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Serpent’s cyclic log: César, Sleipnir,adv | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6594 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 233 of 264 12 March 2015 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well I posted an example previously, a Uruguayan coach said "tenemos pensado que..." :) There's a lot of disagreement on wordreference about the scope of this.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5163 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 234 of 264 12 March 2015 at 11:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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Serpent: I see what you mean, that's what I had in mind. I am currently on vacation in the Penisola Italica (well, literally later this month), but then I can't really compare it in terms of prescriptivism because I've already had it in my native language. Maybe French? But not even French, Portuguese is worse.
Another expression: Eu tenho a impressão (de) que...It is quite neutral, people won't be picky that you are saying "Eu acho" because you're not sure as they usually are. Just remember to add the preposition (de) before the 'que' when writing or speaking formally. You use it when you want to state an opinion on something but remain neutral (or pretend to be). Eu tenho a impressão de que este trabalho não vai ficar pronto a tempo. Eu tenho a impressão de que vai chover. Eu tenho a impressão de que ele vai passar em casa antes da aula, mas não tenho certeza. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6594 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 235 of 264 14 March 2015 at 7:49am | IP Logged | ||
That's from last April. Numbers again, but I felt like doing the Dialang placement test again and got 652 in Portuguese (in the range of 600-900; above 900 is native fluency or C2), 470 in Italian (found a post where I scored 487 in October), 515 in Spanish (my best result so far has been 534 seemingly). LOL did Finnish with zero trust in my intuition, just marking the words I'm 100% confident about. Got 652 as well :D Judging by these results I'm not at my best right now (also too sleepy), so the Portuguese score feels great :) Edited by Serpent on 14 March 2015 at 7:50am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6594 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 236 of 264 04 April 2015 at 6:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've got some great questions from Nieng Zhonghan by PM and I'll answer here :)
Hello Serpent, I’d like to ask you some questions regarding different languages. First of all, what are the best English-Russian (online) dictionaries you would recommend me? What well educated Russian people like you use (or used to use)? I am particularly looking for some definitions above the glossary level out of curiosity and because at mid-term I will definitely need to go one step forward. As for German, for example, I have been looking at a monolingual dictionary which has been helping me to improve my comprehension and increase my vocabulary according to a specific context. I mean, I check a word defined in English and later I check in a German monolingual dictionary for foreigners. It has been working with me. I really like the lingvo dictionary. It's available on yandex.ru for free, but only within Russia. You can use the hola.org add-on for it too, or purchase it as a popup dictionary. Translators also use multitran.ru a lot, since it lists plenty of alternatives that you can choose from. It's a collaborative project, and if you register you can add the words and expressions that aren't in the database. I assume you can even request a translation but I'm not 100% sure. As a teen I also used a Langenscheidt dictionary and monolingual Longman dictionaries. They were great too. Nowadays I use either multitran (if I actually need to find the Russian equivalent), or wiktionary, especially if I suspect that I might know the word in Finnish or Portuguese. And to look up a Russian word I'd do a yandex search and get results from their dictionary database and gramota.ru and various sites on etymology. It seems that you are fond of football as well. Is there any Russian TV channel where I can watch live Russian football? sportbox.ru streams a lot of the matches aired by the VGTRK channels (россия 1, россия 2, спорт 1) but just like with yandex.lingvo, you'll need a VPN service to access it. And these channels air only the Russian NT, not the Premier League. But all the usual places online generally have Russian streams too. On French I have noticed that you haven’t added French into your list of languages which it doesn’t mean necessarily that you have never studied it. I am just curious about the reasons you (I assume) you haven’t studied it or didn’t like it since you know other Romance languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Latin, Catalan, Romanian, but not French. Is there a specific reason? Don’t you like French football? Haha. I dislike the sound of this language. Also, even Spanish used to bother me by what it did to Latin, and French is way worse in this regard. (Romanian is not annoying because it preserved bits of the case system, and the non-Latin elements are mostly Slavic, plus the Balkan Sprachbund is fascinating too) Ironically, Portuguese has the same features that I dislike in French, namely nasal vowels and the r. But I've come to love the R in German and Portuguese, and the nasal vowels in Portuguese or Polish don't have the same messy feeling about them. And I actually watch some French football. PSG has three players that I love a lot, namely David Luiz, Edinson Cavani and Zlatan Ibrahimović. Thanks to them I generally find a stream in Spanish, Italian or occasionally Swedish. Oh and I do have some experience with French, since I used to work as a spam analyst and there was a lot of spam in French. I also did some written GLOSS lessons because I love this site so much. And by now I could use French-based Assimil if I really wanted (I've read through some Swedish lessons), although I'd have to look up some vocab (and generally I don't use textbooks anymore). On Finnish I have been taking a look on Finnish resources and I wanted to ask you about them too. It seems that you have used Assimil Finnish, TY Finnish, FSI Finnish (or DLI) as well, but it is not clear to me how exactly you started learning this language. Can you just name me the Finnish resources you have used before you started your Finnish log? I used Russian-based books, especially Учебник финского языка (Чернявская) and Opi puhumaan suomea (Муллонен). I also got started with native materials early on, since there was a lot of content in Finnish I desperately wanted to understand (songs, interviews, tour diaries, guestbooks, forum posts). Oh and I used TY for some listening and shadowing, Assimil for shadowing (much more, since the audio is Finnish-only), and I checked out FSI but basically didn't use it. I think I found one single structure I wasn't familiar with and did a drill for it. I am interested in an Indo-European language (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and Arabicat the moment); though it seems that unfortunately I will need to learn French for a while (for working purposes…). Obviously I am not in a hurry to start any of the non-IE languages, but I like to take a look on their resources and read about how their system works. On Estonian How similar is Finnish and Estonian for you? Having reached almost