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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Martinovich Triglot Newbie Netherlands admartinovich.wordpr Joined 5046 days ago 27 posts - 32 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Russian Studies: Turkish, Belarusian, Persian | Message 1 of 11 07 April 2012 at 9:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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This will be my second attempt at keeping a language log. Last year I had some problems affecting my language studies and so keeping track was not possible. However, I'm making a restart.
Maybe I should tell you about my background, as it does have a major connection with my language studies. Currently I'm a student at following an education in translating to/from Russian. I won't dig to deep into what exactly I do for my study, but I'll mention peculiar cases I encounter. As my education focuses very few on grammar (it's a part-time study, so there are too few contact hours, and most grammar has already been covered), most of my 'free' study time goes into improving my grammar knowledge. Other then my education, there isn't much else worth mentioning, except maybe for the fact that I've got some problems concentrating, thus my study session won't generally last longer than 30 mins. Below I'll give per language an overview of resources, goals, current level, etc... I'm actively studying 3 languages at this point, Russian, Persian and Turkish, and I've got Belarusian as a 'side-project'. Russian: Current level = upper-intermediate/advanced Goal = advanced fluency Resources: Various Russian grammar books (all Russian, btw), native materials like books and movies and podcasts from the BBC and SBS. Every day I plan to do at least 30-60 minutes of grammar exercises and drills, as well as read either a couple of pages from a book or read an article on the Internet. I'll hold daily skype sessions with native speakers, talking about all kinds of things, from politics to history to the enviroment. Persian: Current level = Beginner Goal = intermediate Resources = Colloquial Persian, Modern Persian (volume 1 and 2), podcasts, Assimil 'Le Persan sans Peine'. I hope to finish every week a lesson of both Colloquial Persian and Modern Persian, as well as to listen to a Persian podcast every day. As Assimil is French, and I don't know French that well, I use it as a supplement, I just listen to the lessons, rewrite them and look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary. Once every two weeks I'm meeting with a native Persian speaker to practise pronunciation and reinforce what I've learned. Turkish: Current level =beginner Goal = intermediate Resources = Assimil 'Turkish without Effort'(Dutch version), Turks op Niveau (a Dutch grammar/school book) and Teach Yourself Turkish, and podcasts. Every day I'll listen do a unit of Assimil, as well as listening to Turkish podcasts, and possible supplement it with the TRT 'Let's learn Turkish' podcasts. I'll finish a chapter of Teach Yourself Turkish every week, and a chapter of 'Turks op Niveau every other week. Belarusian: Current level = starting Goal = beginner/intermediate Resources = Let's talk Belarusian (Russian book), Conversational Belarussian, Essential Belarussian (both can be downloaded freely from the internet) and a BEL-ENG dual language book 'The wild hunt of King Stakh' + audiobook. For Belarusian I don't have a plan as of yet, but I hope (if time allows me) to do a lesson every weekend. And I'll start doing some L-R after a month or so. But who knows, maybe I'll drop Belarusian before then, now it's just to explore the language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Martinovich Triglot Newbie Netherlands admartinovich.wordpr Joined 5046 days ago 27 posts - 32 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Russian Studies: Turkish, Belarusian, Persian | Message 2 of 11 08 April 2012 at 10:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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Sunday 8-4
Russian: I've spend most of the day studying for a vocabulary exam, which I'll have on Tuesday. Today I reviewed around 150 words. All of the words I've crammed at an earlier stage, so most was reviewing the words. It was quite a shock to find out how much I've forgotten! As I use BYKI especially for cramming words, and found it very effective, I've got faith all will succeed. Turkish & Persian: For both languages I did an Assimil lesson (lesson 10 for Turkish, 26 for Persian) and listened to a news podcast. Belorusian: I did some research about the language and I came across this on Wikipedia:
It pretty much describes my experiences when I was Belarus. Even the national tv channels don't broadcast in Belarusian. Today I read about some spelling rules in Belarusian, most notably about the letters в, у, ў and о. Apparently, if the y follows a vowel (even from another word) it changes into ў (pronounced like W in English). The в can't occur, unless it's immediately followed by a vowel, otherwise ў will be used. The letter ў can precede iotized vowels, but if it's preceding a non-iotized vowel, ў will change into a в. The letter o is an odd letter (most Belarusians I communicate with in Russian don't use the o at all, unless it carries stress). In Belarusian words normally don't start with the letter o, there are exceptions to this rule, but they are all loanwords. Words which in Russian start with an o now get the в added, but if the stress shifts from the initial o, then the в is dropped, see the following examples. возера - азёры вокны - акно lake - lakes windows - window All in all, slightly confusing but very interesting language... Oh, nearly forgot, there are some differences between Russian and Belarusian, but I'll get into that in a later post. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Martinovich Triglot Newbie Netherlands admartinovich.wordpr Joined 5046 days ago 27 posts - 32 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Russian Studies: Turkish, Belarusian, Persian | Message 3 of 11 11 April 2012 at 9:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Wednesday 20-04
