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TAC Romulan - Portuguese - Norwegian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| WoofCreature Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 4524 days ago 80 posts - 118 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: German, Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 1 of 26 11 January 2013 at 8:58am | IP Logged |
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For next year's log see: WoofCreature Åsgard & Exploradores TAC14
Hello, this is my first log on this forum, so hopefully I do this right. This year I will be studying Portuguese and French on team Romulan. In addition, I will be studying Tagalog and I might dabble in Cree, Inuktitut and/or American Sign Language. French I started learning French when I was five in Canada's infamous French immersion program and am now in high school. I understand almost everything that I hear or read and I can write reasonably well since I have to write a ton of assignments in French, but I unfortunately have hardly spoken any French in the past few years and my speech is now quite broken. I think I would classify myself as C1 or higher in comprehension, B2 in writing and B1 in speaking. I don't plan to study the language much on my own this year, but I write a lot for a history class and I will be starting a French class in February which should include lots of reading and writing, some listening, some (poorly explained) grammar, and the rare speaking opportunity. Other than that, the only thing I'll do on my own is watch the occasional TV show or movie. Portuguese About this time last year the Brazilian exchange student living with my dad invited me to stay with his family for a month during the summer. I accepted of course and started learning Portuguese soon after. As it was the first language I tried to learn on my own, I didn't know what I was doing and didn't get very far; I had only learned about a hundred words by July, which was when I started studying intensively. For a month I read, listened to and shadowed Portuguese for at least five hours a day. Although there was huge improvement, my comprehension and speaking ability quickly proved to be quite inadequate for basically anything so I quickly lost all confidence and ended up speaking no Portuguese while I was there. Nonetheless, the constant exposure helped me significantly improve my comprehension and have helped me to keep learning after I left. I would say that I am at a low B2 in listening and reading comprehension, and an A2 in writing and speaking, probably a bit higher in writing. My goal is to reach at least a B2 in speaking when I (hopefully) return to Brazil next summer. I plan to do this by going through a grammar, reading novels, watching TV, writing on lang8 and trying to become friends with some of the Brazilian exchange students at my school. Tagalog I have started learning Tagalog because a close relative has a Filipina girlfriend whose son should be coming to Canada very soon, and all of my coworkers are Filipino. It would be nice to know what they talk about around me and it gives me a reason to work: paid language practice. I haven't gotten very far with Tagalog. I seem to be following a similar path in learning Tagalog as Portuguese; since November I have only learned maybe 20 words. My goal this year would be to reach A1 or A2 by this summer when I will hear Tagalog for hours and hours while getting paid. I plan to do this by learning a bunch of vocabulary and some grammar from this website(see below) and then watching movies once I gain a bit more vocabulary. http://www.seasite.niu.edu/tagalog/Tagalog_mainpage.htm Others Cree, Inuktitut and ASL will all just be wanderlust languages that I occasionally learn a few words for. My main interest in them is that they are quite different from the European languages that I'm used to, but lack of resources and people to speak to will prevent me from learning any of them very well in the near future. I will try to update this log weekly. Happy TAC! Edited by WoofCreature on 02 January 2014 at 4:01am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| fireballtrouble Triglot Senior Member Turkey Joined 4522 days ago 129 posts - 203 votes Speaks: Turkish*, French, English Studies: German | Message 2 of 26 15 January 2013 at 6:42pm | IP Logged |
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And there the first encouragement message comes from a teammate. Happy TAC, go Romulans!
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| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4845 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 3 of 26 16 January 2013 at 1:44am | IP Logged |
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I'm glad to see another Portuguese log here. There needs to be more of those!
Good luck! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| WoofCreature Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 4524 days ago 80 posts - 118 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: German, Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 4 of 26 06 March 2013 at 7:30am | IP Logged |
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Well, I haven't updated in awhile. That doesn't mean I haven't been learning though. I'll break it down by language.
