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Jo’s B2 Trifecta TAC’13 Alef, Divan,Nebun | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Hendrek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4880 days ago 152 posts - 210 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Persian | Message 41 of 50 21 February 2013 at 11:56pm | IP Logged |
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Congrats! You know it's a long series, right? You could always keep exploring the
twinkling vampire world :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Amerykanka Hexaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5169 days ago 657 posts - 890 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Polish, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian | Message 42 of 50 23 February 2013 at 3:41pm | IP Logged |
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Congratulations! It's always exciting to finish a book in a target language!
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| JohannaNYC Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4450 days ago 251 posts - 361 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, Italian Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Arabic (Egyptian) | Message 43 of 50 23 February 2013 at 7:01pm | IP Logged |
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Grazie mille tutti e due! Hendrek, the twinkling vampire world is gonna have to wait
until I can read the whole series in Croatian since I don't have the rest of the books in Italian. As of yesterday I've moved on to the magical world of Hogwarts. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| JohannaNYC Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4450 days ago 251 posts - 361 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, Italian Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Arabic (Egyptian) | Message 44 of 50 26 February 2013 at 11:25pm | IP Logged |
Yes, that's not a lot of studying for a language like Arabic. This week is very packed with work related things, so it probably won't be much better. However, I've realized that when I was making my goals for the year I was looking at the amount of hours recommended by FSI, but that's overall for MSA and I'm just going for B2 in spoken Egyptian Colloquial (ECA) which has a simpler grammar and pronunciation. I also found an Egyptian native speaker who needs help with his English and now the Arabic meetup is having monthly conversation practice. I went last week and although it was confusing (every dialect has different question words and in unlike Egyptian they're placed at the beginning of the question) it was a good experience and a great motivator to cram. So overall I'm feeling very optimistic with being able to accomplish my goals in spoken ECA this year. 
Lately I've been losing my motivation for Croatian. It's a hard language, the first one with cases that I've been able to stick with for 6 months (I tried a couple of weeks of ancient Greek, but had to give it up) and the fact that I forget easily unless I have someone to speak with doesn't help matters either. Of course, I haven't been putting in the hours lately, making a difficult situation worse. But then synchronicity hit!! While practicing Italian I met this Serbian lady who needs help with her Spanish because her Italian keeps on getting in the way. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping for a good exchange. On the other hand, I do miss watching Croatian movies/shows so I know this is only a bump in the road. ITALIAN 2/11 - 2/17 = 40 hrs & 57 mins 2/18 - 2/24 = 35 hrs & 18 mins I can't do the breakdown for Italian, it's just too many hours to calculate. However, I can tell you at least a 3rd of those hours have gone into reading. I've been reading anywhere between 1.5 - 3 hours everyday. I've missed reading fiction the past few months so the fact that I can read for fun and get things done for both the Super Challenge and the 6WC, it's just an irresistible combination. I started Harry Potter on Thursday and I'm already on chapter 9, so I'm pretty sure I can finish it by next week the latest. After I finish HP I'm gonna spend more time reading yoga, health and fitness articles or watching/doing online videos as that's what I do for work so I need to be able to understand and produce the terms used in Italian. I also need to study more Italian, I feel like I hit a plateau this week. Which is to be expected since I was learning so much so quickly, but I definitely want to refine what I have. So for the time that's left of the 6WC I want to: - Finish Harry Potter 1 - Read at least 50 pages of health and fitness material - Finish the Colloquial Italian textbook - Finish the first half of Assimil - Finish Pimsleur II (I'm already on lesson 19 out of 30) - Start writing something that's not scriptorium And I think that's more than enough for now. I might need a good rest after the 6WC is over. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| JohannaNYC Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4450 days ago 251 posts - 361 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, Italian Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Arabic (Egyptian) | Message 45 of 50 17 March 2013 at 11:27pm | IP Logged |
