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TAC 2013 - MerryCrassmas - (RUS/POL/GER) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| MerryCrassmas Bilingual Diglot Groupie United States languagewanderlust.c Joined 5061 days ago 62 posts - 68 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English* Studies: German, Russian, Czech, Polish | Message 1 of 8 31 December 2012 at 12:27am | IP Logged | ||
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This is where I shall document all of my thoughts, my experiences, my successes and the roadblocks in attempting
to learn Russian,[ B]Polish, German. I know this will not be an easy task and I expect to experience the ups and down that come with trying to participate in the Total Annihilation Challenge. This is not a goal that will only last through the 2013 year, but beyond this. The journal entry will continue further than the year 2013, but I have decided to join this challenge because I believe it will play a role in giving me the motivation to continue doing this. I created a language journal on this site back in 2008, under a different name, and I found it to be an excellent way to push me in achieving my language learning goals. I haven't really done anything related to a language journal since, so I am excited to be back on board and I am especially excited to document my progress. Even though 2013 has not officially started until 2 more days, I am excited to get started nonetheless. I plan to discuss my current knowledge in the languages that I am going to focus on during the year 2013. Till then, good luck everyone! And Happy Holidays! :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| MerryCrassmas Bilingual Diglot Groupie United States languagewanderlust.c Joined 5061 days ago 62 posts - 68 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English* Studies: German, Russian, Czech, Polish | Message 2 of 8 03 January 2013 at 7:10am | IP Logged | ||
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Hello. Happy New Year to everyone! Glad the holidays are finally over and I can get back to my routine.
For this post, I am going to discuss part of my goal for the TAC of 2013. Ultimately, I want to spend a total of 60,000 minutes studying languages--which is equal to 1000 hours. In order to prevent me to neglect a specific language, the other thing I'd like to do is spend at least 12,000 minutes on each language--which equals 200 hours. The priority for me is to spend more of the time studying Russian, then Polish, and German. That is the order of importance for me. The reason being that I am thinking of applying for the Slavic Linguistics graduate program at several UCs in California once I finish my bachelors. One of the requirements is to have a very good command of Russian all the we around, a second Slavic language, and oddly German and French at a readable level. This is the main reason why I decided to do this TAC--to get me motivated and have a way to track my progress. However if my educational goals change, I still plan to reach a C2/C1 level on all three languages. I am not sure that this is possible to achieve in a year, but I will try to get to the following levels: Russian: Current-B1 -- Goal: C1 Polish: Current A1 -- Goal: B1 German: Current B1 --Goal B2 For the next few weeks, I plan to work on Pimsleur for all languages. Russian: Pimsleur III Polish: Pimsleur I --only level sadly German: Pimsleur III When I reach halfway through the Pimsleur courses I will add the Michel Thomas course for all languages. Russian: Advanced Course Polish: Advanced Course German: Advanced Course I might add the vocabulary courses for Russian and German too. I am still in the progress of getting material together, so I will update them as I gather them. Can't wait to count up the minutes I spend on each language. I will try to update the time once or twice a week. I've wasted no time and so far Polish has the biggest lead! **As of 01/02/12** POL: 300 minutes RUS: 120 minutes GER: 10 minutes Total Minutes Remaining: 59,570 Edited by MerryCrassmas on 03 January 2013 at 7:12am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| MerryCrassmas Bilingual Diglot Groupie United States languagewanderlust.c Joined 5061 days ago 62 posts - 68 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English* Studies: German, Russian, Czech, Polish | Message 3 of 8 07 January 2013 at 12:21am | IP Logged | ||
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Polish
510 minutes Cześć! Man na imię Ricardo i chce mówić po polsku. Jestem z Meksyku ale mieszkam w Ameryce już dawno ☺. Dlatego mówię po angielsku bardzo dobrze. Alright, now down to business! My last update came on January 2nd and I have done quite a bit of language learning since. Not surprising, Polish has gotten the most attention yet again. I am having a very good time learning the language and I am especially intrigued by the consonant clusters, specifically the rz, sz, and cz sounds. What have I accomplished? Since my last update, I’ve completed 5 tracks of Pimsleur Polish I. I am currently heading towards track 20 out of 30, so Polish Pimsleur is almost done for me. I plan to switch to Michel Thomas Polish right after I finish. Also, I have two Polish course books but I plan to go through only one at a time. The options I have available are “First Year Polish” by Swan and “Beginning Polish” by