French Since the new school term started in February I now have all of my classes in French, including an actual French class. This is the third year that I have had this teacher so I know what to expect,but he is changing it up a bit since this is the first time he's had a higher grade level in about a decade. Everyday we do some grammar(which is pretty useless in my opinion; how is being able to identify the conjonction de subordination going to help me speak better?) and read for a bit. So far we've read both version of 'Le Horla' and started 'Des barbelés dans ma memoire' by Alain Stanké. Everyday I write down at least a dozen unknown words during class which I've been procrastinating putting into Anki. Overall, I'm putting a lot more effort into the class this year than I have in the past, which is saying a lot; it remains to be seen if it will pay off. I have a new teacher this year for Biology and Chemistry; she's from New Brunswick. I love her accent. Outside of school I've been watching TV5. Mostly 'On n'est pas que des cobayes'* and 'Hôpitale Vétérinaire'. Also, at the end of January I went through a couple chapters of FSI's Introduction to French Phonology course. It was quite boring and I disagreed with some of what they said, but I think it helped a bit, because before trying the course I hardly noticed David Lowe's English accent on the show linked below. Now after, it's become noticeable enough to be on the edge of annoying. Not sure how I possibly missed it before. It actually took me awhile to even question whether he was French. He's still my favorite though. *http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jN22_zGmoE There's a ton of episodes on youtube if your interested; it's sort of like MythBusters. Portuguese Doing the TAC has made sure I keep up with Portuguese. I've been watching dubbed science documentaries on youtube*. The clear speech and numerous cognates gives me near hundred percent comprehension. It's nice to have moments like that, especially when the moments of near zero percent comprehension are much more frequent. I also discovered that at least one of my Big Bang Theory DVD's has a Portuguese dub, so I have been watching those with unmatched subtitles. I also finally got the books I ordered. I bought 'A cidade do sol' by Khaled Hosseini and 'Veronika decide morrer' by Paulo Coelho. I started the first chapter of the former and was quite lost, so for now I am working through the latter. It's interesting, reading a book in Portuguese, written by a Brazilian author, that takes place in Slovenia and mentions Canadian depression rates. I usually read where I don't have a dictionary at hand, so I've then been going back through later and looking up all the unknown words and putting them into Anki. There's a ton per page, but I'm not finding my comprehension of the text to be too bad. I've also been watching a few movies. I'm particularly enjoying 'A cor do paraíso'**, probably because it's dubbed and not Brazilian. I'm still having issues when stuff reminds me too much of last summer's trip to Brazil; it makes me really miss it. And plus, Brazilian movies all seem to have at least one obligatory sex scene. *http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zapgDvSuBII **http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1J8aI9UAvY Tagalog I haven't been able to stay motivated with Tagalog. Every once in awhile I go through Memrise or do a chapter of FSI, but nothing consistent. My current weekly source of exposure to the language is going to end very soon and it remains to be seen how much exposure I'll get from new sources. Basically, my situation with the speakers I know is quite emotionally charged at the moment, so I'm not sure how much I'll continue with the language. American Sign Language Somehow I convinced one of my best friends to learn ASL with me. Ironically, it's to avoid speaking French on a potential trip to Quebec this summer, but I'm grabbing hold of the opportunity. So everyday for the past month I've been learning a few signs from lifeprint.com and then teaching her the next day. We've also gotten a few other friends interested who've seen me teaching her. It's going quite well so far; it's also a great help that I have almost all of my classes with her, so am able to randomly quiz her throughout the day. It's great to see how excited people are when they learn a new sign or especially when they are able to form a sentence. I don't know how much we'll actually be able to learn before summer when it will all disappear, but it's fun right now. Other I briefly started to learn the Cree syllabics, but then I started ASL and have stopped with Cree. I've been having a ton of wanderlust lately. Them main culprits have been Norwegian(or possibly Swedish, though there's just something about Norwegian...) and an Indian language. Hindi would be the obvious choice, but it was a movie in Tamil that really caught my interest. I've also been mildly interested in an African language(such as Swahili) or an Asian language(such as Malay or Vietnamese or Mandarin or Cantonese) and German(mostly for it's potential usefulness in engineering). Also, my other best friend who has resisted learning ASL has now (perhaps jokingly) suggested we learn Norwegian together. We shall see. And that's about it. Thanks fireballtrouble and kujichagulia for the encouragement. Sorry to my teammates on Team Romulan for not having commented on your logs yet. I've read through all of them but I haven't had anything useful to add. Edited by WoofCreature on 07 May 2013 at 6:14am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4845 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 5 of 26 06 March 2013 at 2:08pm | IP Logged |
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Anytime. If you find more interesting Portuguese films on Youtube, let me know!
