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HŘÍBEČEK TAC13- CZECHOSLOVAK & jäŋe/ledús | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| pesahson Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5726 days ago 448 posts - 840 votes  Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: French, Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 49 of 96 21 April 2013 at 8:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm not going to the conference but I think I would react in the same way! I really like this community that we have on the internet. Everytime I mention Luca or Richard etc I always do it just using their first names, as if I knew them, and they are among few people right now in my life that I really respect and admire for their achievements. The starstruck element would come because I only watch them on the internet, not even TV!, but it kind of gives them this star quality. Why do you think there won't be many HTLELers there? I assumed it will be mostly people who know about this message board. Edited by pesahson on 21 April 2013 at 8:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5347 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 50 of 96 22 April 2013 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
Hi pesahson, thanks for your message. I hope I won´t be starstruck, because I´m sure my languages and enjoyment would suffer as a result. Knowing myself, I probably will be and will turn into my stuttering and shy worst form. I have to fight it at the start and then hopefully it will be okay. I´ve never met a language geek like myself before in person so it should be a very strange experience for the thing that's weird about me to be the most normal! It will be very strange to feel decidedly monolingual compared to most people there. I hope there will be other HTLALers there, but very few have said that they're going on the thread about it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5347 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 51 of 96 05 May 2013 at 5:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Short update while I have a chance and the motivation.
HUNGARIAN Has now become my main focus for the last 2 weeks and will hopefully remain so for the next 2 weeks before the trip. I've refreshed a hell of a lot of vocabulary and done a fair bit of listening. I've also bought the Czech LEDA book for Hungarian which seems to be very thorough and a nice refreshing addition to my Hungarian resources. The course seems to be mainly focused on listening and repetition and seems effective so far. It's completely different to the layout for my Polish book of the same name. CZECH Lots of reading and fluency work. SPANISH Just the class and homework from the class, which I actually need to do after this. POLYGLOT CONFERENCE I've booked my ticket there by coach and my accommodation (one of the cheapest hostels I could find near the centre). I'm not too bothered about how I get back, so I'll worry about that when it's time to do so. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 52 of 96 23 May 2013 at 5:24am | IP Logged | |||||
I recently found an Italian linguist's dictionary in three parts in .pdf which shows Hungarian loanwords in Slovak. Most of the words in the dictionary are attested in dialects or works by Slovak authors (presumably for some kind of stylistic effect). Only a few items are deemed acceptable for the standard language including the aforementioned korčuľovať (sa) and ťava. You may find it interesting to leaf through when you want a break from studying. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5347 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 53 of 96 23 May 2013 at 7:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks a lot, I´ll take a look. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5347 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 54 of 96 24 May 2013 at 10:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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So I went to the Polyglot Conference in Budapest and decided to write a diary of the 2 days there, at least for memories sake. In short it was one of the best weekends of my life.
