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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 |  | |
| 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 281 of 415 07 August 2014 at 9:14pm | IP Logged |
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Yeah it's not my point of defending GT either, it's just a funny "Easter Egg" I accidentally found, like so many others. I did see the issue of the space, but it came with an extra space thanks to the OCR, so it was a striking coincidence that it happened this way, really. Oh, and department store is the preferable translation, so it reinforces the idea that the engine automatically switched from the standard 'he' translation to the feminine noun when the context had to do with shopping for clothes and acessories, hehe.
----------------------- I am having a lot of fun with Colloquial Russian, now that I figured out ways to quickly print off some pages and OCR them. I'm currently using http://www.newocr.com/ . All I have to do si upload the lesson and then change the pages accordingly and press 'OCR'. I'm even managing to read the exercises more consciously, and I'm reading the texts in an intensive and graded way. It's important to get the meaning of abstract, linking verbs, nouns and prepositions so that you manage to quickly figure out the words you really need to look up. Needless to say the situation is even better with Estonian, and now a lesson is taking me 'only' 30 minutes, over almost 1 hour. It is important to get this time back as I wasn't succeeding in doing all my 'post-schedule' tasks which include native materials usage for Russian and German. Yesterday the only one missing was reading in Russian from a novel (I had read 4 pages before comprising Russianpod and Colloquial lessons, so at least my SC number wasn't totally ruined). I'm really enjoying Modern German Grammar. Explanations are very clear and go beyond morphology to talk about functionality. The approach is so consistent and innovative that I don't even notice much redundancy regarding what I had already read before. I only skim through some English grammar explanations for English-speakers, but this is something you can't avoid in a book aimed at this audience. Russian moves on, so does Georgian. In the past 2 days, ted2srt hasn't been working and so I was forced to read more Georgian, more carefully and actually do an L-R exercise of listening to the English and reading the Georgian subtitles. Before, I'd mostly ignore the audio and focus on quickly comparing the Georgian and the Portuguese subtitles. It may seem a banality, but when I started I simply had no means of taking any benefit from the Georgian subtitle in realtime, following the speech. A proof that my Georgian got better, and so did my English, btw. 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 282 of 415 08 August 2014 at 4:20pm | IP Logged |
More on Google Translator, Estonian language, Sexism and Consumerism:
Today I'm solving some issues related with moving to a new apartment, and I will also enjoy a slow lunch with friends. So, I don't expect to study the whole schedule. Will do as much as possible when I come back. 2 persons have 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 283 of 415 11 August 2014 at 10:06pm | IP Logged |
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I said before that Georgian helped me with Estonian, even though the languages have no grammatical affilitation. They have some morphological features in common such as the use of affixes that work like postpositions, and a unique word order that tends to send the main verb to the end of the sentence. Today I remembered another feature: a verbal form that means the speaker reports something of hearsay, not having experienced it themselves. In Georgian we have perfect tenses that do this, one called Turmeobit (turme means 'apparently"), and in Estonian there is a verbal suffix that does the job: -vat. The difference is that the Georgian one is a past tense, and doesn't work in the present.
I'm still pretty much busy with my relocation, but today I finished at least the main resoruces. I'm glad lots of resources are coming to an end. Last week I finished a French film, a French book and a German textbook. Today I finished a Norwegian novel and I will soon finish the TED talks available with Georgian subtitle and start watching Georgian series. 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 284 of 415 12 August 2014 at 11:56pm | IP Logged |
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Today at Contemporary Chinese's lesson I learned a word that accounts for an important island: 家乡 (hometown). Interesting how I felt like using it when talking to the Chinese I met when heading to my hometown, and I had the feeling that it would include the character 家, of course.
Contemporary Chinese isn't a bad textbook. Each lesson includes a few dialogues on the sametopic. Therefore, by doing each new vocabulary you both reinforce the vocabulary introduced and learn more from the same topic in a contextual way. More fun than wordlists. I'm still busier than usual, spending a lot of time with Colloquial Russian 2, reading in Chinese and some issues. I'm running out of time for reading from Agatha Christie's book on a daily basis, but at least I'm reading pages from Russianpod and from Colloquial Russian 2 and thus my Russian reading for the SC isn't that much under risk. 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 285 of 415 13 August 2014 at 11:48pm | IP Logged |
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Too busy today, no time for reading the forum for the past two days. Just some quick notes:
I finished Paulo Coelho's Maktub in Georgian/French and now I'm going to read a book from José Saramago, alongside with the original in my native tongue. I'm really excited as this is going to be my first book from Saramago, and I probably wouldn't read one of his books soon if it weren't for the SC and a Georgian translation. I realize again that I work better with short tasks. When the textbook study takes over 30 min or the video takes over 15 minutes it's easy to lose focus, to interrupt constantly and have to resume again and again. I can't wait to finish CR2 and Modern German Grammar so I can replace them by shorter lessons. 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 286 of 415 18 August 2014 at 11:35pm | IP Logged |
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Finally! After missing Thursday and Friday entirely and missing a few items on Wednesday (my last day of reading Agatha Christie's novel in Russian, my finel item, was August 7th) I managed to accomplish all the tasks today. Almost everything is arranged at my new home. I have a built-in bookshelf where I'd expect more language books would stand instead of only 1 row and a half, but I'm looking forward to increase this number. Will try to take a picture and share here.
