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TAC 2012 – Jinx – Freutsch & Catalan | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| anamsc Triglot Senior Member Andorra Joined 6195 days ago 296 posts - 382 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Catalan Studies: Arabic (Levantine), Arabic (Written), French | Message 17 of 36 05 February 2012 at 5:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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That FAWM thing is pretty cool! I've heard of NaNoWriMo, which is kind of similar (you write a novel in a month). Are you going to write any of your songs in German / French / Catalan?
Congrats on your Catalan exam, too! Your Catalan seems to be coming along nicely. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5685 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 18 of 36 07 February 2012 at 2:10pm | IP Logged | ||
fabriciocarraro: I know, isn't it cool? I love the transparency of Catalan/Spanish/Portuguese – it almost makes me (lazy person that I am) think I shouldn't bother actually learning the last two, because I can read them without much trouble already. :)
Thanks, anamsc! If you ever feel like throwing any Catalan corrections at me, I would be very grateful. Yes, FAWM is actually based on NaNoWriMo, sort of "the songwriter's answer" to that concept. There are a lot of people who partake in both projects, actually. It's really fun, a very relaxed and friendly supportive community atmosphere. For me, writing a song is pretty much the single highest linguistic accomplishment one can reach in any language, let alone a foreign one. There's so much to think about: not only matters of form, such as line length, rhythm, rhyme (partial/perfect/alternating/none/etc.), alliteration, repetition, etc.; but also the layers of reference I like to put into my songs, cultural/literary/historical/etc., including subtle tips of the hat to musicians/writers/artists/any figures who have inspired me; and then of course the general "playing with language" that you can do in songs and almost nowhere else. The reason I'm listing all this stuff is to show how complex and delicate a process it is for me to write a song (for some of my songs, it happens almost unconsciously, and I only realize years later what the song is actually about!). Therefore, I don't really feel that I'm at a level yet in any of my languages to write a song in them. That said, I have written one song in German, a very simple piece, more like an exercise, called "Es wird nie besser werden" ("It'll Never Get Better" – it's not a reflection on my linguistic abilities, I promise!) which you can read here in my Lang-8 journal if you like. I love the idea of getting good enough in all my target languages to someday easily write songs in them, but at the moment that feels like a pretty distant goal! Edited by Jinx on 07 February 2012 at 2:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5685 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 19 of 36 07 February 2012 at 2:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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6 February 2012
Just posting to note two cool things about Croatian. First: The vocabulary people use online is eminently understandable, which is awesome for encouraging a beginner like me. I follow a couple of blogs in Croatian, and one of them just posted "Go Giants! Happy to be Croatian, thank you Mom!" and another posted a picture with the caption "My love. I'm so mainstream, but f*** it, it's love" and I understood both posts instantly without having to look up any of the words! (Confession: if "mainstream" had been in Croatian, I would definitely have had to look that one up, but the blogger wrote that word in English for some reason.) Second: I seriously believe this language is the easiest to understand from listening of any language I've ever tried to learn. The pronunciation is so clear and matches the way it's written so closely that it's easy to find the lyrics of songs by typing a line I hear into Google. Gotta love that. OK, back to studying! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5685 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 20 of 36 29 February 2012 at 9:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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OK, I'm way behind on posting my updates – plan to catch up on that soon! I just wanted to note here that apparently I haven't been receiving private messages on the forum – I think my mailbox might be full. Working on that, and things should be improved soon!
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| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5685 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 21 of 36 29 April 2012 at 7:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's exactly two months since I last posted here – seems an appropriate date to make a grand re-entrance. All joking aside, I feel rather chagrined that I haven't been keeping up with my log here. I could make plenty of legitimate excuses (such as the fact that apparently everyone I know is getting or dying of cancer), but I won't waste time whining, and will instead move on to a play-by-play analysis of what the past two months have looked like linguistically.
