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Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5554 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona
| Message 289 of 392 12 July 2011 at 2:38pm | IP Logged |
A big "onneksi olkoon" (Fin: congratulations) on getting top grades in the AP exams, and good luck with the new schedule!
Edited by Teango on 12 July 2011 at 2:40pm
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| LazyLinguist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5601 days ago 105 posts - 125 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 290 of 392 12 July 2011 at 6:43pm | IP Logged |
Congratulations! I admire your achievement, although from all the effort logged in pages
that I've viewed, I'm hardly surprised that you've managed to do so fantastically. You're
a real model of effort and hard work and I really admire your commitment and you've
clearly been fairly rewarded in your AP exams.
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| Thatzright Diglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5670 days ago 202 posts - 311 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: French, Swedish, German, Russian
| Message 291 of 392 12 July 2011 at 6:44pm | IP Logged |
Congratulations first of all, and second of all, if I may enquire, what are these AP tests exactly? (perhaps you have already explained, but unfortunately I haven't been following your log all that intensively lately, and in any case I have never heard of them before) Are they part of the American educational system, or something that can be voluntarily taken in some institute if one wishes to do so? I have often thought about taking some sort of test like this myself, for several languages, and your success with these ones is certainly nothing short of inspiring.
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| darkwhispersdal Senior Member Wales Joined 6038 days ago 294 posts - 363 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Ancient Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Latin
| Message 292 of 392 13 July 2011 at 11:13pm | IP Logged |
Congratulations on your results and also I second Thatzright for an explanation on AP tests. I've never heard of them
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| Amerykanka Hexaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5169 days ago 657 posts - 890 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Polish, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian
| Message 293 of 392 14 July 2011 at 1:26am | IP Logged |
Congratulations! I've been looking into AP exams quite a bit lately and they seem to be very hard - not many students take these exams in as many languages as you have, that's for sure!
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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 294 of 392 14 July 2011 at 1:53am | IP Logged |
For those not familiar with AP, this should clear it up
For those not interested in plowing through all of the background, then see the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Placement_exams wrote:
Advanced Placement examinations are taken each May by students at participating American, Canadian, and international educational institutions. The tests are the culmination of year-long Advanced Placement (AP) courses. All but one of the AP exams combine multiple-choice questions with a free-response section in either essay or problem-solving format.[1] AP Studio Art, the sole exception, requires students to submit a portfolio for review.
The exams themselves are not tests of the students' mastery of the course material in a traditional sense. Rather, the students themselves set the grading rubrics and the scale for the "AP Grades" of each exam. When the AP Reading is over for a particular exam, the free response scores are combined with the results of computer-scored multiple-choice questions based upon a previously announced weighting. The Chief Reader (a college or university faculty member selected by the Educational Testing Service and The College Board) then meets with members of ETS and sets the cutoff scores for each AP Grade. The Chief Reader's decision is based upon what percentage of students earned each AP Grade over the previous three years, how students did on multiple-choice questions that are used on the test from year to year, how he or she viewed the overall quality of the answers to the free response questions, how university students who took the exam as PART A experimental studies did, and how students performed on different parts of the exam. No one outside of this is ETS is allowed to find out a student's raw score on an AP Exam and the cutoff scores for a particular exam are only released to the public if that particular exam is released in total (this happens on a staggered schedule and occurs approximately once every five years for each exam). The AP Grades that are reported to students, high schools, colleges, and universities in July are on AP's five-point scale:
5: Extremely well qualified
4: Well-qualified
3: Qualified
2: Possibly qualified
1: No recommendation |
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| TixhiiDon Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5462 days ago 772 posts - 1474 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, German, Russian Studies: Georgian
| Message 295 of 392 14 July 2011 at 3:45am | IP Logged |
გილოცავ! Though like others I'm not in the least surprised.
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| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6140 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 296 of 392 16 July 2011 at 6:35am | IP Logged |
Quarter 3: Russian, Japanese
Week 28: July 9 – July 15
Total Study Time This Week: 22 hours
Total Study Time in 2011: 401.75 hours
Average Study Time This Week: 3.14 hours/day
Average Study Time in 2011: 2.05 hours/day
I suppose I’d be lying if I said that this wasn’t a great week for studying, but I still think I could have and should have done much better. I would venture to guess that the first two days of the week were what really threw me off because I was busy doing other things and didn’t have much time to work on languages. This meant that I felt like I had catch-up work to do later on, which in turn made me feel unmotivated upon seeing that I had seven hours of Russian to do, or the like. In short, I spent a huge amount of time on Japanese, not quite enough on Russian, plenty on Finnish and Persian, and then varying amounts of disappointment for the rest. I think I’m going to tweak my schedule a bit so that it’s more reasonable. More on that later…
On a more encouraging note, I did study for over twenty hours this week and today I also finally broke 400 total hours! Hopefully the next hundred will not take as long as the last hundred did.
