lots of French and find some good native materials.  Español
As it always has, Spanish will continue to assert a presence in my life in 2013, and perhaps even more so than in some past years since some of my best friends now are native Spanish-speakers and I usually speak Spanish with them. Although my level is already quite good, I’m always looking to improve. This should be plenty to keep me busy this year – I just hope I can manage it all more successfully than I did in the past year! Thank you for reading and good luck to everyone in 2013! 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Dagane Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4509 days ago 259 posts - 324 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishB2, Galician Studies: German Studies: Czech | Message 2 of 24 27 December 2012 at 9:38pm | IP Logged |
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Although I'm not a team companion of yours, I'm stunned because of the great deal of languages you manage to study and maintain. I guess you face up all sorts of problems in keeping them separately without forgetting much of each one. It's really amazing, especially because you deal with some groups of languages which are far from each other, as well as five different writing systems. Oh my, you've my blessing! ;).
Seriously, I hope you're successful in your 2013 goals. Just impeding your level drop is remarkable. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Rosen93 Diglot Newbie Denmark Joined 4398 days ago 34 posts - 42 votes Speaks: Danish*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 3 of 24 27 December 2012 at 10:27pm | IP Logged |
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I think I might have read an earlier learning log of yours a couple of years ago, before I became a member here myself. I think it was during the TAC 2011 or something. It's very inspiring to see another young member on this forum studying so many languages at once. I'm doing the TAC's for the first time this year, and even though I'm not one a team, I'm looking forward to reading your log. I wish you all the best with your studies. :)
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 4 of 24 27 December 2012 at 10:38pm | IP Logged |
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Nice, modest goals as always I see :-)
Ellasevia - as your ex team mate and comrade in arms, and current goddaughter I can just say that I am proud of you, and admire you for all your languages. I cannot even imagine what or where you will be 20 years from now. Best of luck, and may this year be even better than the previous ones! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Élan Senior Member United States Joined 5442 days ago 165 posts - 211 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Persian | Message 5 of 24 27 December 2012 at 11:55pm | IP Logged |
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I'm very happy to see your log up and running! The monthly goals idea sounds very smart. I hope you don't mind if
I borrow some of your organization strategies--your log is always a real inspiration. I think I will be much more successful this year if I track my time in an organized fashion. Can't wait to read your updates and catch up! It seems that so much has changed for you since TAC 2011. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5393 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 6 of 24 28 December 2012 at 1:04am | IP Logged |
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I love reading your logs, and I am so glad you're on one of my teams this year. I wish you the best of luck with your languages next year! 1 person has 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 7 of 24 28 December 2012 at 9:26am | IP Logged |
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Lofty. If you need some help with Dutch lemme know.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6140 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 8 of 24 04 January 2013 at 2:48pm | IP Logged |
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@Dagane: Thank you so much for your encouragement! It is indeed difficult at times to keep all the languages separate in my mind, but that's part of the fun. :)
@Rosen93: Thank you, I'm glad that my past log served as an inspiration for you. Which TAC team(s) are you a part of this year? @Solfrid Cristin: As always, thank you for the lovely words of encouragement, Cristina. :) I so look forward to watching you progress in Russian and Greek this year as well! @Élan: Feel free to copy anything you like, just know that I actually stole the monthly goals idea from LanguageSponge, so he's the one to whom the credit is due. I'm so excited to be seriously studying Persian with you again this year -- it'll be like a reunion of our small TAC 2011 team. @Kerrie: Hvala ti, Kerrie. Ja isto sam sretan da si u mom timu ove godine! Sretno tebi sa svojim studijima! @tarvos: Dank je, tarvos! Ik ben van plan dit jaar iets in m'n doeltalen te schrijven, dus jij kan me natuurlijk daarbij helpen, want m'n Nederlands wordt erg roestig en waarschijnlijk klinkt heel vreemd. Dit jaar volg ik ook jouw log en het is erg interessant! Happy New Year! Sretna Nova godina! As I begin to write this log entry I'm currently sitting on a bus somewhere in the middle of Croatia, headed to the port city of Rijeka, while listening to some beautiful Persian music. I spent New Year's with my exchange friends in Zagreb and had a wonderful time, but I'm glad in a way to be heading home so that I can get a real start on the TAC, albeit a couple days late. I stayed with a friend of mine from Germany, so I've actually spoken more German in the past several days than Croatian! A similar thing happened when I was in Salzburg a few weeks ago -- I spent such a large portion of the time with my Latin American friends that the language I practiced the most was Spanish, even though I was in a German-speaking country. [And then I got distracted and forgot that I was writing this for the rest of the bus ride. So now it's the two days later and I'm back home on the coast of Croatia.] Now I'd like to outline my goals for each of my languages for the month of January. Hrvatski
- Assimil: 25 lessons - Beginner's Croatian: finish the rest of it, scanning for anything new - Begin reading Mali Princ (not sure how much is realistic) فارسی
- Spoken World: 5 lessons - Assimil: review lessons 1-30 - Start reading some Persian poetry, including at least one in Persian Kiswahili
- Spoken World: 5 lessons - Mwana Simba: 10 lessons 日本語
- Reviewing the Kanji: up through #500 - JapanesePod101: 10 episodes - Sentence Pattern Book: review through chapter 4 Suomi
- Assimil: review lessons 1-30 - TY Finnish: review lessons 1-3 Nederlands
- Review all of Dutch With Ease - DutchPod101: 10 advanced episodes Ελληνικά
- Finish reading Ο Αλχημιστής - "ΣΚΑΪ Γυρίσματα": 3 episodes Deutsch
- Finish reading Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen Français
- TY Improve Your French: review 5 lessons - Listen to 5 hours of French radio Edited by ellasevia on 04 January 2013 at 9:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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