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Expug’s All at On(c)e Log - TAC14 | ||
Tags: Papiamento | Estonian | Georgian | Native Materials | Norwegian | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | Mandarin | Russian | German | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| 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 265 of 415 19 July 2014 at 7:11pm | IP Logged |
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I must admit that I'm a little disappointed by your experience with TY Estonian since I've championed that course to you and anyone else who's wanted to learn Estonian, although I do sympathize with the problems that you faced in the second half of the book. (I too was a little surprised about how much the authors steepened the learning curve as I worked through the course, although in hindsight, I attributed the rising difficulty to the fact that it becomes ever more difficult to provide useful rules of thumb that help foreigners construct grammatical utterances on their first try. My particular problem in Estonian has been the partitive plural - its formation is about as arbitrary as assigning gender in German nominals).
On the plus side, I really liked TY Estonian because it has a lot of exercises and dialogues (contributing to the length of each chapter) and so I could at least start to develop a feel for is and isn't grammatical even if trying to come up with rules to construct things is practically fruitless. I hope that you have better luck with Basic Course of Estonian (I assume that you use it with the free audio from Indiana University?). When I was in Finland last month, I was thinking about buying the Finnish edition of Saame tuttavaks which is an introductory course of Estonian with 4 CDs. In the end I turned it down since I couldn't ultimately justify spending almost 50 Euros on an otherwise excellent course for beginners of a language that I don't plan to revisit for some time (if at all). 2 persons have 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 266 of 415 19 July 2014 at 8:29pm | IP Logged |
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I hope you don't mind if I ask you a question about a resource you used for Georgian. I know you finished the Culture Talk: Georgia series, and I was wondering how you went about using them. I just found them for Ukrainian, but I'm trying to think of the way to maximize this resource (especially as Ukrainian isn't a language with a lot of good listening material for beginners or learners).
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| 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 267 of 415 19 July 2014 at 8:48pm | IP Logged |
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Saame tuttavaks seems to be the way to go in terms of conversational Estonian, Chung. Unfortunately it is also inacessible to me. I do believe, though, I have enough textbooks before I start native materials. Understanding the grammar is not the hardest task, surprisingly Georgian helped a lot. What I am going to need are native resources I still don't know I'm going to get. I'm planning on using all the three (?) video courses available then search for stuff on Youtube.
@Fuenf_Katzen: the videos are short and have translation, so I recommend you to treat them as textbook lessons, that is, to go through them intensively. I don't always do that because I lack the necessary patience, but even so I think I learned a lot about genuine conversartional language from them. Maybe you should do one after another then review them to see how much you have improved since you started. (They aren't linear btw, but you do get recurrent spoken expressions you eventually get used to). You should use them prior to start other native materials, not aimed at learners. They will present important insights on the culture as well. 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 268 of 415 22 July 2014 at 12:31am | IP Logged |
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So, I've started working on Basic Course in Estonian. I also heard of Estonian General Reader and Estonian Literary Reader, but these remain inaccessible.
As far as BCinE goes (did the first two lessons), I have to say the lessons are very long, too. The recordings are also very slow and I do hope they get faster, as spending over 30 min in a lesson was not what I had in mind at this stage. It's my first experience with an FSI-like course and, even though I'm not the language drill person or the lesson exhausting person, I must say I like it so for. Yes, long lessons and lots of words introduced at once are a key for frustration, but I'll try to be patient. After all, that's a lot of lessons and so much audio going on. I hope I manage to learn at least a bit from each lesson. I'm doing the dialogues only by listening to the answers, though I'm translating the dialogues: they're still easier than the long ones from TY Estonian. As for other languages, no breakthrough to report. I'm just adding up to the counter. Sometimes it's a bit boring. Almost 2 years with Russian and I still can't read stuff. 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 269 of 415 24 July 2014 at 10:38pm | IP Logged |
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Time for another update. I'm sticking to plan lately, not much going on, but one can always sum up interesting (I hope) facts now and then.