РУССКИЙ
Total Study Time This Week: 3 hours
Total Study Time in 2011: 26.5 hours
- Vocabulary
- Penguin Russian Lesson 10 (vocabulary)
- Writing a story in Russian!
Alright, let’s explain this one activity at a time. The vocabulary was from some random lists I had made a while back that I finally put into Anki. The vocabulary from the Penguin Russian lesson was from when I went through it in May but was away from a computer so I couldn’t put the new words into Anki or BYKI. Halfway through doing that though, I got extremely bored so I decided to try something more entertaining: writing a story in Russian, which is an idea I sneakily stole from hribecek. I wasn’t feeling particularly creative at the moment though, so instead I just started writing the plotline of a movie I like to watch a lot in Russian. I was surprised at how slow-moving the process was – I spent an hour and a half writing and I got exactly three paragraphs of dubious quality done. If I see this project through to the end though, which, considering my success in following things through to the end, is unlikely, I will definitely see a lot of progress in my Russian abilities. Or at least that’s the idea.
日本語
Total Study Time This Week: 12.25 hours
Total Study Time in 2011: 40.25 hours
- Japanese Sentence Patterns, Ch. 5-11
- New Vocabulary
Welcome back to my addiction to this sentence pattern book! I don’t know what it is about reading fairly plain sentences in Japanese over and over and typing them into an Anki deck that’s so exciting, but there you have it. I literally spent almost a dozen hours this week doing just that and it was extremely satisfying to discover (or remember, since I used to know a lot of them) how each construction worked. The kind of sentences I was reading were things like…
- フライトに 遅れないように急いだほうがいいですよ。 (You had better hurry so that you won’t be late for your flight.)
- 彼は英語を教える ばかりでなく小説も書きます。 (He not only teaches English but also writes novels.)
- 私達は海で 泳いだり、海岸で貝を拾ったりしました。 (We did things like swim in the ocean and gather shells at the beach.)
- 両親が反対しても 彼と結婚するつもりです。 (Even if my parents object, I intend to marry him.)
Deutsch
Total Study Time This Week: 0.5 hours
Total Study Time in 2011: 27.5 hours
- Word of the Day Vocabulary
I didn’t feel motivated to find anything really substantial to work on for German so instead I decided to go through some of the over a thousand words of the day that have been piling up, ignored, in a special folder of my email for the past few years. Unsurprisingly, I knew most of the words already so I was able to quickly go through four months’ worth of words. I did, however, find some new gems.
Ελληνικά
Total Study Time This Week: 0.5 hours
Total Study Time in 2011: 51.5 hours
- Word of the Day Vocabulary
Same story as with German. I have been getting words of the day in Greek for over a year but have barely paid any attention to them so far. I get the Greek words from a different source from the German ones though so there are actually three Greek words delivered to me per day (along with example sentences) compared to German’s one. For that reason I only was about to get through about two months of Greek vocabulary but there was more of it.
فارسى
Total Study Time This Week: 2.5 hours
Total Study Time in 2011: 44.5 hours
- Pimsleur Farsi 7-11
I did a lot of yardwork this week as well as cleaning, so I had ample opportunity to listen to Pimsleur Farsi lessons in the background to make the tedious work a little more bearable. Interesting how that works, actually, given that I usually consider listening to Pimsleur a very boring activity in of itself. Whatever the reason for that is, I reviewed five 30-minute-long lessons of Persian and they were all still very easy. I think that’s a good sign.
Suomi
Total Study Time This Week: 3.25 hours
Total Study Time in 2011: 17.75 hours
- Assimil Lessons 15-21
I’ve now done the equivalent of three weeks of study of Finnish, were I to be following Assimil’s recommended schedule, which I’m not. I usually do two or three lessons at a time every couple days, which also seems to work well. As for the Finnish itself, the structures are starting to get a bit more complicated at this point and the new vocabulary is outpacing how fast I can get to it in Anki. Luckily though, it’s all still making sense and so far I’m not having too much trouble retaining the (mostly) foreign vocabulary.
OTHER
Thank you to everyone for the congratulations! I’ll address the specific questions below.
@Solfrid Cristin: Yes, they’re quite pleased. As for celebrations, I think I ran around the house a few times, dancing and bouncing with excitement (I also got good scores on the other two non-foreign language exams). You could also say that I rewarded myself by watching a season and a half of a TV show that I discovered recently as well as two movies probably eight or more times each, but I would have done those things regardless of the scores.
@Thatzright: I guess Chung has already answered this, but AP (“Advanced Placement”) classes are university-level classes with a very specific curriculum that you can choose to take in high school and which culminate with the AP exam at the end of the year. There are all sorts of subjects, from calculus to Spanish literature to psychology; for example this past school year I took AP English, German, US History, and Environmental Science (but I took the French exam even though I didn’t take the class and skipped the US History exam because there was a scheduling conflict with German). In any case, if you do well on the exams you can receive college credit for that subject area and be excused from certain requirements, not to mention that getting good scores just looks really good on college applications.
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