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Zimena’s TAC 2015 - Team East Asian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Zimena Tetraglot Groupie Norway Joined 4597 days ago 75 posts - 146 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English, German, Spanish Studies: Czech, Mandarin | Message 1 of 7 28 December 2014 at 3:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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With a new year waiting just around the corner,it will be fun to try something new. Two or three new things, in
fact. First of all, this is my first attempt at keeping a log here. I’m signing up for TAC 2015 with Mandarin, so that will be my main learning focus. However, it’s also important to me to keep improving my other languages, so I will also talk about them sometimes. I’m not signing up for TAC in more than one language, though, so let’s talk about that one in this first post: Mandarin will be be my first serious attempt at a non-Indoeuropean language, as well as the first time I’m going to start a new language from scratch by myself. As you can see, that's another couple of new things, then. My main goal at this time can probably be summed up as "get started and keep going" - for now this is way more important to me than getting to a certain skill level in a certain amount of time. In addition to starting a new language, there is of course also another challenge here - the one that is about developing my own learning habits, staying motivated and finding out what works and doesn’t work for me. Right now I’m excited about both things, and that’s why I don’t have a very detailed plan for my learning. I’m mostly using online resources for now, and I keep finding helpful and fun stuff in various places. However, I’m also planning to work through the Michel Thomas Foundation course, then possibly other titles in the same series if it turns out that the method works well for me. I also bought a book to start familiarizing myself with the characters a while ago, and I’m planning to use that in combination with this website. Also, if you wonder why I would like to start learning Mandarin, I have a couple of main motivations. First of all, the writing system is very fascinating to me, and I would like to get to a point where at least something will look familiar, rather than just "awesome, but incomprehensible," as it is now. Another motivation is the fact that I’m a snooker fan, and there are also a couple of Chinese players among my favorites in that sport. (丁俊晖 (Ding Junhui) is one of my favorites, but I also like for example 肖国栋 (Xiao Guodong) and 梁文博 (Liang Wenbo). I tend to want to have a "connection" to languages I want to learn - such as a band/singer or some sports favorites - so you can see that snooker is that connection here. I suppose I will also develop some music connections with time, as I already find myself listening to some music in Mandarin, but I won’t say I know enough to have favorites yet. So, that’s it for a first post. 再见 Edited by Zimena on 28 December 2014 at 3:32pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6602 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 2 of 7 28 December 2014 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Welcome and good luck, honey! ♥
I soooo understand you about wanting a clear rather than abstract connection ;) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4802 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 3 of 7 29 December 2014 at 5:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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I second Serpent's sentiments. Connections are what got me to Japanese in the first
place. Then, the more time you spend with the language, and know about its culture, the more connections you end up making with it, because you'll start finding other things to love about the language and country. It's like a vicious cycle :) Welcome to the team, Zimena! Great first post and I look forward to a great year with you. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Zimena Tetraglot Groupie Norway Joined 4597 days ago 75 posts - 146 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, German, Spanish Studies: Czech, Mandarin | Message 4 of 7 29 December 2014 at 6:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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你好。
我叫 Zimena. 我是挪威国人。 I can say these and a few more words after listening to the first Michel Thomas Foundation course CD for about an hour last night. Unfortunately, I cannot really say that I know the characters yet, but I've been looking them up and practicing writing them today. I've also been practicing the characters for the numbers from 1-10 for a few days. Starting with these felt sort of good, because at least the first three are very easy, and the next six also look familiar to me because of an old game - I just never attempted to write them by hand until now. I'm planning to try to write a few new characters each day, and also keep practicing the ones from previous days until I feel confident that I can write them and recognize them. However, I don't think it makes sense for me to set a goal of so-and-so many new characters each day. The number I'm able to take in depends on my mood that day, as well as on my confidence level when it comes to previous characters, so I'll just try to make some progress each day. Oh, and one more thing: At first I just practiced writing on a regular piece of paper, but today I thought of the fact that using squared paper might help me align the strokes more correctly. Both my book and the site I use to see the characters and the proper stroke order uses squares to aid with this, so it makes sense to practice on squared paper, too. ...and that's a lot of talk about writing, and not that much about speaking or listening. So far I am enjoying the course CD, though, and I'm going to listen to it some more later tonight. I tend to have some time to myself in the evenings, so for now my plan is to spend that time listening/repeating, and then take some time during the day to look up characters and practice them. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4354 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 5 of 7 29 December 2014 at 6:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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Just a thing you might want to consider; writing characters might not be the most beneficial way of
learning. Despite popular opinion, production doesn't guarantee recognition, writing them takes time, you're most likely to find resources for the print-block style, while most people use something more akin to semi-cursive (aka the running style), and you might not have much use for this ability (at least compared to reading). However learning to write these beautiful, complex characters might be a lot of fun, so if you're sure you want to commit to learning to write them right from the start, perhaps try something like Anki (or other SRS), because managing reviews of thousands of characters efficiently, might prove a bit more difficult otherwise (although of course it's possible). Good luck in TAC'15! 加油！ 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6602 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 6 of 7 29 December 2014 at 6:51pm | IP Logged | ||
Wait, does it mean you started Czech with classes too? I kinda never realized. I know you've had some, of course, but I somehow assumed it wasn't from the beginning. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Zimena Tetraglot Groupie Norway Joined 4597 days ago 75 posts - 146 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, German, Spanish Studies: Czech, Mandarin | Message 7 of 7 30 December 2014 at 5:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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First of all, thank you for such a warm welcome, everyone. This definitely made me happy! It's also very nice to
see your input and questions. @Ezy Ryder: I must admit that I've never been able to make friends with Anki (or its SRS cousins). I tried using it a few times in the past, but it has always felt awkward to me. I'm simply not used to it, and I guess I'm a bit old- fashioned and tend to think that I have to get things through my hands in order to get them into my mind. I can, however, see that it would make sense to give it another try now. It's also true that recognizing characters is a different skill from being able to write them, and I simply did not think of that until I saw your reply above. I'll try to make a new Anki deck now, and I'll probably come back to how it goes in another post. @Serpent: Well, you're right that I did not start Czech with classes... but in my opinion I also can't tell when exactly I "started" it. The thing about me and Czech is that I started picking up words and phrases during my travels (I've traveled there about once a year since 1997, sometimes even multiple times a year), and I also picked up things from books, music and websites. However, I never actually "studied" it until I did that summer course in 2007. I guess you could say that my Czech is a bit all over the place. I understand quite a bit if the topic is travel- related or otherwise relevant to my interests (such as football or music), but on the other hand I can be completely stuck even on fairly simple things if they're about anything else. I also know a bunch of loose words and phrases, without knowing why things are said that way or which grammatical rules cause the words to have this or that ending. So, metaphorically speaking, my Czech could be said to be a jigsaw puzzle to which I have a bunch of pieces, but they don't necessarily connect to other pieces and I'm still far from seeing the picture. The summer course helped me connect some pieces, but there are still many that don't connect. Edited by Zimena on 31 December 2014 at 2:16pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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