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Vermillon’s TAC’13 鶴 & Lugus | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 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 49 of 73 08 May 2013 at 11:42am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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J'aurais dit "traoù" (lit. qui vend des choses"). Le breton utilise guère des formes
partitives. Mieux vaut ajouter une description "qui vend des choses à lire ou à manger etc etc), au moins, mais j'aimerais parafraser des choses. Il vaut mieux demander à un brittophone mais je connais personne. Également, pour "comment c'était" (penaos oa) je pense que le breton va utiliser pas l'imparfait mais un forme construite comme "vo bet". (parce qu'il s'agit d'une action qui sera terminé dans le futur et non dans le passé) Ouais, je suis d'accord, peu importe. Ne me donne pas trop de confiance quand il s'agit du breton en tout cas; certes j'ai terminé le livre mais ça ne veut pas du tout dire que je maîtrise la langue (j'écris mal et je parle encore pire... et tenant compte de mon pauvre français ça pourrait compliquer des choses...)) Le plus difficile à mon avis c'est le syntaxe, parce que ce qui vient en tête, doit réglementairement être ce qui est le plus important dans la phrase. C'est casse-pieds avec les traductions dans l'Assimil. Edited by tarvos on 16 July 2013 at 9:15am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 50 of 73 15 July 2013 at 10:26pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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May + June + July 2013 Report
A 3-month report to catch-up, or I'll postpone it until December. Not that I have done nothing, I've done plenty, but somehow I didn't get around to posting anything about it. Perhaps because it's not so brilliant. Perhaps I was too busy. Mandarin / 普通話: Apart from chatting almost every day in Mandarin, in about any context, and sometimes with other people than my girlfriend, I haven't done anything related to Mandarin in several months. I'm flying to China in two weeks, but I feel confident enough to handle about any situation that may arise, so there was not too much pressure to work towards improving my level. I'm also out of novels to read (I don't like the remaining ones that I haven't read yet) which has been really annoying for me, but since I'm going to spend a month over there, I should be able to restock a good amount of them for a year or so... And here I need to call those of you who read Mandarin novels: do you have any recommendations? My favourite author (余华) hasn't released anything recently and I've read all his long-novels. I plan to get around to reading Lu Xun and Lao She, but inbetween I'd like something a bit less dry to read. Also another call to people either living in China or Taiwan, and especially those teaching (whatever they teach): I'd like to put my hands on the reading list of middle and high schoolers in China/Taiwan. The goal here is to get more familiar with the works that every Chinese person should have read, and therefore to improve my knowledge of Chinese culture. Any person who has contact in the academia and who could help me put my hands on such lists would be most welcome. :) Minnanhua / Hokkien / Taiwanese(?) / 閩南話: As I'm going to be in full immersion for about a month, I'm pretty nervous. As I felt my command of the vocabulary learnt so far was not optimal (especially with respect to the tones...), I restarted my Anki deck (reset as new, but kept the cards) and studied them much more dilligently, clicking on "failed" as often as I thought my command of the word was a bit wrong (especially a wrong tone). I feel that my command over the basic vocabulary has increased a lot, but obviously 650 words only get you that far... and I'm still pretty much speaking "Mandarin with Minnanhua pronunciation" rather than idiomatic Minnanhua, but here I'll blame my girlfriend for not really taking the time to chat with me despite my constant requests. Of course, I should have tried to find other speakers and be much more diligent in my studies, but without any teaching material, it's not very easy... and even though I'd really like to avoid it, I know that I'll be able Mandarin to fall back on, if necessary. And if I'm lucky enough, I might manage to find some tuition for the time I'm there! (but let's not dream too wildly) Classical Chinese / 文言: Since lasttime I've posted, the 6WC took place and Classical Chinese was my language of choice. I actually did a 1-month challenge only and then moved onto other things, but during those 30 days I was able to put in 45 hours of reading, which is a huge amount of reading time for me, especially in Classical Chinese. I've managed to read half the book (300 pages out of 560!), which quite frankly amazes me. I really feel like I've done a Great Leap Forward™: I read much faster, and with a better understanding, I need to open the dictionary slightly less often (but still an enormous amount of times per page), I feel the grammar better. My initial goal was to finish the book within a year, reevaluated to "in September", and I think I can still hold onto this goal. With a reading hour per day, I could even finish before the end of August... As I'm going leaving for China in a few days, I'm also planning to start stocking other classics that I may want to read during the year, and here I'll probably buy far too much (enough for years?). Thanks to OneEye for his log, it will definitely help in guiding my choice of books. :) Korean / 한국어 / 韓國語: Hey, it seems that apart from reviewing the vocabulary, I've done nothing. Somehow, it was probably to be expected, I feel like I'm not very good at keeping the pressure for long. I'm at a stage where more vocabulary doesn't really bring anything, since more advanced vocabulary would necessarily belong to texts that are gramatically too complex for my current level. What I need is definitely intensive reading and grammar study, but I'm not very good at it. Hopefully I'll find a source of motivation and