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| WoofCreature Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 4524 days ago 80 posts - 118 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: German, Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 6 of 26 27 March 2013 at 9:08am | IP Logged |
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kujichagulia: Sure, I'll let you know. I did recently watch this movie about child prostitution in Brazil, called "Anjos do sol". It was quite sad and horrifying. I caught the gist of most of it and I now will never forget the swear "filha da p*ta". Here's the link if you're interested.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OByseeh_AMg I do not have much to say about French or Portuguese other than that I am becoming more and more dissatisfied with my ability to speak them and I want to start focusing on production. It does not help that I have a hard enough time making myself understood in English. It is very frustrating and embarrassing when I sometimes have difficulty communicating very basic ideas in French, a language I have been learning and speaking since I was five years old. I do not have a solid plan laid out yet, but I plan on reading aloud and/or shadowing/echoing in both French and Portuguese as well as starting to write consistently in Portuguese and then post it for correction on lang8 (I am already forced to write a lot in French for school assignments). Norwegian So for a week and a half I have been learning Norwegian and I am loving it. I have never enjoyed language learning this much. For some reason I have been really drawn to all things Norwegian lately. Since I have accepted that learning Tagalog is just not happening I have wanted to start another language. ASL is fun, but does not have the media resources that are so important to the way I learn languages when I do not have access to native speakers. I wanted a language with movies and books and music, and ASL does not have that. I tried to convince myself to learn German since it has potential to be useful(certainly more than Norwegian) in a future career in science. And then I tried to convince myself to learn Swedish if I absolutely had to learn a Scandinavian language since Sweden is a bigger country with more media output and there are less dialect and writing system issues to deal with. But alas, there is just something about Norwegian that has made me fall in love with it. So far I have been going through some courses on memrise. One in particular is great.* It apparently contains a few errors, but the way it presents vocabulary is great. Instead of presenting a bunch of words in isolation, it presents sentences, with the occasional single word, so the vocabulary is repeatedly reinforced. It does not have many sound files built into the course, but I have been looking up the words on forvo and acapelabox. I am trying to make sure I do not end up with bad pronunciation habits like I did with Portuguese. Also, the words it introduces are not the typical beginner vocabulary, but the most commonly used words. Already, I can parse a Norwegian text and recognize many words and even sometimes understand a sentence. I have also been watching a lot of I kveld med Ylvis. Wanting an excuse to watch their videos just might have been one of my reasons for wanting to learn Norwegian (thank you to whoever made a thread about their intelevator videos a few months ago)**. Overall, I have never enjoyed learning a language so much. *http://www.memrise.com/course/822/learn-norwegian-basics/ **EDIT: Finally found the thread: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=34194&PN=3 American Sign Language While I was really busy with my school's musical, which ended a few weeks ago, I put learning ASL with my friend on hold. We have spring break coming up soon so we are going to resume ASL after that. For now we are just reviewing the signs we already know. I plan on trying to find some sentences to learn new signs like I have been learning Norwegian. I am not sure how much luck I will have, but we will see what I can find. Edited by WoofCreature on 27 January 2014 at 6:36am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6618 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 7 of 26 30 March 2013 at 7:33am | IP Logged |
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It's always nice to see another person learning Norwegian. I think you will enjoy it, and the language is easy enough for an English speaker that you get a great feeling from making fairly quick progress. Don't worry about the relative small number of native speakers. Norwegians produce an amazing amount of literature considering. You should also be able to find some movies and TV.
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| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4845 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 8 of 26 03 April 2013 at 7:40am | IP Logged |
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Thank you for the link!
I think shadowing and reading aloud will help you with your speaking in your languages. I used to have more time to read aloud in Japanese, and that helped me. Nowadays I don't have any time alone when I can read out as loud as I want, and that probably isn't good for my Portuguese. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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