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The 6WC is over. I'm exhausted, but now feel a little lost without it. I ended up in
4th place in my TL and in 6th overall. Here's the link to my score if you want to see what I spent my time on: http://6wc.learnlangs.com/stats/user/JohiNYC As for my other Italian goals in my previous post: - Finished Harry Potter 1 - Read the 50 pages of fitness articles at the 11th hour - Finished Pimsleur II - Made it to lesson 42 in Assimil, just a few lessons short of finishing half of it. - Wrote a lot of text messages and a few e-mails in Italian. Not exactly what I had in mind when I made my writing goal, but hey it's not scriptorium. - Got nowhere near finishing Colloquial Italian. I think I did one extra chapter after 2/26 Of course, I have perfectly good excuse for failing in some of my goals. I decided to read Harry Potter 2 and almost got started on the 3rd one. HP turned out to be as addicting in Italian as it was the first time around in English. CROATIAN Obviously, I'm very much behind in Croatian since I spent very little time studying or even immersing myself in it during the 6WC. However, yesterday I started watching this soap opera called "Larin Izbor" and I'm desperate to understand it. I'm not sure the vocabulary they teach in textbooks will be useful for knowing what they're saying and it doesn't have subtitles. And unlike "Lud, Zbunjen, Normalan" and cartoons all the talk is not always mirrored in action and sometimes barely in body language. Understanding this soap ASAP is now my number one goal, but I have no idea how to go about it. To speak better you just need to speak more (with corrections of course), but I'm not sure how listening more without knowing what they're saying will help me understand more. HELP! HELP!! Any semi-useful advice on how to proceed will be greatly appreciated. ARABIC Yesterday I started putting the dialogues from Colloquial Arabic of Egypt into Anki and I continued today. I made sure to listen to the audio tracks on repeat of the dialogues I was writing in. Just have to wait and see how well this technique will work out. I'm working seven days a week now (but sill part-time) and I'm needing a lot of rest. So other than figuring out how to improve my understanding of Croatian at an exponential rate, I don't have any specific goals for this week. I just need to let the dust from the 6WC settle and NOT get started on HP3. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| JohannaNYC Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4450 days ago 251 posts - 361 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, Italian Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Arabic (Egyptian) | Message 46 of 50 08 April 2013 at 9:08pm | IP Logged |
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ITALIAN: 11 hours & 40 mins
MOVIES: 6 HRS & 4 MINS I don't need subtitles to understand almost everything in Italian movies, so I figured I might as well try to finish this part of my Major Challenge first. Most of the words that I don't understand are curse words and luckily google has been helping out with those. ASSIMIL: 29 MINS I still have like 6 more lessons to go before I officially start the active wave, but I've had way more complex conversations that appear in the first few lessons. So I went ahead and translated the first lesson to Italian and I did pretty good. The things I got wrong was I wrote "qui" instead of "chi" which would be the Spanish spelling of that sound and "In il telefono" instead of "Al telefono". I think the hardest part later on is not to translate everything literally which has always been a problem when translating between Spanish and English. CONVERSATION: 1 HR I'm really enjoying hearing all the different Italian accents. It's unbelievable how there can be such dramatic differences in accents from one nearby Italian city to the next. READING: 3 HRS & 11 MINS I started reading Harry Potter 3 where one of my favorite HP characters first appears. PIMSLEUR: 56 MINS Slowly making my way through the 3rd level of Pimsleur. There's no rush. GOALS FOR THIS WEEK: - Translate at least 7 Assimil lessons to Italian. - Start reviewing Anki more often to make sure I don't forget what I've already learned. CROATIAN: 10 HRS & 54 MINS TV/LARIN IZBOR: 2 hrs & 16 mins I love this Croatian soap opera, probably because I can't understand a lot of what they're saying as I have probably seen variations of this love story hundreds of times in Spanish. They mix a lot of standard and dialect when they speak and I know like zero dialect, especially some Dalmatian words they use. Luckily, Croatian is highly phonetic so a lot of the time I'm able to spell the words I hear correctly, so once again google comes to my rescue. ASSIMIL: 59 MINS My set of Assimil Le Croate finally arrived. Unfortunately, it starts out very basic. I was expecting to start out at the same level or at least the same amount of lines as Italian with Ease, but the first 6 lessons only have 6-8 lines of dialogue each. Oh well, if I don't make