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TAC My poor overwhelmed brain | ||
Tags: Afrikaans | Wanderlust | Brain | Teach Yourself | Finnish | Swedish | Vocabulary learning | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | Pronunciation | Grammar | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5922 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 1 of 223 04 January 2009 at 4:01am | IP Logged | ||
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Welcome to my TAC log. I know I'm a month late, but I thought the new year would be a good time to start this. This log will definitely be about the following languages: Afrikaans and Spanish, and later on in the year I may tackle Dutch, and then flirt with German, French and a maybe a few more languages, I'll see what happens. I intend to post primarily in English at first, and then after a few weeks I will also add Afrikaans and Spanish to the posts(with translations to English for those who do not know Afrikaans or Spanish). I am also a college student and will be taking Human Anatomy, Sociology, and Spanish this quarter, thus I subtitled this log "My poor overwhelmed brain". I plan to post new entries three times a week, maybe more often, although I only guarantee three times a week. I've never tried seriously studying two, or more, languages before this; so I hope to get some encouragement, and perhaps advice, for this project.
EDIT 26 Oct. 2009: I've decided to continue (or re-start) my Afrikaans log; thus anything I have to say in or about, Afrikaans will from now on be found there. Mick Edited by mick33 on 01 December 2009 at 6:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5922 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 2 of 223 06 January 2009 at 3:33am | IP Logged | ||
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For my second post I will make mention of my language learning goals for this year and explain the methods I use to study languages.
My Goals 1a. To learn Afrikaans well enough to actually be able to carry on a coherent and intelligent conversation that could last more than a few minutes 1b. Stop mentally trying to translate spoken or written messages from Afrikaans to English or vice versa which leads me to 1c. Read and write well enough that I will only very rarely need to look up words in a dictionary. In short bring my knowledge and abilities in Afrikaans to nearly the same level as my knowledge and abilities in English. I fully intend to accomplish the above goal(s) by the end of 2009 2a. Learn at least the basics of Spanish: starting with a little bit of grammar and vocabulary so that I can actually form correct sentences that are usable in everyday speech, listen to enough music and radio broadcasts to get used to how Spanish sounds and then begin singing along with the recorded songs to hopefully help improve my pronunciation. 3. Do scriptorium exercises in both Spanish and Afrikaans daily spending about a half hour on each language. My Methods 1. I began learning Afrikaans using the material on the afrikaans.us site, which, I am happy to report, will have its grammar section up and running sometime in April. One thing I do is listen to a song repeatedly while reading the lyrics so I can follow along once I think I have a good grasp of how the words sound (requires listening at least 4 times a day for 2 days usually) I then begin to sing along with the recording. 2. I also like to do the scriptorium exercise, which I've already mentioned in my goals section and in my previous log. I like scriptorium because it teaches me new vocabulary words in a useful context and I get to hear myself speak my target language. 3. Just read things in my target language, such as online newspapers, maybe some blogs, and childrens' stories. I don't have any childrens' stories in Afrikaans yet, but I do have access to a few in Spanish. I hope to have my first report of my activities later on today, after I've gotten some sleep. Lekker slaap & (Eng. "Sleep tight", or more literally "good sleep" maybe "sleep well" Buenos noches Mick EDIT: In describing my methods I should have added that one of the first things I like to do is look briefly at the basics of grammar in my target language. By basics of grammar I mean the following things;(assuming these features exist in the language) Pronouns, diminutive forms, the simplest form of past, present, and future tenses, a little bit on the most commonly used cases, prefixes or suffixes, and how words are made plural, and then maybe attempt to construct my own simple; but hopefully grammatically correct sentence in each tense. I do this brief "overview" to get a vague idea of how the language might work at around the same time I began learning pronunciation by listening to music, though I add that the "grammar overview" is something I only spend a 1/2 hour on at first; then, after getting what I hope is a better grasp on pronunciation and some vocabulary, I begin deconstructing a few sentences by translating them to English using the target language's word order. Learning how to make a few Afrikaans words plural was very helpful in the beginning, because I discovered that the bilingual Afrikaans-English dictionaries I could find did not usually mention plural forms, but I was already encountering many plural forms of words in reading. Afrikaans, similarly to Dutch (I think), usually adds an "e" or "s" to the of a word to make it plural, and it was important to for me to know that a word like "fiets" which means "bicycle" is not plural. I will explain this more fully in a later post this week but right now I must look at how to form plural words in Spanish. EDIT: As of June 5, 2009, the afrikaans.us site does not have it's grammar section up yet. Edited by mick33 on 04 August 2009 at 11:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5922 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 3 of 223 06 January 2009 at 11:44am | IP Logged | ||
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This morning I have just finished 25 minutes of scriptorium work in Afrikaans; and I have learned some new words, and at least three of them could be synonyms. NOTE: Afrikaans words are in quotes then I follow with a dash and give a corresponding English word or phrase.
