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A Linguistic Odyssey

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ellasevia
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Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian
Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian

 
 Message 145 of 265
06 January 2010 at 4:37am | IP Logged 
Words of the Day
Swedish
- en nyckel = key
- en fjärrkontroll = remote control
- ett kylskåp = refrigerator
- ett öra = ear
- någon = somebody, someone

For the first four words, I chose them because I like how they sound and how they look when written. For the last one, I thought choosing it for a word of the day might help me remember it and its meaning better. It means "somebody" or "someone," it it sounds sorta similar to the English "no one." Well, it's certainly closer to it than ingen, the real word for "no one" in Swedish. Whenever I hear or see it, I keep thinking that it means the opposite of what it is. So, to my mistaken eyes, the sentence Någon äter godis. (Someone is eating candy.) looks like "No one is eating candy." It's very aggravating. I have the same issue with the German word for "old"--alt. I always (even when writing the last sentence!) mistake it for meaning "tall" because it sounds and looks similar to the Spanish/Portuguese/Italian alto, which means "tall." I dislike those stupid faux amis.

Today I did another two Swedish lessons and did all of the reading and speaking exercises for the five lessons I have done in Swedish 102 so far. These exercises were just published today, along with the 201 and 202 courses. (It's nice to be familiar and friendly with the person in charge of adding and publishing new languages. I just sent an email asking when they would be expected to be done and a bit later they were published.)

I also learned one new kanji, but my amazing achievement of 42 kanji the other day makes up for today. The one I learned is 式, which means "style." When writing my goals (see later on in post), I calculated that if I do ten kanji per day, my goal for January should be to have learned 310 new kanji. That is scary, because that is how many approximately I learned since last May. For February I would learn 280 new characters...

In the last moments before I began writing this post, I BYKIed two of the Cortina Method Brazilian Portuguese lists that I had entered a couple days ago. :)

Well, today was the last day of break. Tomorrow school starts again, which is sad. Today was also the last day (the due date, as it were) of my language goals that I set a bit before break. So, out of those 160 mini-goals, I only accomplished...[drumroll] 62. Sadness. Only about 38%. Well, I knew it would be a stretch and I didn't take into account that I would have family here from December 23rd until January 1st, which was over half of the break. However, some of these goals were not quite fair. I counted learning 50 kanji as only one goal, but doing four tutor reviews in Portuguese (which take only a minute or two each) as four different goals. And finishing the Michel Thomas Advanced Japanese course was only one goal, as was finishing the Michel Thomas German Foundation course (which I still have two more hours of). Oh well. I have no one to blame but myself.   

I should also note that I have just edited my goals for 2010 a bit.

That's all for now.

--Philip

P.S. I'm definitely looking forward to getting up at about 5:30 tomorrow morning. 6:00 at the latest. NOT.
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ellasevia
Super Polyglot
Winner TAC 2011
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5982 days ago

2150 posts - 3229 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian
Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian

 
 Message 146 of 265
11 January 2010 at 3:56am | IP Logged 
I apologize to myself and whoever may be following this log for not posting in such a long time. I was so deeply involved in studying languages and learning so very much that I didn’t have time to post. NOT. In fact, this week has been fairly fail-ish language-wise.

Apparently I'm back. Getting up on Wednesday was not a problem, and it wasn't for my brother, either, because apparently I got him sick. So later on Wednesday we went to the doctor's and we both tested positive for strep throat. So I didn't end up going to school on Thursday, but I did on Wednesday and Friday. But I feel fine now, so that's good. The only problem is that I completely wasted Thursday, which I had to do whatever I liked. Oh well…

I was reading on this forum on Wednesday evening and found something about Lithuanian. I decided to take a look, just out of curiosity. A poster gave a link to this Lithuanian course and I went to check it out. I was just looking at the first lesson, which was interactive, so I tried to do some of the stuff, not really planning to do any more. In fact, it ended up being a little addictive, so I know a bit of Lithuanian now. I do not plan to study it though, but I did go up through lesson 15, I think. By that time I was able to write this sentence in Lithuanian: Aš nesuprantu labai gerai lietuviškai, bet aš kalbu angliškai, ir aš galiu skaityti lietuviškai. Which means "I don't understand Lithuanian very well, but I speak English, and I can read Lithuanian." I never thought about learning a Baltic language, but while I was doing the course, I seriously considered studying it or Latvian, because of their linguistic significance (supposedly Lithuanian is the closest living language to Proto-Indo-European and conserves the most ancient features). But I resisted, so hooray. Maybe some other time in like 30 years.

