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TAC 2011 - Team Ohana – Le Cinéma Rex | ||
Tags: Dabbling | France | 6 Weeks Challenge (6WC) | Immersion | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | English | German | French | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6142 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 129 of 198 05 June 2011 at 5:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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Renee, your rants about the MT Spanish course and particularly about its male student have been so amusing that I'm now curious to see what it's all about. I of course already speak Spanish (or Castilian, as you call it), but I think I might just have to find a free download of the course when I return home in a few weeks just to see if he's really as bad as you say. This should be interesting. :)
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| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5335 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 130 of 198 06 June 2011 at 11:56am | IP Logged | ||
Awesome! I can't wait to hear what you have to say about it. I think you should listen to one of the later recordings because that's when Dumber really shines. For the first two or three recordings, both students were equally bad but somewhere around the sixth or seventh recording, Dumber's idiocy really comes out in full force. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5335 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 131 of 198 06 June 2011 at 12:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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Week 22: May 30 / June 5
I already wrote about my near-freedom from school in my Castilian update but it bears repeating: I’m nearly free! One colossal research project is all that stands between me and the freedom to sleep and study whenever I want. Unfortunately, I have not actually done anything for this research project yet but I am allowed to write it about something closely related to languages so it should be fun once I actually get started. Dutch/English Early this week I started a project that I’ve been thinking about for a while and now that the summer is upon us, I finally have the time for it. It was originally supposed to be a way to quickly learn new idioms and expressions in English but so far it has actually been far more beneficial for my Dutch so I’m labelling it as a joined Dutch/English project. What it amounts to is that I watch every single episode of Kinderen geen bezwaar, a Dutch sitcom I can recommend to Dutch learners because it’s hilarious and includes a lot of pop-culture references. I also chose it because it uses a lot of words, idioms and expressions that I have disappeared out of my active vocabulary because of all the English I speak. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I used to be very well-spoken for a child my age but over the years I poured so much of time into English that it’s actually kind of shocking to see the total state of decay that my Dutch is currently in. I’m constantly mixing English into my Dutch because I can’t remember the simplest words. I recently had to write an essay in Dutch for the first time and I’ve never had so much trouble with finding the right expressions and phrasing things in the correct register. On the other end of the scale, people my own age are teaching me slang because I’m so hopelessly out of touch with my own peers. I guess that last part isn’t so bad since I don’t use that much slang anyway, but I just feel completely out of touch with the language on a whole which makes me feel horrible because I know I’m not using it to the fullest in terms of its vocabulary and expressiveness. So as an antidote, I’m trying to reconnect some of the English I know to my forgotten Dutch to hopefully become a little more articulate in both languages, since I’m not exactly Cicero in English either. I have made a new Anki deck and every time I hear a Dutch word or expression for which I don’t know the English translation OR a Dutch expression that I had forgotten existed but for which I do know the English translation, I make a flashcard for it (that last bit was a bit of an anti-climax, wasn’t it?). I already have over two hundred of them and I’ve only watched four episodes so far. The show is almost 200 episodes long and still running so it should be enough to keep me busy all summer. I’m really enjoying my ‘project’ so far. Every time I re-discover something I had forgotten, I get this wonderful feeling bordering on nostalgia, like I’ve remembered a childhood memory I’d half forgotten. I’m not sure how to explain it, but it’s a wonderful feeling. French Week 22 (39): 18 h. 2011: 353 h. Hier je me suis rendue compte que ça fait très longtemps que je n’ai rien écrit en français donc il m’a semblée qu’il est grand temps pour un peu de pratique d’écriture. Ça a été une très bonne semaine pour le français. J’ai regardé cinq films, entre autres Jean de Florette, ce qui est l’un de mes films préférés et j’étais très contente de voir que je n’avais pas grand mal à comprendre la plupart du film. La dernière fois que j’ai essayé de regarder un vrai film français (par opposition à des films doublés), ça a