I second emk's idea that some days your brain is just sharper. As I try to do little bits for a lot of languages each day, I don't see much progress in the short run. Even so, at a few days you can notice some changes that renew your motivation, and today was one of these days. It started with Chinese and one episode of Tutu. I could follow it comfortably, not understanding everything obviously, but enough to laugh a bit. Then at the episode of 'Happy Journey Across China' I notice my decoding speed for Chinese improved to the extent that I'm closer to being able to analize both Chinese and English and learn from it. Even at longer sentences, I can understand from the pauses and inflections in voice when a syntactical term ends and another starts. By doing this I can relate to the Chinese subtitles (after taking a glance at the English ones) and process synergically audio and video. Anyway, what is helping me the most with Chinese is the Memrise course HSK4. I'm learning many more words that are of daily use, no longer words of obscure meanings just for the sake of radicals. I'm also managing to make sense of bysillabic words easier. For example, when I saw the word 看法 for the first time I could understanding it directly (it's ponto de vista in Portuguese; was translated at the course as 'a way of looking at things'. I believe the bisyllabic world is the stage where the Chinese writing system starts to make the expected 'sense' we always thought it would. Even if both characters are arbitrary (for example both 看 and 法 look arbitrary when compared to their meanings of 'see' and 'law'), when you take for granted what each means, then the way both combine to form the word for 'point of view, in a abstract way' makes sense. Russian reading is still tiresome, but even so I noticed a small improvement today. I finally 'found' the missing Upper-intermediate level lessons, so I had to 'start over' with them and take a break from 'Advanced Audioblog'. It's worth it, I like the Upper-Intermediate level. They are much more consistent with the level claimed than the Chinese ones, which are a continuum of equivalent lessons from upper-beginner to upperintermediate. I'm nearly giving up following the audio alongside with the text for Basic Estonian, given that the speaker is so slow and there's nearly an hour each day. So, I just keep working with the sample sentences, grammar, exercise and conversation while all the soundfiles are played on the background. I'm happy with what I've learned so far, in less than two months of the language. I have little problem in assigning each word its equivalent syntactical function, and that makes translating possible. I'm also reinforcing vocabulary in a consistent way, thanks to this basic course that is FSIesque. This format is fine for an 'alien' language such as Estonian. Only in the case of Romance languages, for example, that'd be too much, unnecessary repetition. It's like the antithesis of Assimil, that works better for closer languages and/or the ones you already have a large vocabulary discount for. Norwegian was the good surprise of the day. For the first time I'm following my current Norwegian book better than my Frenc one. Not to the extentof understanding more words - far from that, but of being able to follow the story and being attached to it when I try to read both extensively. What I mean to say is: if I'm following the story in the Norwegian book comfortably and with interest even when reading extensively, that means my Norwegian got much better. The reason I'm reading Norwegian and French extensively these days is that I'm often busy during their 'times' and thus has to be faster. Today, for example, I had to go downtown and brought the tablet for reading while waiting in line. I have a reason to believe that German is even better than Norwegian now. It isn't even listed under my profile, but I'm close to reaching basic reading fluency with an occasional lookup at the dictionary for clearing things up. Moreover, my German listening is much better thanks to the better articulation and smaller set of vowels and tones of the language itself. Sometimes I think both languages improve 'paripassu' and sometimes I think German is getting better, but then I remind myself that actively Norwegian is much easier and Norwegian sentences just pop up in my mind everytime, while I need to think a lot to come up with a German sentence. One of the signs that I'm getting better at a language is when I start to translate lyrics into it mentally, not getting stuck at the first verse but actually going up to the chorus, and this is what is happenning to Norwegian now. I don't know why (why I do this mental translation and why this is happening to Norwegian now), it just happens. So, now I can say only listening comprehension is standing on the way to my change of status for Norwegian in my profile. One more thing about German: I'm happy about progress so far and also about my old TY textbook. I believe this is going to be my last one, or maybe first but last. That opens up a slot for another language I want to brush up from A2/low B1, and that will be either Spanish or Italian. My plan is to work quickly on early Assimil lessons (the way I did with German, 7 lessons a day), then a grammar-focused textbook then native materials-only. 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 270 of 415 26 July 2014 at 12:44am | IP Logged |
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Another day that passed smoothly. The highlight moment was when I noticed I understood 90% of an episode from Tutu, in Chinese. I realized that in spoken Chinese intonation plays a large role in telling about syntactical roles. It's like we learn to understand from intonation what's the main clause, what's a subordinate, what's an adverbial sentence of time. I'm also getting used to pay attention and prepare for the most important things within a sentence. I believe my focus on a lot of listening in Chinese is starting to pay off. And today I made sample recordings of each of my languages to friends, and they found them all nice, with a good intonation.
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 271 of 415 26 July 2014 at 12:50am | IP Logged |
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Will you upload those recordings here? I'd love to listen to them. Edited by fabriciocarraro on 26 July 2014 at 12:50am 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 272 of 415 26 July 2014 at 1:13am | IP Logged |
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Ok here we go...it was all improvisation, no previous text:
Georgian http://vocaroo.com/i/s1wFG5OjRjAh Russian http://vocaroo.com/i/s1SxNiAwZycl http://vocaroo.com/i/s19OwtNxWAeT Norsk http://vocaroo.com/i/s0GbNefinnCp Chinese http://vocaroo.com/i/s0lqgqdH7QMH There were more but I was introducing myself and giving away personal info... ;) (Edit: fixed URL tag in Chinese) Edited by Expugnator on 27 July 2014 at 12:38am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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