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What Expug is doing in 2015 (TAC n more) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4522 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes  Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 161 of 364 13 May 2015 at 12:00am | IP Logged | |||||
I had a quick look. You are tough. I hope this isn't your first book in nynorsk. I wouldn't want to read that without a popup dictionary (which I don't think exists for nynorsk). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 162 of 364 13 May 2015 at 11:37am | IP Logged | |||||
Great to hear that you've had success, sounds like Héro Corp has been useful. I'm keen to check it out. I sometimes get into a comfort zone with my listening comprehension and think I understand everything, but every so often I get a shock and realise it still needs improvement. At one point last year I was hanging out with two French girls who were close friends, and I really struggled to follow their very fast and slangy conversations. That pushed me to keep working on colloquial listening and seek out series like the ones you've discussed. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5010 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 163 of 364 13 May 2015 at 8:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It looks like Héro Corp took over the forums recently. In how many threads are we
discussing it right now? Three? Four? :-D 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 164 of 364 14 May 2015 at 12:00am | IP Logged | |||||
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@daegga: I find it extrtemely difficult too, but also regarding the style: a lot of description and the actual narration is diluted, and few dialogues. It is hard to figure out when something is actually going on.
@garyb: It was really interesting to check how this progress happened. The French meetings we have here were quite helpful both for improving comprehension and for progress checking. Pity they don't happen often. There are usually 4 or 5 natives to 15 Brazilians but the natives take the lead and talk almost all the time, so it's good practice. I went to one of these last year and noticed I could understand the French talking between themselves. At the one that took place this year they even wondered if I weren't francophone, as it had become even easier and my conversation had also improved thanks to the colloquial TV series without subtitles. One trick: it helped me a lot when I was listening to Le trône de fer on the background while working on typing Italian Duolingo sentences. I wasn't forced to pay attention to the French and so it came naturally. I believe when it comes to listening, more than any other skills, the diversity of techniques and exercises does make a difference. No wonder a learner of Chinese, lorinth, posted this link about transcription exercises for Mandarin. We don't have to be that radical to make transcription our main exercise for French, given the greater familiarity of the language, but my point is that doing different activities in different contexts helps a lot. À propos de Hero Corp, le nom de la série s'écrit officiellement sans l'accent sur la lettre 'e', tout comme en anglais ;) @Cavesa, really?! I only know of this one and Elenia's log...missed any? ============================== Accomplished Language Textbook: E nagu Eesti 
I'm happy that I finished this book because it was taking me a lot of time. That's what you get when you work with a monolingual textbook that wasn't OCR'ed. I had to translate almost everything, and it got worse with the exercises. Nevertheless, it is a great book for learning linguistical competencies. Not so great for grammar because it actually doesn't explain anything. Like I usually say here, I suggest to keep the monolingual textbooks for one's final steps before - or while - starting to work on native materials. E nagu Eesti has some of the best dialogues I've seen on textbooks. They have the appropriate size to allow for the conversations to sound authentic but still deal with the required grammar and vocabulary. The recordings are quite good. The book has over 30 lessons, if you count the reviews which take place every 5 lessons and are great to make you realize you actually did learn something. The exercises are also among the most creative I've ever seen for language textbooks. They are just too many for most of the lessons,and the ones that annoy me the most are of the fill-in-the-blanks type, because I can't OCR and get a proper translation because a word will be missing, so I have to type the whole sentence by looking at the question and the answer. Anyway, what is most motivating about this book is to think that it teaches you so much and there is still a sequel T nagu Tallinn. So, you rest assured that you have enough guides on your path to learning Estonian. Now I'm going for the textbook I bought at Munich, Lehrbuch der estnischen Sprache. It is indeed meant for self-learners, but it doesn't seem that much self-learner friendly. I've flipped through it and there are some exercises that are more like the ones found in textbooks aimed for classrooms, such as E nagu Eesti above. Also, there are several dialogues which are not translated, which means I will have to OCR a lot with my phone. Started a new author at 'Short Soviet Stories' and this specific story deals with engagement, marriage and so has a lot of vocabulary in common with the soap opera Poor Nastya. As a result, I understand almost everything from this story and read it quite fast. (I say it in the present because I only read two pages a day so I'm going to continue it tomorrow). So I started Fais pas ci, fais pas ça. I already understand better than I did at the beginning of Hero Corp. I still havr to focus in order to understand, and I couldn't transcript everything, for sure. All in all, it is not my favorite genre of series but it is one I need. You get to learn all sorts of conversations within a family. Maybe having similar series for each language, with transcripts, grammar explanations, exercises, Anki/Memrise decks would do the trick better than most insipid textbooks? I will see how far I can go with this one. I still prefer stories, and I will probably resume Le trône de fer and then maybe try to find this H thing for download and so I have to look at my files again. By 'files' I mean a draft I saved at Gmail where I write every media suggestion I read on logs as well as the paths I plan for my languages when it comes to textbooks (I've already spent a hell of a time browsing past logs just to remember which order I had planned for my textbooks). No time for Turkmen or Italian today. I spent a long time searching for flights to Santiago for a trip that isn't that much likely to happen, because when you go from Google Flights to the actual companies you don't get the price you expected. At least I did 6 instead of 3 pages of Goethe-Verlag exercises for Mandarin and so I catched up (another thing that took a lot of time as well). (EDIT: formatting). Edited by Expugnator on 14 May 2015 at 12:02am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 165 of 364 14 May 2015 at 10:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Yesterday evening I had a fearful moment. I took the bus to attend an appointment and when I passed through the turnstile I pulled the loop of the schoolbag I used to work so I could pick up a book to read while on the traffic jam. I let the bag drop, and there is my external HDD with all the stuff. I was frightened it could crash like my first one (when I lost everything I had for Russian and Chinese, as I had no backup in my home computer). Luckily the shock was absorbed, and it is less likely to get damaged when it is not functioning anyway. I waited till I came back home and tested, and everything is okay. Even though now I don't think I have stuff that is exclusively at the external HDD, I should still buy another one for backup. SDDs are still expensive, I could only buy 240Gb and that's too little since this HDD alone is 1TB.
