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Total Annihilation - Volte | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6437 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 41 of 72 09 July 2007 at 5:20pm | IP Logged |
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Lumulo: thank you for the clarification and expansion.
Thanks reineke. I'd see that site before, but I haven't been using it; I should give it a try. Today's log: For core study, the minimum; I'm exhausted. On the side, I did a little bit of French, German, and Esperanto reading (but a -really- little bit; browsing a few news articles in each, online), and I started reading "A practical introduction to phonetics", which seems quite exciting so far. Now that exams are over, I can try to start following a better schedule. The trick now is how to balance total annihilation with putting a reasonable amount of time, effort, and energy into my summer research job (which is entirely unrelated to languages). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6437 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 42 of 72 10 July 2007 at 5:35pm | IP Logged |
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Real Total Annihilation, day 1.
I was longing for a change of pace, and so I took a rather drastic one. I decided to take a day off from all of my regular studies. I watched an hour of anime, in Japanese, with English subtitles. Via careful attention, I was able to pick up some words I hadn't known. I spent a few hours on unilang. The most interesting part was the voicechat. My accents for various languages apparently aren't doing particularly well currently. My English was first identified as British; after some time talking, with a couple of American participants, it had shifted to something more indeterminate, but the idea of my accent sounding Canadian was adamantly denied. My spontaneously mutating accent was out in full force. I also got to hear snippets of Icelandic, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Nahuatl(?), French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto, etc. I passed about 20 minutes with my phonetics book, and did exercises on frictives and stops. It's surprisingly tiring to explicitly and consciously manipulate airstreams for phonetic experimentation. The effect is similar to the opposite of that via the breathing exercises found in Yoga and Buddhist meditation practices, or so it seems to me. I also spent about 40 minutes reading "Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction". I found that it was originally a Canadian book, but I have the British edition, where Canadian pronunciation, cultural examples, and so forth are replaced by British ones. I would have picked the other edition if I'd realized this, but this one should be illuminating regardless. The table of contents suggests that it should fill in a lot of gaps in my knowledge (and fill in enough basic knowledge in other areas for me to start to see gaps, where currently I only have a total void). I think I'll return to reading "An Introduction to the Languages of the World" once I've finished the above two books. Last, but not least, I read "Words in context: A Japanese Perspective on Language and Culture". It was very worthwhile. The treatment on cultural concepts, how words 'slice up' reality, and on Japanese personal pronouns varied from convincing to illuminating. It provides some excellent examples of how the semantic fields of words don't overlap between languages, a stunning critique of the concept of denotation vs connotation, another stunning critique of (monolingual) dictionary entries for basic words, such as 'stone' and 'pain', and arguments that are almost convincing that state that one's perception of reality is more shaped by words than the other way around (a concept which I'm historically rather skeptical of). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6437 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 43 of 72 11 July 2007 at 5:56pm | IP Logged |
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Today was largely spent on gathering resources, and far too many technical frustrations. I also did some phonetics.
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6437 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 44 of 72 12 July 2007 at 2:58pm | IP Logged |
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Yet another day spent on technological hassles, work, and phonetics. Trying to gain explicit control over whether or not the glottis is closed, and being -positive- that this has been done is surprisingly tricky.
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6437 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 45 of 72 13 July 2007 at 5:03pm | IP Logged |
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Today was theoretical linguistics, project Gutenberg, looking up audiobook sites, and phonetics. Glottal initiation and trying to take conscious control of my larynx is a recipe for a sore throat.
I've finally resolved the technical problems that have been hounding me the last few days (aka, recovering from a harddisk failure). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6445 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 46 of 72 13 July 2007 at 5:27pm | IP Logged |
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lol aren't hard drives dirty traitors? Please do share those audiobooks sites with the rest of us. Edited by reineke on 13 July 2007 at 5:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6437 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 47 of 72 13 July 2007 at 5:34pm | IP Logged |
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Yeah. Fortunately, it wasn't -my- harddrive, and more than that, it only had operating systems on it and a tiny bit of data that my sister didn't care about; the major data was on a second disk. Less fortunately, I managed to burn a couple of bad ubuntu CDs and have various other headaches getting it back up again.
I'm sharing every decent free, non-pirate-oriented audiobook site I find, and all the ones that people tell me about too. The list is at http://www.how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.a sp?TID=6386&PN=1&TPN=1. [Edit: by the way, nice response to the Charles Heinle thread.] Edited by Volte on 13 July 2007 at 5:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6437 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 48 of 72 14 July 2007 at 5:32pm | IP Logged |
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Today's log: 4 hours Polish (audiobook + parallel text method; I went through all of "Animal Farm"). This was my first non-trivial exposure to Polish, or really to any Slavic language. It went fairly well; I largely managed to follow along, and found quite a few cognates. Basic connectives and superlatives are starting to become passively clear.
I also did a bit over an hour of reading in Italian ("A Brüsinpiàn gariva ul suu: Una storia d'Alzheimer"). The latter is a Ticenese book; despite the title, very little in it (only short quotes) is in dialect (and the meaning of those parts largely evades me); the 'standard' Italian has a rather Ticinese feel to it, but apart from a few words, is fairly straightforward to understand. No phonetics, theoretical linguistics, Esperanto, or Assimil today. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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