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lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4275 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish
| Message 113 of 408 19 July 2013 at 10:18am | IP Logged |
ZH
Read a bit of 余华's 《活着》 in French while listening to the ZH audio version.
Finished chap. 1 of 《盗墓笔记》. Am considering reading it again.
Read part of an article saying that 欧盟禁止所有欧盟成员国与位于巴勒斯坦被占 领领土的以色列定居点企业
或机构进行贸易 (the EU forbids all its Member States to do business with companies or
organisations based in Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories).
The article.
Watched more videos for kids about fruit and animals.
Usual vocab drills: words in Pleco, Cloze production sentences in Anki, characters in
Skritter.
FI
Listened to the news on Selkouutiset while reading the transcription.
LA
Read chap. 1 of Winnie Ille Pu. It will be different than reading Regulus, if only
because I've never read A.A. Milne's original version. On the other hand, I've watched
some episodes of the animated cartoon version on TV with my kids, so I know what it's
all about. An interesting feature is that the stories and the dialogues are often
poetic in a slightly surreal way, so I may not be able to tell whether the outlandish
stuff is due to the author having fun or to a misunderstanding on my part.
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| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4275 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish
| Message 114 of 408 21 July 2013 at 7:54am | IP Logged |
ZH
Started a novel by 亦舒 called 早上七八点钟的太阳. It's on real dead tree paper, for a
change. We'll see if I can stand the shock of abandoning my cozy Pleco reader. I'll keep
Pleco handy, of course, as a dictionary.
I can't remember why I bought this particular novel by this particular author. The
Wikipedia page about her lists 286 works, no less, many of them novels. Impressive?
That's peanuts: her brother 倪匡 has written "more than 300 wuxia and science fiction
novels and more than 400 film scripts".
Info in EN about Yi Shu.
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| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4275 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish
| Message 115 of 408 31 July 2013 at 8:42am | IP Logged |
Back from a one-week holiday in Greece, where I spent more time building castles of
sand and admiring ruined castles of marble than studying languages. However...
ZH
I continued reading the novel I'd just started, namely 早上七八点钟的太阳, by 亦舒. I
decided to read it intensively, i.e. I looked up every character whose meaning and/or
pronunciation was doubtful. Concretely, first, I read one page "cold": not looking up
anything in the dictionary and I doing my best to guess the meaning of unknown words
and remember the pronunciation of those I'd already studied and then forgotten; second,
I read the page again and looked up every doubtful character. I scribbled notes in the
margin or above the text: the meaning if necessary; just the pinyin when I knew the
meaning or had guessed it right; just tones above the characters, in many cases. Third,
I read the page again, to make sure everything was in place. No need to say that my
pace was quite slow. It could take anywhere between 30 and 45 minutes to "read" one
page. On the plane back, having reached page 25, I decided to switch to a more
"extensive reading" mode for a while. The novel, up to now, is slightly disappointing,
naive and not credible.
--
I read a biography and anthology of Su Dong Po (Moundaren ed.). It counts as language
learning because the biographical part is interspersed with poems and letters in
Chinese and in translation, so I could try to follow the Chinese version as best as I
could. Though I wouldn't dream, at the present stage, of understanding the Chinese of
1000 years ago, many poems were surprisingly easy to follow with the aid of the
translation. The bibliographical part read like a vivid novel. The life of a free
thinking mandarin was certainly not easy at the time. The story of Su Dong Po's life
was so detailed and moving that I felt just like in front of the ruins of Knossos,
where you don't know what is "authentic" and what is the fruit of the imagination of
the archaeologist.
Wikipedia on Su Dong Po.
--
Minimal vocabulary diet: I simply reviewed my SRS queue in Anki, without adding new
words. Also in Pleco, I didn't add any new words. I did three or four study sessions in
Skritter, but my backlog is now rather big.
GRC
"GRC" is the ISO code for ancient Greek, apparently. I've been dreaming for a long time
of learning ancient Greek. Homer. Sappho. Sophocles. Plato. Xenophon. Marcus Aurelius.
And so many others. Problem is: as I already said a few posts ago, free time is an
endangered species and wanderlust is its worst enemy. And yet. In a few days, I've had
the opportunity to get acquainted with the Greek alphabet, which allowed me to
recognize quite a few words that have passed into the international lexicon. So I might
just use that pretext to go on discovering the language and try language learning
hypotheses. For instance, I just might try to LR the entire Assimil ancient Greek
course, just to check if it's any use.