get back on track soon. Japanese / 日本語: Done nothing, even deleted my deck, and have no plan for now to get back to it. If I did, it would probably mean "in replacement of Korean", but that's not for this year anyway. Breton / Brezhoneg: Emaon a-benn ar fin o paouez studiañ gant an Assimil-levr hag e c'hallan lavaret me 'gar brezhoneg. Daoust ma n'eo ket ken fentus al levr-se hag al levrioù Assimil all (an hini spagnoleg 'zo fentus-meurbet, da skouer), kavout a ran e desk mat ar yezh, memes tra. Ha pa kroget 'm eus studiañ brezhoneg e penn ar bloavezh-mañ, biken ne soñjjen goude c'hwec'h mez hepken e c'halljen komz kement mat a brezhoneg! Pa lavarin mat, daoust ma ne gomzan ket brezhoneg mat a-walc'h evit lenn levrioù pe bevañ e Breizh hep komz galleg, me 'gav ma'z e studifen un tamm pelloc'h e c'hallfen gwellaat a-walc'h evit ober se. Bec'h de'i'! :) I've finished studying the Assimil book, and I'm very happy with it. Even though in terms of fun and amount of material, it doesn't compare with some of the best courses Assimil has to offer, I still feel it was well taught, and in the end I feel confident enough to express my ideas, given a bit of time and a dictionary. That sounds like a reasonable achievement I believe, and I feel extremely happy about this adventure (somewhat for heritage reasons, even if unfortunately the language is not spoken anymore in my family). I've put my hands on Morvannou's edition (1st volume only, of course) and I think I'll study it as well, because it has an entirely different approach and there are many things that even in its 50 lessons I couldn't understand (once passed the problem of the entirely different spelling convention...). Using Anki and patiently (painstakingly?) editing the audio and entering the content of all the lessons has proven to be very useful, it let me skip the active wave altogether and I feel I have a very good command over the book, I think I have a feeling for the language, the accent, the stress etc. I have set the maximum interval to 100 days, so that I should get a full review of the book in that amount of time (and it should average to a maximum of 10 minutes per day to do so). Some may find that boring, but somehow I'm enjoying it, and hope that it will serve as a way to maintain my level if ever I do nothing else with the language for some time. Of course, I hope to get some time and start tackling native material (books!) and perhaps write a bit in the language, but since I'll be in China for the next month, I will keep it down to revision only. Wanderlust: Wanderlust has practically been my main activity for the past two months, hence the relative absence of content in the other sections. It feels like I'm just repeating last year's pattern (intensive Korean for a few months, and then trying to study everything I can for the rest of the year), but it's not that big of a problem, I guess. So following the same principle as described for Breton's Anki deck containing all the lessons from Assimil with audio, I've also finished entering the full Norwegian course (and close to having learnt it), and I'm quite happy about it, because since last year I had forgotten an awful lot of the vocabulary and I had never remembered idioms. This is now going very well, and even though I surely don't have the B2 level promised (ahah...), I suppose I could say that it's somewhere between A2 and B1 (perhaps I'm a bit too confident on that one..), surely at least in reading. Anyway, that's a good basis to either maintain for later or to continue studying immediately. I don't have any particular plans for Norwegian for now, but I've started reading a grammar written in Norwegian for learners, and I'm enjoying it so far. I also hope to find some time to start reading some native material, and perhaps I'll follow Expugnator (thanks for your log!) and go over a few more textbooks, just to expand my vocabulary and solidify my command of grammar. The "success" of the Anki decks I've built for Breton and Norwegian made me really tempted to go wild and indulge in a lot of wanderlust, and I've decided to revisit the courses I've studied last year (German and Polish, for now) as well as to get some basics in two languages I meet too often in my life not to be able to have a simple conversation in: Spanish (which I used to speak fluently, perhaps around 2004, so I hope to get back at it quickly) and Italian. Living in London, these two languages really are part of my daily life, and I've felt too frustrated over the last few months (having to communicate with Spaniards and Italians living in my flat whose English was dramatically poor, at least some vocabulary would have helped me), so here I start them. I've also made a deal with a colleague that when I come back from China, we'll speak only in French and Spanish. And finally this was a very good excuse to start buying a lot of second hand Assimil books for a bargain, though I don't really have any plan to study most of them for quite a long time. Now my collection consists of: Arabic, Armenian, Breton (2 editions), Egyptian, Finnish, German, Greek, Ancient Greek, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Latin (2 editions), Norwegian, Occitan, Polish (2 editions), Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Vietnamese. And it's growing regularly, every time I spot a copy for <10€. Summary TL;DR. Well, even though my goals have changed a lot since the beginning of the year (and I won't be "Mr TAC 2013", ahem), I'm very happy with my studies, and that's what matters. Next report should be by the end of August I would think, and hopefully with great news (truckloads of books, etc). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4713 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese | Message 51 of 73 15 July 2013 at 10:44pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I cannot imagine how I would feel if I was able to read a book in Mandarin or Classical Chinese. I can barely read a book in Russian, which is supposed to be much easier, without having to look at a dictionary every 2nd word.
