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Ellasevia’s TAC 2011: Team Ohana | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5351 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes  Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 337 of 392 14 September 2011 at 3:17pm | IP Logged |
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Just want to say that I hope you're okay and that you're coping okay now. I'll be looking forward to your next update as you are one of the most interesting learners on this forum.
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| LazyLinguist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5605 days ago 105 posts - 125 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 338 of 392 14 September 2011 at 10:06pm | IP Logged |
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As others have already said, I hope you're coping well and look forward to your next log
post. Saturday Mornings just haven't been the same without it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6144 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 339 of 392 19 September 2011 at 2:20am | IP Logged |
Quarter 3: Russian, Japanese  
Weeks 35-37: August 27 – September 16 Total Study Time This Week: 19.5 hours (3 week total) Total Study Time in 2011: 509.75 hours Average Study Time This Week: 0.93 hours/day (3 week total) Average Study Time in 2011: 1.96 hours/day 
So I haven’t written in over three weeks. I had a variety of reasons for not writing, among those being that I’ve been unbelievably busy and simply didn’t have the time, that I couldn’t motivate myself to write anything, and that I wanted to wait to break the 500-hour mark before writing again. I apologize for having disappointed anyone… The past three weeks have marked the end of both August and the 6 Week Challenge. Sadly, August took a surprise turn for the worse when school started up and now holds the title of Worst Study Month of 2011, falling short of even April with just under 35 hours. Maybe it really is all in the name – the three J-months had the highest study times, and the two A-months had the lowest. I really am glad that school has started, though, and am now more or less adjusted to the workload, so I think it was worth it. As for the 6WC, the results are a bit better. I came in 18th place for total study time with just over 100 hours of language study. Remember, though, that I was counting my two language classes at school, Anki time, and some other miscellaneous activities (such as talking to friends in Spanish and German, which is almost a daily practice) which I wouldn’t normally bother counting. My top five languages at the end of the challenge were Russian, German, Japanese, Greek, and Dutch, in that order. Russian was of course my target language for the challenge, which I unfortunately did not have much time for after school started, and for which I came in 40th place, so significantly lower than my score for total study time. Aside from that, in the past three weeks I’ve managed to scrape up the equivalent number of hours of what I would consider one “good” week and have finally broken 500 hours. I was hoping to reach 1000 hours by the end of the year, but I think it’s only too obvious that I won’t be accomplishing that goal, seeing as how we’re over 70% through 2011 and I’m only about halfway to 1000 hours. What else? I’ve had some escapades with a couple tonal languages since I last wrote, namely Mandarin and Hmong. But more about that in their respective sections. Finally, I should warn you that this practice of only writing every few weeks might become a habit for the remainder of the year due to time constraints. And I might as well put this out there as well so that you can get used to the idea – I can’t guarantee that I’ll be keeping a log at all next year, and most likely won’t. More on that at a later date.  РУССКИЙ
Total Study Time This Week: 2 hours (3 week total) Total Study Time in 2011: 52.5 hours - Writing in Russian - STG Russian Lesson 1 Looking back on my study spreadsheet reveals that I really didn’t do very much Russian at all in the past few weeks. I spent about half an hour a couple weeks ago writing a paragraph in Russian, which I assume was in nogoodnik’s new log. Then last week, in a final effort to boost my target language study time a bit before the end of the 6WC, I spent 1.5 hours going through most of the first lesson of this poor book which I must have started studying at least four times already. As it turned out, the lesson was much longer than I expected and since I had other commitments to attend to as well, I have not yet finished it.  日本語
Total Study Time This Week: 0.5 hours (3 week total) Total Study Time in 2011: 50.5 hours - Vocabulary Wow, I did even less Japanese than Russian. This is really quite sad. Luckily I can console myself with the knowledge that I have four hours of Japanese class at school per week. However, as a disclaimer to its quality, I should note that this was the same class where everyone was surprised to learn there was a test earlier this week because when my teacher had announced it, he said it in Japanese and apparently no one understood. :P In any case, I did some vocabulary study, which I presume was for my class because I don’t actually remember doing any of my own.  Português