Ah, wait. We'll see how I feel about it when the salt on my skin and the sand in my
shoes have vanished.
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| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4275 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish
| Message 116 of 408 01 August 2013 at 8:35am | IP Logged |
ZH
Vocabulary: purged my SRS backlogs in Anki, Pleco and Skritter.
ChinesePod: started listening to a lesson about 意思的意思。
Read half a page of 早上七八点钟的太阳, then fell asleep after yet another not so believable
twist in the plot.
LA
Read one more chapter of Winnie Ille Pu.
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| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4275 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish
| Message 117 of 408 02 August 2013 at 6:26pm | IP Logged |
ZH
Read one more page of the novel 早上七八点钟的太阳. In fact, I think it's silly. Anyway, I
don't like it very much. I believe I'll start reading something I'm more interested in.
Went through the vocabulary routine (Pleco, Skritter, Anki).
Listened some more to the ChinesePod lesson about 意思的意思.
GRC
Listened to the first CD of Assimil ancient Greek (there are four) while following the
Greek text and glancing at the translation. Have I been wasting my time?
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| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4275 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish
| Message 118 of 408 06 August 2013 at 9:44am | IP Logged |
ZH
Yet another of those dreadful plateaus where it seems I'm not progressing at all, I
keep starting many things while not completing any, and I have even less time than
usual to devote to languages.
Back to basics.
As for "not progressing at all", I shouldn't look at the horizon. Whatever your pace,
the horizon never seems to get closer. I should look at the next hill. And if that hill
is still too far away, I should look at the next *step*. In that context, SRS is a
godsend: I can do it for any length of time, one minute if I want, and absolutely
anywhere.
As for "starting but not completing", I shouldn't worry too much. As long as I keep
doing stuff, who cares if I decide that book A is boring and I'd rather start book B or
movie C, as long as I actually start reading book B or watching movie C.
As for "even less time than usual", I should keep in mind that one minute of input is
better than one minute of lament about not having time (because it amounts to 0 minute
of input).
So I did the following:
INPUT:
- I'm fed up with 《早上七八点钟的太阳》, so today I started a novella called 《小二黑结婚》
by 赵树理. It's in an anthology that I bought second hand titled "Reading From Chinese
Writers/Textes choisis d'écrivains chinois 1919-1949," vol.2 (Foreign Language Press,
Beijing, 1982). We'll see how far I can get. With each text, there is some vocabulary
translated into French and English.
There's some info about 赵树理 in the Chinese and English versions of Wikipedia.
- On NDTV, I watched a short news item on 突尼斯 and read the transcript.
- I finished the Chinese Pod lesson about 意思的意思. By "finished", I mean I did some
parroting, copied, translated and retransled the lesson orally and in writing, and I
did the exercices.
VOCAB:
- Anki: HSK lists and Cloze deleted sentences from ChinesePod
- Pleco: words collected through input
- Skritter: characters
LA
Read one more chapter of Winnie Ille Pu.
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| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5409 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh
| Message 119 of 408 06 August 2013 at 9:58am | IP Logged |
lorinth wrote:
LA
Read chap. 1 of Winnie Ille Pu. It will be different than reading Regulus, if only
because I've never read A.A. Milne's original version. On the other hand, I've watched
some episodes of the animated cartoon version on TV with my kids, so I know what it's
all about. An interesting feature is that the stories and the dialogues are often
poetic in a slightly surreal way, so I may not be able to tell whether the outlandish
stuff is due to the author having fun or to a misunderstanding on my part. |
|
|
Ah, Ah, I have exactly the same feeling when reanding Winnie ille Pu :-) I've only read a few chapters but find it quite a pleasant read.
1 person has voted this message useful
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4275 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish
| Message 120 of 408 07 August 2013 at 12:39pm | IP Logged |
ZH
Vocab: Pleco, Anki, Skritter.
Input: read some more of 《小二黑结婚》.
Watched Travel in Chinese, episodes 1 & 2.
A very very small victory yesterday: as I was listening distractedly to Radio Taiwan
International, as I often do while walking back home from work, I could actually
understand what they where talking *about* (欧洲的古堡, specifically). Now, what they were
saying exactly was still beyond me. But, hey, don't spoil my joy.
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|
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