Congratulations on your studies! 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| OneEye Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6848 days ago 518 posts - 784 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Taiwanese, German, French | Message 52 of 73 16 July 2013 at 6:14am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I don't know if Taiwanese people have a list of novels they read in school. They do have a list of things they read for their 國文 classes, but it's nearly all 文言文. This book contains the standard body of stuff they read. They may read more than that in school, I don't know. I do know that 金庸's novels are very popular. I plan to read one of them this fall (雪山飛狐).
How's 說苑? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 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 53 of 73 16 July 2013 at 9:11am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Chañs vat! N'm eus graet netra gant ar brezhoneg, me gred ankouaatet am eus holl ar
brezhoneg. Ret eo din lenn ul levr a-nevez. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 54 of 73 16 July 2013 at 6:27pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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What an inspiring update, vermillon! I can't imagine what would be to read a whole book in mandarin, let alone classical chinese! I've been stuyding Mandarin for two years now, but doing too little each day. Only a few days ago I've started to speed things up by adding some activities after I was done with all other languages.
As for Norwegian, I really didn't take as much profit from the Assimil Norwegian book as you did, I found it overwhelming to have so much rural-life related vocabulary at once. That's why I think the monolingual textbooks work more effectively as graded readers at this respect. Tho they may be already too easy for you... I wonder if you have used anything from Asiathèque on your early Mandarin studies and would like to recommend some...I have a book called Etape par Etape which seems fairly consistent to bring one from A2 to B2. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 55 of 73 18 July 2013 at 8:02am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Thanks for the link. Apparently, the lists are not very difficult to find, but hopefully I'll put my hands on them quickly after I arrive in China, and hopefully it contains a lot of modern litterature. As for 說苑, I must say it feels a bit like a brainwashing program, at times. It's divided into chapters whose title is a virtue that one should possess, and each chapter basically contains a few dozens of stories taken from other works (some of which are not extant anymore, so it's good they're in 說苑) to illustrate the importance of that virtue, how it served those who possessed it and deserved those who did not. It is quite repetitive, but it is actually a good thing: if every page was entirely new, reading would be a dictionary-browsing nightmare, and at least with repetition you can get to grips with the vocabulary and get familiar with the idiom... and I suppose it's on purpose, you get to assimilate the importance of all those virtues, through the many stories illustrating the point, and you get to understand certain stories because you're already familiar with the other stories of that chapter. To me, it's a good book to read, both because for a beginner it's repetition is crucial, but also for the perspective it offers on the Chinese mentality (of a certain elite?) at that time. I think I could probably re-read it in the future once I've become better at reading Classical Chinese.
Ma 'fellfe dit e c'hallfen kas dit ma pakad kartoù-memor, me 'gav din ez int mat da zalc'h soñj da unan ar kartoù-se, hep bezañ ret da dremen kalz a amzer bemdez da azgwelet (a pemp da dek munut pep deiz 'zo trawalc'h).
Meh? "rural life"? Do you have anything in mind in particular? I've found the vocabulary to be extremely varied, and surely not to be as focused on touristy vocabulary as some (mostly Southern countries?) other Assimil have. What I particularly like is the rather large amount of idioms displayed in the dialogs. I remember finding that extremely difficult to tackle last year, but when using Anki, well, you're bound to remember that idiom as well. :) Surely using monolingual textbooks is great, but still I wouldn't dismiss Assimil (since it took me where I am, for less than £70/150p, price of the Norwegian textbooks).
I'm afraid I don't have much to recommend when it comes to Chinese textbooks. My big steps in Mandarin where: -living in China (though I could have learnt faster, it really gave me enough motivation to go through the motions). -having to do weekly presentations in Mandarin (30mn + 30mn of discussion) -deciding to take the HSK (for which I used this book at the time: http://www.amazon.fr/livres/dp/2842792580). And discovering Anki around that time. Mandarin's grammar is relatively light, and for at least the intermediate stage, I would consider that your level of fluency is about equal to the size of your vocabulary. And of course, Mandarin is a language I actually have friends in, which is probably why it's the only of my foreign languages I can speak fluently. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 56 of 73 18 July 2013 at 5:47pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Well I still found it overwhelming. I don't mean necessarily rural life, but vocabulary about mountains, winter sports, cooking to the extent that I couldn't even understand the French translation and sometimes I would translate from French and come across an unknown word in my native language! Anyway, it's that ordinary feeling that you get too much detailed vocabulary that isn't necessary for a beginner, while missing the reinforcement of the most important vocabulary. I've just had a look at it and the lessons in the middle seem more complicated than the texts at Stein på Stein! So, no wonder Assimil brought you to a higher level. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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