During semester break I had hoped to focus on my secondary languages, Catalan and Croatian, but I ended up maintaining my habit of focusing almost exclusively on my main two, German and French. Why did this happen? I'll tell you: the curse of the plateau. Near the end of February I reached yet another plateau in my German level, and a very depressing plateau at that. In my head, I know that I have quite an advanced level of German, but for some reason I still can't convince myself to really FEEL that knowledge. I guess the problem is that every day, living my life in German, the only moments which really stick out like sore thumbs are the ones where I DON'T know how to say something. If I DO know how to say it, nobody notices: I don't notice, rolling along in my conversation toward the next thing I want to say; and whomever I'm talking to certainly doesn't notice, because they deal with foreigners speaking pretty-good German every day. Something else which is really irritating me at this level in German is the disconnect between what I know and what I say. I know lots of grammatical constructions, noun genders, verbs, etc., but when I'm caught up in the rush of actually having a live-time conversation with someone, I tend to fall back on familiar forms and expressions, and regularly make mistakes with gender and agreement and so on, just because my brain is moving too fast and focusing on communicating "the gist" rather than slowing down and pronouncing every word perfectly. And my conversation partners don't mind this in the slightest, and never correct me. Seriously, I can hardly remember the last time someone corrected something I said. Which is annoying, because how else am I ever going to keep improving? Anyway, rant aside, the objective assessment is that, clearly, my German is still steadily improving, and even if I don't feel satisfied with that, I know I ought to be. As for French, I've almost reached the end of my Assimil course (it only took me what, two years to get through it?) and I've been reading a LOT. I've almost finished "La Nausée" by Sartre, and have started "Les Misérables" by Hugo. The former is quite enjoyable, despite the narrator's depressed immaturity (oh, excuse me, it's called "existentialism"? my mistake!), and I'm simply loving the latter so far. There are plenty of vocabulary words I don't know in both books – more in Hugo than in Sartre – but not to the extent that it impacts my enjoyment of reading at all. As the weather's been getting warm recently, I've taken to biking to the park and spending the afternoon reading French on a bench near some ducks. I was rather dreading starting my new Catalan course this semester, seeing as I hadn't done nearly as much study over the break as I'd wanted to, but I shouldn't have feared. I'm enjoying the course even more this semester than last semester. We have two language-focused meetings and one culture-focused meeting a week, so a total of four and a half hours of class time every week. Every class is still entirely in CT, including the culture class, which is basically a lecture format. On Friday a Mallorcan a cappella group came to class and talked and sang to us. It was absolutely lovely to get a dash of real Catalonian culture! Unfortunately speaking is the weak point of this otherwise fantastic course, and although I have almost no problems reading the language and can write and listen with confidence, I am still stuck when it comes to speaking. A friend of mine wants to have a weekly study session with me, though, so if I can convince her to incorporate speaking, that would be perfect. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5685 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 22 of 36 27 June 2012 at 10:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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27 June 2012
I was considering waiting two days, so that it would again be exactly two months since I'd last posted, but no – best to seize the moment and update now, while I'm thinking of it. I may have been rather absent from the forum recently, but I've been studying like crazy. I've recently discovered the website DuoLingo.com, which is available for German, French, and Spanish so far. The German and French courses have several mistakes in the higher levels and the audio is very low-quality, but overall their material is quite interesting and well put-together. GERMAN - classes in German - translation homework - translation jobs - socializing in German - reading - films/TV - journal writing - up to level 14 on DuoLingo - a presentation on a topic I didn't understand Uni continues as always – I get listening practice during my lectures, and reading and writing practice from my homework. This semester I'm focusing on two quite different types of translation: advertising (DE>EN) and microelectronics (EN>DE). They require very different skills, but they're both quite interesting. I also recently researched for and successfully gave a presentation on an utterly opaque (to me, at least) topic: B2B online marketing platforms. This is honestly something I couldn't talk about in English, let alone German; and yet I was assigned to do it and did it. I'm starting to realize that German is a far better language to use if you need to sound intelligent while discussing something you don't understand at all. I also have two translation jobs now! Besides continuing my job translating a language website (finished the German-to-English part – my next assignment is French-to-English), I've gotten a new part-time job proofreading the English version of the University of Leipzig's website. Once I've finished that, I'll continue translating the website myself. It's a low-paying student job, but it's pretty cool to have such a responsibility, and I'm enjoying my work situation and colleagues so far. Right now is the EM, so Germany is all a-flutter over soccer (football if you're European), and the mood has infected me as well. I don't watch soccer normally, but every two years when the European Championships or the World Championships are taking place, it's hard to avoid. I've been regularly getting together with friends to watch all Germany's games so far, and that means lots of chatting and socialization in German. I can do it extremely well, but my group of friends here has a ton of inside jokes and references to life as