Now we get to some stuff that I did get done. Perhaps the best thing is that I have kept up more or less with my kanji goal of one per day. Since I posted last I have learned the following kanji and now know up through #400 in RTK1.
試 (test)
弐 (II)
域 (range)
賊 (burglar)
栽 (plantation)
載 (load)
茂 (overgrown)
成 (turn into)
城 (castle)
誠 (sincerity)
威 (intimidate)
滅 (destroy)
減 (dwindle)
桟 (scaffold)
銭 (coin)
浅 (shallow)
止 (stop)
歩 (walk)
渉 (ford)
頻 (repeatedly)
肯 (agreement)
企 (undertake)
歴 (curriculum)
武 (warrior)
賦 (levy)
正 (correct)
証 (evidence)
政 (politics)
定 (determine)
錠 (lock)
走 (run)
超 (transcend)
赴 (proceed)
越 (surpass)
是 (just so)
題 (topic)
堤 (dike)
建 (build)
延 (prolong)
誕 (nativity)
礎 (cornerstone)
婿 (bridegroom)
衣 (garment)
裁 (tailor)
装 (attire)
裏 (back)
壊 (demolition)

(And yes, I did specifically list them like that to make it look like a lot.)

On the note of that Lithuanian thing, I found out that that website allows you to make language lessons of your own using that nice formatting. So I decided to start making a lesson for Basic Greek and have now completed three lessons. Unfortunately, that, among other things, ate up lots of my time this weekend for studying.

I keep meaning to finish that Michel Thomas German Foundation Course some night, but it's not happening. I mostly get the opportunity to listen to that when I'm cleaning the bathroom or something. But now I have bowling as one of my classes (it's temporary, but it's a matter of how temporary because of schedule reconfigurations) and we have to walk up to the university bowling center every day (except Wednesday), which is about ten minutes. I should be able to listen to my iPod during that walk and since I don't have any friends in the class to distract me, I can continue studying with the iPod as I bowl and as I come back too. And then it is my last class of the day, meaning that then I have to walk to the bus station, so that means that there is the potential of listening to audio lessons for over an hour every day. :)

I don't think I mentioned yet that all of those books that I ordered have come, which is exciting. That means that I now have books in the "Ultimate" series for (in order of getting them) French, Portuguese, German, Italian, and Japanese. Exciting. Plus I also got my 101 French Idioms book and a Japanese sentence pattern book. I showed the former to my French teacher on Friday and she said that at some point she would be willing to go through it and put sticky notes on the idioms that are actually used in France, which would be really nice of her.

On Friday I went for Greek and did two Greek lessons with my grandmother again. And gave my grandfather some beginning Greek and German lessons. But anyways, I really need to get back into Greek and do some of that vocabulary eventually. (Maybe if I stopped writing over-detailed posts I would have time...)

On Friday night I was feeling motivated so I scanned through three lessons of Ultimate Portuguese and wrote out the vocabulary, which I studied an hour or two ago. Hooray. I accomplished something.

I intend to either now do some German studying or world history reading about slavery and sugar plantation in the West Indies (I already sacrificed probably three hours or more this weekend trying to decipher complex and boring texts about this for a class discussion tomorrow and now I have to get it all over again from my textbook). Hm...which is more interesting do you think? Sigh, I guess I'll do my homework now. :(

Good night...maybe.

--Philip
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ellasevia
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 Message 147 of 265
15 January 2010 at 4:37am | IP Logged 
WORDS of the DAYS
Portuguese
a fofoca - gossip

Just a funny-sounding word. It reminds me of foca, the word for 'seal' (as in the marine mammal) in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian.

French
le citron - lemon
les agrumes - citrus fruit
interviewer - to interview

I chose the first two of these because I like citrus fruits...lemons especially. And the chose the second because it always looks so ridiculous when languages (like French) adopt words directly from English. And the pronunciation is sorta funny, compared to the original English: ântervjuvä (â = like American English "cat," ä = like "day," j = like "yard")

Italian
la sicurezza - safety, security
la partenza - departure

I just like these words for some reason.