Total Study Time This Week: 4.75 hours (3 week total) Total Study Time in 2011: 8 hours - Harry Potter e o Prisioneiro de Azkaban (film) - Harry Potter e a Ordem da Fênix (film) In an attempt to beef up my study time at the end of the 6WC, I decided to watch two Harry Potter movies in Portuguese. Strangely, the two movies were apparently dubbed in different dialects; the third movie was in European Portuguese and the fifth was in the Brazilian dialect. The only explanation I can think of that makes at least partial sense is that they perhaps made separate dubbings of the entire series for each dialect and I just happen to have one of each. Naturally I found the Brazilian Portuguese easier to understand since that’s the form I’m more used to, but the European Portuguese didn’t pose any major problems either, particularly since I’m so familiar with these films.  Deutsch
Total Study Time This Week: 6 hours (3 week total) Total Study Time in 2011: 35 hours - Reading and Writing in German - Homework and Tagebuch for German Class - Vocabulary Lots of German in the past couple of weeks. I’m counting all of my homework as study time, and we’ve also been doing a fair amount of reading in class so I revise the readings again at home in order to extract new vocabulary from them. I mentioned this previously, but I’ve also been speaking a lot of German with one of my friends. I didn’t count any of that as “official” study time, though I counted it for the 6WC.  Svenska
Total Study Time This Week: 1.25 hours (3 week total) Total Study Time in 2011: 43.25 hours - Pocahontas på svenska (film) The time I spent on Swedish was purely accidental. I wanted to watch Pocahontas, so I downloaded it and started watching. I thought it was odd at the beginning that I couldn’t catch what the lyrics to the opening song were, but attributed it to some strange British accent they must have been using. It wasn’t until the actual dialogue started that I realized that it wasn’t in English, but Swedish! I ended up watching the entire movie in Swedish and was pleased to find that as soon as I had figured out what language I was listening to I could understand nearly everything without any trouble. I hadn’t seen that movie in probably at least 12 years, and therefore didn’t remember anything about the plot aside from the fact that there were Native Americans and English settlers involved somehow, so everything I got was purely from the Swedish. :)  Ελληνικά
Total Study Time This Week: 3 hours (3 week total) Total Study Time in 2011: 59.5 hours - Ο Χάρι Πότερ και ο Αιχμάλωτος του Αζκαμπάν (film) - Ο Αλχημιστής - Writing in Greek Similar to the explanation under Portuguese, I decided to watch a Harry Potter movie in Greek to try to improve my 6WC score. I actually watched the Greek version of the third movie first, and then decided to take advantage of the fact that it came with audio options in both Greek and Portuguese and watched the latter version as well. As with the Portuguese, it was no trouble at all to understand. As for Ο Αλχημιστής, I believe I read another chapter or two of that on the bus ride to school one morning last week. Finally, I’ve been doing mini journal entries every day in Greek on the sides of papers during spare moments in class. I don’t know how long I’ve spent on those combined, but probably at least five minutes for each one… Hm, I probably should have awarded myself more time for that.  中文
Total Study Time This Week: 0.25 hours (3 week total) Total Study Time in 2011: 0.25 hours - Chinese Demystified (exploring) A friend of mine wants to learn Mandarin and asked for a book to study from for her birthday. After scouring the bleak offerings (even for a language as big as Mandarin) at the bookstore, I decided on Chinese Demystified. However, I still had to verify the quality, of course, by engaging in some study from it myself. That was clearly just an excuse to have some fun with Chinese, but whatever you call it, I spent some time reviewing things I used to know from when I studied Mandarin briefly five years ago. Here’s an attempt at saying something (but in Pinyin): Nĭ hăo! Nĭ jiào shénme míngzì? Wŏ jiào Philip. Wŏ shì Mĕiguó-rén. Wŏ bù huì shuō Zhōngwén.  Moob
Total Study Time This Week: 1.75 hours (3 week total) Total Study Time in 2011: 1.75 hours - Phonology, vocabulary, and grammar study - Practicing speaking with friend For those who don’t know, Moob is the native word for the Hmong language. And again for those who don’t know, Hmong is a language from the Hmong-Mien language family which is spoken by over four million people in southern China and Southeast Asia. In this case I’ve chosen to use the flag of Laos to represent the language because that’s where the dialect I’m studying is from. I have a good friend who speaks this as her native language because her family comes from Laos, and she has offered to help me learn some for fun. It’s a fairly small language and I can’t even find any good printed resources for it, but I did find this website which is