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Ugla soars higher TAC13 Sakura桜 & Romulan | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5227 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 41 of 156 09 January 2013 at 12:41pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Did you mean "sprain" or is that some kind of slang? Because I can totally believe you got an injury rather than finish all of that -- What level did you say you were? :))
Yep, you got me - we don't actually have that many 'th's -- our tongueth end up tho tired that we thimply thpeak like that after thome time. Which explains why I never went beyond 'she sells sea shells on the sea shore' with English ;P
Did you do any Pimsleurs? I don't remember about Pimsleur Spanish, but they certainly did at that the beginning of Russian and Japanese. It was simple stuff, so I never needed to try it out or check any 'science' after it (wasn't presented as part of their 'proven' method). Anyway, did it work well for you? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6621 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 42 of 156 09 January 2013 at 2:00pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Yes, I meant "sprained." It was just a joke about not being about to talk after that. (So was "tink" (think) and "thome."(some))
I've never tried Pimsleur, so I didn't know they did that. I learned it from an old music teacher. The idea is that the end part gets the most practice so it just comes automatically. Usually, it's reasonably easy to start the word or musical phrase, but as you get further into it, you tend to get confused more easily. So by repeating from the end, you are making the end part just as easy as the beginning. I started on New Year's Day, so I'm not very advanced at all and I can't make any kind of Spanish phrases roll of my tongue. That's why I thought I'd try a few tongue-twisters. Also, it's just fun. The course I'm currently using for Spanish is FSI programmatic. It doesn't teach many words so far, but it makes sure you have the pronunciation down pat. They repeat every syllable one at a time. And then they carefully repeat the parts where the words slur together or the sound of a letter changes because of the sound before or after it. And then they repeat those few phrases over and over. Oh, and I found out why that guy was so eager to find Sanchez. It turns out, Sanchez is having a party! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6621 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 43 of 156 09 January 2013 at 9:53pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I’m already doing a fantastic job of annihilating Japanese so far this year. At least if you are judging by my last lang-8 entry. There was blood all over that battle field. I did get a few words right though here and there. Don’t you love how Japanese people can rip your writing to shreds, finding a zillion things wrong with it, and then tell you how fantastically well you write?
It took me 3/4 of an hour just to go through all the corrections. I am very thorough though. I wrote last year about how I go through the corrections, but I thought I’d mention it again. First I paste my original essay into Word and divide it up so that each sentence has its own line. Then I turn it into a numbered list. Then I put corrections as sub-points to each number, and explanations as sub-points under those. Here’s what I mean: 1. My first sentence. a. Correction to my first sentence. i. Explanation to correction. b. Another person’s correction to my first sentence. 2. My second sentence a. Correction to my second sentence. I also make sure all my mistakes are included in the corrected sentences, but crossed out and with the type-face in grey. And I make sure the type-face is in red for all the corrections. Then it’s easy to see the changes. Just going through this process is enough to show me where my weaknesses are so I can look them up in my grammar book and study them again. So, tomorrow I have to study up on the difference between が and けれど again. And I also need to read a bit about から vs ので apparently. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5227 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 44 of 156 10 January 2013 at 7:46am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Congratulations on your advances with Japanese!! I'm still waiting to actually start ;(
Yeah, the 'thome' bit was more obvious so I responded, but by the time I got there I had already forgotten about 'splained' so I didn't connect both things, and I simply overlooked 'tink' -- I guess I had to read carefully from the beginning :)
Yes, I see how it's supposed to work. Very interesting, thank you.
Excellent, I wish all courses did that with their audio...
What? ¿EN LA OFICINA? We're in a down economy, didn't they see the ads about productivity all over the place? I hope nobody gets sacked... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5335 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 45 of 156 10 January 2013 at 8:01am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Just a point on correcting: It actually is not as crazy as it sounds to make heaps of correction but still praise
your writing, if the mistakes are spelling errors, or things you cannot simply expect a foreigner to get right. If on the other hand you have really butchered the language to the point of making the native speaker sick to his stomach, then he is less likely to praise you. Is it not good to know that you probably belong in the first category? :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5227 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 46 of 156 10 January 2013 at 8:20am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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One of the things I always found very difficult about Japanese people is the damn indirectness. I see the point of being polite even when correting, etc. but we're not made of glass!