THE POLYGLOT CONFERENCE 2013 – BUDAPEST – DAY 1 Wow, what a bunch youtube language stars as speakers (this is just a list of the people I knew of before I went)- Richard Simcott (Tobyrne) Luca Lampariello Benny Lewis Susanna Zaraysky Alex Rawlings Judith Meyer (sprachprofi) Anthony Lauder (splog) Robert Bigler Plus just as visitors to the conference - David Mansarray Amir the Kazakhstani polyglot Iversen Huliganov Mae There were also a lot more who spoke more languages than some or all of these people, but I didn’t know of them before I went and I’m sure I missed many more. PRE-CONFERENCE I had been looking forward to this trip for a long time, imagining what it would be like to spend time with so many language geeks, what the 'famous' youtube polyglots would be like and how I would combat my usual annoyingly debilitating shyness. Leaving my hostel in the morning and heading towards the location of the conference, I was so extremely nervous. I think the not knowing and the thought of seeing everybody I watch on youtube in person were the main reasons. The first person I recognised was Robert Bigler near a metro station with a few others, presumably from the conference. I should have approached them immediately but instead pretended that I didn't know who they were and continued on my journey. Another tactic I had decided to employ was alcohol! I had brought with me a carton filled with Slivovice and downed a couple of shots about half an hour before I was due to arrive, in order to try to kill the nerves. THE CONFERENCE When I arrived at the Kossuth Klub, I immediately noticed Amir the polyglot from Kazakhstan walking towards the door too, along with some more people. I continued inside and there was a small group of people waiting in the hallway and filling out their language badges. My brain froze and even though the alcohol had seemed to have helped, I felt like I could barely even speak English. I took my badge and started filling it out. Then Benny Lewis came into the room and I saw him meet Amir for the first time. I had admired and still admire people like Benny, Amir and Robert Bigler for a long time and for me they were the biggest possible stars in the world (much bigger than the Queen or Mohammed Ali or the Dalai Lama or whoever)! I know and knew I was being stupid but still continued to be so and felt like I had completely lost my tongue and ability to think. Benny sent us upstairs to our seats and there I saw Richard Simcott. After that I found a seat and watched as more and more of the speakers and participants arrived. I watched some of the polyglots meet each other for the first time and listened to others speaking in many languages. I could see however that there were several other people like me, who were kind of hiding in their corners and keeping themselves to themselves. I remember looking round and seeing one guy who was sitting 2 seats from me and thinking that he looked like he was feeling similarly to me and this guy turned out to be the most incredible polyglot of the whole event and a future possible youtube star. (Emanuele Marini). The conference started and continued for the next few hours, including a 10 minute break, without me actually having a proper conversation with anybody. All of the presentations were good before lunch and my personal favourite was Carole Westerkamp's. All these presentations will be on youtube soon and described by many people so I won’t bother. In any case, the only presentation I didn’t like was the one about Hungarian, because it was all about the difficulties of Hungarian and seemingly trying to put off learners. At lunch time I knew that I needed to buck my ideas up, because I was wasting my chance to make the most of this experience. Luckily a friendly Brazilian guy called Felipe introduced himself to me and then we got talking and ended up chatting a bit in Hungarian (his was better than mine), which made me feel much better. We sat down for lunch and suddenly I found myself having one of the best language experiences of my life! First I spoke Hungarian to the couple in front of me for a few minutes, then I had a quite long conversation with a Thai guy in Czech (turns out he lives in CR too) and then in Spanish to an Italian guy for several more minutes! Wow, all of my active foreign languages in the space of 30 minutes! This pattern continued for the rest of that lunch period. So suddenly my polyglot conference experience had come alive, everyone was so friendly and interested in everybody. I’m so used to being around people that aren’t interested in other people’s lives or at least not interested in languages, so it was hard to accept that we really did have this geeky thing in common and I could continue with conversations without the other person getting bored. The experience was such a boost to both my confidence and desire to learn more languages and improve my current ones. In the evening I spoke quite a lot to Huliganov, mainly in English, but also in Czech. It was so surreal having Susanna Zaraysky sitting behind me, Judith Meyer (sprachprofi) and Alex Rawlings sitting a couple of metres away and Huliganov sitting at the same table. Later in the evening I got a chance to speak a little to Benny Lewis, who told us what his secret mission in Berlin is. After that we all sat down in a bar and chatted in our foreign languages, speaking in Spanish to the German to my left and in Czech to the Thai to my right! Such a random experience. Along with about 8 language geeks we then invented a really fun game of language Chinese whispers where one person would say something quietly to the next person in a language mutual to those two and then the message would be translated round the circle in 8 different languages until it got back to the start, where we would find out if we’d managed to maintain the same message. We were reasonably successful. I never really got rid of the anxiety completely, but when sitting down and comfortable I had some great conversations and an amazing day. I'll do day 2 soon. 11 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5347 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 55 of 96 02 June 2013 at 3:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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DAY 2 – POLYGLOT CONFERENCE BUDAPEST
