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Expug’s All at On(c)e Log - TAC14 | ||
Tags: Papiamento | Estonian | Georgian | Native Materials | Norwegian | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | Mandarin | Russian | German | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 273 of 415 31 July 2014 at 12:35am | IP Logged | ||
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The vacations are over and they were productive, though sometimes I had to extend my
language activities to make up for hours spent doing something else. Last update was on Friday, so I'll try to sum up the main relevant factors. I spent the weekend practicing my languages and watching films in English. It wasn't an easy task to get people to talk to at Sharedtalk, but in the end I managed to have my first voicechat in Russian. It was similar to my live conversation in Chinese, only worse. I noticed I can communicate/express more than I thought I could in Russian, but I just don't get the replies. Sound quality sometimes don't help that much. Then I voicechatted in French too and everything was transparent. I also voicechatted in Norwegian with another student who is maybe at an A2 level, and I noticed I could answer in Norwegian most of his questions. I took the time to write one paragraph in French at Lang-8 and another one in Norwegian at italki. I was happy about both: only minor corrections. The not so happy part was me realizing my French is probably still B2. I'm really looking forward to having a certificate so it's time to call Aliance Française and ask for a placement test first. I noticed my mistakes are mostly predictable grammar issues and that I have a good comprehension of spoken French and can express my thoughts comfortably most of the time, without being a nuisance to the speaker. I finished Russe90: I had already recommended Chinois 90 and I extend my recommendation to Russe 90. After going through three Assimils, I was a bit reluctant to start yet another textbook, but I examined this one carefully and thought it was worth it. I don't regret my decision. The lessons are also more well-designed and clear than Assimil, especially regarding grammar and exercises. Only the final lessons with literary excerpts weren't that interesting, as they are dated. I noticed some improvement in reading Norwegian. It's not that far from a B2, I believe, even if I'm aware that I'd benefit more from looking words up at this stage. Time constraints prevented me from doing that, which I expect to resume after getting back to normal routine, at least in ordinary days. As for spoken Norwegian, my comprehension really seems to get stuck when there are English subtitles instead of Norwegian ones: there's much less synergy going on, so I improve much less. Still reading Pride and Prejudice in Chinese with Perapera and noticing some improvement. Now I'm following the story just by looking up the unknown characters and words and trying to make sense of them within the sentence. The number of characters I need to look up also diminished considerably. Yesterday, since I was travelling back, I had to read the Chinese extensively, that is, I read the Chinese text in the device with no internet connection, not looking up anything, then I read the French. I'm glad I could understand a bit the Chinese text: it's no longer a blur of symbols. Another positive effect: today I found it much easier to follow the text with Perapera. I think this extensive attempt told my brain to tune sharper and pay more attention to the Chinese phrase and the role of each character. I didn't read Georgian extensively yesterday but I did today, that is, I did read the French translation later but the point is I read a few pages entirely in Georgian first. I see some improvement, though the two words per sentence are still words that hinder global comprehension. And German. I read the 10 pages I read from my book extensively for the first time. So far I had German and English versions mirrored and reading in parallel. Yesterday I read the German chapters first and I was happy to find out I had over 80% of understanding. It's really going paripassu with Norwegian or even faster. Now I'm optimistic. Not so with Russian, though. I've already asked for a Christmas present which would be being able to read either Georgian or Russian extensively and actually following the story, by Christmas. I am not sure it is realistic but it is something I really hope for. As for Estonian, Basic Course in Estonian with its FSI style is really massive, but I'm more adapted to it now. The audio is just too slow; I let it play on the background while I read the sentences and the grammar. The problem is the exercises have no translation, so I have to translate them manually almost in a SRSesque fashion. The good news is the vocabulary repeats consistently over the lessons, as it would happen in a good Assimil, so I'm actually getting a boost in Estonian comprehension: I have loads of sentences and dialogues with literal and proper translation; then I have grammar explanations with sentence samples that get translated. Then I have exercises to force my brain into trying to reading Estonian, and the same goes for the final conversation, that is contextualized and thus actually easier than the isolated sentences in the exercises, but at the same type helps provide more pertinent repertoire. It's as if I was using 3 types of textbook at once - Assimil with the core of the lesson; an old TY for the grammar explanations; and a phrasebook-like anglo textbook like Colloquial and TY - or even a graded reader, optimistically - for the final sentences and dialogues when I have to translate everything myself. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 274 of 415 31 July 2014 at 6:36am | IP Logged | ||
