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A Linguistic Odyssey | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5991 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 201 of 265 30 March 2010 at 7:28am | IP Logged |
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Thanks brian91!
Well, I'm back again. I suppose I should have taken better notes on what I did yesterday. I'll just try to guess on what I have done since I last posted. SUMMARY - Did some tutoring on Livemocha for English, Spanish, and Portuguese - Entered a French vocabulary list from Imaginez! into Anki - Entered vocabulary lists from Italian Vocabulary (a book that I started previously and intend to continue with once I finish Ultimate Italian) into Anki - Entered Livemocha Italian 101 vocabulary into Anki - Entered Livemocha German 101 vocabulary into Anki - Listened to two CDs of Michel Thomas Advanced German (review) - Other Νέα Ελληνικά lesson's vocabulary list - 2 Livemocha Greek lessons (I thought I had finally finished the stupid 102 course, but I realized that I still have a few writing submissions to do that became available after I started the course in um...June) - Learned new kanji up through #1180: 伊, 君, 群, 耐, 需, 儒, 端, 両, 満, 画, 歯, 曲, 曹, 遭, 漕, 槽, 斗, 料, 科, 図 - Reviewed about 100 failed kanji - 2 Livemocha Swedish lessons (finished 102 course) - 1 lesson from Swedish: An Elementary Grammar-Reader (SEGR); details below - Entered some Spanish vocabulary into Anki - Finished up lesson 2 from TY Swahili DETAILS 1. I just wanted to comment on how I feel that the Livemocha courses are often very subjective, and therefore difficult for some of the activities. For example, in one lesson you have to identify cars by how expensive they might be, and because I thought one car looked more expensive than another, I got the exercise wrong. Also, for languages that were translated by the community (Greek for example), there are some translations that weren't quite accurate enough, is missing a nuance, or has inconsistent vocabulary usage. This makes it quite difficult to do some exercises, particularly the "magnet" exercise, when you have a variety of words to choose from and several words are completely interchangeable. Anyways, it's annoying. 2. Apparently this morning I wrote a note on here to myself that the fact that I still have to learn about 800 more kanji makes me feel like crying. I feel extremely overwhelmed by all of it at the moment, but I cannot quit. If I just keep up my pace of ten per day, I'll get there eventually (to be precise, around June 21st, I think). 3. It took me a lot longer to do my SEGR lesson than expected, partly because of the vast vocabulary. This book is so incredibly comprehensive that I feel like it wants me to have advanced or native fluency in Swedish by the time I finish it. There were several vocabulary words it introduced that I had never heard of in English (strikebreaker, protracted). Also, in this lesson the past participle was introduced, which was a bit of a shock to me because I thought I already knew it. This was because I was under the impression that the supine form and the past participle were essentially the same thing--WRONG. The supine form is what would be the verbal usage of the past participle in other languages, which is to say that it is used in forming the perfect tenses and such. The actual past participle is used in making adjectives or nouns out of verbs, which is still a bit confusing for me, but I get the gist of it (for example, döda means 'to kill,' and you can get the following from that: - den döde (the dead/killed man) - den döda (the dead/killed woman) - de döda (the dead/killed (people)) Okay, even though I posted my English to Swedish translation on lang-8, I would like to post it and the Swedish to English translations here anyways, just for people to look over and gauge my level if you like. Also, the story was pretty interesting--it's another one of the historical ones. I think I'll post the clearly historical/cultural ones, but not the conversational/fictional ones. SWEDISH to English I Sverige finns det ett utbrett interesse för film, och som många andra studenter är Kerstin medlem i en filmstudio. Hon har ett särskilt interesse för filmer, som behandlar sociala och politiska ämnen. En kväll tar hon Erik med sig till filmstudion