Today I learned an important word at Happy Journey Across China, 在理. I like it the most when I learn a new word with two characters I already know, it's like doing more with less and taking profit of what I already know, showing that it wasn't in vain ;) There are some things only a passion for languages and knowledge can explain. This morning I couldn't wait to get here and start browsing through my new Estonian textbook, start using it. I was excited with the idea and I came by bike. Since I was cycling fast, the autumn wind was cold and reminded me of when I was in Munich where I bought the book. I'm already in love with this book (it's ok, a book can be feminine, in Russian for example). Just as a headstart I read 10 pages of German (the book's introduction. What I said yesterday about having to translate stuff? Fugettabouti'. You can download the German translations from buske's site. I really like all that interactivity and supplementary stuff publishing houses like Buske and Asiathèque are bringing to the market. Why make the book thicker and more expensive if you can just leave accessory stuff like translation to exercises and answer keys online? So I went through the introduction on pronunciation, and although I knew what was being said it was explained quite well. I also learned quite a few German words, had to look a dozen up. Tomorrow lesson 1 starts, but I can't wait to get to the middle of the book where I'm more likely to review/consolidate important stuff. All in all, the new Estonian book will probably take me less time each day. But then today was incredibly busy, and I even need to help my brother with a college paper, which means I didn't achieve much after the Russian soap opera and novel. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4522 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 166 of 364 14 May 2015 at 10:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
You shouldn't regard anything on an SSD as safe anyway. SSDs lose data when not in use for longer time (usually 1 year, but the exact amount of time is not very predictable). 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 167 of 364 15 May 2015 at 11:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@daegga: many thanks for this important info I hadn't heard before. So I will have to do with using one HDD as a backup for the other in case of physical crash (which is likely) or just excessive use.
For those who are learning Portuguese: free audiobooks here!! It took me 1 hour to help my brother with his uni paper but I finished it and could resume studying. I had already studied Lesson 1 from Lehrbuch der estnischen Sprache (dorénavant LES) and it took me less than 40 minutes, which is an improvement. It can get better because this morning I was also busy. I then studied Russian and Georgian (by 'study' I mean using textbooks, as I do native materials later; actually I'm using readers for both) and paused for helping my brother. Just one hour behind and I hope I can finish all my tasks and read the forum. I worked so fast on the paper that when I finished I had a principle of burnout and it remained through the 14 French pages that were left and the 10 Norwegian ones. Besides, people were talking a lot out loud here. My burnout only got better after starting to watch the Norwegian video. It is quite useful to watch some video to regain focus when you have gone through some intensive reading/writing sessions. You get to focus on that specific activity and listening always helps with that, it's almost like rebooting my brain's RAM memory. Again no time for Turkmen or Italian. I had some pending repetitive work so I did it while watching Fais pas ci, fais pas ça. At least I got two episodes which means over an hour for the SC. I'm already noticing some improvement on my comprehension, meaning I start to understand some stuff even when less focused. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Elenia Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom lilyonlife.blog Joined 3857 days ago 239 posts - 327 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Swedish, Esperanto | Message 168 of 364 16 May 2015 at 1:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
The case for me to learn portuguese becomes stronger! Thanks for sharing the link :)
I have never really thought about it like that 'rebooting'. I tend to take a lot of breaks whenever I am studying, but I usually just play a game that is completely unrelated to languages. Although the saying 'a change is as good as a break' is one of my favourites, I've never really thought of just switching study method when I am burnt out. I will have to try it! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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