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Aww, you have a beautiful pronunciation in Russian :-)))
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 275 of 415 31 July 2014 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | ||
Спасибо! Я всё ещё не могу использовать русский :))) Back to work and I noticed the combo Bssic Course in Estonian + Colloquial Russian 2 is adding up at least 1 hour to the time I spend. Unfortunately my copy of CR2 has no OCR: when I copy-paste it I get meaningless latin characters that barely resemble a transcription of the Russian text. I know it'this is the stage at which I should be working intensively at this book, doing each exercise, reading the texts word by word so that my Russian could finally move on, but I still didn't manage to do it today. Better luck on Monday (as I have the day off tomorrow, it was already planned before the holidays). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 276 of 415 01 August 2014 at 12:18am | IP Logged | ||
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Writing it down before I forget. Plan for Russian:
Colloquial Russian 2 (work in progress), Assimil Perfectionnement (if I find it), Living Language Intermediate, Linguaphone Russian, I Read Russian, Streetwise Russian, Ilya Frank's method, Intermediate Russian A Grammar and Workbook, game over. This list is subject to changes if any of the items become redundant by the time I get to them. I may also insert a basic grammarbook if I feel I still haven't got enough of declensions before doing the Intermediate Russian book. I should work more on German grammar now, but I really don't feel like it. I don't write down the exercises at the old TY German, even if that'd be essential for me to clear up the grammar issues; it's just too boring. I hope I can overcome these mistakes by writing more later. So, after finishing this old TY I plan to do the missing upper-intermediate textbooks for my better languages (Grammaire progressive du français niveau avancé and Learn Norwegian), then I will start boosting up a new Romance language, probably Spanish. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 277 of 415 04 August 2014 at 10:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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So, after getting back to work on Thursday I still managed to have a day off on Friday. No language studies at all the weekend. We travelled to a resort in the countryside. The internet connection was very slow and I couldn't even do Memrise, but I'm not really concerned anymore. I have a few hundred characters to water but I will soon catch up. Since I don't have this issue with Anki, I didn't do Anki either (well, actually I forgot), and I didn't do it today either. Will do it later, it's better to focus on the several activities I missed for a few days in the past week.
Russian is still my main concern. Today I finally managed to do one lesson from Colloquial Russian 02 more carefully, and I noticed the benefits. It really slowed me down, because I had to type a lot of unknown words, but if I'm doing this for Estonian, why not do it for Russian too, which is a language I am having trouble with? I am confident it will get better in the upcoming weeks, less words to look up within a textbook. By the way, I forgot to mention each lesson from russianpod has over 10 pages, from which a long dialogue and a cultural excerpt that I count for the SC, plus loads of sentences with translation used on vocabulary and grammar explanations. All this to say that the issue with me not being in the mood to read Agatha Christie's book carefully and not understanding much from it might actually be a result of overexposure to Russian rather than a low enough dosis. Today I finished El Chino de Hoy II. I had already used the first volume and I liked the second volume even better. It has some of the nicest dialogues I've seen and they fit my level pretty well, allowing me to learn basically the new words introduced as the rest of the dialogue is already familiar. That is to say, this textbook doesn't assume you know more than what has been taught previously. Now I'm going to work on Contemporary Chinese 2, 3 and 4. It has dialogues, pinyin, translation, audio. I'm afraid the first lessons will still be too easy. I'll try not to make compulsory use of the 'cheats', but rather enjoy the facy I'm picking a lot from those dialogues, that is, I'm finally managing to understand the Chinese grammar to the extent that I can make sense of what I listen to. I'm going to finish the old TY German tomorrow and I probably won't replace it with another textbook. That will be the slot I'm keeping for brushing up French and Norwegian with the new textbooks I got. I really don't feel the need for German grammar drilling now; I'm really happy with the progress made through Easy German and even through my daily parallel reading, which I'm doing consistently, even when the subject isn't that user-friendly (like the change in paradigms on biology by proving genetical determinism wrong). I am sure I will get to a point at which I am going to need German grammar again, but at that point I hope I will be able to focus only on the endings as I will be comfortable with both the vocabulary and the syntax. Nevertheless, I'd welcome recommendations on good upper-intermediate German textbooks with focus on grammar. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 278 of 415 05 August 2014 at 10:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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A busy day and I did almost nothing, though I took important decisions.