för att se en känd men omtvistad film, Ådalen 31, av den berömde, svenske regissören Bo Widerberg. Den handlar om en utdragen strejk på trettiotalet, då lågavlönade arbetare i Ådalen ordnade ett stort demonstrationståg mot de avskydda strejkbryterna. Arbetsgivarna kallade in militär, och chefen för trupperna, som trodde att arbetarna var beväpnade, gav soldaterna order att skjuta. De sköt ihjäl fem personer. Bland de dödade var en ung flicka, som inte hade något med demonstrationen att göra. Denna blogiga händelse, som är unik i den svenska arbetarrörelsens historia, blev en oerhörd chock för alla svenskar, och till begravningen av de skjutna ådalsborna kom folk från hela landet. Den socialistike diktaren Erik Blomberg har i följande korta dikt tolkat den bitterhet som många kände inför det skedda: Här vilar en svensk arbetare. Stupad i fredstid. Vapenlös, Värnlös. Arkebuserad Av okäda kulor. Brottet var hunger. Glöm honom aldrig! Ådalskonflikten ligger nu i det förflytna och är nästan glömd, men den bidrog till att socialdemokraterna följande år fick makten och började bygga upp den moderna svenska välfärdsstaten. In Sweden there is a widespread interest in film, and like many other students Kerstin is a member of a film club. She has a special interest in films that are about social and political subjects. One evening she takes Erik with her to the film club to see a well-known film, Ådalen 1931, by the famous Swedish director Bo Widerberg. It’s about a prolonged strike in the thirties, when low-paid workers in Ådalen staged a big protest march against the loathed strikebreakers. The employers called in the military, and the head of the troops, who believed that the workers were armed, gave the soldiers the order to shoot. They shot five people to death. Among the killed was a young girl who didn’t have anything to do with the demonstration. This bloody event, which is unique in the history of the Swedish workers’ movement, came as a tremendous shock for all Swedes, and people from the whole country came to the funeral of the shot Ådalsbors. The socialist poet Erik Blomberg interpreted the bitterness that many felt in face of what happened in the following short poem: Here rests a Swedish worker. Fallen in peace time. Weaponless, Defenseless. Executed by unknown bullets. The crime was hunger. Forget him never! The conflict at Ådalen is now in the past and is almost forgotten, but it contributed in that the following year the Social Democrats gained power and started to build up the modern Swedish welfare state. ENGLISH to SWEDISH At the beginning of the thirties there were many strikes in Sweden, and low-paid workers organized demonstrations against their employers. A tragic event occurred on May 14th, 1931 in Ångermanland when the employers called in the military. The soldiers fired at the protest march, killing four men and a young girl. The girl had only been watching the march. This came as a great shock for the whole country, and many Swedes came to the funeral of the workers who had been shot. This strike is now almost forgotten in Sweden. But many have seen the controversial film about it which the famous film director, Bo Widerberg, made in the sixties. I början av trettiotalet fanns det många strejker i Sverige, och lågavlönade arbetare ordnade demonstrationer mot deras arbetsgivare. En tragisk händelse inträffade den 14 maj, 1931 i Ångermanland kallade arbetsgivarna in militär. Soldaterna sköt mot demonstrationståget, och dödade fyra män och en ung flicka. Flickan bara betraktade tåget. Detta blev en oerhörd chock för det landet, och många svenskar kom till begravningen av de skjutna arbetarna. Nu är denna strejk nästan glömd i Sverige, men många har sett den omtvistada filmen som handlar om den som den berömde filmregissören, Bo Widerberg, gjorde på sextiotalet. 4. Swahili is so charming! I just love how it sounds and despite the annoyance of its noun classes, I do enjoy the alliteration the often bring into the language. Here is an example I thought of, but I'm not sure if it's grammatically correct: Watoto wawili wakubwa wanatoka wapi? "Where do the two big children come from?" Would anyone care to tell me if this is actually correct? And if so, if I wanted to further complicate it by adding in wangu (my), where would that go? Asante! 