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AlOlaf Danish TAC 2015 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Tilia Diglot Groupie Denmark Joined 4474 days ago 48 posts - 68 votes  Speaks: Danish*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 33 of 163 17 April 2013 at 2:10am | IP Logged | ||
Your welcome. Have you tried dr.dk/bonanza where they put a lot of their old TV programs, as they get them digitalized. Maybe they don't have the same restrictions on them. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| AlOlaf Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5146 days ago 491 posts - 617 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Danish | Message 34 of 163 17 April 2013 at 2:19am | IP Logged | ||
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Wow! The videos play and there's cool documentaries about fighter pilots and stuff! Man, this is exactly what I was looking for! It really is a bonanza! Thank you thank you thank you!
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| Tilia Diglot Groupie Denmark Joined 4474 days ago 48 posts - 68 votes Speaks: Danish*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 35 of 163 17 April 2013 at 3:09am | IP Logged | ||
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Det var så lidt. :-) You should think about watching the old tv series "Matador", some time. It is on Bonanza too. Is is something that nearly all Danes have seen, so you would know what we talk about when we refer to it :-) And you would learn a little Danish history too.
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| AlOlaf Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5146 days ago 491 posts - 617 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Danish | Message 36 of 163 30 April 2013 at 8:04am | IP Logged | ||
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I’m at lesson 19 of Assimil Dänisch ohne Mühe. That’s only four lesons in about a month, but the slow
progress is partly because I’ve been making recordings with pauses and practicing with them in an effort to duplicate the pronunciation. It’s also because I’ve been spending a lot of time watching Danish documentaries about fighter pilots and Danish TV shows about gardening and food preparation. I’m not understanding just a whole lot of this yet, but it’s fun and I’m starting to recognize some commonly used phrases. I heard that if you bombard yourself with interesting imput, your brain will want to make sense of it. It’s possible I made that up. Maybe I just want to avoid the rigors of an effective, disciplined learning regimen. What I did do was finish reading a Danish children’s book about Vikings. And I found "Matador". Edited by AlOlaf on 30 April 2013 at 4:01pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| AlOlaf Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5146 days ago 491 posts - 617 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Danish | Message 37 of 163 07 May 2013 at 9:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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I can't really be sure, but I think I'm making progress. I'm now on lesson 24 of Assimil Dänisch ohne Mühe. I'm also reading a Danish collection of Grimm's fairy tales, which is a children's book with simple language and lots of pictures, sort of like a freeze-frame video-just my speed and suited to my visual nature. I drove around repeating after my Pimsleur Danish cds until I couldn't stand it anymore and I think it really helped. I listen to Harry Potter alternately in German and Danish and watch Danish television shows and documentaries in the Internet. There's a lot I don't understand, but I'm slowly getting more of it and it doesn't sound as foreign to me as it used to. I read Politiken.dk and copy and paste stuff I don't understand into Google Translate. I have several Danish courses and I put pauses in the audio so I can repeat after the speakers. My next project will be to change about 7,000 Anki cards from German-English over to German-Danish, provided I can summon up the discipline.
I get discouraged sometimes because the language is so hard for me to speak and understand, but its allure, like some weird ray, keeps pulling me back. I started out just wanting to learn enough to be able to go to Denmark and read signs and menus, but now I want more and I don't care if it serves no purpose and offers no payoff. Meanwhile, my German books sit patiently on the shelf, waiting for me to read them... Edited by AlOlaf on 07 May 2013 at 9:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5345 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 38 of 163 07 May 2013 at 10:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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Wow! It sounds as if you’re making impressive progress indeed.
Of course, conquering a language is a long process and we’re all bound to have some discouraging moments here and there. The important thing is to maintain motivation even in the face of inevitable difficulties and above all be careful not to burn out. Keep up the good work! You’re doing great! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| AlOlaf Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5146 days ago 491 posts - 617 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Danish | Message 39 of 163 07 May 2013 at 11:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the encouragement, Emme! I've read your log and really admire your organizational abilities. My approach seems pretty spastic in comparison.
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| AlOlaf Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5146 days ago 491 posts - 617 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Danish | Message 40 of 163 27 May 2013 at 10:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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I had rotator cuff surgery on my right shoulder two weeks ago and haven’t been able to work since then. As a result, I’ve had lots of time to study Danish and am now on lesson 36 of 64 in Assimil Dänisch ohne Mühe. I’ve made recordings with pauses for each lesson and can repeat after the first 25 at full speed; the more recent ones I have to slow down a little. Who knew a variable-tempo guitar trainer could be such a swell language learning tool? And to think that the audio sounded way too slow to me at first; now that I’m trying to reproduce it at speed, it seems downright peppy. As to the “Danishness” of my pronunciation, I’ve got a long way to go.
It was time to start the active phase several lessons ago, but I guess that’ll have to wait until my arm’s out of the brace and I’m able to write again. I’m going to try hard to stick with this Assimil course and maybe actually finish something, for a change. I’m hoping that the accountability that comes with posting this log will help me to overcome my recent tendency to suddenly stop in the middle of a project and flit off to start some shiney new one, only to abandon it in turn for a still shinier one, etc, etc. Great for acquiring half-baked knowledge; for mastering anything, not so much. It turns out my girlfriend, who speaks only English, loves Borgen. Within the space of a few days, we watched the complete first and second seasons on DVD (with English subtitles) and then started watching the whole thing over again. In between, I’ve been putting on the Danish subtitles and looking up new vocabulary; at my level, there’s way plenty. (Incidentally, for anyone who speaks German and wants to learn Danish, I can wholeheartedly recommend Langenscheidt’s Taschenwörterbuch Dänisch. For such a compact dictionary, it contains a lot of commonly used Danish expressions and idioms and, so far, I’ve found almost everything I’ve looked for in it.) I was hungry for more Borgen, but a search of the Amazon sites for a third season turned up nothing. Then I learned from the Team Viking log (thanks, Emme!) that the Swedish site SVTPlay was in the process of airing the third season’s episodes, with Swedish subtitles. Since I’d worked through the first few lessons of FSI Swedish last year, the language wasn’t totally foreign to me and, though I don’t plan to make a habit of mixing Scandinavian languages before I’ve got a real handle on one of them (namely Danish), it sure is fun to plow through these new episodes to see how much lort/skit I can understand. I’ve been dragging my heels, though, on converting my German-English Anki cards to German-Danish, partly because I know how much time and effort will be involved and partly because it’s more fun to jabber Danish dialogue and watch Danish TV. I guess I’ll get around to it eventually, but in the meantime I’ve got to come up with a method of memorizing the strong and irregular Danish verb conjugations. Years ago I used paper flashcards to learn the German ones, sorting them into groups according to vowel change. It looks like I’ll be able to take the same approach with Danish, only this time I think I’ll try to do it in Anki. My book of Grimm’s fairy tales in Danish is a real source of enjoyment. I read the tale of Puss in Boots for the first time, along with a story that reminded me of Little Red Riding Hood, only in this version the wolf gobbles six young goats instead of Grandma and then gets cut open and loaded with rocks by the goats’ mother instead of by a passing huntsman. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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