Schenker. I understand both are great books, but I would appreciate some feedback on which one might be better to use ☺ Material: Pimsleur Polish I Michel Thomas Polish Advanced First Year Polish or Beginning Polish Russian 380 minutes For Russian I mainly worked with Pimsleur. However, I decided to go down to level II instead of III. While I worked for level III, I was messing up on some phrases, so I figured I could use level II as a brush up. At some point, I plan to focus on the verbs of motion. I find myself mixing them up all the time ☺ Also I watched a Russian movie that I liked very much “Driver for Vera”. Some kind person put it on YouTube with both English and Russian subtitles. This helped me get down some words or phrases that were said too quickly. However, I found the speech in this movie to be very good for a beginner/intermediate learner. For my Russian coursebook, I plan to use “The New Penguin Russian Course Book”. Back in 2007-2008 I got up to chapter 16 of the book, but never completed it. This time I am going to make it a goal to have it finished by the end of the year (maybe in 6 months?). I also have a wonderful text “Russian Grammar” by Galina Stilman—this is an excellent course book. Material: Pimsleur Russian II & III Michel Thomas Russian Advanced Michel Thomas Russian Vocabulary Penguin Course German 160 minutes Es tut mir leid. Ich habe nict zu viel Deutsch gelernt. I find myself studying German right after I finish doing Polish or Russian. Reason being that I don’t want to study Russian followed by Polish (or vice versa) so I do not mix them up. I worked through several tracks of Pimsleur German III: 1-5. German is still my strongest language, so it is a piece of cake going through German III. I plan to use Michel Thomas Advanced once I finish it. Even though I completed it a while ago, I go back to it because there are some grammatical points that I always seem to forget slightly, but remember it quickly when I go through it. I still don’t have a German coursebook, so if anyone knows of a good intermediate German book, I’d be happy to take considerations ☺ Material: Pimsleur German III Michel Thomas German Advanced Michel Thomas German Vocabulary ---------------------------------------------- Previous Update POL: 300 minutes RUS: 120 minutes GER: 10 minutes **As of 01/06/13** POL: 510 minutes [+210] RUS: 380 minutes [+160] GER: 160 minutes [+150] 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 4 of 8 07 January 2013 at 2:35am | IP Logged | ||
Based on my experience with both I give a slight edge to Swan's book over Schenker's since the former presents things in a more interesting way and so you're less likely to get bored. Swan has a knack for making short but quirky dialogues that keep you going (his course "Beginning Slovak" has some similarly entertaining/useful dialogues). On the other hand Schenker's course is the nearest thing to what FSI Polish Basic Course would look like but its many exercises are only transformation or substitution drills. On the other hand, if you can tough it out with Pimsleur Comprehensive, then Schenker's methods aren't that much of a stretch from what you'd be used to. Swan's edge over Schenker would be even greater if there were an answer key for at least most of the exercises and all of the textbook's units had audio (as far I can tell, the audio only goes up to Unit 9 - I'll explain below). With Schenker's course, you have the answers to all of the drills since everything was recorded and posted to a public archive at Yale. When I used the online "First Year Polish", there was audio only for the first six units, and I asked a couple of Polish friends to correct my answers to the exercises. At that time, my answers for a chapter's worth of exercises took about 4 pages of a Word document at 12pt font, and basically I was sending a file to them every two weeks and getting the corrections about a week or two later. Notwithstanding these adjustments, I got a lot out of the first online edition of "First Year Polish" and continued with "Intermediate Polish" (hard copy only and lacking audio) again with the help of my friends. However I got less out of it since I couldn't get any practicing hearing or speaking Polish using the book's dialogues or exercises (but that's what having Polish friends and partying with them were for!). Send a PM to our guardian angel, Marya (or any of the Poles on the forum for that matter. Julie, Gosiak, Theodisce and Przemek are off the top of my head) to see if they can check the answers to whatever exercises from the course that you end up doing in writing. Prof. Swan has revealed a new repository of audio and video files here for the online textbook but as I noted earlier it doesn't have everything (e.g. the dialogues are recorded in .mp3 up to Unit 9). I recall an older exchange with you where we were talking about the audio for the old edition of FY Polish in the lossless (but massive) .aiff but this stuff that I just mentioned matches sections in the online textbook (if not being complete). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4367 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 5 of 8 07 January 2013 at 3:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have Swan's second edition of First Year Polish (got it for free from a former student of his, so I couldn't refuse!). I'll just share my experiences with it.
