YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4253 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish
| Message 17 of 33 29 January 2014 at 2:21pm | IP Logged |
I've been really enjoying Reading for French and Reading for German after your recommendations in the reading-based courses thread. How does Living German compare, both in terms of quality and difficulty? Do you think it would be useful to use the Living ______ series before, alongside, or after using Reading for ______?
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Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4252 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian
| Message 18 of 33 29 January 2014 at 4:12pm | IP Logged |
Alongside or before, I would say. I think they're good beginner's courses and definitely valuable even if you aren't an entire beginner.
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Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5165 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian
| Message 19 of 33 29 January 2014 at 11:29pm | IP Logged |
I second that. I normally use them after Assimil and before resources such as Linguaphone
and monolingual textbooks, and I find them to be of high quality. No way to compare them
to phrasebookish TY's and Colloquials.
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Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4252 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian
| Message 20 of 33 01 February 2014 at 5:45pm | IP Logged |
I would like some feedback on my pronunciation, because I think I have most of it down but some of the things are a bit off with it so I'd love to know what I'm doing wrong so I can break the bad habits before they get rooted very deeply:
Listen to these reading passages and comment on the mistakes and how it should be instead, I would be very thankful.
German
Edited by Henkkles on 02 February 2014 at 10:37am
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Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4252 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian
| Message 21 of 33 05 February 2014 at 9:40pm | IP Logged |
I am done with Living German! Finally.
Okay so L-R projects that are up and coming:
Hermann Hesse - Demian - English/German
Fëdor Dostoyevsky - Notes from the Undergound English/Russian
Arnaldur Indriðason - Jar City English/Icelandic
(a possible northern Sami experiment too)
I had some self reflection and I thought to myself that these three are my main languages as of now, and the rest are expendable more or less, if I'm taking classes in them. This ensures that everything is going to go well. The romance languages still aren't anything more than an experiment.
I'm trying and trying to find stuff to L-R in Estonian but Finns don't believe in Estonian audiobooks for some reasons, there aren't ANY materials for L-R in the libraries of my area.
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Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4252 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian
| Message 22 of 33 09 February 2014 at 2:36pm | IP Logged |
Okay so what's been going on:
Icelandic:
I just finished the 7th beginner book that I read through. An exhaustive list of my Icelandic learning:
Teach Yourself: Complete Icelandic
Teach Yourself Icelandic (Glendening)
Colloquial Icelandic
Icelandic for Beginners (Hippocrene, Helga Hilmisdóttir)
Learning Icelandic
Beginner's Icelandic
Allt í lagi - Islantia suomalaisille
What I still have left:
Íslenskir leskaflar
Lärobok i nutida islenska (Fries)
Icelandic Grammar Texts Glossary
A Course in Modern Icelandic
a textbook in German if I still can be arsed
I am getting increasingly better in Icelandic, my comprehension is miles ahead of what it was a month ago and I'm super confident in the progress I'm making.
German:
Chapter 1/8 done from Demian. It's not that difficult. Deutsch Direkt/Express starting soon.
Russian:
Third chapter in Notes from the Underground going on. It's so far very difficult but I'm just working with it and then I'll read it again by writing down all the new words and doing a root-search for each word and analyse the word in order to better remember it. This will also do as Russian etymology-training.
Not a lot going on on other fronts, or anything to really write home about.
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Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4252 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian
| Message 23 of 33 17 February 2014 at 12:26pm | IP Logged |
I have not given up, I have just been sick and have not had much energy to study under the last week. I am still sick but getting better but my ability to study is greatly decreased as of now, but I'll write more when there's more to be written.
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Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4252 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian
| Message 24 of 33 05 March 2014 at 1:09pm | IP Logged |
This has been a fantastic experiment in finding my limits, and even if it has been largely stumbling in the dark, everything is much more clear to me right now.
People always say that focusing on as few languages as possible is best, but because I have a think that I can't believe people unless I arrive at the same conclusion myself, I had to test. Hereon I will do the following radical changes;
1. I am dropping the Romance languages for now. In order to break through in an entire new family of languages one just can't be studying six others in the side, especially because I lack the passion. As much as I'd love to study them, my heart is with inflectional and fusional languages, and I will postpone the studying of these languages until a better time surfaces. My passion in Romance languages belongs to Italian, and I will have to start studying that at some point and use it as my key to the Romance family, but as of now, I've got too much on my hands.
2. I will not be "studying" Swedish per se, but I will start reading novels in it and such. This will just be a minor change as I'm just excluding it from my log because I'm not doing anything interesting with it.
3. I really want to start studying Hungarian. I fathom a huge interest in it and I want to up my Uralic knowledge. I will look into beginning it at some point, maybe during the summer.
So my routine will be decreased to:
IE:
Russian
German
Icelandic
URAL:
Estonian
Northern Sámi
(Hungarian)
Next step:
I will investigate in how to make this manageable.
Milestone goal:
To read "Little Prince" in all of these languages.
Edited by Henkkles on 06 March 2014 at 7:39am
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