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Hendrek’s Italian TAC - The Romantics | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Hendrek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4883 days ago 152 posts - 210 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Persian | Message 25 of 38 12 March 2012 at 7:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks garyb. I've seen Arekkusu's post before and that's sort of the thing I'm trying now. I've never actually done the #2 part though, which is probably one of the keys to active/fluent vocabulary acquisition with this, so I'll have to incorporate that. I do often talk about random things to myself, especially in the car. I know that I look like a lunatic in traffic. That's if I'm not struggling to squeeze out the chinese sounds with Pimsleur, then I'm sure it just appears that I'm being tortured.
General log entry: Speaking of Chinese, how on earth does anyone actually speak Chinese!? It's like pulling teeth trying to get my mouth to say the words and tones correctly. Granted, I've only been at it for about 2 weeks now, but still. I'm going through FSI drills at the moment, which will hopefully help with time, but it is so incredibly fatiguing to follow along with the speakers. Pimsleur would surely be an easier entry point except that they don't specify the tones being used, and I can't yet reliably distinguish them, so I end up repeating the wrong words, only to find out they are wrong later by seeing them in FSI. This is one interesting thing about languages though, I think: one tends to forget just how difficult it is in the beginning. I know that Italian seemed like one giant tongue twister at first, but since it's so easy to pronounce now, it's easy to forget this fact and despair anew at the "unusual" difficulty of Chinese as a new language, when in fact I'm likely just going through a similar familiarization process (I hope not too long). Pronunciation aside though, I really enjoy learning the characters. I have learned over 120 characters in less than a week now and can fully recall and draw them. Remembering the Hanzi is truly an amazing book and technique. I hope to be over 300 by the end of this week and to have learned the full 3000+ within a few months. I'm also continuing to expose myself to passive materials in Italian. I'm at the point where listening to podcasts actually improves my vocabulary as I can often hear and get the meanings of unknown words on the fly from the context. I pretty much understand the the full podcast (news/talkshows) unless someone calls in on a bad cell-phone connection, or it's some sort of variety show with people laughing raucously and someone trying to mimic Spanish speakers using Italian while playing the piano and singing (true example). I also am typically able to read news articles and such with lingro looking up only 2 or 3 words per article. But at the same time, my Skype conversation time has fallen off a cliff for various reasons, when in fact that's the thing I need to focus most on. As mentioned above, self-talk is what I'm trying to do to fill in the gaps, but it's tough. I suppose this is officially the long-hard road to C-level fluency that is often mentioned on this site. But that's still my goal: Moving from B2 to full C1 Italian within 2012 (without letting Chinese bog me down too much). Now enough log-writing. Back to work. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5396 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 26 of 38 12 March 2012 at 7:58pm | IP Logged | ||
That cracked me up! I am having a similar problem with Croatian, and all their sh-ch-shch-zh-jhe-dje sounds. I feel like I'm (literally!) tripping over my tongue all the time. I don't know how they can walk and talk at the same time! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hendrek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4883 days ago 152 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Persian | Message 27 of 38 20 March 2012 at 10:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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OK, so I had guests this past week and weekend and was working on many other things and did practically no language studies in comparison to what I normally would. On the plus side, everything else that I did was very productive.
I am only at 200 traditional hanzi characters at the moment but did receive and begin my MT course in the car, which I'm liking A LOT more than the pimsleur version for now. They clearly explain which tone each new word should have, and the grammar explanations are also very helpful, as I'm able to start the sentence-level thought (at a very rudimentary stage of course). This was the case for Italian as well: MT was much more helpful overall, but in that case, Pimsleur was an excellent starting point. For Mandarin, it's just difficult to start with something that lets you mis-interpret and mis-pronounce the tones without trying to ensure that you know what is right. For me, they're just too easy to get wrong. I need to decide whether I will be able to do both FSI and Assimil together, or whether I will need to choose one at a time. I see the benefits to either one. For Italian, I've listened to additional podcasts, I always read the news in Italian, and I have gotten re-started on the active wave / self-talk using Assimil. Going pretty well, but still needs a lot of polishing. Kerrie: another thing is then being able to recognize the differences when you hear them. Even trickier sometimes! Edited by Hendrek on 20 March 2012 at 11:00pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hendrek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4883 days ago 152 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Persian | Message 28 of 38 24 March 2012 at 4:39am | IP Logged | ||
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I was reading a thread on this forum and came across the DIALANG online test for European languages based on the CEFR levels.