German
ärgern - to annoy, tease
beobachten - to watch, observe
bewundern - to admire
der Höhepunkt - highlight (lit: the height-point)
der Kampf - fight, battle
der Sieg - victory
die Königin - queen
schwach - weak

I just like all of these German words for one reason or another. I just wanted to point out how 'annoying' and sexist German can be sometimes with its feminine in suffix. die Königin is a composition of König (king) plus the feminine in suffix. I think it's insulting...not quite sure why, though. It just seems like they could have come up with a completely separate word for 'queen.'

Well, now that I'm done with those words of the day, I can say what I got done. Surprisingly, it's been a significant amount.

I forget when I did them (I think on Monday), but I did two more Livemocha Swedish lessons. :)

Also on Monday, I did the remaining Ultimate Portuguese lesson to complete my monthly goal. It was about the media, if my memory serves me. Nothing special about it. I think it was teaching the imperfect subjunctive, but I already knew that. About the imperfect subjunctive, we've been sort-of passively reviewing grammar concepts all year in my Spanish class and now this week we've been on that and apparently most people in the class (even the good ones) were getting almost every answer wrong in the homework (about the usage). I only got a couple wrong it was because I wasn't paying attention enough when I was filling in the blanks. Oh, and I also did some tutor reviews. Exciting.

On Tuesday, I did three out of the four French lessons I assigned myself for my monthly goal. Nothing too special about those either. Interestingly, the topics for the French and Portuguese seem to be linked for some lessons so one of the ones I did was also on the media.

Yesterday (Wednesday), I started my new Ultimate Italian book and did three lessons (out of the four I assigned myself). They were very easy, but there was a surprising amount of vocabulary.

Today I did only one German lesson, but it was a long one, and I might still have time to do another one. It was also about sports, which was...demotivating. But I got through it and all of the German vocabulary in listed above was from that lesson, so there were words I liked. I also learned about comparatives/superlatives and ordinal numbers, which I already had a very basic grasp of. I have also been listening to the Michel Thomas German on my iPod a lot more because of bowling class. I finished the foundation course and am a bit over a quarter of the way done with the advanced course. I underestimated the loudness of the bowling alley when I posted earlier, and also the people in my group are pretty nice, so I don't end up studying while I'm playing. Wouldn't really work anyways. But I do have a fair amount of walking time up to the alley. I also had it coming back before I found out that there is a bus stop about two minutes from the bowling alley, so now that study time is sitting on the bus, which is better anyways. Plus, I don't have to worry about getting confused and lost (yes, even though the way to the other bus stop, the one that's like a 15-20 minute walk away, is almost all a straight line and I know the area, I got lost on either Monday or Tuesday anyways). Wow. That was a long paragraph.

And now it's time for my every-postly kanji update. I am on target still for my kanji goal and have learned 40 new kanji in the past four days, up through #440. Here they are:
kanji 哀 (pathetic), 遠 (distant), 猿 (monkey), 初 (first time), 布 (linen), 帆 (sail), 幅 (hanging scroll), 帽 (cap), 幕 (curtain), 幌 (canopy), 錦 (brocade), 市 (market), 姉 (elder sister), 肺 (lung) 帯 (sash), 滞 (stagnate), 刺 (thorn), 制 (system), 製 (made in…), 転 (revolve), 芸 (technique), 雨 (rain), 雲 (cloud), 曇 (cloudy weather), 雷 (thunder), 霜 (frost), 冬 (winter), 天 (heaven), 橋 (bridge), 嬌 (attractive), 立(stand up), 泣 (cry), 章 (badge), 競 (vie), 帝 (sovereign), 童 (juvenile), 瞳 (pupil), 鐘 (bell), 商 (make a deal), 嫡 (legitimate wife)

That's it. Maybe I'll decide to stop being lazy and post again sooner next time.

