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LakeSea’s (In)decisive Log | ||
Tags: Sign Language | Portuguese | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | Italian | Japanese | Russian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4332 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes  Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 9 of 23 02 February 2013 at 3:49am | IP Logged |
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It is at times like this I need to remind myself of a great japanese idiom: 千里の道も一歩から (senri no michi mo ippo kara - "A long trip starts with a single step"). Feeling tired, but not defeated.
RUSSIAN I'm putting in the hours I planned, but I'm starting to feel like I may be skipping along too fast and letting important details fall along the wayside. This is mostly evident in that I've had trouble retaining vocab this week, and in that I still don't fully understand when each case must be applied to each noun. On the plus side... - I'm becoming able to create short "unrehearsed" sentences about my own persona, with little to no assistance from the dictionary. The day where I'll have enough vocab to stretch my wings in conversation must be nigh! - I'm ALMOST done learning the numbers from 1 to a milliard/billion. Numbers from 1 to 400 are essentially as good as learnt, but after that, things get a little bit muddy. I'm stubbornly sticking to flashcards, but I think the time has come for practical exercises (or else I'll never learn to use numbers in real time). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4332 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 10 of 23 20 February 2013 at 6:37am | IP Logged |
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Not dead yet, just absurdly busy with work (enough that I haven't been able to sit down and study ONCE in the last week and a half). To offset for the screeching halt in momentum, I'm trying to go over what I already learned as often as I can. We'll see how well that worked once I get back on a normal studying schedule.
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| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4332 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 11 of 23 11 June 2013 at 8:04am | IP Logged |
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Welp, change of plans.
After a reevaluation of my workload against the hours I can devote to studying, I've decided to go back to my old flame (Italian) and make friends with an old enemy (Portuguese). The point is to take both to a high B1 in reading and listening comprehension, and a low-to-maybe-decent B1 in spoken language by the end of the year, although I suspect this is easier said than done with Italian. Portuguese seems to be giving me no grief so far. Russian has taken a backseat for now. I've decided to work it passively (ie. listen/watch as many radio/podcasts and cultural background as I can while not actively studying the language) in preparation for devoting the entire next year to it, and it alone. The more I learn of it, the more I think Russian demands one's full attention (at least if one means to get anywhere with it...). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4332 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 12 of 23 26 June 2013 at 12:49am | IP Logged |
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ITALIAN
Current mission: learn proper usage of prepositions and conjunctions. Every night after work, I'm firing up Duolingo's Italian and doing from three to five (or seven, if I feel masochistic) repetitions of verbi in presente indicativo, besides repeats of any prior lesson I don't feel I've completely understood, and the lesson I'm currently at. I'm making it a point to repeat the lines provided, out loud. At least every week I'm putting up a post on Lang-8. However short it may be, I go through it twice after I'm done writing and then print out the corrections. On a personal note, my mother's happy that I'm studying it (she seems giddy to hear me try and reply in somewhat broken Italian and never misses a correction). We still haven't gotten to the point where I can keep a conversation going, but I can make a few remarks and questions, and she'll reply in Italian (and explain whenever she sees my face go blank!). She says it forces her to practice as well, and to go over things she's forgotten, so that's a huge motivational bonus for me to keep working hard at it. :) It may sound like I'm slaving away at the basics, but up to last week I felt like I was unwillingly chained to the grammar of my