Here is the software site link. I had to also download the older Java platform for it to work. Here is the wikipedia page that describes it. It may be useful to you Romantics out there to sort of see where you stand in your languages... it even offers suggestions on how to improve based on how you score in each category. There are 5 categories. I just took it to see how I would do in Italian. 1. Listening -- C1 2. Reading -- B2 3. Writing -- B2 4. Grammar Structure -- B2 5. Vocabulary -- B1 Some parts of the test are constructed a bit oddly, so there were a few where I knew the answer, but not how to properly type it in to make it recognize it as such. It's hard to explain, but becomes clear when you see their sometimes wonky format. Or maybe I'm just not good at reading directions carefully :) I don't know how reliable this is, being that there are only about 30 questions in each category, but my scores did correspond pretty closely to my expectations and to the DLPT that I took... though I would have expected to score as well in reading as listening (were it not for my confusion on the answer formats, I think I would have). Writing isn't writing per se, but really a combination of section 4 and 5 I think. I'm not sure how they could ever hope to judge writing without a human to grade it, so this is to be expected. Basically, this test confirms more or less what I already knew: I need to work on my vocabulary (though this score also suffered from some confusion on how to answer), and probably should re-dive into grammar structures to fix a few bits of ongoing confusion. Edited by Hendrek on 24 March 2012 at 4:47am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Hendrek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4883 days ago 152 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Persian | Message 29 of 38 04 April 2012 at 9:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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I slacked off with last week's post since I had posted the test results above.
My Skype partners have basically disappeared. I have plenty of initial interest via sharedtalk or conversationexchange, but most I have never spoken to even once outside of these sites. It's mainly an issue of timing. Frankly, I don't really want to be tied to my computer anymore outside of work hours and when I get home I have plenty of things that need doing which involve being outside and active. This makes it hard to hold sessions since the timing often needs to be too flexible. I think I need to actually pay a few bucks for set appointments for language practice. I did this a bit before my Italy trip, and it worked well for 3 reasons: 1. There was no need for an "exchange" so it could be all in Italian, freeing up the requisite English time. 2. Usually these are folks who sign up with teaching in mind, so they are actually more attentive to correcting mistakes and giving pointers than normal conversation partners. 3. Because of the payment, it was easier to get convenient US times rather than trying to find some weird time with the 7 hour difference. What sucks is paying for something that *should* be available for free... but maybe it's ultimately worth the increased convenience. This past week, I've mainly been doing language-in-the-car time for active skills. I've just been busy with other things (I enjoy gardening and have a lot of work to do there). Being outside lends itself fine to passive skills on the iPod, but I haven't yet transferred my active materials for Chinese to iPod. I need to just sit down and do that. I'll have Chinese-speaking tomatoes in no time. Michel Thomas Mandarin has been very helpful. I'm on the last CD of the Foundation Course now and have learned quite a bit. The tones are much easier to produce now, though I've noticed that even with Assimil's not-quite-full speed, they will be much more difficult to pick out when listening once the language speeds up. Speaking of Assimil, I'm working through it slowly, repeating each lesson several times so far, but I think I'm ready to hit the 1-per-day pace soon. My Remembering the Hanzi goal has all but been left for dead. I still haven't reached 300 characters (around 250 now). Unfortunately, Assimil uses simplified characters while I want to learn the traditional, so I need to continue to study both... which is challenging. My routine has been interrupted recently by several visitors to the house and additional work on the weekends, so I'm trying to re-establish a study norm. My intent is to do 10 characters per day consistently and 50 on the weekend for 100 per week. This should be a reasonable goal, but only attainable through consistency I've found. Similar to Assimil, this works best in small amounts rather than large chunks. I intend (someday... needs to be sooner than later for efficiency's sake of course) to incorporate ANKI and get everything from MT, Pimsleur (which I will start again after