--Philip

EDIT: I forgot to mention four things. The first is that my grandfather (he's a linguist) needs to learn some Japanese for his upcoming big trip to Japan, and wanted my suggestions on choosing some study material. I recommended Ultimate Japanese (which I myself will start on Saturday) and Michel Thomas. This brings me to my second point, which was that I think once I finish the MT Adv. German course I will start listening to the MT Adv. Japanese course again and do the transcribing thing for all of it just to cement my knowledge of everything. The third thing is that some of my friends who take Japanese at school keep saying that I could probably go into Japanese 3 next year, instead of my guess of level 2, because, according to them, they barely do anything. I doubt, however, that this is the case. I have talked to some other people and have seen some stuff and it looks pretty substantial (assuming it's representative). And finally, I forgot in the meantime what my fourth point was, so I'm going to use this one instead: apparently I did my math wrong before or something, because I had estimated that if I learned 10 new kanji per day, I would be able to finish RTK1 by mid-May. I just calculated that if I do indeed do 10 every day until I'm done, the last day would be June 23rd of this year, with me learning 11 kanji on that last day (2,041 kanji total in the book). So, that will be my goal. JUNE 23RD, 2010.

Edited by ellasevia on 11 March 2010 at 6:06am

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ellasevia
Super Polyglot
Winner TAC 2011
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5982 days ago

2150 posts - 3229 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian
Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian

 
 Message 148 of 265
15 January 2010 at 5:04am | IP Logged 
And I just remembered that last thing, but I'll write it in a new post for cleanliness and so that big scary paragraph at the end of the last post doesn't get even bigger.

So, I have been able to do most of my lessons and kanji all in the morning before school and still getting up later, in part because I have been writing out the vocabulary for at least one lesson the night before. For example, last night I did this for the German lesson on sports. Tonight I'm not going to do it because tomorrow I'm going to actually start learning the vocabulary that I've been getting from my Greek lessons with my grandmother since November but not studying up until now. :)


1 person has voted this message useful



ellasevia
Super Polyglot
Winner TAC 2011
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5982 days ago

2150 posts - 3229 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian
Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian

 
 Message 149 of 265
25 January 2010 at 5:41am | IP Logged 
Γεια σας! Δε μπορώ να το πιστέψω--επέστρεψα μετά περισσότερο από μιά εβδομάδα! I don't know why I just decided to write in Greek, but for anyone that doesn't read Greek I basically said...well, I'm too lazy to write it, go figure it out yourself if you really care that much.

I have not written in a long time. Or at least it feels that way because of how busy I've been. I shall categorize all of the things I've done according to language.

PORTUGUÊS
Almost nothing. I did do one vocabulary list in BYKI from the Cortina Method Brazilian Portuguese but that's about it. I was planning on doing some more later tonight or tomorrow.

FRANÇAIS
If my memory serves me, I did one list of French vocabulary from Ultimate French this past week, but nothing else.

ITALIANO
I did one vocabulary list from my Ultimate Italian book. It was about nationalities, so it was very easy. I also listened to one episode of LearnItalianPod while waiting for the bus. I also did one lesson of Italian on Livemocha.

DEUTSCH
I did one lesson out of Ultimate German. The lesson was on studies and professions, and I am done done with 27 out of the 40 lessons in the book. I also started re-listening and transcribing the Michel Thomas Advanced German Course.

ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ
I FINALLY typed up all of that Νέα Ελληνικά that I've had sitting around since the end of October and learned it all. Hooray. Oh, and I discovered the first word in Greek that has ever given me issues with pronunciation. (I normally have a completely native accent because of my early exposure to Greek.) It is the word for 'discount,' έκπτωση (ekptosi). That consonant cluster k-p-t is really hard to pronounce without it sounding awkward. I am more or less able to say it correctly now (with a bit of difficulty), but I literally spent probably 20 minutes just on saying that word over and over.

日本語
I got a bunch done for Japanese mainly in the kanji department. Currently I am actually ahead of my schedule by a few characters; I know 545, but I only need to know 540 for today. This is because of this new technique I'm doing in bowling class--I try to memorize a new kanji between my turns and then draw it in the air with my mind as I throw the ball. As you can imagine, it's made me learn a bunch of them really quickly. Anyways, I am now in Part 3 of RTK1 now (the final part, when the author decided to get lazy and make the learner start doing all the work). So here's a list of them, divided into rows of them (and then five).