tourné très mal. Je vais probablement regarder le deuxième film Manon des Sources aujourd’hui ou peut-être demain. La suit me plait même plus que l’original parce que la fille de Jean se venge du village et César finit par avoir ce qu’il mérite. *rire diabolique* Ben, il faut dire qu’en vérité je ne suis pas si méchante. En fait, il me fait toujours pitié, ce qui rends la fin du film si émouvante. À part ça, j’ai aussi commencé à regarder plus de télévision française. Je reçois la chaîne TV5Monde et j’avais compté de la regarder pendant une heure par jour mais il y a quelque chose qui cloche avec ma télévision donc je ne pouvais regarder que deux heures au total. Je ne comprends que la moitié de ce qu’on dit donc maintenant je suis demi-informée de ce qui se passe dans le monde. Okay, that’s enough French for today. I was toying with the idea of writing the entire part about French in French but it’s taking me way too long and I have other things to do today. Not that I anything more to say about what I did this week. Now that I’ve finished the Michel Thomas Spanish course, I’ll probably start on the advanced French course soon and I’m also thinking about racing through the second Harry Potter because the first one was so beneficial for my listening comprehension. It will have to wait until after next week though, because I have that one last thing to finish before this hellish semester is officially over. Just a couple days more, keep breathing…. Edited by ReneeMona on 06 June 2011 at 12:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5335 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 132 of 198 13 June 2011 at 2:17am | IP Logged | ||
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6 Week Challenge Castilian: week 6
Week 6: 7 h. 10 min. Total: 38 h. 20 min. This update is scandalously late, partly because I’m lazy but mostly because the universe was once again conspiring against me. I don’t know what I did in my former life but it must have been something like skinning puppy dogs and clubbing baby seals to merit all this bad Karma. There can be no other reason for the uncanny ability of my internet connection to break down when I can least afford to lose it, thereby forcing me to make the long journey to my parents’ to make sure I’m able to post this at all. Thankfully, I do actually have something to write about (as opposed to the previous five weeks of this challenge) so let’s move on to that. I finally managed to top the score of my first two weeks this week, though that was only because I watched the entirety of Orgueil et Préjugés which gave me the brilliant idea of seeing if I could find Orgullo y Prejuicio as well, which I did. It even had Spanish subtitles which, together with the slightly sad fact that I know this series by heart, made it very easy to understand the vast majority of what was said. I’ve only been able to watch the first two episodes because the rest refuses to download (karma!) but I think I may be able to find the rest on YouTube. Assimil [05/109] According to my log, I have not even looked at Assimil since week 3 of the challenge. I’m rather surprised by my disinterest in it because I loved working with it for French so much but I think it may be the short and simple dialogues, which I hate even when I can’t handle anything more complicated. I also dislike how slowly the speakers on the recording speak. Having the text in front of me makes following along very easy and there’s no need to slow it down to allow me to copy the pronunciation because I have a “speed - down” button and I’m not afraid to use it. Anyway, since I didn’t exactly get far, I plan to abandon Assimil for a while and maybe get back to it once I’m advanced enough to skip ahead through the lessons until the dialogues get a bit more meaty. Berlitz [07/20] Berlitz is another book that I’ve been neglecting. The dialogues are at fault here as well but mainly because they’re boring, which, to be fair, does not go for Assimil. I do remember rather liking some aspects of it though, so I would like to get back to it at some point, if only because I hate the idea of leaving it unfinished. Harry Potter [04/17] I only read on chapter this week and I had planned to do more but it’s okay because I intend to continue reading it over the next couple of weeks. So far what has most impressed me is how easy it was to follow along with the Spanish right from the beginning while I had a lot more trouble with the French translation, even though I’m much more advanced in French. Perhaps I overestimated the speed with which Spanish is spoken or maybe studying French has just made me better at understanding fast spoken languages. Either way, I like this translation a lot more than the French one so I’ll definitely try to finish it before I leave for France. Michel Thomas [83/83] When Michel Thomas says he thinks that knowing how to handle verbs is the key to knowing a language, he is not kidding. Of the 167 words taught in the course (that I counted anyway), 55 were verbs, 38 were nouns, 28 were adjectives and 21 were adverbs (the rest was made up of pronouns, conjugations and prepositions). That’s alright by me though, because I agree with him on his stance on verbs (to a certain degree) and he does teach them quite well because