a good start, particularly for the complex phonology. I don’t know how seriously I’m going to pursue it given the lack of resources and for now it’s just a fun thing on the side, so I haven’t added it to my study graph just yet. Hmong is a tonal language which makes use of seven (and sometimes eight) tones. It’s written using the Latin alphabet with the tones indicated by silent consonants at the end of the words, which are almost all monosyllabic. For example, taking the syllable po as an example, we can form: - pob (high tone) - po (mid tone) - pos (low tone) - poj (high-falling tone) - pov (mid-rising tone) - pom (low-falling [creaky] tone) - pog (mid-low [breathy] tone) After lots of practice, I can now recognize the sign for each tone in writing and can more or less reproduce them myself. The most difficult one for me to produce correctly is the breathy tone, which is sort of problematic seeing as how it’s used in such common words as moog (to go), yog (to be), and nwg (he/she/it). The tones aren’t the only thing that makes Hmong pronunciation difficult. The vowels are fairly straightforward, pronounced mostly as written along with a few diphthongs. Double vowels (such as in Moob) represent a nasal vowel and ‘w’ is actually used as a vowel that sounds like something between the German ‘ü’ and ‘ö’ to me. Consonants, however, aren’t as simple. There are several very peculiar consonant clusters (plh, hny, nqh, nrh) which are considered one sound, so you can get scary-looking words like ntxhw, which means ‘elephant.’ Some of the consonants are also just scary in their own right. The consonants used in the dialect my friend speaks are: c, ch, dh, dl, f, h, hl, hml, hn, hny, k, kh, l, m, ml, n, nc, nch, ndl, nk, nkh, np, nph, npl, nplh, nq, nqh, nr, nrh, nt, nth, nts, ntsh, ntx, ntxh, ny, p, ph, pl, plh, q, qh, r, rh, s, t, th, ts, tsh, tx, txh, v, x, xy, y, z. The website I linked to before has recordings of all of those if you want to hear how they're pronounced. Now, let’s see if I can compose something in Hmong… Nyob zoo! Kuv yog Philip hab kuv yog Miskas. Kuv tsi hais lus Moob hos kuv muaj siab xyum kawm tias kuv kwv luag hais Moob. Kiag kuv yog tsev tom, hos pig kis ib moog tsev kawm ntawv hab kuv noj mov. OTHER @Solfrid Cristin: Yes, it’s pretty amazing. Of course it would have been better to be at 700 hours by now, but such is life. I don’t know how the winners of the 6WC managed to fit in almost 300 hours of study into only six weeks. @Meelämmchen: Thanks, I’m feeling much better nowadays. :) I would count my class hours, but I want to be consistent and I didn’t do that at the beginning of the year, so… @hribecek: Thanks to you as well. As I said before, I’m coping much better now and have adjusted to the school year. I generally am looking forward to every school day and even get mad at the weekends for existing sometimes… :P @LazyLinguist: I’m sorry to have disrupted your routine! Hopefully this post makes up for some of the previous disappointment. Better late than never. Edited by ellasevia on 19 September 2011 at 8:23am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5558 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 340 of 392 19 September 2011 at 3:14pm | IP Logged |
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510 hours = goooaaaallllll!! Welcome back, mate. :D Edited by Teango on 19 September 2011 at 3:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Magdalene Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5038 days ago 119 posts - 220 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Mandarin, German, Modern Hebrew, French | Message 341 of 392 19 September 2011 at 10:03pm | IP Logged |
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Glad to see you back, ellasevia. Congratulations on reaching 500 hours! I LOVE the color you've chosen for this quarter's graphs; it shows up as a purply chocolate on my monitor. Mmmm...
One mistake in your pinyin: *bù huì should be bú huì. 不 (bù) takes second tone when followed by a fourth tone syllable. If you'd like to see your paragraph in characters: Traditional: 你好! 你叫甚麼名字? 我叫 Philip*. 我是美國人. 我不會說中文. Simplified: 你好! 你叫什么名字? 我叫 Philip. 我是美国人. 我不会说中文. *腓力, Féilì...but you might want to transliterate your name differently, or get a "real" Chinese name. Have fun with Hmong! You definitely deserve a linguistic treat after all the hard work you've put in this year. :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| darkwhispersdal Senior Member Wales Joined 6042 days ago 294 posts - 363 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Ancient Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Latin | Message 342 of 392 20 September 2011 at 4:21pm | IP Logged |
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I thought Vietnamese tones were complicated Hmong makes them look easy. Glad to see you back on the forum :-)
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| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5336 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 343 of 392 21 September 2011 at 11:52pm | IP Logged |
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Congratulations! You are a hero!