native Spanish (I don't care what people say, they are not similar enough to be helpful in learning one when one knows the other), and was getting fed up at getting them mixed up. Right now I feel like I'm finally starting to learn how to separate them, largely thanks to the native corrections I get from Lang-8. To keep acquiring more vocabulary, I've subscribed to a podcast called News in Slow Italian. I'm enjoying it tremendously--it's exactly the tool I'd been looking to reinforce listening comprehension. BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE Current mission: acquire enough vocabulary for a short live conversation I'm also using Duolingo for this, in addition to Lang-8 and reading a newspaper called Folha de São Paulo as often as possible. Odd as it may sound, what with me 'being chained to Spanish grammar' in regards to Italian, Portuguese is an absolute wonder in that I'm suffering a lot less in acquiring the basics. I don't know if it's that the verb conjugations aren't that different, or that the usage of prepositions, pronouns and conjunctions is relatively similar to Spanish, but it's just coming in naturally. Other than mistakenly writing 'un/una' instead of 'um/uma' (and I'm sort of convinced it only happens when I'm too tired or sleepy) and forgetting which words use what accents, right now I don't have too much trouble with it. However, I'm not yet up there in terms of vocabulary as I am with Italian, so this honeymoon period with Portuguese could come to an end soon... (but hopefully not.) Em símtese, estou desfrutando muito o Português. :D JAPANESE SIGN LANGUAGE Current mission: master 指文字 (fingerspelling)'s 'kana', alphabet and numbers JSL and ASL have been in my shopping list for years, but I've never given either a proper importance. However, I recently got a chance to check out Benny's visit to Gallaudet University, and while watching, remembered that I want to have at least one non verbal language under my belt (ideally, both JSL and ASL, although at this point this may be a slight naive way of thinking...). After watching, I decided that there's no time like 'now' and started looking for resources. I chose to do JSL first for several reasons: Japanese is very close to my heart, the word order seems remarkably close enough to spoken Japanese, it shares the fingerspelling alphabet with ASL, and a huge number of signs are just incredibly straightforward (I mean, mountain-climbing literally implies drawing a mountain with a finger, and then have two fingers 'climb it', lol). As a learning resource, I've chosen to go primarily with an app and site called Shuwa Station (手話ステーション). It is a dictionary-like app, which has clearly explained animations of the alphabet and kana, the 2000 most commonly used words, and basic sentence patterns. At this point (one and a half weeks in) I've learned 30 kana out of 46, out of which about four or five are shared with the alphabet, as well as the numbers from 1 to 1000. Conversation wise, I'm able to present myself, spell my name and say my age, but I don't know how to ask the same of my conversation partner yet. Note: I don't intend to take JSL or ASL further than B1. I just want to put them at a level sufficient to start and understand simple conversation, be able to answer a deaf person's questions, and maybe strike a friendship. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4332 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 13 of 23 30 June 2013 at 8:06am | IP Logged |
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JAPANESE SIGN LANGUAGE
Current mission: master the alphabet It may be an insignificant milestone, but I'm finally done with learning kana and the numbers! It isn't all that much to celebrate over, but I'm sort of happy knowing that I can now ask the other party 'how do you sign _____?' Full sentences I've learned in these past few days: - What is your name? - Are you okay? - Let's meet again. Textbook phrases if you will, but hey, it's a start. :D While I'm not underestimating the difficulty of learning the amount of signs needed to maintain a simple conversation going, at the pace I'm going, JSL may end up being a shorter project than Italian and Portuguese. It would be nice if I could string sentences together by the end of August. I guess we'll see. Edited by Lakeseayesno on 30 June 2013 at 8:06am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4332 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 14 of 23 06 July 2013 at 7:03am | IP Logged |
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Ricapitolazione generale, molto in ritardo!