progress now the only excuse I'll have is that I have too many textbooks. READING: 4 HRS & 40 MINS I started reading Twilight as a parallel book and I'm up to chapter 4. I'm reading intensively so that's about 70 mins per chapter. I don't think I'll ever forget how to say "uzdahnula sam" (I sighed). Despite the repetitiveness of the words, it's a lot harder in Croatian that it was in Italian. I cover the English half of the book until I need it, but I still find myself sounding like a caveman when I translate what I read in my head, even when know 9 out of 10 words. In this case vocabulary is not as big an issue as I'm encountering a lot of words from Pimsleur and TY, but the word order still feels foreign for me. PIMSLEUR: 24 MINS It helps me get ready for conversation and it actually reminded me of some of the words which are coming in handy for reading Twilight. I had put them in the back of my head when my Croatian and Serbian friends told me those were not used that often in conversation. CONVERSATION: 15 MINS ANKI: 2 HRS & 20 MINS GOALS FOR THIS WEEK: - At least 3 hours of textbook studying. - Have at least one 30-min conversation. ARABIC: 8 HRS & 7 MINS MICHEL THOMAS: 1 HR & 14 MINS Finished the second Vocabulary CD. ANKI REVIEW: 43 MINS MOVIES: 2 HRS & 23 MINS Nothing memorable. COLLOQUIAL: 16 MINS Mainly been learning the vocabulary from the dialogue and adding them to Anki. MINI-LESSON/POP QUIZ: 1 HR The first time I spoke to my new Skype partner I was so tentative with everything I said that he assumed I knew less than I did. So he decided to test my knowledge of colors, foods and random everyday things and I totally aced that quiz. Then he helped me with new vocab including some curse words. Then I surprised him when he had to pick up a telephone call in the middle of our Skype conversation and I understood almost everything he was saying even though he was speaking at native speed. CONVERSATION: 30 MINS I seem to be more comfortable practicing with non-native speakers in person. But I have about 20 Egyptian contacts on Skype, so I need to get over my discomfort. PIMSLEUR: 56 MINS Just like for Croatian used to get my speaking muscles warmed-up before speaking. RADIO & MUSIC: 1 HOUR & 5 MINS GOALS FOR THIS WEEK: - Put in at least 12 hours of Arabic (counting conversation and movies). - Learn all the lyrics of at least one song and add them to Anki. - Have an hour worth of conversation Edited by JohannaNYC on 08 April 2013 at 9:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| JohannaNYC Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4450 days ago 251 posts - 361 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, Italian Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Arabic (Egyptian) | Message 47 of 50 01 May 2013 at 4:44am | IP Logged |
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I just posted my first update in the Super Challenge thread. I decided to re-post it
here since I don't update this blog as often as I'd like to and in case you missed it. Italian 57% done 50.6/50 films 21/50 books - Twilight - Harry Potter 1-4 - Fitness articles and short essays from "Read & Think Italian" 37.8/50 conversations 4.2/50 pieces of writing Yay! I completed the movie portion of my challenge and what a journey it has been. Four months ago I started watching Winx Club only getting the gist of what was going on. Now I've finished that part of my challenge understanding everything in a Fellini film except for some colloquial expressions. Although I'm not even halfway done with the books yet, my progress in reading parallels that with the movies. I read Harry Potter 4 at the rate of less than 4 mins per page. The 6WC helped a lot, but I don't think I would be reading so quickly and still have time to look up words in the dictionary/phone if it wasn't for the Super Challenge. Thanks Christina for coming up with the idea and Philip for creating the bot. Croatian 31% done 40.8/50 films 0.7/50 books 10.5/50 conversations 10.9/50 pieces of writing The book count is not correct. I'm about a third of the way through Twilight, but I'm reading it as a parallel text I made, so I'm not sure of the page count. I'm hoping to read the second half or last third of the book with just a dictionary. However, the vocabulary is less problematic than the grammar, so I'm gonna have to study some more before continuing with it. Arabic 20% done 26.9/50 films 0/50 "books" 3.2/50 conversations I changed my Super Challenge to a Major Challenge with conversations only. Even though I'm not learning to read Arabic script I'm learning with songs written in the Latin alphabet. 200 words = 1 page and I'm reading the lyrics over and over until I can memorize the words as well as their meaning. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 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 48 of 50 31 May 2013 at 3:32pm | IP Logged |
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hi! just wanted to let you know that tadoku starts tomorrow! (june 1)
would be fantastic to compete with you in Croatian ;) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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