適, 滴, 敵, 匕, 北, 背, 比, 昆, 皆, 混
渇, 謁, 褐, 喝, 旨, 脂, 壱, 毎, 敏, 梅
海, 乞, 乾, 腹, 複, 欠, 吹, 炊, 歌, 軟
次, 茨, 資, 姿, 諮, 賠, 培, 剖, 音, 暗
韻, 識, 鏡, 境, 亡, 盲, 妄, 荒, 望, 方
妨, 坊, 芳, 肪, 訪, 放, 激, 脱, 説, 鋭
曽, 増, 贈, 東, 棟, 凍, 妊, 廷, 染, 燃
賓, 歳, 県, 栃, 地, 池, 虫, 蛍, 蛇, 虹
蝶, 独, 蚕, 風, 己, 起, 妃, 改, 記, 包
胞, 砲, 泡, 亀, 電, 竜, 滝, 豚, 逐, 遂
家, 嫁, 豪, 腸, 場

Only 1,497 to go!

In other Japanese news, I did the first and second lessons from my new Ultimate Japanese, which I like much better than that Teach Yourself Japanese.

SVENSKA
Swedish has been pretty good too. I am back on track with it and I hope that I'll accomplish both of my Swedish goals for the month. I have done several Livemocha lessons (I'm now 67% done with Swedish 102) and today I reviewed all of my vocabulary lists from SEGR (what a feat) AND did the lesson that I started back on December 15th. I don't know why I didn't do it before... Probably because I was afraid of learning the word for 'maypole' (en midsommarstång). But yes, I'm done up through lesson seven in my book now, just a couple days before my four-month anniversary (how pathetic, right?). As is custom, here is my translation exercise into Swedish. (If you want to see the Swedish --> English translation, that would be on page...um...a lot of pages ago.)

--
ENGLISH
Mora
Friday

Dear Kerstin and Erik,
Thank you so much for your letter.
     We have now been here in Dalarna a whole week, and the weather has also been marvelous. We are living in an old cottage by the lake. The water is rather cold, but we have been bathing every day. Everybody is very brown. Yesterday we took the old rowboat and rowed over to a little island which we can see from the cottage. Today we went with a neighbor to the open-air museum and looked at the old houses which people in Dalarna used to live in many years ago. It was great fun. The houses are so small. Tomorrow we are going by car to Leksand to look at the maypole. It stands all winter in the square. By the way, have you heard that Britta is in Dalarna? We saw her this evening when we were shopping in Mora. She is living in one of the beautiful cottages by the lake.
              Yes, it was miserable being left in Stockholm. Can we come out and see you in August? That would be fun.
       
                             With love,
       
        Mum and Dad

SWEDISH

Mora
Fredag

Kära Kerstin och Erik,
Tack så mycket för brevet.
     Nu har vi varit här i Dalarna en hel vecka, och vädret har också varit underbart. Vi bor i en gammal stuga vid sjön. Vattnet är ganska kallt, men vi har badat varje dag. Alla är mycket brun. I går tog vi den gamla roddbåten och rodde till en liten ö som vi kan se från stugan. I dag gick vi med en granne till friluftsmuseet och tittade på de gamla husen som Dalarnabor bodde i för många år sedan. Det var jättekul. Husen är så små. I morgon åker vi bil till Leksand för att titta på midsommarstången. Den står den hela vintren i torget. Har du förresten hört att Britta är i Dalarna? Vi såg henne i kväll när handlade vi i Mora. Hon bor i en av de vackra stugorna vid sjön.
     Ja, det var trist att vara kvar i Stockholm. Kan vi komma för att hälsar på er i augusti? Det skulle vara roligt.

                             Vi älskar er,

        Mamma och Pappa

--

Liz, you are, as always, welcome to point out anything you may notice. :)

MISCELLANEOUS
My friend, when asking me how I do the LM exercises so quickly, gave me the idea to make a template for the writing exercises in English so that I can just translate that into X language and not have to waste time thinking of something different to say. It's much faster this way. :)

And, I have something to announce...