MT is finished) and Assimil in there. This way I can start associating the characters and the words and morphemes that I already know on a more regular basis. Basically, for Chinese I think a key to success is being incredibly pro-active in designing one's study plan and materials: basically it needs A LOT more up-front preparation work than did Italian. This feels suspiciously like *not* language studying in the moment, though of course it is thoroughly beneficial in the long run. For Italian, I'm still doing self-talk exercises and reading and listening as much as I can. I need to start using lang-8 and really get my writing going to help cement the correct grammar forms in my mind (especially those pesky prepositions) and more quickly recognize and correct mistakes on my own. This, I've found, pretty quickly moves into my spoken habits as well. OK, that's enough: basically last week was "meh" as far as language studying is concerned. I will have to do better than this! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hendrek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4883 days ago 152 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Persian | Message 30 of 38 29 April 2012 at 12:18am | IP Logged | ||
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Wow, I haven't logged anything in almost a month now!
But I have been studying languages. It's just that I've been very seasonally busy with work and gardening maintenance and haven't been focusing on it nearly as much. In fact, I would say that I'm getting in only about an hour a day at most of late. I have to take 2 tests (completely unrelated to language) for my job soon, which involve dozens of hours of reading material each, so that will take up a considerable amount of time over the next few weeks, but I still listen to language tapes during my commutes. I was in the habit of reading the news in Italian over lunch, but I've slipped up a bit on that... will have to get back to it. Frankly, I've just been very busy overall. I still listen to Italian podcasts while at the gym, which is helpful since I also have to go to the gym for my job, but I know that I need to continue to study it more actively to improve my vocabulary. I do find myself suddenly taken with an urge to self-talk while in the car. This is in part because I become (literally) tired of listening to chinese tapes and think "but Italian is so much easier, I should just speak to myself!" This is bad for chinese, but it's great that I have this secondary motivation to go back to Italian. Anyway, Chinese will be a long-term effort I've realized, but I think I will certainly remain on track to accomplish my goals this year for Italian, with perhaps only a B1 in sight for Chinese. There's just one problem (there are several, but this is a good excuse)... My computer sucks. I mean really sucks. My desktop is almost 10 years old and doesn't really function anymore, so I'm on an old (5+ yr) laptop. Of course, this makes it exceedingly difficult to do the necessary legwork of copying audio, using Anki and any other software necessary for helping with chinese. So... I might break down soon and buy a new computer (I'm generally cheap when it comes to "things". I have no smart phone, and my iPod is the original model... though it still works just fine) which will likely make it seem incredibly easier to accomplish everything. We'll see I guess. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5396 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 31 of 38 29 April 2012 at 12:28am | IP Logged | ||
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Haha. I thought my 5 year old desktop was outdated. =)
I would definitely recommend getting a new computer, if you're working on something that old. You'd be amazed at how inexpensive you can find a good computer, especially if you have a monitor already. You could have something blazing fast (comparatively, anyways!) for a few hundred bucks. And it'll make a big difference in how fast things run for you. =) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hendrek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4883 days ago 152 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Persian | Message 32 of 38 24 May 2012 at 9:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, it's been almost a month again and so I think it's time to do a requisite update.
As before, everything's busy with focuses elsewhere, but language studies ongoing. My work-related testing will be complete soon, which will allow for more free time devoted to languages. I listen to Chinese during my commutes, self-talk in Italian here and there, and continue to listen to Italian podcasts at the gym. I will likely get back into Italian more after my work testing, since I would like to take the more advanced DLPT at the end of next month. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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