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| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6144 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 344 of 392 03 October 2011 at 6:08am | IP Logged |
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Quarter 3: Russian, Japanese
Weeks 38-39: September 17 – September 30 Total Study Time This Week: 11 hours (2 week total) Total Study Time in 2011: 520.75 hours Average Study Time This Week: 0.79 hours/day (2 week total) Average Study Time in 2011: 1.89 hours/day 
I’m back! I have both very little and a lot to say this time around, so we’ll see which one wins out. In the past two weeks I have kept up my failing streak as far as my languages go so there’s really not much to comment on there. I spent zero time on my focus languages, as usual, and a lot of time on German. It’s also the end of both the month of September and the Third Quarter. Let’s take a look at the very disappointing trends that we have going here: … July: 83.25 hours August: 34.75 hours September: 29.5 hours Quarter 1: 224 hours Quarter 2: 148.75 hours Quarter 3: 147.5 hours As much as I’d like to say that I intend to reverse this trend in the last three months of the year, I don’t want to make any promises of that sort right now. The fact remains that I’m extremely busy with school, and when I’m not swamped with work I’m usually too tired to even begin to think about working on languages. That said, after lots of vacillating, I’ve decided to resurrect my Swahili as my second focus language alongside German for the last quarter of the year because this year isn't complicated enough as it is. But more about that in the next update… Deutsch
Total Study Time This Week: 7 hours (2 week total) Total Study Time in 2011: 42 hours - Lots of Reading and Writing in German - Homework and Tagebuch for German Class - Vocabulary Well German continues to be the language I’ve spent the most time on recently thanks to my class, and my activities have essentially remained the same. I think the highlight of my German studies in the past two weeks was that last weekend I composed an original Norse myth in German explaining the origin of the northern lights. We had been studying Norse mythology in my class for the past month or so, and writing our own myth in German was our culminating project. For our Tagebuch this past week I wrote a rather unsophisticated explanation of why I do and don’t like (I couldn’t decide) my school’s new modified block schedule and the advantages and disadvantages over last year’s normal schedule.  Nederlands
Total Study Time This Week: 0.25 hours (2 week total) Total Study Time in 2011: 82 hours - Tatoeba and Vocabulary I have spent hardly any time on Dutch recently, which I would like to change if possible. Maybe I should start bringing my copy of Harry Potter in Dutch with me to school so that I can read out of it if I get a moment. Wait, no, I already do that with Ο Αλχημιστής and still only remember to pull it out like once every three weeks. What I did do this week, however, was play around on Tatoeba and translating sentences from Dutch into English and collecting any exciting new vocabulary that I found there, as well as from a few other sources in the past couple weeks. Svenska
Total Study Time This Week: 2.75 hours (2 week total) Total Study Time in 2011: 46.5 hours - Den Lilla Sjöjungfrun (film) - Pocahontas på svenska (film) Nothing new here, I just decided to watch two of my favorite Disney movies in Swedish again since I have them at my disposal. Vad roligt. :)  Français
Total Study Time This Week: 0.5 hours (2 week total) Total Study Time in 2011: 46.75 hours - Letter in French This already feels like ages ago, but I wrote a letter in French to one of my friends who is now in college because she was upset that she never gets any mail. I wrote it by hand in rainbow colors, so between the fact that it was written in French and the bright colors it was very pretty, if I may say so myself. Ελληνικά
Total Study Time This Week: 0.5 hours (2 week total) Total Study Time in 2011: 60 hours - Writing in Greek Well I’ve continued to write my secret little journal entries in Greek almost every day during class, so I’ve probably spent than just 30 minutes on Greek in the past two weeks, actually. However, I only just now realized that and have already done all the calculations for this log entry and am far too lazy to go back and redo them all just for a bit extra study time. Plus, 60 hours is a nice, round number. Apart from the journaling, I was also doing work on a fair amount of Greek lessons for GreekPod101.com so in theory I could count at least part of that time as study time for Greek. When I started working on those at the beginning of August, though, I made the decision that I wouldn’t count them as study time for some weird reason, and now I want to be consistent in not counting them so that I don’t have to recalculate everything. If I were to count that time, though, it would probably give me between 4 and 18 hours of Greek study time, depending on what proportion I decided to count. OTHER  I tried to learn a song in Arabic last week, an exercise which taught me the importance of being able to understand what you’re saying in memorizing lyrics. I spent well over an hour pounding the lyrics into my head by force, plus however long it took me to rehearse the song later on before it became semi-fluent. Compare that to when I learned the same song in Spanish and German, for example, where I just had to read over the lyrics a couple times and then I had them down. Learning the song in Arabic was my way of satisfying the wanderlust for Arabic that I had been experiencing lately.
@Teango: Haha, thanks Teango. 510 (now 520) hours aren’t as many as I would have liked to have accumulated this far into the year, but I’ll take them nonetheless. :) @Magdalene: Thanks for stopping by! Purply chocolate? Hm, I just meant it to be a normal brown, but I’m glad you like it. Thanks for the correction of my pinyin – I do remember learning that rule (a very long time ago) now that you mention it. And thanks for putting my text into characters for me. :) @darkwhispersdal: Hmong’s tones make Vietnamese look easy!? We are talking about the same Vietnamese, aren’t we? The one where every vowel has like three different diacritics? @Solfrid Cristin: I’m not sure what I did to earn that compliment, but I’ll take it anyway. Thank you! Edited by ellasevia on 04 October 2011 at 12:42am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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