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Super Challenge Update thread 2014-15 | ||
Tags: Super Challenge | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4887 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 105 of 198 30 June 2014 at 11:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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June Update
I've been resisting the temptation to star chase. I figure it's better for me to try and keep things balanced, and my goal was to have my first stars in September. I'm so tantalizingly close, though ... Italian Movies and TV (11.1) Il commissario Montalbano. Season 1. This is really enjoyable, and has a nice mix of detective-work and more personal drama. I had watched part of season 7 and was lost. It's much easier to follow from the beginning. Also, Sicily looks so dang beautiful in this show that I want to go there now. 
Gomorrah. (Matteo Garone, 2008). My first movie fail of the challenge. It's all guns and violence and hopelessness without any insight or context; the kind of show that makes the critics gush about how authentic and real it is. As if any of them know anything about the ghetto, and what's real and what's not. Italian Books (10.3) Haven't finished a complete book yet. Harry Potter is so damn long! French Books (17.2) La planète des singes. (Pierre Boulle, 1963) A classic sci-fi novel of ideas, and a relatively easy read. It's different enough from the Charlton Heston movie that I stayed interested throughout, though there are a few rough patches at the end that didn't make much sense at all. Still, recommended for sci-fi fans. French Movies and Podcasts (19.8) Irma Vep. (Olivier Assayas, 1996) This is the coolest movie. A has-been director brings Maggie Cheung in from Hong Kong to star in a remake of a silent film classic, Les vampires. Maggie Cheung's character doesn't speak French, and the crew communicates with her in various degrees of broken English. I got a certain Lost in Translation vibe, except this time it's the Europeans who aren't always making sense. 
I've been listening to a lot of podcasts; my favorites (i.e. the ones that I can actually understand) tend to be the stories on France culture that I'm already familiar with. I find I get really lost in 'new' stories. History podcasts have also been hit or miss for me, the I'm slowly getting better at following Au coeur de l'histoire Favorite stories of the last month: Peter Pan, ou le garçon qui ne voulait pas grandir Le Tour d'écrou de Henry James De la terre à la lune de Jules Verne Le Fantôme de Canterville de Oscar Wilde  Edited by kanewai on 30 June 2014 at 11:59pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 106 of 198 01 July 2014 at 3:13am | IP Logged | ||
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Last weekend, I focused on Italian. There wasn't quite as much football on as before:
28 Jun 2014 it-ch: brasile-cile 1:1 95 minutes (I watched the extra time and penalties in Danish) 28 Jun 2014 it-ch: colombia-uruguay 2:0 29 Jun 2014 it-ch: olanda-messico 2:1 29 Jun 2014 it-ch: costa rica-grecia 140 minutes reading: 28 Jun 2014 san pietroburgo e dintorni 29 Jun 2014 john foot - calcio I tweeted two books, but I started the first one the day I bought it in Peterhof. For Tadoku I recorded a total of 77 pages in Italian. As for the second one, it's a huge 600-page book about the history of Italian football. I read the sections about the referees and about the two teams from Torino, including lots of information about the tragedy of 1949 and its aftermath. On a lighter note, I now have both kinds of silver badges in Italian :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4907 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 107 of 198 02 July 2014 at 1:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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One mini-project I had for the first two months was to get to know Amélie really well. I have the script in English and in French, and read carefully through the French. It turns out the English script is pretty awful, so I made some corrections while I put them together into a parallel script. More importantly, I created a spreadsheet of vocabulary, essentially every word in the script except common words. In other words, any words not in the top 1000 French words. In most cases I included the frequency, IPA and a sample sentence.