5. I submitted a Hungarian speaking exercise on Livemocha, just for fun and to see if I am pronouncing things correctly. It wasn't very easy for me and I had to practice a couple times. The accents throw me off because they make me think that's where the stress falls instead of showing a long vowel. But I particularly like the letters 'ő' and 'ű.' Anyways, it got full marks (perhaps my grader was just being nice?) and HERE it is, for anyone who would like to hear. *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** I wanted to do more today, but there is just not enough time. Tomorrow is my last day of Spring Break, and I intend to make the most of it. Out of my copious list of goals to be accomplished over Break, remaining still are: Portuguese: 0 French: 2 Italian: 0 German: 0 Greek: 6 Japanese: 2 Swedish: 0 Esperanto: 0 Spanish: 8 Swahili: 2 Total: 20 (I technically have until the end of March 31 to finish all of these off. I will try to attach a picture of my completed goals sheet on Wednesday evening to show my success. :) ) I believe that's it, so I shall say good night to everyone in all my languages (same order as in the goals list), followed by my Anki statistics, which I forgot last time. Boa noite! Bonne nuit! Buona notte! Gute Nacht! Καληνύχτα! お休みなさい！ God natt! Bonan nokton! ¡Buenas noches! Usiku mwema! ANKI STATISTICS: ESPERANTO: 1158 FRENCH: 2810 GERMAN: 1603 GREEK: 1851 ITALIAN: 1543 JAPANESE: 593 PORTUGUESE: 2486 SPANISH: 2140 SWAHILI: 310 SWEDISH: 1348 TOTAL: 15,842 (+1,509) 874 cards in 42.62 minutes Edited by ellasevia on 31 March 2010 at 1:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ruskivyetr Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5330 days ago 769 posts - 962 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Russian, Polish, Modern Hebrew | Message 202 of 265 30 March 2010 at 8:11am | IP Logged |
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Ellasevia, dieser Log ist ECHT TOLL! Ich kann nicht glauben, dass du SIEBEN SPRACHEN lernst. Dein Deutsch ist nicht
so schlecht, eigentlich sehr gut, von was ich sehen kann. Ich kann auch sehen, dass du Swahili lernst. Ist es schwierig? Du hast gesagt (in diesem Log), dass dein Swahili Studieren nicht so gut geht. Womit lernst du? Ich weiß, dass es ein FSI Swahili Basic Course gibt, und das sollt besser sein, dann was du jetzt benutzt. Ich werde dein Log mehr lesen, es ist sehr interessant :). Edited by ruskivyetr on 30 March 2010 at 8:12am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5991 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 203 of 265 02 April 2010 at 7:30am | IP Logged |
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I have decided as of a few hours that I now hate languages and will be deleting this log shortly to destroy all evidence of my ever having a passion for them. April Fools'!
Here's the name for April Fools' languages I study: Pescado de Abril (Spanish) - "April Fish" Poisson d'Avril (French) - "April Fish" Pesce d'Aprile (Italian) - "April Fish" Dia de Mentira (Portuguese) - "Day of Lies" Aprilscherz (German) - "April Joke" Aprilskämt (Swedish) - "April Joke" Πρωταπριλιά (Greek) - "April First" エイプリルフール (Japanese) - "Eipuriru Fūru" Ŝercotago (Esperanto) - "Joke Day" [Couldn't find it in Swahili. :( ] Danke, ruskivyetr! Eigentlich lerne ich zehn Sprachen wenn man Spanisch schließt ein: Portugiesisch, Französisch, Italienisch, Deutsch, Griechisch, Japonisch, Schwedisch, Suaheli, Esperanto, und Spanisch. Suaheli ist ein bisschen schwierig, aber er ist so toll! Ich lerne ihn gern, weil die Sprache und ihre Wörter und Grammatik mir gefallen! Obwohl die Substantivklassen zuerst ein bisschen schwierig zu verstehen sind, sie sind sehr regelmäßig und machen viel Spaß! Hm, what have I done? Well. I did an Odysseas lesson, and then the "midterm exam" for that. The exercises on that are really easy, but they take forever to do. I finished unit six and wanted to put it into unit seven before logging out, and it said that I couldn't progress to unit seven until I finish unit six, and then the timed midterm exam came up, which meant that I had no choice but to stay put and do MORE of the horrid exercises. It had taken me a fair amount of time to do the normal unit's "homework," which consisted of 13 exercises, so when I saw that the exam was 40, I freaked out a bit... But it ended up being only 19 for some reason, so I don't know why it showed 40 of them... Another Greek thing is that I thought I had to memorize this poem in Greek for my World History class by Wednesday, so I was freaking out about that for quite some time on Tuesday. It turns out that I don't need to know it until Monday, though. We had to pick a historical speech/poem to recite, and it could be in a different language if we wanted. I chose Στα 200 π.