A NEW LANGUAGE!!! *cheers* *groans*
Yes, as you may have noticed, I now have Esperanto listed in the "studies" section of my language profile to the left of this post. I had studied Esperanto previously for about a month about a year and a half ago, but didn't progress much. I was using the "Free Esperanto Course," and somehow last Saturday I started thinking about Esperanto and started up again. It's not such a bad thing--it's really easy so it shouldn't take too much time. I have since finished that FEC and got my 'diploma'. So now I am working through a downloaded version of Teach Yourself Esperanto which looks great and very comprehensive (I've also heard good things). I'm up through lesson four, although I haven't BYKIed the vocabulary for three or four yet. I'm thinking of doing Esperanto whenever I have time or feel like it, preferably on Mondays because Portuguese really doesn't take long. In any case, I've already shocked myself at how much I know--I only started studying on January 16th and I've already updated my profile on this website to reflect my middle-to-high intermediate level. So yeah, I'm going to try to get to basic fluency within a month or two by finishing off that TYE. Who knows, it might even bring me to advanced fluency. How exciting.


ONE LAST THING, I PROMISE
Finally, we went to a symphony concert last night at after drinking a Coke, I was wide awake and contemplating my hit-list language sequence (before the intermission, I was asleep for most of it because it was so soothing). I planned that I will probably drop Portuguese first, and then French, and then Italian from my study schedule. At first, I won't start anything new, but rather try to spend more time on the ones I have so that I will progress faster. Once I'm either tired of doing that or have decided to remove some language (probably Swedish) from my study plans, I will start Russian. I actually prefer Czech in terms of Slavic languages, but Russian is easier and has more resources, and several members of my family speak Russian very well and can help me. When I feel ready I will add Arabic. This should keep me going for a while, but when I'm ready to add another, I will add either Swahili, Finnish, or Czech, but probably Swahili. Then Czech, then Finnish, and maybe Dutch and/or Afrikaans inserted somewhere in there. Then either Mandarin or Romanian or Turkish... Of course, this will probably not end up happening just like this, because interests change, and just because I like one language now does not mean I will like it in three years or whenever I was planning on adding it.

Well, that's all for tonight. This post has taken forever to write.

--Philip

EDIT: Fixing a typo that I noticed.

Edited by ellasevia on 25 January 2010 at 5:45am

1 person has voted this message useful



ellasevia
Super Polyglot
Winner TAC 2011
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5982 days ago

2150 posts - 3229 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian
Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian

 
 Message 150 of 265
28 January 2010 at 3:18am | IP Logged 
Hello. I have decided that I don’t get enough practice with this log, so I am going to attempt to make it multilingual. I am writing this introduction in English so that most people can understand what’s going on. So, I plan to write in whichever language a certain section of my post pertains to; if I’m talking about my Greek studies, I shall write στα ελληνικά, if I’m talking about German, I’ll write auf Deutsch. If I find that I do not yet possess the ability to write a coherent message in this language, I will use either English or the language of the day (specified on some previous page; today’s is Italian). I might occasionally post a summary in English, if I feel like it. So, brace yourselves…and I hope that I don’t completely fail. Here we go…

------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------

PORTUGUÊS
A semana começou com o português na segunda-feira, como sempre. Por alguma razão, por um tempo não pude acordar cedo na manhã, mas esta semana sim posso. Fiz duas lições do livro Ultimate Portuguese (uma foi dos feriados e a outra foi da política). Só há duas lições mais antes de que eu termine o livro por fim! Claro que vou revisar todo o vocabulário, mas é não obstante emocionante. Também percebei que não tenho muitos mais materiais (depois de Ultimate Portuguese para estudar o português; só tenho um curso em Livemocha, umas lições em Cortina Method Brazilian Portuguese, aquele dicionário de frequência (vou começar de usá-lo logo) de Routledge, e Teach Yourself Brazilian Portuguese. Porém, não acho que eu vá usá-lo (o TYBP porque é demasiado fácil pra mim. O que já tenho que estudar são os verbos irregulares, especialmente no pretérito. Também tenho um livro de Harry Potter em português e acho que eu o ler melhoraria muito a minha proficiência. Esquecei de mencionar o BrazilianPodClass...

