Serpent’s log (Language Learning Log) Language Learning Forum

Serpent’s log
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Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log

119 messages over 15 pages: << Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 13 ... 14 15 Next >>

Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6596 days ago
9753 posts - 15779 votes

4 sounds
Speaks: Russian*, English, Finnish^C1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish

Message 97 of 119

26 October 2008 at 3:27pm | IP Logged

Why would I look for excuses? :P The problem is that I haven't found any Romanian broadcasts:( My fave channel is broadcasting some match in Romania's league...
As for the terminology, I can't think of anything except wikipedia.
1 person has voted this message useful

Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6596 days ago
9753 posts - 15779 votes

Message 98 of 119

31 October 2008 at 12:06pm | IP Logged

I've decided to try Pimsleur Romanian and I really like it. Like most people say, it's really very nice introduction to the target language :) especially if you didn't have to pay a crazy sum of money for it ;)
Forgot to write that I got a few new books recently: some detective story in Portuguese in the same format that the Ukrainian book I used (translations after each phrase and some explanations), a book with Esperanto translations of Pushkin that I bought at Lingva Festivalo last weekend, and I also won a quiz on Slavic languages there and the prize was the book about Karlsson-on-the-roof in Belarusian :)))))))))) By the way, I'm currently reading The Unfinished tales (Tolkien) in Finnish and I've come across very few unknown words so far :)

I wish things were going as nicely with my English studies at university :/ there's way too little new stuff and I have no motivation at all... I guess I don't love the language any more :( any tips on reviving love to a language?

edit: typo

Edited by Serpent on 31 October 2008 at 5:26pm
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Leopejo
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
Italy
Joined 6108 days ago
675 posts - 724 votes

Speaks: Italian*, Finnish*, English
Studies: French, Russian

Message 99 of 119

31 October 2008 at 12:53pm | IP Logged

Serpent wrote:

I changed my mind over time, and wholeheartedly agree with you. I'd like to hear what you think of it... after some 70-80 lessons :-D

Quote:

I wish things were going as nicely with my English studies at university :/ there's way too little new stuff and I have no motivation at all... I guess I don't love the language any more :( any tips on reviving love to a language?

People will help you love English again. My drastic suggestion would be to change your course. But no really, everything you "must" do will eventually become boring, whether it is English, Romanian or mathematics.
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Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6596 days ago
9753 posts - 15779 votes

Message 100 of 119

31 October 2008 at 5:25pm | IP Logged

I've found only the basic Pimsleur course that consists of 10 lessons :/
As for my English classes, the university system in Russia is not very flexible... I'd have to change the university or take entrance exams in summer and start everything over again at a different faculty, perhaps not having to take the courses I've already had but still having to study for the same 5 years as those that are in their last school year now :/
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Leopejo
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
Italy
Joined 6108 days ago
675 posts - 724 votes

Speaks: Italian*, Finnish*, English
Studies: French, Russian

Message 101 of 119

31 October 2008 at 5:37pm | IP Logged

Serpent wrote:

I've found only the basic Pimsleur course that consists of 10 lessons :/

Oh, right. You won't learn much, but you'll still get the feel for the language and perhaps a better pronunciation :-)
Perhaps you found Assimil Romanian too, but only with an Italian textbook. I don't think that with your Portuguese and Latin you'd understand it, but perhaps the all-Romanian audio could still help?

Quote:

As for my English classes, the university system in Russia is not very flexible... I'd have to change the university or take entrance exams in summer and start everything over again at a different faculty, perhaps not having to take the courses I've already had but still having to study for the same 5 years as those that are in their last school year now :/

You can't always do what you'd wish. Just don't think about it as something to like, but as a goal to reach. And perhaps you should read Tolkien in the original for a change (or have you already read it 37 times in English?).

Remember also that English is the language of this forum, the language of many of your friends, the language of Joseph Conrad and William Blake, the language of Dumbo & Bambi, and if there is some obscure field of study you are particularly interested in (the obscure links of archaic Finnish with Proto-Slavic? The mutual influence of Death Metal and Heavy Rock?), chance is that it is studied and written about in English. :-)

Edited by Leopejo on 31 October 2008 at 5:38pm
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Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6596 days ago
9753 posts - 15779 votes

Message 102 of 119

31 October 2008 at 5:51pm | IP Logged

Leopejo wrote:

:-))))))

As for Tolkien, I read about half of the third volume of The History of Middle-Earth (The Lays of Beleriand) in the original in September and it didn't feel as nice as reading in Finnish... I truly enjoyed reading The Letters of Father Christmas though, perhaps the arctic bears' Finnish names helped? :DDD
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Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6596 days ago
9753 posts - 15779 votes

Message 103 of 119

01 December 2008 at 7:57am | IP Logged

Ouch. My log has slipped on the 4th page of the subforum!

I spend the last 4 days working at Non/fiction book fair. It was wonderful, I used my Finnish a lot (I was working at the Finnish stand). This was my first job ever, actually.
So naturally I've been working even more than usual on my Finnish... and since my request was declined ;) and there are still just 24 hours in every day, this has resulted in neglecting my other languages to varying degrees. I think it's time to have a look at my goals for the second half of this year and make up for the neglection (surely not by neglecting Finnish, I would die if I had to do that! LOL).