Χ., by Κωνσταντίνος Καβάφης, on recommendation by my dear grandmother. I also finished and did the vocabulary for the TYIYF lesson that I started the weekend of March 21st. Hooray. I still technically have to do one more to meet my Spring Break goals. On that note, I finally finished my Spoken World Swahili lesson 3 last night. It was a ton of vocabulary and introduced two new noun classes: the N class and the KI/VI class (the former I already knew from TY Swahili, the latter I had deduced from context). This means that now I officially know the M/WA, the N, and the KI/VI noun classes, but have some general ideas about how others work. I think there must be one that is similar to the N class, but just adds ma- to the word to form its plural, a JI --> MA/ME, a M --> MI, U --> -, and so on. I also finished up my Spanish vocabulary stuff. I listened to a bit more of the MT Advanced German course. As for kanji, I finished reviewing all my failed kanji. Let's celebrate! Oh right, I'm probably going to just fail them all again. And I haven't actually done today's kanji reviews yet, or learned all of my kanji for today. I guess I can do that tomorrow morning because I'm tired now. I did learn up to #1200 as of yesterday, and have learned like four more so far today. Yesterday I did two Ultimate Italian lessons. I still know most of the stuff except the vocabulary, most of which is familiar from other Romance languages anyways. I'm up through lesson 24, I believe, in that. Today I did a German lesson, which introduced the "special subjunctive" [sigh], which makes a bit more sense then the "general subjunctive." Luckily the rest of the lesson was very easy, just about holidays and mainly just memorizing the names of holidays: Ostern, Weihnachten, Neujahr, Karneval, Pfingsten, Himmelfahrt, Rosenmontag, Karfreitag (hey, that's tomorrow!), Aschermittwoch... Wow. I found the "You know you're a language nerd when..." thread and I literally sat down and read all 60+ pages (over 500 posts). I would have done it in one sitting, but I had other things that had to get done, such as eating dinner, homework, going to school, etc. Anyways, wow. I can't believe I didn't find that before, actually. I agreed with almost everything in it and it was so fun to read! Unfortunately, I lost quite of bit of study time to that, so I am not as far as I would like to be. I couldn't figure out how to add my scan of my goals sheet for Spring Break (it didn't like the format and I didn't feel like trying to figure out how to convert it at the moment), so I might post later, but probably not. There were 164 check boxes and I was able to check off 161 of them as of last night. The three goals I missed were: - Lesson 4 of Teach Yourself Improve Your French - 1 lesson from Learn Greek Without a Teacher (wow! we haven't seen that in a while) - Lesson 3 from Teach Yourself Swahili In other news, I feel like my Anki is too much work to review, so I have reduced the number of new cards (at least temporarily) down to five per day for all languages but Swahili and Japanese, which will be at ten. I hope this makes me less stressed about it and gives me some more time. ANKI STATISTICS: ESPERANTO: 1157 FRENCH: 2938 GERMAN: 1633 GREEK: 1863 ITALIAN: 1608 JAPANESE: 593 PORTUGUESE: 2487 SPANISH: 2240 SWAHILI: 368 SWEDISH: 1348 TOTAL: 16,235 (+393) Today: 864 cards in 42.87 minutes Edited by ellasevia on 02 April 2010 at 7:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5991 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 204 of 265 04 April 2010 at 9:01am | IP Logged |
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Today, which is really yesterday, was a very unproductive day. I spent most of it reading on this horribly addicting website, and while it's informative, there's only so much you should read about language-learning before you actually go do it. So, I didn't even get much homework done. Great.