by the end of the course you should know how to conjugate all regular and some irregular verbs in all persons and six tenses (I say ‘should’ because it takes a kind of attention that I wasn’t always paying, especially towards the end of the course). El Internado [01/70] The story of El Internado and me is a sad one so far. I was really excited about watching the first episode earlier this week but something had apparently gone wrong in the downloading process so the media player I was using broke down every five minutes. I re-downloaded the entire first season which seemed to have been successful but I was having the same problems again in the first fifteen minutes of the second episode so I gave up on it. I’ve been trying to find the episodes online with subtitles in a language I can understand but all I’ve been able to find is Romanian, which was interesting to watch for the first five minutes but got annoying after a while because I had no idea what was going on. Goals I’m glad I didn’t post any concrete goals at the start of the challenge because I would undoubtedly not have achieved them. However, I do remember having the not-so-concrete goal of improving my opinion on Castilian. I can’t say the challenge has been as big a success in that respect as I had hoped but I may have had slightly unrealistic expectations. However, though there’s been no 180-turn/love-at-first-sight kind of change, I have started to appreciate Spanish just a little bit more. I definitely like the sound of it a lot more than six weeks ago and depending on the speaker, I even find it pleasing to listen to. There are currently three Spanish speakers who really make me like the language when I listen to them which I realize is not a huge number (especially considering the fact that one of them is fictional), but it’s a start. I still don’t really like the written language but since it’s impossible to chance my synaesthesia, I’m not even going to try to change that. Overall, simply hearing/seeing the language still leaves me kind of indifferent but I really enjoy learning the language and seeing how it works. I’m not sure what that means and I’ve analyzed it to death trying to figure it out but regardless, I definitely plan to get back to Spanish in the future. Perhaps not in August because I will probably be too busy with my two new target languages but it might be a target language for next year’s TAC. EDIT: Note to self: Proofread, proofread, then proofread again. Saves me so much embarrassment. Edited by ReneeMona on 27 June 2011 at 10:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Vos Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5566 days ago 766 posts - 1020 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Polish | Message 133 of 198 13 June 2011 at 5:27am | IP Logged | ||
Just thought I'd share with you some different Spanish voices which I find most charming and/or simply beautiful, hopefully they'll fare well with you also. Mercedes Sosa - Gracias A La Vida - Argentinian. Paco Ibáñez - A Galopar - Spanish (speaks a bit in French before hand) Manu Chao - Desaparecido - Spanish, but sings with a South American/Colombian accent. Rebekah Del Rio - Llorando - Latin American (not sure exactly where from). Chambao - Pokito a Poko - Andalucía, España. Ojos De Brujo - Sultanas De Merkaíllo - Barcelona, Spain. Although I believe she sings with an Andalucian accent, as due to the dropping of the final 's' and such, though not sure if that's simply a characteristic which is shared in other parts of Spain also. If no however, you can't force yourself to like something which you simply don't. That goes for the Spanish language also. As in my case, it would be nice to have a liking to French, as the French culture, history and language is rich and I hear the country is beautiful, and I also like a people who are proud of their language and customs, but unfortunately, I just don't feel anything for it. Although as I have told you, now that I'm surrounded by a few more French people in my life, I can see that my view of it is improving, not that it was bad view beforehand, just that I was indifferent. Whereas now I'm warming to it a little more, but still without any interest in studying it. However I'm glad to hear that atleast your opinion of Spanish has somewhat improved since the start of your challenge. Do you have any Spanish/Latin American friends in your life? As I always find the people I meet to be a big influence on what I feel and think of the language. Also what is this about "two new target languages"? Already have them decided upon? And how in gods name do you fit in so many languages whilst studying at Uni full time also? Well all the best with your continuing studies and also with your upcoming trip to France!! Your French is going to get a massive workout. Fantastic! And keep the updates a coming! Always a joy to read. (Sidenote: I found The Secret History in Dutch the other day at a second hand bookstore for only 10 bucks! Win!) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5335 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 134 of 198 13 June 2011 at 4:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hi Vos, thanks for the links. They’re all great but I especially love gracias a la vida and llorando.