Strengths: Despite my very slow progress, I think it's a good book and if you really understand and digest the lessons, you come out with a good foundation. You can actually learn some interesting vocabulary that you wouldn't necessarily think of so early in the learning process (So far, my favorite "advanced phrase" was something along the lines of "He is a strict disciplinarian--I had absolutely no idea how to say that in German and I've been speaking it much longer). I didn't discover the audio for the course until recently, but it does help a lot. The grammar comes slowly, which is helpful in giving yourself enough time to make sure you really understand it. I actually think his explanations of cases are quite helpful. Weaknesses: It's definitely a university textbook. There are exercises but not an answer key. Usually this isn't a huge problem, but sometimes he puts in a word or a particular exercise and it isn't explained as clearly in the lesson. Some of the order is a little strange as well; why put numbers in lesson 12 for example...but keep in mind I'm also working from an old edition, so maybe it's not such an issue anymore. I also think you have to do more work to get listening practice. You have to go searching for the audio files. Like I said, I ended up with this book for free, but it really is a good course to have. Between that and some of the short stories available on the department's website, you can get a lot of reading practice (if someone ever finds the audio for the stories, let me know!). Personally, I've met Dr. Swan a few times and he's a very intelligent man, which is reflected in his course. Ultimately, no course takes you to fluency by itself, but this one gives a pretty good foundation which makes fluency easier to achieve. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| MerryCrassmas Bilingual Diglot Groupie United States languagewanderlust.c Joined 5061 days ago 62 posts - 68 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English* Studies: German, Russian, Czech, Polish | Message 6 of 8 07 January 2013 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Chung and Fuenf_Katzen, thanks a lot for the feedback! Based on your descriptions and experiences with the books,
I've decided to stick to Swan's book. I own the second edition as well, and I do remember our previous encounter with First Year Polish Chung. I managed to get messages from several kind users here and they pointed me in the right direction, such as where I could find the audio for the second edition. I have not yet listened to the entire audio, but it seems to me like there is or should be enough audio to cover the entire book. I'll have to check it out when I get back from work. But I wanted to say thanks for taking the time in writing your response :) I have a feeling this is going to be a great year for learning languages! Danke sehr! Proszę bardzo! Большое спасибо! I am off to listen to more Pimsleur on my way to work! !ill next time :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| MerryCrassmas Bilingual Diglot Groupie United States languagewanderlust.c Joined 5061 days ago 62 posts - 68 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English* Studies: German, Russian, Czech, Polish | Message 7 of 8 16 January 2013 at 1:45am | IP Logged | ||
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Okay so here is yet another update. So far it has been a trend for me to focus heavily on Polish. Russian was slightly
touched on this past week and German I did nothing. I've been going through my Penguin Russian course and First Year Polish, however I have just been passively reviewing the first few chapters, for I had gone through them previously. Once I reach the chapter that I feel I can use more time reviewing, then I was actively go through the chapters beyond that. Polish: I completed the entire Pimsleur Polish I course today! This past week I spent going over a few tracks twice, because I felt I needed to practice some of the vocabulary that was giving me trouble. As I was going through the course, I was amazed (but not surprised for obvious reasons) just how much vocabulary Russian and Polish share. It seems to me that the Slavic languages are much closer --or share much more smilar vocabulary- than the romance languages. Of course, this is just a mature assessment and perhaps this is not exactly true. I was working an overnight shift with my friend from Montenegro and we spent some time comparing words from Montenegrin, Polish, and Russian--it was quite fun :) I did a couple of lessons of Russian Pimsleur II, but not as much as I would have liked. I am going to start Michel Thomas Polish Advanced, First Year Polish (actively), and Russian Penguin course (actively). My university classes (16 unites) start next week --January 22nd-- so I am not sure how much workload I will be able to take. I might have to drop German, as it has been the language that I've spent the least amount of time OR I might just stick with it, but do it once a week to at least keep it fresh in my memory. Here are the time updates since I last updated. You will notice Polski is on a rampage! **As of 01/15/13** Polish: 930 minutes Russian: 440 minutes German: 160 minutes Oddly or perhaps not, I can still understand and speak Russian and German better :) I just have become quite fascinated by Polish that I am eager to study it any time I can! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Mooby Senior Member Scotland Joined 6103 days ago 707 posts - 1220 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Polish | Message 8 of 8 16 January 2013 at 7:35am | IP Logged | ||
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Congratulations on completing Pimsleur!
Let's all stand up and sing the Polish National Anthem!! Keep it going MC! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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