My day started off with kanji. I hadn't reviewed in two or three days so I had about 220 to review, which was really tiring. I also hadn't really learned as many as I should have, so I had to learn about twenty instead of ten. Instead of doing all the reviews at once and then despairing at the failed ones and doing those all at once, I did a few reviews and then restudied the failed kanji and in this way was able to maintain the failed kanji at zero. I am now up to date on kanji and have actually already reviewed for tomorrow (which is really today) since it's past midnight. I now know up through #1230: 用, 庸, 備, 昔, 錯, 借, 惜, 措, 散, 廿, 庶, 遮, 席, 度, 渡, 奔, 噴, 墳, 憤, 焼, 暁, 半, 伴, 畔, 判, 券, 巻, 圏, 勝, 藤, 謄, 片, 版, 之, 乏, 芝, 不, 否, 杯, 矢, 矯, 族, 知, 智, 矛, 柔, 務, 霧, 班, 帰 This kanji, and my Anki, pretty much puts me in a mood where I don't want to do anything else for a while. This is why it's good to do it before school on school days, because then I go to school and by the time I come back I want to work again. :) While doing chores and baking cookies today, I was listening to Michel Thomas German, and was able to check off this week's goal of finishing the third CD. Last night (which was really two nights ago), I read through my Japanese lesson for today (which is really yesterday). It was exceedingly short and easy, with only twenty words of vocabulary. What a blessing. The grammar had to do with the plain form, which I had read about previously and had a general idea of how to form it. My book then proceeded to tell me that it would from now on be presenting verbs in this form and that I should learn them in it instead. A bit annoying, because this meant that I had to go through my cards in Anki and change all of the verbs to the plain form so that they'd match. That there was most of the day, which is rather sad, because very little homework even got done in that big black hole of wasted time. This evening has been a bit better and I have done some more homework (finalized an essay on Candide, did my worksheet for Spanish on El Internado, and added the current vocabulary from the play we're reading in French, Marius, into Anki along with the random vocabulary I did in class). Looking at my sheet of things I intended to accomplish today, this is depressing, especially since tomorrow (which is really today) is Easter and I'll have to be at my grandparents' house for much of tomorrow for the celebration. Tomorrow I'll try to get the following done in terms of language study: - New kanji: to #1240 - Study failed kanji (currently only 12) - Anki reviews - 1 Beginner's Swedish lesson - 1 LGWT lesson - 1 TY Swahili lesson - 1 TYIYF lesson These last three are not of paramount importance, so I'll forgive myself if they don't get done, especially with my time constraints and homework. ANKI STATISTICS: ESPERANTO: 1157 FRENCH: 3053 GERMAN: 1633 GREEK: 1863 ITALIAN: 1608 JAPANESE: 658 PORTUGUESE: 2487 SPANISH: 2246 SWAHILI: 368 SWEDISH: 1348 TOTAL: 16,421 (+186) 774 cards in 36.26 minutes 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5991 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 205 of 265 12 April 2010 at 2:30am | IP Logged |
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Wow, it's been way too long since I've written here. Therefore, the following will be a piecing together of what I can remember and what I've written down as notes. (Yes, I write notes for my next post in this text box here and just reserve a tab on my browser for that, and that's why it always looks like I'm on this website.)
Okay. So, the day after I last posted was Easter, which was a Sunday. That morning I was panicking and working on my French project on the Tuilerie Gardens and Palace and Rue de Rivoli, which I presented this past Friday. So that was a bit of French practice because I had to write up a whole notes sheet for the class in French. That same morning I did my Beginner's Swedish lesson, and um...that's all that I can say about it, that I did it, and in the usual method with the shadowing and such. Oh, I learned from my Swedish book (which has etymological sections that compare English and Swedish) the origin of the English pronoun 'they.' According to the book, it was originally hie, but because of sound shifts, it came to resemble 'he' too closely. The solution of the Old English was to adopt the Scandinavian word for the concept, þeir, which is still the Icelandic word for 'they.' Eventually, this evolved into 'they' and 'de' (pronounced 'dom') in English and Swedish respectively. While I was at my grandparents' house for Easter, when I wasn't talking with people, I was working on a TY Swahili lesson. I finished going through it all and wrote out all the vocabulary, but I still have yet to learn it. This week has been a bit crazy and, well, hellish. (By which I mean that I have for some reason had very little homework for this entire semester and now suddenly the teachers are dropping it all on us at once, and