25 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3 4 Next >>
Jerrod Senior Member United States Joined 6494 days ago 168 posts - 176 votes Studies: Russian, Spanish
| Message 1 of 25 01 June 2007 at 12:18am | IP Logged |
Today is the first day of summer in Russia! This means that it is time to discuss our short term summer goals. What will you be doing?
This summer I plan to improve my Russian by reading at least 20 readers by August 22 (first day of classes). I hope this will get me to a solid B2 reading level (which I am sort of at now, but as you know moving up each step gets harder the more advanced you are).
I also plan to work on listening comprehension by watching special Russian DVDs for the B1 and B2 level, and work with my conversation books (B1 and B2) and memorizing all the dialoges.
This is my last month in Russia so I will be living as a Russian and reading, thinking, etc.. only in Russian (except when here of course :)
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Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6694 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map
| Message 2 of 25 01 June 2007 at 4:44am | IP Logged |
1) my main task: try to think in Russian, - and learn even more Russian words so that I can read ordinary Russian texts without looking up half of the words. That language is harder than I had expected!
2) consolidate my recent advances in Modern Greek (and read the two grammars I bought in Athens two weeks ago)
3,4...) keep the rest of my languages alive and happy by reading and listening (and doing a word list once in a while in each of them)
Edited by Iversen on 01 June 2007 at 4:50am
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| egg_uk Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6409 days ago 203 posts - 204 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 3 of 25 01 June 2007 at 5:02am | IP Logged |
My main aims are:
1) to keep up the motivation to learn everyday.
2) to finish MT beginner and advanced, and start the further vocab parts.
3) to read at least one Spanish reader
4) to consolidate where i am upto
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| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7196 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 4 of 25 01 June 2007 at 5:47am | IP Logged |
My primary goals for the next couple months include:
- Learn all the vocabulary in a couple of audiobooks that I have been working on for some time. Be able to actively shadow them with high comprehension.
- Another trip through Assimil Using Spanish. Get all the vocabulary down. Be able to shadow everything with high comprehension. Do some supplementary reading on the topics presented.
- Continue making progress in FSI Basic Spanish.
- Go through about 60 pages in a frequency dictionary. That's primarily words with a frequency rating from about 1500 - 3000. I know a lot of them, but want to fill in the gaps.
- Continue through Streetwise Spanish and Speaking Spanish like a Native with a primary goal of familiarization, making notes, and of course learn a few things.
If I do all of that, I'll be making good progress on my 2007 goals. Assimil Using Spanish is not specifically a 2007 goal, but it is a multifacted challenge that I want to take out this year.
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| japkorengchi Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6671 days ago 334 posts - 355 votes
| Message 5 of 25 01 June 2007 at 5:53am | IP Logged |
Further expand my vocabulary in Japanese.
Make full use of the immersion camp in Seoul for my Korean.
If possible, start learning a bit of French/Vietnamese. I will not start learning them before my Korean outperforms my Japanese though.
And above all, get to know some language partners for Japanese and Korean as well as Mandarin. Ironically, I find it so difficult to find people to talk with me in Mandarin in Hong Kong, so I have to make some more Mandarin friends to activate it. For future’s sake I will have to make some French or Vietnamese friends as well.
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| Cisa Super Polyglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6410 days ago 312 posts - 309 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Hungarian*, Slovak, FrenchC1, EnglishC2, Mandarin, SpanishB2, RussianB2, GermanB2, Korean, Czech, Latin Studies: Italian, Cantonese, Japanese, Portuguese, Polish, Hindi, Mongolian, Tibetan, Kazakh, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew
| Message 6 of 25 01 June 2007 at 8:32am | IP Logged |
1. Practice and learn Spanish as much as I can every day, because in August I´m gonna take a serious school exam. Read the Lord of the Rings The Two Towers in Spanish, plus Mis putas tristes by Márquez and Eva Luna by Allende.
2. The same for French. Plus I want to read The Return of the King in French and something other, to listen to two French audiobooks.
3. The same for English, I want to take a Cambridge Proficiency exam, so I really gotta study much! (Plus get HP 7 and read it! :-P)
4. Practice Russian grammar and read Harry Potter book 1 in Russian.
5. Practice Japanese, enrich my vocabulary and Kanji knowledge and maybe try to talk to some Japanese tourists in my city... :-)
6. Well, I have enough to do, but maybe I´ll get through Lernu.net (Esperanto, not a big deal) or take a little closer look on Portuguese or Italian.