The last two days I spend virtually all of my study time on Russian. Cramming nearly 400 words is very tiresome. Besides cramming I had to translate two texts, the first was from Russian to Dutch about the Siberian tiger. It was an interesting text, but not much new words or grammar constructions. Most of the lesson we spend discussing how to translate Приморье, whether it should be only transliterated or translated into Eastern Siberia/Russian Far East. The text I had to translate to Russian was about appendicitis, a lot of medical terms, but also some useful constructions. Belarusian I've spent some time L-R "The Wild hunt of King Stach" (дзікае паляванне караля Стаха), so far I've done the prologue two times, but not sure if I learned something from it, besides the fact it looks an awful lot like Russian, and sounds pretty much the same. Continued studying the introduction of "Гавары са мной па-беларуску" (a Russian-language based course book). I've met a few false friends like арбус, in Belarusian it means tablecloth, but in Russian it's a watermelon. Another thing I noticed was that stress is very important, and isn't necessarily in the same place as it is in Russian. I tried to look for some Belarusian movies... well... I found 1 so far. I did find some dubbed Hollywood movies, but my experiences with dubbed Russian movies push me away from those types of movies, and I prefer native movies over foreign, but dubbed movies. Persian Today I did lesson 29 of Assimil (سال آینده) and learned that Persepolis in Persian is تخت جمشید (takht-e Jamshid) and learned some other words and reinforced the use of the future tense. I also did the first chapter of Modern Persian, which basically was reviewing what I had learned previously. Later I decided to print the first paragraph from the Persian Wikipedia about Persepolis and see how much I understood. Not that much, of course. But I was surprised that I could understand some historical names (such as Dariush) and some words I never had heard before, such as تاریخدانان and پیش از میلاد which mean historian and BCE. Turkish For Turkish I only managed to do another lesson of Assimil and a few exercises from my Turkish grammar book, dealing with the use of the accusative. Edited by Martinovich on 11 April 2012 at 9:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Martinovich Triglot Newbie Netherlands admartinovich.wordpr Joined 5046 days ago 27 posts - 32 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Russian Studies: Turkish, Belarusian, Persian | Message 4 of 11 14 April 2012 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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Saturday 14-04
I can't believe it's Saturday already. Looking back on the previous week I noticed I spent way too much time on reviewing vocabulary (which I already knew) and I allowed Belarusian to become a major study language. The more time I spent with it, the more I start to like the language. At least the materials I've gathered were all freely available. I've decided to enter the Super Challenge with Belarusian, meaning I'll have to read 100 books and watch 100 movies in Belarusians. The last part might actually become quite a challenge, as it's extremely hard to find movies in Belarusian. Russian: At the beginning of the week I had to study 420 words for a Russian vocabulary exam. Most of the words I learned, however, were words that were either written only, or even not used in regular speech. The last week I managed to translate 3 texts, of which 2 were from Russian to Dutch and 1 was from Dutch to Russian. Probably I spend about an hour or so on grammar exercises, far below what I had hoped to do, but I'm not really fond of grammar exercises. Why? Because during those exercises I do around 70-80% correct, but when I'm using Russian that percentage drops to 50%. Turkish: Every day I did an Assimil lesson and reviewed TY Turkish chapters 1-3, while starting on 4. A note on Assimil, though, I'm not sure if I like it. The vocabulary seems to stick and I pick up some grammar, but the dialogues are boring (in my opinion) and long. I'll stick to it for another 2-3 weeks and decide what to do with it. On the other hand I completed chapter 3 of 'Turks op Niveau', which focused on the accusative and the verb to be. Persian: As with Turkish I did an Assimil lesson every day, and studied the vocabulary. Ironically, I encountered the future tense, which I discussed last week with my Persian friend. Apparently in Persian the future tense seems to be omitted in colloquial speech. Regardless of that, I do know how to form the Persian future. I started with chapter 2 of Modern Persian, but as with chapter 1, it seems to be more of a reinforcement of what I had previously learned. Belarusian: Well, I upgraded it from a 'project' to a real language study. Hopefully it won't disturb my other studies to much. This week I largely spend reading about the language and its history. I have found an interesting video about the history of Belarus (in Belarusian) and the lyrics to the song in Belarusian, English, and Russian, so now I'm making a trilingual text from it. Other than that, I did the prologue дзікае паляванне караля Стаха once again, writing down every word/listening carefully to the narrative. All in all quite a productive week... unfortunately now I've to divide my time between 4 languages rather then 3. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Martinovich Triglot Newbie Netherlands admartinovich.wordpr Joined 5046 days ago 27 posts - 32 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Russian Studies: Turkish, Belarusian, Persian | Message 5 of 11 16 April 2012 at 7:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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This weekend my laptop died on me... which is quite frustrating as I lost dozens of hours of work, not to mention all my language materials which are now lost. At least I managed to retrieve some study materials (especially for Belarusian) and even found several new ones, while I searched for what I had previously. I've found 3 Persian-Russian bilingual texts and 2 Turkish-Russian ones. Not quite sure how I'm going to incorporate those into my study schedule, though.