my studies both in and out of school have suffered as a result.) Soo... Monday-ness. Monday is Portuguese, so I did some tutoring on Livemocha, continued working through my frequency dictionary up through the 1150th entry, and completed a lesson from Cortina Brazilian Portuguese. Tuesday was French, and I did an entire TYIYF lesson. The lesson was unexpectedly short and this was very happy indeed, because I have been loaded down with work this week. If I have time, I will be doing some work from a vocabulary book that I have, but this is not likely. Wednesday was Italian. I have been having issues with my alarm clocks all week, so I didn't have time to do my Italian before I had to leave for school at 7:00. No matter, though, I did it during the "fluff time" in two of my classes. Thursday was German, but I wisely did not schedule a new lesson for this day. I was already fairly behind from a couple other days because of homework, and had been staying up late to finish it, which means that I was very tired. So when I woke up late again on Thursday, my alarms had been blaring extremely loudly for two hours and I was still asleep, so my mom just said that I could stay home from school in order to rest. I did end up sleeping longer, and then caught up on my language work, mostly. I did end up going in just for my math class, though, because we had a test and I didn't want to have to make it up later. For German this week I set the goal as to just enter the Livemocha German 102 vocabulary into Anki. As of now, I have done about half of that. I have also now finished MT Advanced German, which was another goal. Friday was Greek and I went to my grandparents' house for a Greek lesson. Not much to say about the matter, we did the lesson, and that's that. I only last night (Saturday) at about midnight learned the vocabulary for it... I've also gone part-way through a new LGWT lesson, for the first time since about September. Yesterday was Saturday, and thus Japanese, but I still unfortunately have not completed my lesson. I'll do that if time permits later tonight. As for kanji, it has now been 100 days as of yesterday since the beginning of my 10-kanji-per-day product on January first. If you'll remember, I started off this project knowing only 300 kanji (this number seems so laughable to me now!), and as of yesterday I have now learned 1000 more than that in 100 days. But of course, it is no longer yesterday, so I am now in fact at kanji #1310. Here are the ones I've learned since my last post: 弓, 引, 弔, 弘, 強, 弱, 沸, 費, 第, 弟 巧, 号, 朽, 誇, 汚, 与, 写, 身, 射, 謝 老, 考, 孝, 教, 拷, 者, 煮, 著, 署, 暑 諸, 猪, 渚, 賭, 峡, 狭, 挟, 追, 師, 帥 官, 棺, 管, 父, 交, 効, 較, 校, 足, 促 距, 路, 露, 跳, 躍, 践, 踏, 骨, 滑, 髄 禍, 渦, 過, 阪, 阿, 際, 障, 随, 陪, 陽 陳, 防, 附, 院, 陣, 隊, 墜, 降, 階, 陛 And finally today. Today has been, well, the word "meh" sums it up pretty well. Today is Swedish and while at the library today (I fled to the library to force myself to finish my world history reading and do some actual study) I read through the SEGR lesson and translated the beginning text. It was a pretty interesting story, so I think I'll post it here once I'm done with the lesson. And on Friday night I took a Swedish placement test from this one website (I don't remember it at the moment, but I set a date to retake the test at the end of May, so I'll post it then). Most of it was pretty easy, but there were some things on which I had no idea, and a couple things where I made really dumb mistakes. So I scored that I was a very high A2, more like B1 actually, which is around where I was thinking. This week I also completed a new Esperanto lesson from TY Esperanto. It seems like this book is jamming about three or four normal lessons' worth of vocabulary into each lesson. For this last lesson (nine), there was something like 220 words of vocabulary, and most of them were not defined in the vocabulary section. This was alright, though, because I understood most of them from word roots + previous Esperanto knowledge, or knowledge of languages which gave words to Esperanto, or both. Hooray-ness. Hooray, miscellaneous time: - Apparently I wanted to mention that I can pretty much read Dutch on this forum and understand most of it because of my combined knowledge of English, German, and Swedish... - I found a website called RhinoSpike (no idea why they call it that; it has nothing to do with rhinos) where you can submit a text in a foreign language to be read by a native speaker. I have submitted the beginning texts for my SEGR lessons so I can hear them pronounced and most of them have already been completed. The woman who did it for me even sang the song that was in one of them! - Finally, since I have completed MT Advanced German, I don't really have anything new to do when I have to do tedious things and need to be entertained, or preferably be studying languages. So, in a new project I have started the Michel Thomas Polish course, and will be tracking my progress with Polish as a dabble-language in a separate log: Playing with Polish. It already has a few posts, and I have explained in detail there the purpose and goals of the project and such. ANKI STATISTICS: ESPERANTO: 1357 FRENCH: 3223 GERMAN: 1693 GREEK: 1900 ITALIAN: 1700 JAPANESE: 660 PORTUGUESE: 2631 SPANISH: 2247 SWAHILI: 368 SWEDISH: 1390 TOTAL: 17,189 (+768) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5991 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 206 of 265 12 April 2010 at 7:35am | IP Logged |