C2 level in Finnish, can you recognize and understand words from Estonian websites (news) and magazines? I understand a lot, yes. I'm sure that with some LR I'd reach a high level of comprehension quickly. In fact I just got back from Finland and I kinda felt bad when I read a Geisha chocolate label and wasn't sure about a simple Estonian word ;) I also know the famous false friends but undoubtedly there are many that I'm not aware of, especially the more subtle ones. With Estonian (and even Finnish) I also have an advantage being a Russian native speaker. In Finnish the loans are generally pretty old and often have a different meaning, but in Estonian they're more recent, and there are also more international words. Out of the languages you listed, these should be the most accessible. But Arabic has more resources and more content, of course. I am also interested in the similarities between Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian from the perspective of a native speaker of Russian. How similar are they? They appear extremely similar until you actually become serious about them. Especially Belarusian is so similar that I struggled with it before I had Polish as a reference point. (my dad is Belarusian and I've spent a lot of time in Belarus, but pretty much everyone speaks Russian there nowadays) Also, in the current political situation, deliberate mistranslations from Ukrainian happen sometimes. So most Russians don't understand it *that* well, though it's mostly a question of exposure. With more exposure the Scandinavian situation would be possible in Eastern Europe too. What about Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian? Are they mutually intelligible? I assume you mean with Russian? ;) For me it's two languages at most, and the differences are often exaggerated. The intelligibility with Russian is very high, also through Old Church Slavonic/Bulgarian. But I admit that I definitely understand less than in other Slavic languages, perhaps also because I've not been to the Balkans and I've not done all that much listening. If you've not read the logs of Radioclare and Chung I highly recommend them :) Edited by Serpent on 04 April 2015 at 10:22pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6594 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 237 of 264 07 April 2015 at 8:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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In our team thread, Ccaesar asked me about my learning of Danish, which is his native language :)
And well, this story may go back to before I was born ;) As a kid I used to remember my previous life, and I lived in an orphanage in Denmark. I honestly remember the feeling of remembering that as an actual memory. And if I had been fantasizing, wouldn't I have preferred to be a princess or something?.. But whatever. I myself don't think of that much anymore. I just couldn't resist learning Danish. I love Northern Europe anyway. My learning style is heavy on listening, but obviously in Danish I've not had as much success as in Spanish etc. My German is only barely getting good enough to be of use, and the pronunciation is... well....... welll.... It's beautiful, though. Much more charming than Swedish. I also kind of support Aalborg BK in Denmark. Well, I watch more or less every match, but I don't really know much about the team. I've been a fan ever since they lost to Manchester City 2:0 and then won 2:0 at home. They lost on penalties but won my heart :) That was 2009 and originally I just started watching football in Spanish, Italian, Danish in order to get used to the sound and later learn them properly. Two-three years later I kinda forgot that and was dissatisfied with my progress in Danish, compared to the Romance ones. (I admit that I think I would've been able to understand far more Swedish or Norwegian) Interestingly, some flirting with Dutch definitely helped me build the needed bridge from German, and then I also LR'ed HP 4-6. I was improving, but not enough. I found a Nordic bookstore and got some books: HP4, Naiv. Super, Tolkien (the children of Húrin and the letters from Father Christmas). I LR'ed HP4 with Danish audio and Danish text and that was much better. But I still haven't read the remaining books yet. I was hoping to get done with them during the Super Challenge, but now I don't even know. It was only last summer that I finally got around to learning the pronunciation, at least enough to be able to read without an audio and feel confident. It's probably time to refresh that btw. I got really close to finishing the movies only half SC in 2013 but by Dec 31 I was just sick of HP and I focused on Romanian instead. I think at 23.57 I was still listening btw. But although I "only" got 94 Danish movie items (also quite many dubbed cartoons), I finally saw light and hope. I compare that improvement in listening to this video. Of course I still have setbacks, and after that I've not been doing much apart from watching football, but yeah... :) And writing this makes me want to do more Danish. Especially as in April there aren't any short-term challenges. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6594 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 238 of 264 07 April 2015 at 10:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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Also, a long overdue update for Team Rare (thanks Luso for not removing me!)
The best situation is definitely with Dutch. It gets roughly the same attention as my non-Romance SC languages, apart from the fact that I don't support any Dutch team (but I watch some matches from other countries every now and then). I also recently got an album of Dutch paintings with translations of each name into German, English and French. I also recently heard of the movie "Thunderpants" with Rupert Grint, which seems somewhat embarrassing but funny. I struggled to find a dub in Spanish or another major language but found a Dutch one. Also, my dad went to Turkey recently, and he got me three guidebooks in Spanish, one in Italian and one in Dutch. Speaking of guidebooks, my friend went to Malaysia and Thailand in January. I asked him to get me a guidebook in a European language and something popular translated into Malay or Indonesian, and he found a big multilingual bookstore near his hotel. But he put this off, and when he was staying at the same hotel before his flight back to Moscow, the store was closed :( I was motivated but now this went downhill again. Although I still come across some Indonesian on twitter and I often understand football-related tweets. IDK. Right now the languages I'm most afraid of losing are Danish and Indonesian, I would say. And maybe even Esperanto, although I still have mixed feelings about it. I've gone through some Karelian Anki cards but nothing else for now... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6594 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 239 of 264 25 April 2015 at 8:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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I now have over9000 posts :)
9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sarnek Diglot Senior Member Italy Joined 4212 days ago 308 posts - 414 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: German, Swedish | Message 240 of 264 25 April 2015 at 9:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=SiMHTK15Pik 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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