Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5957 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French
| Message 1 of 8 29 January 2009 at 1:10am | IP Logged |
I am taking the liberty of bending the TAC rules somewhat to establish on a trial basis a log for my study efforts in the form of an extended TAC self-challenge. I am keeping a separate log of a more narrative nature elsewhere, and intend here only to render a dry record for my own purposes of material studied or reviewed, so it is unlikely to be of any real interest to others. Feel free, however, to poke around: it is mostly the fear that others will see here what a lazy fellow I am that hopefully will motivate me to keep studying at least six days a week.
Challenge: attain by the end of May 2028 at least a "just a shade beyond rank beginner" conversational and reading ability in the following languages (not necessarily acquired in the following order): French, German, Japanese, Italian, Norwegian, Indonesian, Czech, Swahili, Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic, Scottish Gaelic, Greek, Portuguese, Croatian, Turkish, Swedish, Russian, Africaans and one of either Thai, Laotian or Cambodian.
Henceforth, only study log entries and no more narrative comment from me here until the end of May 2028, at which time I (a new, improved, multi-lingual and considerably more smug I) will come back to gloat and etc.
Best wishes to everyone in their own mad TACs and learning language goals.
Spanky
Edit: After a night's reflection, I have changed my mind - two separate logs seems a little excessive, so I'll discontinue this one and diarize it for 2028 just to see how things have turned out.
Edited by Spanky on 29 January 2009 at 9:22am
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Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5957 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French
| Message 2 of 8 10 December 2012 at 11:00pm | IP Logged |
After 1422 more nights of additional reflection, I have decided to punch in from time to time to provide irregular interim updates of the break-neck pace of my progress in this challenge.
As of pretty much the end of 2012, my status is as follows:
French – in progress. So far I have:
Completed:
Pimsleur I, II and III
Michel Thomas, Beginners (Foundation) course
FSI, French Phonology
A fair number of articles from French.about.com
Watched:
Intouchables
Paris je t’aime (about 30 times)
Bon Cop, Bad Cop
Non, ce pays n'est pas pour le vieil homme - No Country for Old Men
Le chevalier noir - The Dark Knight
Max le menance - Get Smart
Read:
Bunch of kiddies books, mostly involving Rattu and his rascally adventures
Camus, L’Etranger – years ago, hated it
Tintin, L'affaire Tournesol
Various cereal boxes (the French part of the bilingual packaging), including
Count Chocula, Rice Krispies, et ma favori, L’Honey-comb
German – stalled
Started Pimsleur, Michel Thomas and DW Warum Nicht, but abandoned them all sometime ago in favour of being sloth-like
Japanese Japanese – stalled
Worked through and internalized some of the Remembering the Kanji, up to about the first 300 characters, and then got all headachy and put it aside and am now too terrified to go back
The other 17 languages
Not yet started, but I still have 15 years, so get off my back.
See ya in a while or something.
Edited by Spanky on 10 December 2012 at 11:09pm
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kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4848 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese
| Message 3 of 8 11 December 2012 at 4:23am | IP Logged |
This thread depresses me. I'll be 50 in 2028!
Anyway, good luck! You have a hard task ahead, but certainly a doable one.
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Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6621 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish
| Message 4 of 8 11 December 2012 at 8:06am | IP Logged |
Hey Spanky!
You’re getting a little ahead of yourself starting your 2028 log already. I like your learning strategies though. Keep reading the Count Chocula, and L’Honey Comb. I’ll probably stick to El oatmeal. :D
I think I have to join the Romance team this year just to be on the same team as you.
There's still room on the Japanese team BTW. It's really not all that scary.
Edited by Brun Ugle on 11 December 2012 at 8:13am
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Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5957 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French
| Message 5 of 8 11 December 2012 at 4:42pm | IP Logged |
Brun Ugle wrote:
You’re getting a little ahead of yourself starting your 2028 log already. |
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Well, I hate leaving things to the last minute, so I thought I would get a head start!
I am currently sheltering notes concerning my sloth-like progress with French in a
stand-alone log: "18 Months of French", which occasionally is in danger of being
renamed "18 Months of indifferent, occasional French language study" in the interests
of being strictly accurate.
Brun Ugle wrote:
There's still room on the Japanese team BTW. It's really not all that scary. |
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Very tempting, but probably counterproductive for me at present.
Edited by Spanky on 11 December 2012 at 4:45pm
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Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5957 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French
| Message 6 of 8 11 December 2012 at 4:50pm | IP Logged |
kujichagulia wrote:
This thread depresses me. I'll be 50 in 2028!
Anyway, good luck! You have a hard task ahead, but certainly a doable one. |
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Thanks kujichagulia. Part of me hopes I give up long before having to tackle Scottish
Gaelic, because from the little I have seen of it, I am pretty sure that language will
break my brain.
Edited by Spanky on 11 December 2012 at 4:52pm
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Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6621 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish
| Message 7 of 8 11 December 2012 at 6:02pm | IP Logged |
Spanky wrote:
Brun Ugle wrote:
You’re getting a little ahead of yourself starting your 2028 log already. |
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Well, I hate leaving things to the last minute, so I thought I would get a head start! |
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I thought maybe your calender was running fast.
Spanky wrote:
Part of me hopes I give up long before having to tackle Scottish
Gaelic, because from the little I have seen of it, I am pretty sure that language will
break my brain. |
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But I see you have Norwegian on the list too. That one's easy, so it will counterbalance the difficulty of the Gaelic. Oh, and if you have Norwegian, you don't even need to bother with Swedish. There are lots of Swedes working here and they never bother learning Norwegian. (Don't tell any Swedes, but Swedish is just a dialect.)
Edited by Brun Ugle on 11 December 2012 at 6:06pm
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Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4640 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian
| Message 8 of 8 11 December 2012 at 6:11pm | IP Logged |
kujichagulia wrote:
This thread depresses me. I'll be 50 in 2028! |
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And I will be close to retirement! Let's just hope HTLAL still goes strong by then, so we can look forward to Spanky's TAC 2055...
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