Germans that I as a foreigner obviously don't get. They're all very nice about it and never make me feel excluded, but conversations can get boring when they're 90% quoting TV shows I don't watch or making jokes and puns that fly by too fast for me to catch. And yet I steadfastly refuse to hang out with other English-speakers, so go me, I guess. I've also been dipping into a lot of different books, mostly philosophy (Martin Cohen's "99 philosophische Rätsel", Michael Hauskeller's "Was ist Kunst?", Lilo Göttermann's "Denkanstöße", Peter Sloterdijk's "Du mußt dein Leben ändern", Jay Rosenberg's "Philosophieren", and something awful called "Im Bett mit Kant"), classics (read all of Die Zauberflöte, still working through Goethe's "Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre"), and Krimis (got partway through a fun mystery set in Brittany – "Bretonische Verhältnisse" by Jean-Luc Bannalec – before it vanished from my bookstore). Some friends also recommended a Swedish novel by Jonas Jonasson that I'm currently reading in the German translation: "Der Hundertjährige, der aus dem Fenster stieg und verschwand". It's a really fun book – I'm not done with it yet, but I already feel confident in passing on the recommendation. I also read a whole small book on DDR slang which gave me a fun "blast from the past", and I even ended up accidentally memorizing a limerick: Ich darf's mit dem Onkel in Zscherben auf keinen Fall jemals verderben. Er hat zwar kein Land, doch für den Trabant könnt' ich mal die Anmeldung erben. You have to be a real DDR-geek to get this one, I guess – the joke is a reference to my favorite East German car, the adorable and rather pathetic little Trabant or "Trabi". Apparently you had to get on a waiting list to receive one of these vehicles, and the list was so long you could wait years before receiving your car! Things I've watched recently include a fun "dark comedy" film called "Dänische Delikatessen" (sort of a Sweeney-Todd take-off, if you know what I mean), "The Avengers" in German (my friend is a huge Avengers fan and forced me to see it), and my beloved Tatort München. And then there's always music – I continue listening to all my favorite music at home, of course, and recently the Ost-Rock group "Karussell" performed here in Leipzig at a festival, so I got to hear them for free. Sometimes I write in my journal in German too, which is rewardingly easy after being bombarded with new vocab all day. FRENCH - lots of reading - journaling - still approaching the end of Assimil - up to level 12 on DuoLingo I have been reading French voraciously recently. I finished "La Nausée" by Sartre (glad I stuck that one out; the ending was worth it), and since then have completed a small book of jokes ("La France qui rit") and two more short novels in French: "Une forme de vie" by Amélie Nothomb (got through that one in 3 days!) and "Maigret et la jeune morte" by Georges Simenon. Books I've dipped into without yet finishing include "L'homme au petit chien" also by Simenon, "Une Saison en Enfer" by Rimbaud, a collection called "Neuf nouvelles nouvelles", and "Les Misérables" (haven't returned to that one lately, but I'm looking forward to it). CATALAN - Catalan class, including presentation on Dalí - started parla.cat course L Bàsic 1 - reading & typing over "El gat que va perdre els bigotis" - continuing Colloquial course (up to unit 11) - watched some stuff (TEDx talk, film "Pa negre") - listened to some CT radio It was fun to realize that I can successfully write and give a ten-minute presentation entirely in Catalan. I'm having no trouble reading the assigned children's book for our course (El gat que va perdre els bigotis), but my active production is still lower than I'd like it to be. In our Catalan-culture class we recently watched the film "Pa negre" – very intense, emotional and dark, and completely worth the traumatization! Fantastic film. CROATIAN - reviewed vocab on memrise - got some audio input (a TEDx talk) Barely touched Croatian recently – I miss it in my life! DUTCH - re-started Assimil (up to lesson 56 on wave 1 & lesson 7 on wave 2) For some reason I jumped back into Dutch with a vengeance. Due to my German, Dutch is so easy it almost feels illegal, but I have a great fondness for the sounds of the language – what can I say? MANDARIN - started Assimil (up to lesson 31) - writing practice - a bit of ChinesePod - reviewed Michel Thomas disc 1, tracks 1-7 I've also finally returned to Mandarin! I keep forgetting how much fun this language is. I meant to just glance through the Assimil course, but that "glance" turned into something more, and now I seem to be seriously working my way through it. It's great for learning characters, because I hate memorization. But with Assimil, I just encounter them regularly enough that they stay in my brain almost effortlessly. I love Assimil so much. Writing the characters also really helps me remember them. DABBLING - read Assimil Japanese lessons 1-12 - watched a 13-minute video interview in Esperanto - read Assimil Turkish lesson 1 - read Assimil Hungarian lesson 1 - up to level 3 of Spanish on DuoLingo Edited by Jinx on 15 July 2012 at 4:18pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ReQuest Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5024 days ago 200 posts - 228 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, German, French Studies: Spanish | Message 23 of 36 27 June 2012 at 10:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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Succes met Nederlands !
And you seem to be making progress , good goin'! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5387 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 24 of 36 27 June 2012 at 11:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have been thinking about getting the Japanese and Chinese Assimil books. Are they as good as the rest of the Assimil books? I like Assmiil better than any other beginner's courses that I've seen, but I've heard they aren't as good for most of the non-European languages. Once I get done with the Advanced (Spanish and French) and Italian with Ease, I'm going to finally allow myself to start Catalan Sin Esfuerzo. I might even added a half a Super Challenge for it next year. =) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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