I mean, being (overly?) polite and cautious still kind of makes sense over the internet where you can't see the other person's reactions and there's a lot that gets lost in connection, but in person, face-to-face (where I had most of my practice ages ago)? It just leads to / stems from (I guess it's a kind of vicious circle) an unhealthy emotional repression*. *Which doesn't mean you should express everything you feel all the time either -- being on the extremes without good reason is never a good idea. Edit: summarizing: on the internet, my first thought as the norm is that people who correct me don't hate my guts -- in real life I just look at their faces... Edited by mrwarper on 10 January 2013 at 8:23am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6621 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 47 of 156 10 January 2013 at 9:31am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I don't think Sanchez's party is actually EN la oficina. That's just where he was when the guy was looking for him. I don't know where the party is. I guess they don't want us showing up and crashing it. All I know is that it is mañana a las cinco.
The pronunciation thing is great. Each unit has a dialogue of only about 5-6 sentences, but they go through the pronunciation very thoroughly including how the sounds change. For example, bien by itself sounds like it looks, but in bastante bien, the b in bien turns into something that sounds sort of halfway between b and v. It reminds me of the way the ふ in Japanese is something between fu and hu and your teeth don't quite come down to touch your lip, but they come close. At least that's how it sounds to me. So they make you say "Bastante. Bien. Bastante bien," a few million times to get the pronunciation down. My Japanese was corrected by two people and the one who said that I wrote well, didn't correct nearly as much as the other. I think she corrected it so that it was technically correct, but didn't bother making it sound beautiful. She did make a few hints about the things the other one simply corrected though. Like -- "perhaps you might try using ので sometimes." But she didn't say it right out. Actually I like the correction that fixed every tiny flaw better, but I wish she'd given some more comments about why she fixed things. Fortunately, my grammar book gives comparisons of things like が vs けれど, so I just need to go through it again and try to figure out those subtle differences. In English "but" is "but." So figuring out the differences between the different "buts" in Japanese is a little difficult. I read and think I understand, but then I forget, or don't understand well enough to get it right all the time. I feel a little sorry for the people on lang-8 who are trying to learn English. I checked and there are about 5.3 times as many English learners as English native speakers. So a lot of their entries don't get corrected. I think about how much effort I put into writing one little entry and how disappointing it would be if after all that effort, it didn't even get corrected. I'm lucky to be studying Japanese. It's a Japanese site, so there are a lot of Japanese there. My entries are usually corrected within half-an-hour. They really need more people that speak other languages though. I correct more than I write, but I don't think I can manage to correct 5x as many entries as I write. The Japanese indirectness is very difficult. I'm autistic as well, and we have great trouble reading between the lines even in more direct societies. So when it's as extreme as that, it's almost impossible. It's very difficult for other foreigners too though. Personally, over-politeness feels impolite to me. A psychology professor told me that he had his students go home and act like they were at someone else's house for the weekend. So they called their parent's Mr --- and Mrs ---. And asked things like, "May I get a drink of water." Apparently some of the students weren't able to make it through the whole weekend their parents got so angry. To me, even a stranger being so polite as the Japanese are gets in my craw a little. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5335 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 48 of 156 10 January 2013 at 10:56am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Levels of politeness between cultures are always difficult. In Norway you say "Thank you" for everything, and I do not know how many times my Spanish friends have yelled at me for thanking them (You are not supposed to say thank you to me - we are friends -being the mantra), and it took some getting used to Spanish friends just using my things without asking me first - particularaly personal things like lip stick - just because we are friends.
I have probably shocked French colleagues because of my extreme Norwegianness when it comes to formality and directness. I am very informal, and very direct, and that does not always fly with high ranking French directors who are used to being treated like God. Getting used to other ways of viewing politeness is however very useful, and I find that my experiences with Spain has prepared me for Russians who are also very direct. I have a colleague from Russia who has a little bit of trouble fitting in. Or actually, I don't even know if she knows herself, but people get uncomfortable around her, because she is so direct, that they try to avoid working with her. Her Norwegian is impeccable, just a tiny little accent, and I absolutely adore her and her way of working, but I think she scares the living daylights out of some of my colleagues. I just appreciate her no-nonsense right-to-the-point approach, and she is amazing at her job, and whenever she gets too formal for me I just start kidding until she starts to laugh, and then we are good. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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