For those interested, I've set up a blog for my Belarusian participation in the super challenge. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Martinovich Triglot Newbie Netherlands admartinovich.wordpr Joined 5046 days ago 27 posts - 32 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Russian Studies: Turkish, Belarusian, Persian | Message 6 of 11 24 April 2012 at 9:41am | IP Logged | ||
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The last week wasn't a great one for my language study. My computer crash of last week dominated my schedule, or rather the catching up because of the crash. The only positive thing about it is that I had to re-enter my word lists in BYKI/ANKI, which was a lot of work, but despite that I had an additional chance to reinforce my vocabulary.
I'm now trying to create a suitable schedule for my language study, as my current schedule (doing every language, every day) doesn't really seem to work. Rather then doing that, I'll focus on 1 language each week (ie this week Belarusian, next week Persian), meaning I'll try to spent most of my time on that language, while trying to reduce my time spent on other languages. To give an example:
A slight note on my Belarusian study. I've decided to throw my dual language book away, as I don't like it at all! The English translation is bad and sometimes entire paragraphs are missing! I'll still be L-R дзікае паляванне караля Стаха, but without any English (or Russian) translation. For vocabulary studies, however, I'll be using Беларуская мова, which basically is a school book but completely in Belarusian and with short texts and questions about those texts. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Martinovich Triglot Newbie Netherlands admartinovich.wordpr Joined 5046 days ago 27 posts - 32 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Russian Studies: Turkish, Belarusian, Persian | Message 7 of 11 07 May 2012 at 7:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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I’ve not updated in quite a while, and I’m pretty sure I can make a lot of excuses, like my computer crashed again (it did, much to my disbelieve) or that my college assignments were taking away most of my time. The real problem is that my planning skills are abysmal to say the least. Now things are slowly returning to normal, I’m going to make an effort in making a decent schedule and sticking to my languages. As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ll have a weekly alternating ‘main’ language. My previous experiment was slightly successful, and I hope it’ll prevent me from boredom. Last time my main language was Belarusian, so now I’m switching to Turkish, meaning that I’ve to study at least 5 days of Turkish for an hour at least. Today I already fulfilled my goal, as I studied vocabulary for an hour, and half an hour of grammar exercises.
With the start of the super challenge, I’m dedicating an hour of my time to reading in Belarusian. So far I’ve read 4 chapters of Дзікае паляванне караля стаха. Truthfully, at times it’s confusing or I don’t understand much of the text. Sometimes I can understand it pretty well, and now that I’m getting used to the writing style I can already recognise the more important sentences and paragraphs. For Belarusian I’m also working from a Russian language based textbook, which is challenging in its own right, but I’m progressing slowly. The spelling rules of Belarusian still need mastering, though. One thing I lack, though, is a dictionary. I’ve got a decent online dictionary/encyclopaedia, but I prefer a hard copy… I like to leaf through the pages and just look at words. My Modern Persian books are very thorough; unfortunately they are more based for a class room environment. Nevertheless, I enjoy reading the lessons. The first 2 lessons were largely focusing on pronunciation and the alphabet. I did learn some new words, though, and as the second lesson went on about subjects on schools and languages, I decided to drop some of the vocabulary offered in that book and change it with some words more appropriate to my situation; such as نرگردان (translator) بلاروسی (belarusian), هلندی (Dutch) Oh, by the way, I mentioned I had to cram several hundreds of words for an exam. Well, I passed the exam with flying colours! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Martinovich Triglot Newbie Netherlands admartinovich.wordpr Joined 5046 days ago 27 posts - 32 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Russian Studies: Turkish, Belarusian, Persian | Message 8 of 11 18 May 2012 at 11:14am | IP Logged | ||
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Friday 18/05
My experiment with choosing only one main language to study per week is going very well. Last week I choose Turkish as my main language, and I managed to study 10 hours, well above my expectations and was only surpassed by Russian. The only reason why Russian scored more hours was because I watched some movies, read a lot and wrote various emails. My other two languages, Belarusian and Persian, however, lagged behind tremendously. This week I decided to spend most of my time on Persian, and so far it’s going well, averaging 1,5 hours of study time on this language. The last 2 weeks I redid chapter 1 of my Turkish ‘grammar’ workbook, learning around 150-200 new words. And I prefer to use this book, above my other books, simply because the amount of vocabulary you learn is higher than with my other books, and also a lot more useful with its grammar drills. As I’ve got access to a Turkish TV station, I’m also spending 30 minutes to an hour on watching Turkish TV. For Persian I’m focusing on Modern Persian at the moment, and already did 2 chapters (which are quite long, actually) I’ve not yet really made up my mind up if I like this book or not, but I pick up a lot of new vocabulary, so it’s not all that bad. Recently I started to notice that my Belarusian language study started to interfere with my Russian, mainly showing itself in a lot more spelling errors. With some Russian exams coming up at the end of the month, I decided that it might be wiser to put my study of Belarusian on hold for a little while. Before I decided this, I did manage to read half of the book I’m currently reading, and listen to 3 chapters of the corresponding audiobook… For now I’m taking a break of 2 weeks from Belarusian, and will catch up once my exams are behind me. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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