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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4255 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes  Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 1 of 29 30 September 2013 at 4:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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Why does this make me choose a language and a type? This is all so confusing.
Anyway I promised to make weekly checks on my "project Germania" where I try to cram in my head all Germanic languages on the planet. Well, the major ones and the ones I want to read and all that. More on that in the other thread. First language pair I got for myself was German + Icelandic. I will pursue German more intensively for the first few weeks because I'm going to Germany for an extended weekend trip tenth of October, and I wish to be able to do something in German already. I'll also scour for some cheap classic books to start laborously working through. I will start working through some textbooks of German (and Icelandic) and I'll listen to one CD of Michel Thomas foundation every day on my way to university. I will also start working through some Kafka stories with L-R after I have the basics down. Comments, suggestions, etc? Edited by Henkkles on 30 September 2013 at 4:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Via Diva Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation last.fm/user/viadivaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4236 days ago 1109 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German, Italian, French, Swedish, Esperanto, Czech, Greek | Message 2 of 29 30 September 2013 at 5:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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For German I would've recommended Deutsch - Warum nicht? when you get bored of Michel Thomas.
It's actually good to catch up the very basics very fast and start using it at once. For this purpose I used the course "Немецкий за 7 дней" - quite a series of them are made on Russian. I'm sure that there exists something just the same in English. And, of course, immersion. Music in German, movies in German, translations and subtitles required. Always useful. P.S. Is Kafka's language style easy to LR? It was quite hard for me to deal with Zweig (though I adore him), so I switched to Harry Potter. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4255 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 3 of 29 30 September 2013 at 6:05pm | IP Logged | ||
Well I don't know, and that's what I'm going to find out. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4830 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 4 of 29 30 September 2013 at 8:48pm | IP Logged | ||
I'll repeat (from your other thread) my suggestion of You Speak German You can hear one free lesson on the website, then if you register (for free) you can access and download 3 more free lessons. I think it's pretty good, and by lesson 4, he is covering some quite advanced structures. Similar in style to Say Something in Welsh [Spanish, Dutch ... etc], and not unlike Michel Thomas, although he does differ from Michel Thomas in that he is not afraid to use traditional grammatical language. Edited by montmorency on 30 September 2013 at 8:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4830 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 5 of 29 30 September 2013 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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In case you haven't already found it, this posting from 2007 is probably relevant. It includes useful contributions from Professor
Arguelles, but also others, including Iversen. Germanic family 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4255 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 6 of 29 07 October 2013 at 9:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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Week one:
German is going really well, I'm learning to comprehend it pretty well although I haven't activated practically any of it yet. Icelandic will come into picture eventually, I just need to familiarize myself with German. Looking forward to my departure to Germany to pick up some books and some motivation. This week I did in German: I listened to Michel Thomas, I worked with an easy reader and I bought an Agatha Christie paperback to start working through with a dictionary after I'm done with the basics. This week I did in Icelandic: Did a few lessons from a textbook and listened to some audio material. Not very intensively though. The next week I'm going to do in German: Complete Michel Thomas and then listen to "You Speak German" stuff and start working with a Matlock book in German that I scored from an antiquariate. The next week I'm going to do in Icelandic: Probably nothing or something very minimal. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4830 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 7 of 29 08 October 2013 at 12:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hi Henkkles,
I'm glad it's going well. I don't know if you saw my thread about ParallelBooks and Aglona Reader: Parallel Books & Aglona Reader here also message number 7. I'm really impressed with Aglona Reader, and it's a lightweight "install" on a PC. (There is an Android version, but I don't have an Android device, so I have no experience of that). I've always thought parallel books should be an excellent method, but in practice, I found them difficult to use. Aglona seems to get over at least some of the potential problems. Now, there aren't many PBO format books publicly available yet - there are 5 English-German PD books mentioned on that site. If you find any of them attractive, then it might be worth having a go. One can also prepare one's own PBO books using Aglona reader, and I plan to try doing this since I have several originals and translations in e-book form that I could use as my "raw material". I suspect it's not quite as easy as seems to be suggested there, and I think the critical thing would be, as ever, the quality of the translation used (and how complete it is). I doubt if you'll have time to attempt creating your own in the time before your trip, but if one or more of those existing books is any good to you, well, there you go. (Admittedly, they are translations from German to English and not the other way around, which is not ideal from the purist's point of view, but for classic works, I'd take the risk). One could also use it for shorter texts of course, like web articles, etc, if you have the translation. In fact that would be good practice in parallel text creation. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4255 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 8 of 29 08 October 2013 at 3:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you. I actually have a newly acquired Android tablet so I'll be using that Aglona program. And as it is it supports two of my biggest TLs, how splendid.
I got a new easy reader from the library from a series that says their stories contain "600-1000 lemmas". I also got Colloquial Icelandic from the library, through which I will start working with exactly one week from now. I will probably try to start translating Icelandic to German and German to Icelandic to best of my abilities once I'm in the intermediate phase in both in a few months. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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