Things are getting better with Russian. Studying texts intensively helped a lot. I'm managing to learn core abstract nouns that were hindering comprehension in texts. As for Georgian, I started a novel by José Saramago. Not a piece of cake either - long paragraphs and periods. It takes me a lot of time to flip and gaze through the Georgian translation and the edition. All in all, I'm utterly convinced that intensive study is the most effective tool at least until a B2 stage. It worked for French, I've started looking up more words in Norwegian today and I want to make it work for Russian, Georgian and Chinese. Even if I can't make the whole amount of material intensively, I can try to do 1, 2 pages. I'm sure this will teach me the same amount I was used to since the textbook ages, an amount that reduced to almost zero when I started doing my reading almost exclusively extensively. 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 287 of 415 19 August 2014 at 9:42pm | IP Logged |
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I'm managing to do things a bit more quickly. Still not enough time for the forum, sad thing. I'm faster with Basic Estonian as well as with Colloquial Russian - the latter will be over still this week.
The immediate problem are my mornings. They are busy and I still haven't adjusted my routine since I moved in and also moved to another gym, that only opens at 7am. I need this morning shift because that's when I can study from audio/video resources that I can't download and that are blocked for streaming from home. Currently they consist of the fifth season of Tutu - which I don't like that much, and of Happy Journey Across China. I want to finish Tutu and replace it with something for Estonian. I also do the podcast lessons for Russian and Chinese early in the morning because I can listen to them in the background and then read the text when I'm done with my morning tasks. The Chinese one will be over in a few months and only the Russian one will be left. I don't plan to replace them, so I am going to free up some time. There's also SRS: I watered the Memrise from the weekend and kept on planting, but I'm mostly neglecting Anki, only worrying about it when I'm really idling - and this isn't happening the past days. I had a better day with Georgian. I started the TV series Shua Qalaqshi, no subtitles, and understood much more than I expected! I usually get the shorter sentences, but with compound periods I can't decypher the sounds or the meanings. It's not only a matter of ear training, because I still can't read properly, but I expect to improve both skills. 10 minutes a day is a good number to prevent burnout. As for reading, I'm managing to do almost one sentence at once from Saramago's book, and that alone is already providing some results. It's much better with a contemporary novel than with a collection of short stories which characterized Paulo Coelho's last book. I'm confident. I did Chinesepod's first advanced audioblog lesson. I'm really happy with the outcome. I understand maybe 60% of the characters and I still need to follow close both the translation and the pinyin but I can get the overall meaning. Since each text is scattered in one page, I think I'm going to make my own interlinear - or interparagraphic translation so that I don't have to flip back and forth all the time. The second most important lesson I learned about reading the past days is that avoiding page-flipping is another key to sucess with reading. Norwegian comprehension is being worked upon again, as I'm watching Kong Curling with Norwegian subtitles and pausing when I come across something unknow - that is, I'm doing this intensively. It doesn't happen much often. If it weren't for the subtitles, I think my final comprehension would be slightly better than Georgian, but of course my Norwegian overall is way better, it's just that when I lose track of the words I end up not understanding anything within a sentence, even if theoretically I know 80% of the words in there. Something interesting about Norwegian is that my active vocabulary isn't that bad compared to the passive one. I'm reading a sort of a medieval novel and it's getting easier each day, now that the story is settling on. I'm trying to look up the most important words within this novel accordingly to the availability by the time I'm reading it. 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 288 of 415 20 August 2014 at 11:27pm | IP Logged |
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Another day of accomplished tasks! Only SRS is missing again, but not so when you manage to do more focused, almost intensive reading. I'm doing this for Russian and Georgian and I'm happy about it. Russian is starting to become transparent, at least short, simple texts.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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