I guess we’re kind of in the same situation with Spanish and French, only reversed. I don’t know if I’ve explained this in my log (I know I’ve written about it before but it may have been in an email) but I think a large reason behind my less than enthusiastic opinion on Spanish is the fact that I’ve never been to Spain or Latin America. With French, and to a lesser extent Italian, I have so many happy memories of spending my childhood summers in France that every time I see or hear the language I’m reminded of the beauty of the country, the people, the food, etc, and I can’t help but adore it. I’ve tried arranging a trip to Spain this summer but I don’t have the time (or the money) and no one will go with me so it didn’t work out. Maybe next year. I also don’t have any Spanish/Latin American friends so I guess that contributes as well. I do have one good friend who speaks Spanish and another who studies it (or claims to anyway) but neither of them lives close enough for me to see them regularly. Yes, I already have my two new target languages decided upon because I have my entire linguistic life for the next three years all planned out. :) I will be studying Old English at uni next semester so I plan to make a beginning with it this summer because next semester will be very busy so it’ll come in handy to be ahead of the rest of the class. The other languages is German, which I had originally planned to introduce this month but then I decided to go to France so I postponed it until August. As for how I fit everything into my life, I’m very good at cramming for tests the night before and writing essays about books I haven’t read. As a result, I’m probably the least well-read English lit. student ever. This last semester was very tough though, and I have even had to drop two of my courses because I wasn’t able to keep on top of all of them (and one of the ones I dropped was boring which made it extra hard). I was taking a combined total of 50 EC’s (they recommend 30) whilst also trying to study at least fifteen hours of French per week and maintaining something resembling a social life. Needless to say, I failed miserably yet I don’t seem to have learned from the experience because I fully intend to register for the same amount of course next semester. Een ezel stoot zich in het algemeen… Ah yes, The Secret History. I confess I haven’t looked around for it much after I initially failed to find it online but I just found out the central library of Amsterdam has it (I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me to look there before) so I’ll go there and borrow it as soon as I’m in Amsterdam again. Thanks for stopping by and commenting and keep up the good work with your Spanish! Edited by ReneeMona on 27 June 2011 at 10:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5335 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 135 of 198 13 June 2011 at 6:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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Week 23: June 6 / June 12
Despite of what my total study time may lead you to believe, this has actually been a very bad week. I still am not completely done with school and I have nothing but my own damned procrastinating to blame for it so that means I still can’t work on my languages with a clean conscience. In terms of languages, I haven’t worked on my Dutch/English project at all and for the first time in several weeks, I haven’t finished my list for French, which is really bugging me. French Week 23 (40): 16 h. 05 min. 2011: 369 h. 05 min. As I said, my total study time for this week is deceiving. Almost a third of it derives from watching all six episodes of Orguiel et Préjugés which I know so well by now that I shouldn’t really count it as studying anymore. Meanwhile I did absolutely no verb conjugations, watched no TV5Monde at all and my Anki deck is once again hopelessly out of control. I’m getting terribly bored with reading Hésitation which I take as a good sign because I think it means that I can read well enough to notice how bad the writing is. I may go back to Sans famille or I may choose a new book entirely. I’m not sure yet. Oh, and another thing I didn’t do and that I feel bad about; I didn’t watch Manon des Sources. Other things I did not do this week include starting on Michel Thomas, reading Harry Potter, watching French in Action and attending a MeetUp because I had to work. However, I did sing along to Partir là bas about thirty-seven times and learned Mr. Darcy’s first proposal by heart: Permettez-moi de vous dire l’ardeur avec laquelle je vous admire et je vous aime. *melts* DDDD I’m thinking of changing the name of this section. Maybe to something like “Dabble, dabble, toil and … trabble.” Never mind. Since I just explained my carefully laid-out plans for Old English in my last post, I’m sure you’ll be able to imagine my annoyance when I tell you that I just found that someone at the UvA had the great idea to completely rearrange the study schedule for the English bachelor which means that I won’t be able to take the course on Old English until February next year instead of September like I had planned. This pissed me off at first because I am really looking forward to the course but after some reflection, I guess it’s a good thing since it will give me more time to study beforehand and it will take some of the pressure off this summer. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I like this. If I start in August, I will have five months to get to an acceptable level and breeze through my homework and tests come February, which will give me time to take more courses! Old English is currently the only one of my dabble languages that I am not neglecting. I don’t think I’ve even glanced at my Arabic deck for a good month and the German and Esperanto “word of the day”-emails are steadily piling up in my in-box. I don’t even want to talk about Greek. Oh, and I suppose Spanish is now a dabble language as well. I tried in vain to re-download El Internado and Orgullo y Prejuicio but both are refusing to cooperate. Bleh, dabbling is annoying. I’m going back to French. À tout à l’heure. Edited by ReneeMona on 20 June 2011 at 12:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5335 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 136 of 198 20 June 2011 at 3:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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Week 24: June 13 / June 19