The new words are 1. "bruilof" - wedding 2. "troue" - wedding 3. "reiniging" - cleanse or purify (might be an older term) 4. "skoonmaak" - cleanse, purify or purge 5. "dienaar" - servant (might be an older term) 6. "klipkan" - literally stone can (possibly refers to clay pot) 7. "anker" - anchor I will get to Spanish later on and post another message (possibly tonight) after I find a text for scriptorium in Spanish. One last thing, I've noticed this log already has 81 views, which actually surprises me. So what I want to know is: What do the people reading this log think of it? also, Is what I write useful or interesting to you? Finally, Does anyone have any advice or suggestions about how I could improve my study mathods or how I write about them in this log? Mick NOTE: I edited the above message because the first question had the word advice where it would make no sense. One unmentioned advantage to TAC is that it will force me to improve my typing skills, in two or three languages! Edited by mick33 on 17 January 2009 at 8:16pm 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 4 of 223 06 January 2009 at 12:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, it's interesting; I'm curious about Afrikaans, but I'm not letting myself study it. I don't really have advice. Good luck!
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| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5922 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 5 of 223 06 January 2009 at 3:08pm | IP Logged | ||
Thank you Volte, for your reply. I'm glad you find my log, and Afrikaans itself interesting. I can understand not letting yourself study a language for various reasons; I'm not currently studying Esperanto and Hungarian, to name just two languages I don't have time for now. Oh well, I now have something to look forward to in the future! Mick Edited by mick33 on 24 March 2009 at 4:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5922 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 6 of 223 07 January 2009 at 12:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Today I will begin writing about Spanish. My Spanish studies have actually gotten to a slow start, I'm still trying to form a study schedule. My Spanish class at college began Monday and I think I will really like it. The teacher is very knowledgable about both Spanish and English and, surprisingly she seems to speak both languages with the proper accent and intonation (though I don't think it's reasonable to believe I will learn to speak Spanish with a proper native accent or intonation.) I haven't found a suitable text for scriptorium work in Spanish, but I think it's too early for that anyway, possibly in a month or two. I will write more on both Afrikaans and Spanish plural words and how they are formed in my next post.
Mick Edited by mick33 on 08 January 2009 at 2:54am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5922 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 7 of 223 09 January 2009 at 3:57am | IP Logged | ||
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I noticed I forgot to write anything about Afrikaans in my last post, so this time I will begin with what I've been doing the last few days to study Afrikaans. I've been learning a new songAs jy my kon volg this style of music isn't what I usually listen to, but the YouTube video also has the lyrics which is what important since I still don't know enough Afrikaans to figure out the lyrics on my own, also I did manage to do 20 minutes of scriptorium work yesterday then I remembered that I wanted to review my notes from the afrikaans.us website, which is partly why I promised in my previous post to discuss plural forms of words in both Afrikaans and Spanish.
Before I get into plurals, I want to briefly mention my Spanish studies. I spent about an hour learning new vocabulary and I was surprised to find that many of the words in the first lesson seemed to be familiar to me; though I still learned many new words and useful phrases. The genderization of nouns is also not as much of a problem as I thought it would be. Now to get to the plural forms. The first thing I want to say is that the formation of plurals for both languages is fairly simple, though Afrikaans appears to have more exceptions. Afrikaans &n bsp; &n bsp; Spanish Most words are made plural by Plurals are usually made by adding "s" adding "e" or "s" el diccionario - los diccionarios examples la fotografía - las fotografías vinger - vingers boek - boeke If singular form ends in a consonant add "es" the suffix "heid" becomes "hede" la universidad - las universidades waarheid - waarhede la conversación - las conversaciónes a few words add suffix "ens" examples: nooi - nooiens lewe - lewens gevoel - gevoelens 2 Exceptions to above forms: kind - kinders pad - paaie Some English cognates with "es" ending add "te" fees - feeste gees - geeste bees - beeste Words ending with "f" after a short vowel skrif - skrifte Words ending in "f" after a short vowel duif - duiwe slaaf - slawe words ending in "g" after short vowel vrug - vrugte nag - nagte words ending in "g: after long vowel vlieg - vlieë The lists may not be complete (especially for Spanish), but it was a good way for me to compare and contrast one feature of both languages. Mick Edited by mick33 on 29 January 2009 at 4:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5922 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 8 of 223 12 January 2009 at 11:39am | IP Logged | ||
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I may have to reconsider posting in both Spanish and Afrikaans. I will definitely post in Afrikaans by next week but my Spanish is, as I should have expected, not yet to a usable lavel; I don't know enough words to write anything yet. But who knows... maybe I will have learned enough Spanish vocabulary by the beginning of February.
Now back to my study of Afrikaans. As I already wrote in my other log, I most often use the Bible for scriptorium work. I haven't mentioned this before for a few reasons; 1. I figure writing much about what I'm reading and writing in the Bible might be violation of forum rules. 2. Anyone else who's interesting in the Bible in Afrikaans can read it by going here and then clicking on the link "Lees die Bybel" (in English: Read the Bible.) But Friday I had trouble with getting the Afrikaans Bible website to come up (my computer was having problems) so I decided I would instead find online newspaper articles to use for scriptorium work. I found an interesting article about a popular South African cricket star, Graeme Smith. I read the article and discovered I didn't understand half of it because, being American I know almost nothing about cricket, but it was still very interesting to read. I'll post something about Spanish either later on today or tomorrow. Lekker dag Mick P.S Since I assume that many who read this log are probably more interested in reading about Afrikaans; I'm planning to review my notes on diminuitives, which are very commonly used in Afrikaans. I hope to post a little bit of information on them Thursday or Friday. Edited by mick33 on 16 January 2009 at 2:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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