I was faced with a long reviewing lesson in Basic Course in Estonian without translation, so I decided I'd OCR the lesson. I did so at onlineocr.net and it was indee the best I could have done. I learned much more from fixing the OCR as I translated the sentences at GT than the way I'd do before, looking up words one at a time, slowly. I even wrote about this at "The CHeating & COnsolidating Method"'s topic. Then I did the same for Colloquial Russian. The OCR worked even better, the software just ignored the accent marks used at the textbook. I didn't learn the Colloquial Russian 2 lesson as deeply as the Estonian one because I had a very busy day solving issues related to our moving next weekend. I don't expect to catch up as it is already half past five pm, but at least I finished Aprenda Sozinho Alemão: This is an edition in Portuguese of the old TY format. I used the French one and it helped me enormously. The German one isn't much different, and it even goes further in grammar than most textbooks aimed at intermediate students. I didn't write down all the exercises by hand as I did back then with French, but even so I must say this book helped a lot and I'd be glad to get back to it when I have some grammar issues. Only some words are a little outdated. I went through my German resources once again and, even though I was planning on doing something else in another language, I decided to do Modern German Grammar and its textbook, from Routledge. They're much more comprehensive and better presented than Intermediate German: A Grammar and Workbook. I don't plan on spending much time reading redundant grammar explanations, but from what I could skim this book is going to provide important insights on applying the grammar knowledge. If I'm supposed to study from Grammaire Progressive du Français and Learn Norwegian in order to improve these languages, then why not do it at once for German while I'm at it? I checked other textbooks, more aimed at dialogues, and I'm glad to realize that at my current stage it's much better to simply keep working on native materials the way I'm already doing. This makes me happy, because it shows that I've progressed a bit with German. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 279 of 415 06 August 2014 at 10:44pm | IP Logged | ||
A friend OCRed the whole book of Basic Course in Estonian with much less errors, and today I had a smooth learning time. I came across this: how sexist is Google Translator?!
Things might get better with Russian, as I am starting to focus on some words that I see too often to ignore their meaning. And also with Georgian: today I had a problem with getting the double subtitles from ted2srt and so I had to read the Georgian-only, on the go, while listening to the English. I tried reading the Georgian before and I realized I could understand much more from the TED transcript than from the Paulo Coelho's book I'm still reading. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6062 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 280 of 415 07 August 2014 at 3:12am | IP Logged | ||
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Actually, if you write the last one without the space before the "s" (I believe it was a typo), it translates as "He went to the supermarket" (no more "she", no more "department store's".
I'm really not commenting on the language, as I know nothing of Estonian, but I found this striking. Anyway, I don't think the space before the "s" is supposed to change the gender... or is it? Oh, and as a learner of an "exotic" (*) language, I'm not going to defend Google Translate. ;) (*) with a different structure and alphabet Edited by Luso on 07 August 2014 at 3:30am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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