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Russian and Greek, TAC2014 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4639 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 49 of 99 29 July 2013 at 4:51pm | IP Logged |
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Back from Crete. A week is really too short, but it was a great week and we managed to do a lot of things and visit many places I had not been to before. However, I will focus on the language part of the travel, and my experience can be described as both frustrating and stimulating.
Frustrating, because I am clearly not at a level where I can have a meaningful conversation in Greek beyond the very basics, like με λένε Ογριμ, είμαι νορβεγός αλλά μένω στο Στρασβούργο, στην Γαλλία. Εχω δύο παιδιά. Θα ήθελα ενα μπουκάλι κόκκινο κρασί, παρακαλώ etc. My active vocabulary is still way too limited - I certainly need more practice. As for listening skills, well, I did understand a bit, but more when I listened to the news on TV than when talking to the locals. They speak really fast, and I guess the accent does not make it easier. My listening experience has mostly been limited to my course audio material and some short podcasts. Listening to real life conversations between Cretans is a different story. We stayed in a mountain village called Maza, a 40 minutes drive east of Chania, halfway to Rethymno. The village has about 100 inhabitants, no shops, but a small taverna in the village square. The owner, Kostas, was a great man - and we spent a couple of nice evenings at his tavern eating their home-cooked food, drinking the locally produced wine and his homemade raki. Although I got frustrated sometimes, the experience was also enormously inspiring and stimulating. People were very impressed with my basic tourist Greek and everyone encouraged me to continue learning. "Τα ελληνικά δεν είναι δύσκολα", they told me. Well, maybe not very difficult, but I will have to put in a lot more hours to get to a level where I can feel at ease talking Greek with the natives. Almost everyone there speaks better English than I speak Greek. That will have to change by the next time I visit Greece. I did spend quite a lot of time working intensively with my Greek material. While the wife and children were bathing in the sea, I would sit in the shade with my Langenscheidt course, my grammar book and a dictionary. (Yeah, totally nerdy...) I repeated a lot of the exercises and did those I had not completed from the earlier chapters. I am now at lesson 10, with five more to go before I am done with this course book. After that I will need to find other material to work on. (By the way, I also took the Assimil with me, but I just get bored after a couple of chapters, and it does not seem to improve - I did lessons 20 to 24, but then I gave up again.) Having tried to immerse myself in Greek as much as possible, I have not done any Russian for a few weeks. I will continue hard with Greek, but I also want to get my Russian studies up to speed again. As I still have three weeks of holiday left this summer, I should be able to do something about that during the month of August. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4639 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 50 of 99 30 July 2013 at 3:55pm | IP Logged |
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One of my interests besides languages is astronomy and cosmology. I was therefore thrilled to find a few Greek books on this subject at the place we rented in Crete (there was a small bookshelf with Greek and English books). I will not pretend that I actually sat down to read them (that would have taken me ages and constant consultation of dicationaries). However, I did learn one thing: Greek has other names for the planets than those we are familiar with from Germanic and Romance languages. It is acutally very logical, since the planets in our solar system are named after Roman gods, and the Roman gods correspond in all but name to the gods of Greek mythology.
Here is the list, for anyone interested. If you know Greek-Roman mythology you will of course recognise the correspondence between planets and gods in each language: Mercury - Ερμής Venus - Αφροδίτη Earth - Γη Mars - Άρης Jupiter - Δίας Saturn - Κρόνος Uranus - Ουρανός Neptune - Ποσειδώνας Inspired by this, yesterday evening I sat down with the Greek Wikipedia article on the solar system, and with the help of a dictionary I found it not too difficult to read. I guess this kind of "scientific" texts can be relatively easy to tackle, as you intuitively understand many of the concpets because we have borrowed the Greek words for for them. Nevertheless, I was very happy with the experience, as I suddenly got the feeling that I actually have consolidated a base on which to build. I did not really have that feeling when in Crete. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| embici Triglot Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4610 days ago 263 posts - 370 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Greek | Message 51 of 99 30 July 2013 at 4:50pm | IP Logged |
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I'm glad to read you had a good trip to Crete.