FRANÇAIS
La situation de mon français c’est similaire à celle du portugais. Hier j’ai fait deux leçons de Ultimate French, et il en manque seuls deux qu’il faut que je fasse. Pour le français, j’en ai plus de matériaux que pour le portugais, mais je crois que la lecture me fera du bien. J’ai aussi un livre d’Harry Potter en français. Je ne sais pas si je vais suiver le cours de français 5 à l’école l’année prochaine, mais je pense que oui. Aussi pour ma classe de français, ma prof nous a donné le devoir de faire des cartes mémoires pour la vocabulaire de l’histoire que nous lisons (« Mateo Falcone »), et il y en avait beaucoup. J’ai mis 119 mots et phrases dans BYKI et il fallait 40 feuilles de papier pour les imprimer ! C’était fou, je vous dis…

ITALIANO
Questa mattina ho fatto, come per il portoghese e il francese, due lezioni del mio libro Ultimate Italian. Adoro quella serie... Ho deciso finalmente cosa farò col libro Easy Italian Reader che ho ricevuto per il Natale: lo darò a una ragazza nella mia classe di storia mondiale chi vuole imparare l’italiano ma non sa come farlo. Già parla lo spagnolo come lingua maternale, poi l’italiano sarà molto facile per lei. Solo leggendo il libro l’aiutarà in reconoscere le strutture Italiane e le differenze tra lo spagnolo e l’italiano. Glielo darò domani.
漢字 (KANJI)
Questi sono i caratteri che ho imparato da domenica:
湯, 羊, 美, 洋, 詳
鮮, 達, 羨, 差, 着, 唯, 焦, 礁, 集, 准
進, 雑, 雌, 準, 奮, 奪, 確, 午, 許, 歓

Fra loro c’è il carattere per ‘belleza’ (美), ch’è composto dai caratteri per ‘ovino’ (羊) e ‘grande’ (大)...allora, la belleza per i giapponesi e i cinesi è un ovino grande! Questo mi ha fatto ridere molto... Adesso so 570 kanji.

日本語
昨日私は日本語のピムスロルを聞きました。 とても簡単でした,でもまだよく話しません 。

EDIT: Spelling error in Portuguese.

Edited by ellasevia on 28 January 2010 at 5:50am

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ellasevia
Super Polyglot
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Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian
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 Message 151 of 265
28 January 2010 at 4:47am | IP Logged 
Jag glömde att säga att jag räknade upp alla mina gloslister och jag vet nu ungefär 950 ord på svenska. Jag måste lära många mera att tala flytande, men det är en början. Men, gloslisterna har inte ord lik ’jag’ eller ’inte.’

EDIT: typo

Edited by ellasevia on 28 January 2010 at 4:49am

1 person has voted this message useful



ellasevia
Super Polyglot
Winner TAC 2011
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5982 days ago

2150 posts - 3229 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian
Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian

 
 Message 152 of 265
28 January 2010 at 5:42am | IP Logged 
Hm. So within a couple hours, this idea of multilingualism in my log has already died. Maybe if I have time and feel motivated, I will write it in another language, but otherwise it's not going to happen. Probably. I don't know. But I'm feeling rather discouraged about my Italian right now. I decided, after having wasted hours after school today doing nothing (when I have no homework due the next day, I have this tendency), I decided to review my Livemocha Italian 102 vocabulary, only to find that I had forgotten a large portion of it. Sadness. In fact, complete epic fail. I really should be at basic fluency or better now, but no. And many of the words I forgot were really basic things. I think the problem is that I have done lots of passive practice (LearnItalianPod, etc.) but not nearly enough active practice. Because of this, I am going to start actively going through that book Easy Italian Reader and comb it for everything. This should help, I hope. My grammar needs tuning up too, and it's just...fail-ish. It's despicable. But I think it is due to three main things:
1. losing lots of motivation for Italian this summer and not studying seriously for a while as a consequence
2. the big computer crash thing that happened in October combined with lots of schoolwork, which made it so that I would never get around to Italian
3. so many languages...this is a problem, and I really am looking forward to reaching the level in Portuguese and French where I can stop studying and focus even more on the other ones I'm doing already; no Russian, Arabic, Swahili, etc. until I have at least three 'empty' days in my week, preferably four (aka, finishing Portuguese, French, Italian, and Swedish, in that order)

So, yeah. That was my tirade of the evening. Good night.


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