Serpent wrote:

Here are my plans for the rest of the year:

Finnish
Start shadowing again. Do more scriptorium. WORK ON MY LISTENING COMPREHENSION. Start going through the business Finnish textbook that I've recently bought. Keep on learning the vocabulary, polishing the grammar and reading.

Not surprisingly, this is the language with my progress in which I'm satisfied. I haven't done almost any shadowing or scriptorium though, I also decided my grammar polishing was not so urgent now that the book fair was coming and other aspects of the language needed more attention. And funny enough, I've ended up not starting the business Finnish course. I knew I wouldn't have to interpret business negotiations anyway :)
I heard a lot of wonderful Finnish futuristic poetry yesterday, and I'm thinking of trying to shadow some good recording - usual shadowing, even of interesting podcasts on linguistics, has become too boring for me. I haven't tried shadowing audiobooks though...
Plans for December: reading, scriptorium, grammar-polishing, maybe also "crazy shadowing" or business Finnish.

Serpent wrote:

English
Start shadowing. Try to study better at university and use what I have to do to improve what I need to improve anyway, instead of dismissing it as useless and doing it badly or not doing at all. For example, I hate our home-reading classes but since listening comprehension is my weakest skill in all languages except German, I'll listen to audiobooks of the stuff that we read and discuss. I'm not setting any specific goals as far as the articles at get-it-write-online.com are concerned, but I'll try to read more of them, at least a bit more.

I'm indeed listening to the audiobook of Theatre by Maugham for my home-reading classes but other than that I'm doing very little and getting even worse results than last year :/ Goal: not becoming kicked off from the university.

Serpent wrote:

Russian
Yeah, Russian. A couple of weeks ago I decided I should make effort to stop using English words in Russian when I'm too lazy to try to find an equivalent. Hopefully saying about this in public ;) will help me keep on doing it.

Probably the only good thing about my current somewhat negative feelings towards English is that I don't feel like using English words in Russian. I'm guilty of using Finnish words in Russian when talking with other assistants at the book fair though.

Serpent wrote:

German
Finish the Warum nicht course by DW and then probably some L-R or whatever I feel like doing. And of course do my best at university. My worst enemy in high school German were noun genders - so I'm going to put every single noun that we'll learn into a special notebook, writing the feminine ones on pink sheets of paper, the masculine nouns on blue ones and the neutral ones on violet ones. In order not to feel bored when things are still easy and miss some points I don't know I'll try to get some help from...
...Portuguese. My German notebook will be in German and Portuguese only :-)

I finished the course, although the last lesson was a huge disappointment :(
German is going wonderfully at university. I'm doing the way I planned with the new words and their genders - currently a bit behind though, but I still have filled quite many pages in my notebook. I didn't mention I was going to do shadowing in German and I didn't do it, perhaps there's connection here. So: I'm going to do shadowing in German. I'm also going to find a book that describes things like where you have to put your tongue when pronouncing a particular sound, and make sure I pronounce sounds the way they're described.

Serpent wrote:

Portuguese
I'll try to reach the intermediate level solely by L-R, translating texts from Esperanto into Portuguese and having them corrected, drilling verb conjugation, shadowing and learning the vocabulary via Mnemosyne. If I'm still not intermediate by November I'll add other methods in order to fulfill this goal by the end of the year.

Got enough done to claim I was indeed studying Portuguese actively, but not enough for reaching the intermediate level. I'm not leaving the goal of getting there by the end of the year, but I won't be terribly disappointed if I end up not fulfilling it. I'm going to read the parallel book with explanations that I got, wanna see how far it brings me. I'll also try my best to finally get the irregular verbs down - it's a violently raped version of the elegant Latin system, but I can do nothing about it. Other than that, I'll decide later on what I'm going to do.

Serpent wrote:

Hopefully the same things, along with using Esperanto more (e.g. discussing the corrections to my translations at lernu forum) will bring me to basic fluency in Esperanto by the end of the year.

I've done nothing but vocabulary learning. Going to do the exercises that Sprachprofi has sent me. Not sure what will follow, frankly speaking at this very point I'm not very motivated about Esperanto, but I do think things will get better.

Serpent wrote:

Latin
No clear plans yet. First of all I'll read some parts of LOTR translated into Latin that I've found online... Then I might read some works on linguistics in it or L-R whatever I can find...

No clear plans and nothing done, except the repetitions in Mnemosyne. I haven't even read the translated parts of LOTR o_O Going to do so.

Serpent wrote:

Belarusian
Learn more vocabulary. Start using genuine materials.

Not much of the former and none of the latter. Going to concentrate on the vocabulary for now, and probably read the children's book that I won during my Christmas holidays.

I wasn't learning Romanian back then. Going to finish Pimsleur and keep on watching matches commented in Romanian. And do whatever I feel like.

I also might start toki pona, it never hurts to learn 118 words and the rules of using them ;) It's a weird language as far as fluency is concerned though - if you don't need to analyse the syntax to understand things then you've just memorized the way of expressing a concept... which kinda kills the principle of thinking in simple ideas :/

Oh, and I'm not in for Total Annihilation. Both times when I participated nothing changed except the title of my log.
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Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6596 days ago
9753 posts - 15779 votes

Message 104 of 119

03 December 2008 at 4:42am | IP Logged

mi wile lon tomo sona. taso mi sona e toki pona.

Edited by Serpent on 03 December 2008 at 4:43am

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