Congratulations on your progress, Ogrim! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| stelingo Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5832 days ago 722 posts - 1076 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Mandarin | Message 52 of 99 30 July 2013 at 5:21pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for your report Ogrim. You seem to be making good progress.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4639 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 53 of 99 30 July 2013 at 5:34pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for your remarks, embici and stelingo, I am making progress slowely but surely. Now if I only could stay in Greece for three months rather than a week, then my progress would be really good, but a week is better than nothing, and as far as motivation goes, it has been great.
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| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4639 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 54 of 99 04 September 2013 at 4:59pm | IP Logged |
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High time to make an update. I really need to feed this log on a more regular basis!
After an intensive period with Greek in July, I felt that I had neglected Russian for too long, so during August my main focus has been on this language. I've continued working with Colloquial Russian, completing some exercises in book 1 that I had been too lazy to do when working through the last few lessons. I have also progressed with Colloquial 2, and concentrated in particular on unit 6, "Культурная жизнь в России" and unit 7 "Средства массовой информации". Both units have interesting texts and make for some useful revision of certain grammar points. I enjoyed in particular a text about the theatre director Lev Dodin. Another thing I have been doing in order to expand my vocabulary is to read news articles on different subjects, ranging from cooking to sport to the Snowden case. And today I have slowly started on a long interview with Vladimir Putin published in Российская газета. The nice thing is that the article has embedded a short vido clip with an extract from the interview, so for this passage you can hear Putin speak and read the text at the same time. Those interested can find the article here. I have come to realise that my main weakness is little or no oral practice. I have therefore signed up to Russian classes with the "amicale" of my workplace (typically in France any big organisation or company has an "Amicale", a kind of association that offers cultural, educational and other activities to the employees). It will only be a lesson a week, but at least it will be an opportunity to speak, and if the teacher is good, I might do some private lessons as well in addition. As for Greek, I have mainly limited myself to revising the texts and grammar ponts I worked on in July, so I have gone through lessons 9 and 10 of Langenscheidt again. Still, my aim is to be through all the remaining 5 lessons before the end of the year. That means 1.5 lessons per month from now til the end of December. Although the lessons are long and packed with vocabulary and grammar, I think it is realistic, even with a main focus on Russian. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4639 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 55 of 99 20 September 2013 at 3:27pm | IP Logged |
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This week I had my first Russian language class, and since I have not been in a class setting for many years it was an interesting experience, which has led me to some reflections around self-study vs. classroom learning.
Firstly, I got confirmed that my active knowledge of Russian, i.e. the ability to speak, is much lower than my passive knowledge. This is clearly a result of the way in which I have preferred to study the language, with lots of reading and grammar study and very little speaking practice. This was in also the main reason why I decided to sign up to a class now, I really want to work on my active skills. Secondly, I was hesitant as to at what level I should sign up, but since my oral Russian “stinks”, I went for an A2 course. Now although we are a small group, just four of us, we were nevertheless at quite different levels. I’ve been actively studying for over a year now, I have been through most of the grammar and I have built up a relatively decent vocabulary (although I need to activate it more). The teacher therefore suggested that I might fit better in a B1 group. I am not sure though whether this means that I underestimate my level or whether the course is not really at an A2 level. Finally, it is clear that you do not learn a language from attending a class once a week. However, for me it is a great motivation factor. To know that once a week I am “forced” to speak Russian makes me spend more time listening to Russian, doing shadowing and other oral exercises. We also get homework, and although it is not obligatory, the fact that a teacher will look at it and correct it is more stimulating than just doing an exercise that you check yourself against a key. For me there is also a “pride” factor, I don’t like to be the guy in class who doesn’t do his homework. So all in all it was a positive experience, and I look forward to next week’s class. Actually I might have two next week, because I will still go to the A2 group on Monday, and then, if the teacher concludes that I should move, I’ll be in the B1 group on Thursday. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4707 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 56 of 99 20 September 2013 at 4:34pm | IP Logged |
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What type of class are you in? And at what type of institute? Edited by tarvos on 20 September 2013 at 4:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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