So the first day was great but at the same time it was the day of getting rid of awkwardness and getting to know people a bit in order to feel more comfortable and also to find out who speaks your languages. The second day felt a lot more relaxed for me, suddenly I felt like I knew some people and had at least been acquainted with others. This feeling helped in meeting even more new people. The first presentation of the day was actually my personal favourite of the weekend – Robert Bigler´s about translating and interpreting; something I’m very interested in, do a bit of and would like to do a lot more of in the future. His speech was both very useful and at the same time very funny, with many interesting insights into the world of an interpreter. Look out for the video coming soon! During the day there were other good presentations; Anthony Lauder’s (Splog) about the difference between polyglots and polynots was probably the most memorable for most people. I also forgot to mention that Alex Rawlings’s speech about Yiddish was my favourite of the first day. All three of the presentations I’ve mentioned (Robert Bigler, Alex Rawlings and Anthony Lauder) were funny, informative and memorable. Again lunch time was probably the best part of the day for me as I got the chance to speak a lot of Spanish, mainly with an English guy and an Italian guy. The English guy and I didn't even realise we were both English until about 15 minutes into our conversation, but we still didn't use a single English word during lunch or any time after that when we exchanged a few sentences here and there. The weekend showed me that my Spanish is still at a pretty fluent and comfortable level and I understood everything said to me. The only controversy of the day surrounded the presentation of a Hungarian specialist. It only portrayed the complex issues of Hungarian, seemingly trying to make people think that Hungarian really is as hard as the mysterious reputation. This always really annoys me and I met another Hungarian who insisted that nobody should learn the language, because it’s so difficult and stupidly illogical. He even seemed a bit disgusted that I would try to learn it. Needless to say, I don’t agree with any of this and actually think Hungarian is very logical and refreshing. It was sad when the conference finished, but we still had time for group photos and more chats before we set off for dinner. At dinner I got the chance to speak to Iversen and hear about his techniques and ideas and I also learned about Sanskrit from a British Turkish guy. I made a lot of new acquaintances during the weekend from so many places - Thailand, Germany, Sweden, Singapore, England, Czech Republic, Australia, Denmark, Italy, Brazil, the Philippines and many more. I don't think I can say that about any other weekend from my life. Unfortunately my bus was leaving at 10.30pm so I had to leave the group at about 9.30pm. In hindsight I would have booked my departure for the following day, but I didn’t know how much fun it was all going to be. As one last intensive language experience, my bus back was full of Bulgarians and I managed to have some very broken conversations with them in CzechoBulgarian. To be honest they were quite dodgy characters and were actually trying to sell me prostitutes and drugs so I was a bit scared! Shows what a language geek I am that while they saying god knows what frightening stuff to me, I was analyzing their language and comparing it to other Slavic languages! IMPORTANT REALISATIONS FROM THE WEEKEND 1) I should learn more languages to a lower A2 level, because it is great fun communicating even at a basic level with as many people and in as many languages as possible. With that in mind I hope to push my Polish and Slovak up to a much more active level and also to maybe learn Italian, Ukrainian, Esperanto and who knows what to an A2 level before the next conference in Berlin next year. 2) Spanish is a great alternative to English at such events as probably 80% of the participants spoke it. So I have even more motivation for that now. Unfortunately English was still the main language I heard and used there as it was the only 100% common language. 3) 2 Days is not enough, hopefully it will be longer next time and I should try to arrive earlier and leave later in order to enjoy it all more. 4) My anxiety and nervousness is so pointless and next time I’ll be so much more relaxed. 5) The ‘famous’ polyglots are only human and have problems in their languages, just like I do. 6) There is a big group of people like me in the world and when I’m with them, I’m in my element. Edited by hribecek on 02 June 2013 at 3:47pm 10 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| pesahson Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5726 days ago 448 posts - 840 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: French, Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 56 of 96 02 June 2013 at 3:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I was looking forward to your account! I'm glad you had such a great time. I can't wait for the videos on YT.
All the accounts I've read so far stress the fact that everyone was very friendly and encouraging. Maybe that's the main reason to keep such meeting going. In everyday life not everyone shares our passion, and even though there are places like HTLAL, they won't substitute face to face interaction with fellow language lovers. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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