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I am currently feeling lost in piles and piles of work, so I am going to slash this week's linguistic workload in half. I'll be going up to write my goals for this week in just a moment, but you can be sure that it won't be very strenuous. I was thinking something like this:
- 1 lesson CMBP - 1 chapter French Vocabulary - 2 Ultimate Italian lessons - 1 Ultimate German lesson - Finish typing up LM German 102 - 1 Νέα Ελληνικά lesson* - 1 Ultimate Japanese lesson* - Kanji to #1380 - 1 SEGR lesson* * Perhaps LGWT lesson/two/Beginner's Swedish lesson No goals this week for my minor study languages (Esperanto, Swahili, Spanish, Polish). However, progress is welcomed, time permitting. I think this is April's revenge for me forgetting that it exists. (Yes, I actually do always forget that April is a month except when I am listing out the months in order. Even though I like its name.) Okay, I'm too tired. I need to go to bed. Good night. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5991 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 207 of 265 13 April 2010 at 7:48am | IP Logged |
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A1 - beginner
A2 - beginner-intermediate B1 - intermediate B2 - basic fluency C1 - advanced fluency C2 - native fluency These are officially my standards. Of course, there are many levels within each of these, but these can serve as rough guidelines. I am going to now list my languages according to this system from my own estimates: English: C2 Spanish: C1 Portuguese: C1 French: C1 Italian: B2 Greek: [between B1 and B2] Esperanto: B1 German: B1 Swedish: B1 Japanese: A2 Swahili: A1 Polish: A1 Now, as for what I have done today, sadly not much. I was overexcited by the fact that I didn't have much due tomorrow that I squandered most of my time after school doing quite literally nothing, and then realized that although not necessarily due tomorrow, there was quite a lot I should be doing. I did complete my Portuguese goal of 1 CMBP lesson (multitasking in biology today because we were watching a movie), but I didn't finish my kanji or Anki reviews and did not yet learn my new kanji. In regards to Swahili and my trip to Tanzania, I am getting a fairly good understanding of its German colonial history because for a language arts project we have to write a research paper on 19th-century imperialism somewhere in the world. My given continent was Africa, so I chose German East Africa as my specific topic and am now know quite a bit about Tanzania's early colonial history. However, the research does not continue past World War I because it's only German East Africa and after that the British took control. I am going to try to incorporate some history of Swahili and the reasons for its prevalence in eastern Africa today as part of my essay, and explain some of the German influences and such. Well, now to see if I can review a bit and then read a bit of Heart of Darkness. --Philip 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5991 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 208 of 265 15 April 2010 at 7:05am | IP Logged |
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This shall be a quick post.
Yesterday I completed my French goals by finishing up through chapter 2 in a French Vocabulary book. Today I completed two lessons out of Ultimate Italian. I'm still a few days behind on learning kanji, but at least my reviews are caught up for it (this morning I had over 120 to review and yesterday I had 140) and so is my Anki. I have also done some more work with Polish, but you'll have to check my other log for that. On the way home from school today, I was listening to several of the Swedish audio files for the SEGR texts that I had pronounced on that RhinoSpike website, and was able to understand most of them. :) I'm going to try to catch up a bit on kanji, then do some reading, then go to bed. ANKI STATISTICS: ESPERANTO: 1377 FRENCH: 3435 GERMAN: 1693 GREEK: 1900 ITALIAN: 1760 JAPANESE: 660 PORTUGUESE: 2663 SPANISH: 2404 SWAHILI: 368 SWEDISH: 1390 TOTAL: 17,650 (+461) EDIT: I was able to learn 20 new kanji, up through #1330. I should be at #1340 by today, though, so I'll just learn another 20 tomorrow. 隣, 隔, 隠, 堕, 陥, 穴, 空, 控, 突, 究, 窒, 窃, 窪, 搾, 窯, 窮, 探, 深, 丘, 岳 Edited by ellasevia on 15 April 2010 at 7:42am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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