ITALIAN Current mission: get a grasp of them @&°+*#... adverbs. As you might guess from the mission title, I'm currently getting my tuchus handed back to me by adverbs. I've never had to do as many Duolingo do-overs as I have over the past two days! The routine remains more or less the same--review past lessons before going on to new lesson. As the word pool has grown, repetition of some lessons has become unnecessary (obviously), but I want to keep myself "on my toes" as much as possible, so I've made it a point to cross-reference my most common mistakes in Lang-8 to what I need to review in Duolingo. Output wise, little by little, I'm managing to say longer sentences. My talking speed is evidently nothing to write home about, but I'm happy to report I'm slowly increasing my conversational repertoire. Writing a middle lenght blog post still takes me between 30-50 minutes, dictionary at hand, but my mistakes are growing smaller in nature. Also, while I'm still tripping up ocassionally, I've been working very conscientitiously to separate my Spanish and my Italian, and it seems to be working so far. BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE Current mission: expand vocabulary, polish pronunciation As opposed to Italian, I've realized that I have next to no need to review Portuguese grammar point-by-point each night (instead, I do full reviews on Duolingo, which randomize the content seen thus far, three-four times, and then move on to a new lesson). While this is a nice development, I also get the feeling Portuguese is waiting around the corner, ready to slap me with some huge grammatical irregularity. The thing that trips me the most so far is the false friends, and words like 'longo' and 'largo'. I didn't realize they were different until I noticed they refer to different dimensions... However, I've somehow become used to the manner of accentuation, which is good because I'm having a lot less spelling mistakes now! JAPANESE SIGN LANGUAGE Current mission: expand vocabulary, analyse syntaxis in longer sentences Two weeks in, I'm done with kana/alphabet/numbers! *happy dance* I self-evaluated by walking all over the office and signing (in kana and alphabet fingerspelling) the names of just about everything. I'm happy to report that I had no need to review any sings. Due to a relatively busy week, I only learned two more signs in addition to the sentences I already know ("water", and due to an odd coincidence, "salad"). However, since I'm done with mission #1, I can move my focus to sign retention from now. I'm not giving myself a weekly quota of signs to learn yet because, as signs and fingerspelling are slightly different in nature, I don't know if I'll be able to retain as many signs daily (during the kana-alphabet fase, I did between five and six a day). However, if I could do between two and three per day, I would feel pretty satisfied. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4332 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 15 of 23 15 July 2013 at 3:27am | IP Logged |
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Ricapitolazione del progresso di questa settimana.
ITALIAN Current mission: capire i pronomi diretti completamente Anche adesso faccio il corso da Duolingo più o meno 1 ora ogni giorno. Questa settimana il problema è "i pronomi diretti" (particolarmente 'ci' e il suo uso come riflessivo). Si assomigliano troppo ai pronomi diretti dello Spagnuolo, così è facile fare passi falsi... Okay, that's as far as my brain goes without blowing a transmission. I'm sure there must be a mistake every second word, haha. I also signed up to Verbling in order to practice my spoken Italian (and Portuguese), but I haven't had the chance to sign back in due to too much work, so I'm trying to set things up so that I can use it once or twice per week. BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE Current mission: Choose a book in Portuguese and read it Another week's gone by and Portuguese hasn't slapped me with that huge grammatical irregularity I've been fearing. If I'm progressing slowly in Portuguese, it's because I'm not dedicating as much time to it as I am to Italian. I haven't changed anything in the routine so far because I haven't yet taken a lesson on Duolingo's Portuguese that I have to repeat (unlike Adverbs and Personal/Reflexive Pronouns, in Italian). I've decided to go ahead and try to read a book in Portuguese, to improve my composition skills and vocabulary. I've downloaded a few, and right now am torn between No Pais dos Ianques, by Adolfo Caminha, and Contos, by Eça de Queiroz. I'm looking forward to trying out a conversation in Portuguese in Verbling, but I'm also nervous because I feel it's even MORE familiar to Spanish than Italian, and I want to avoid falling into Portuñol as much as possible... JAPANESE SIGN LANGUAGE Current mission: same as last week Due to (once again) a busy week I wasn't able to meet even a one-sign-per-day quota, but I learned a few useful signs such as "thanks", "age" and "place of birth", so I've amplified the range of things I can ask. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4332 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 16 of 23 22 July 2013 at 11:49am | IP Logged |
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Meu Deus, preciso de umas feiras...
ITALIAN Current mission: conversare con un Italiano Questa settimana ho studiato diligentemente ogni giorno eccetto oggi. Usualmente la domenica è il giorno quando posso studiare meglio perché il lavoro non è così pesante, ma ieri è stata una giornata molto dura, ed oggi non ho avuto l'energia per studiare... PORTUGUESE Current mission: same as last week In terms of the language, I finally am starting to feel like I can differentiate Spanish and Portuguese before they're out my mouth, but while I'm doing fine in the theory portion, there hasn't been much progress in the practical portion of this language's study yet. Not much to report on JSL. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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