The summer vacation is the only time when I can deal more with languages, and I´ll take some exams next year, so wish me good luck! :-P
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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6588 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 7 of 25 01 June 2007 at 9:12am | IP Logged |
Yeah the first day of summer and it's got about 15 degrees colder :D
English: polishing some minor points, particularly concerning the usage of articles. preparing for an entrance exam, after it probably no studying till autumn.
Finnish: watching news at Ylex, learning the words from the 10000 most common list that I don't know, loads of practice, hopefully spending some time in Finland in August.
Ukrainian, Belarusian: getting a Belarusian textbook in late August. I'd love to learn both Belarusian and Ukrainian in a history-based/comparative context, but I have no clue how to do this. I have a pretty decent level of comprehension in both and can translate non-literary texts with 98% accuracy, my active skills however are nearly non-existant.
German, Yiddish: keeping alive
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6430 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese
| Message 8 of 25 01 June 2007 at 10:26am | IP Logged |
Italian: Read several novels (for vocabulary and becoming more comfortable and quicker at reading, as well as to gain more knowledge of the language, literature, and culture), become truly comfortable with the conditional and subjunctive (as opposed to merely being somewhat able to use them), improve my use of prepositions, read several books on Swiss geography/history/politics, and use the gathered information to pass the Swiss citizenship exam. Tools: Assimil, novels, newspapers, books on Switzerland, and possibly mnemosyne.
French: Solidify my knowledge of the basic vocabulary and grammar, increase listening comprehension, and aim for basic spoken and written conversationality using largely correct language. I can currently read newspapers, etc fairly easily, largely due to cognates, but I have a lot of fairly fundamental holes in my knowledge. Tools: Assimil, French in Action, native reading material, possibly online radio and mnemosyne.
German: Solidify my knowledge of basic vocabulary and grammar, increase my vocabulary, basic conversationality, and gain the ability to read German texts (I can currently get the gist of factual articles, but I miss far too many words, and novels are currently beyond me.) Aim for correct use of genders and cases. Tools: Assimil, "1000 Lektionen Französisch" (much of it is in both French and German, so it serves as a bilingual text), "Die Schweiz vom Bau der Alpen bis zur Frage nach der Zukunft" (which I also have in Italian), Deutsch Welle, and possibly mnemosyne.
Esperanto: better knowledge of the affixes, correct use of the correlatives, largely correct use of grammar, more vocabulary, better listening comprehension, basic conversationality. Tools: lernu, online bilingual texts, possibly mnemosyne.
Dutch: better comprehension of the spoken and written language. I'm happy to make slow progress with this language, as I have no pressing need for it, but I enjoy learning it. Tools: Assimil, occasional listening to and reading of native materials.
Persian: learn the writing system. Accustom myself to the sound of the language. This is another language that I'm happy to make slow progress with for now. Tools: Assimil, occasional use of native materials, light greetings/how-are-you level chatter with Iranian acquaintances.
Japanese: keep fighting my urges to resume study of this beautiful language. I will return to it once I have 'basic fluency' in German, French, and Esperanto, and am intermediate in Dutch and Persian, and -no sooner-. If this takes a couple of years, so be it; either way, it's off the plate for my short term goals.
[Any language unspecified]: similar to Japanese.
Clarification: by 'basic conversationality', I mean the ability to talk, comprehensibly, for an arbitrarily long amount of time about major topics of interest. I'm at this level in Italian and English. In the languages that I'm aiming for it in (German, French, and Esperanto), I can already manage some chatter, answer simple questions out of the blue, and express simple things, but not really maintain much of a spoken conversation; I can only maintain written ones slowly and with some aid from a dictionary, and I have done so in all three. This goal may be excessive for the short term, but regardless, it is the direction I am aiming for.
Edit:
Try out several learning techniques. I'm currently trying to take an 'onion' approach to Persian. Other techniques that I want to try: the sentence method with Mnemosyne, heavy explicit grammar study. If the latter goes well, Iversen-style vocabulary plus grammar study.
Try conlanging, inspired by Jerrod's post on his Russian friend. Read a significant amount about linguistics, phonetics, and most of all, grammar. Supplement with small amounts of wanderlust into languages with unusual (to me) grammatical aspects, without aiming for any type of proficiency in these languages on this pass at them.
Edited by Volte on 09 June 2007 at 5:42pm
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