After reading the script 3 times, I watched the film without subs for the first time (I'd seen it with subs about 5 times). It was an odd experience: I knew what everything everyone said meant, but a lot of the time they spoke so fast I still couldn't pick out all the words. The fast paced, run-on sentence narration is one of the stylistic features of the film, and I suspect even native speakers wouldn't be picking up every word of the narrator unless they were really paying attention. Here's a link to the vocab spreadsheet in my drop box. I hope it works! If anyone wants to import them into Anki or something, I'd be grateful if they could share it. As it would be copyrighted, I can't share the parallel script like that. PM if you want more info on the script. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| VivianJ5 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4260 days ago 81 posts - 133 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 108 of 198 02 July 2014 at 3:21pm | IP Logged | ||
Jeffers, this is wonderful! I just browsed through it, and although I haven't seen "Amelie" in a few years, and only saw it once, I'm looking forward to watching again after having reviewed your spreadsheet. Lots of great expressions, which are very hard to catch in normal conversation. Thank you! Edited by VivianJ5 on 02 July 2014 at 3:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Mohave Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Mohave1 Joined 4005 days ago 291 posts - 444 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 109 of 198 03 July 2014 at 2:43am | IP Logged | ||
Jeffers - Thanks so very much for sharing this! This is fantastic! I watched Amélie once for the Super Challenge, but planned to watch it again. I plan to study the vocabulary list, and perhaps, add some of this to my Flashcard Deck, and then watch again. Thanks again! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| wv girl Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5237 days ago 174 posts - 330 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish | Message 110 of 198 03 July 2014 at 1:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've finished Twilight in Spanish. It took about 4 weeks, but my reading wasn't consistently every day. Oddly,
when on vacation, my reading went down! Seems keeping an eye on the kids when they're in the ocean or pool really cuts into my own "free" time. Really feel my vocabulary improved. I've tried to not just read for meaning but to polish some common words and make them more active. For example, after a quote, you know you can just substitute "said," but it's good to get familiar with "murmured, mumbled, mused," etc. And this novel had a lot of expressions that it used over and over again. Although I'm not taken with the story, I bought the 2nd book, as it was only $3. It's good to be able to read more easily. I certainly couldn't have done it without the work I put in last year on the Challenge. Nice to see results! Libros: 1. Crepusculo, 504 paginas Haven't been watching anything on Netfix or online. One of my summer goals is to get some French and Spanish channels, to make watching/listening more accessible. Maybe I will look for some Spanish podcasts. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5332 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 111 of 198 07 July 2014 at 12:09am | IP Logged | ||
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June challenge update:
The first weekend I saw 2 films, and I felt fairly confident that I could do better, so I did not register that. The second weekend I did - nothing. And the third weekend I did - nothing. ( Nothing language related anyway, but I have made a few hundred glasses of rose jelly :-) Then the last weekend I listened to the entire 11.5 hours of audiobook of Harry Potter in Russian - and half an hour of it again for good measure. Those 12 hours were my maximum weekend effort. I did not get to do any reading I could register, but I timed myself over a few pages to an average of 5 minutes per page, without looking up anything. At some point during the challenge we will do this again, and I trust that my results will be better then :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4887 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 112 of 198 17 July 2014 at 1:46am | IP Logged | ||
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July challenge - French
I used L'homme qui plantait des arbes, a ten-page short story and 30-minute animation. I did it over the course of four days rather than back to back. Round one - watched the video without subtitles. I understood the story, though missed some transitions Round two - I read the text straight through, with no dictionary. I understood 95% of it; there were a couple dozen words and a small handful of phrases I struggled with. Round three - Read the text while the animation played. This is where it got interesting; I found that it really calibrated the way I read and the internal voice I use. I actually understood most of the words that I hadn't understood the first round of reading. Round four - I re-watched the video, and was really surprised at the huge leap in my comprehension. It's interesting how different techniques work at different stages in our learning. I had done variations of listen-read before, and it was useful, but it was always slow work. This is the first time where I noticed such a quick improvement over such a short period, and it seems to have carried over into my comprehension of other podcasts. I followed EMK when he was doing something similar with Buffy, but I don't think I was at the right point where it was useful for me. Whereas now this is something I want to integrate more into my studying. My reading skills have really outpaced my listening skills; this will help to bring my listening up to par. I'll try this with Italian next week. I'm not expecting as big a leap. animation text: www.inlibroveritas.net/oeuvres/16698/l-homme-qui-plantait-de s-arbres And for those who missed the notice (it got buried pretty quickly in the other thread), here's the challenge:
Edited by kanewai on 17 July 2014 at 2:35am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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