French Week 24 (41): 23 h. 10 min. 2011: 392 h. 15 min. Summer boredom has officially set in, as evidenced by the number of films I watched this week. Despite the fact that this has been the third best week of 2011 so far in terms of study time, I actually didn’t do all that much since I spent more than half of the 23 hours watching a ridiculous amount of films. So ridiculous in fact that I had trouble switching my thoughts back to English/Dutch and at some point started to get confused about the correct English pronunciation of a word because I couldn’t stop pronouncing it the French way, which I took as my cue to take a break from it. Reading I don’t know what I was thinking when I claimed I was going to read the entire Twilight series, since I’ve never been able to get through all of them in English in one go either. I got through the first relatively unharmed, browsed through the second and was halfway through the third when I realized I was bored out of my mind and the blurry print was giving me a head ache. I started reading Orgueil et Préjugés but got kind of bored with that one as well so that’s when I decided to give up on reading altogether and declare this week Movie-Marathon-Week. Movie-Marathon-Week 1. Jeux d’enfants (4x) I am ever so slightly obsessed with this film. I watched it for the first time about six or five years ago in French class and at the time I thought it was just bizarre and disturbing. I recently rediscovered it and after seeing it about nine more times in the past two weeks, my opinion of it has changed a little. I still think it’s bizarre and disturbing but wonderful and awesome at the same time and it brings out my hopelessly romantic side in a slightly embarrassing way. There’s just something so fascinating about these two people who can’t be together and can’t be apart at the same time. *sigh* Okay, moving on now. 2. Ensemble c’est tout 3. Le dernier vol A bit confusing at times but it has Canet, Cotillard and camels in it so you won’t hear me complain. The closing titles made me feel terrible about rooting for them to get together (Canet and Cotillard, not the camels) but according to Wikipedia the entire story was basically made up so that made me feel a little better. 4. Là-haut [o.t. Up] 5. Les Indestructibes [o.t. The Incredibles] I’m a little confused by the translated title of this one, since the only one of all the superheroes in the film who is really indestructible is Mr. Incredible. Anyway, I love this film. 6. Le chocolat [o.t. Chocolat] There’s something strangely disconcerting about watching a film set in France but spoken in English dubbed into French. 7. Easy A [o.t. Easy A] A lot of the faster dialogue went completely over my head but that’s okay because I’d only seen it once before so I was glad to be able to understand anything at all. 8. Pirates des caraibes: Le secret du coffre maudit [o.t. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest] Annecy In less than two weeks from now I will be blundering my way along the European railway system while being severely de-motivated by the fact that I won’t understand a word anyone says to me and most likely losing/being robbed of large parts of my luggage while trying to figure out where I am. I can’t wait! I have a two hour layover in Paris which should give me enough time for my habitual hour of getting lost while trying to find my way from one train station to another (may a pigeon poop on the head of whoever designed the Paris railway system). It may even be enough time to pay a short visit to the real Cinéma Rex but that all depends on how well the Parisian metro and I get along. We have quite a turbulent history (come to think of it, so do the London and Roman ones and I) and the route I need to take has an awful lot of transfers. I love wandering through big cities on my own so maybe I won’t visit anything at all and just get intimately acquainted with the little back alleys of the neighborhood surrounding Gare de Lyon. Or that’s how I imagine it anyway. In reality I’ll probably be so paranoid about missing my train that I’ll spend the entire two hours sitting on the platform, clutching my luggage and staring blindly down the tracks. We’ll see. As long as I arrive in Annecy in one piece, I won’t really care anyway. I had all sorts of grand plans for the weeks in between the end of the 6WC and my departure for France like reviewing Assimil, listening to the MT advanced French course, watching one hour of TV5Monde every day and L-R-ing the second installment of the Harry Potter series. I haven’t started on any of those yet though. And then there’s those last dozen or so episodes of French in Action, the thought of which has been haunting me for the last couple of days. I really hate leaving things unfinished… EDIT: I hate typos. Edited by ReneeMona on 28 July 2011 at 3:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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