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Solfrid Cristin TAC 2012 Team Sputnik | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5396 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 9 of 270 28 December 2011 at 7:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Cristina, your enthusiasm is really making me want to learn Russian (and Greek), sooner rather than later. I keep trying to convince myself that 20 minutes a day on Assimil wouldn't add that much to my language load, right? Maybe once I finish my TESOL Certification in the next few weeks, I will give in!
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| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5335 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 10 of 270 28 December 2011 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
You are sooo right :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| senor_smile Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6387 days ago 110 posts - 115 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Russian | Message 11 of 270 28 December 2011 at 10:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I too have an old Russian deck in Anki that I accumulated from last year. I have nearly
1,000 entries in it, so I may at least passively know many more words than I originally thought. It is never a bad thing to simply start an Anki deck over, although I am kind of feeling the challenge of the rest of my vacation being used in part to catch up on this huge deck. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5557 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 12 of 270 29 December 2011 at 7:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I loved the image of blank sheets of paper and chubby colouring crayons to kick off the new year. Which reminds me...it's time to open up a box of Lego and start moulding some Play-Doh figures to accompany my new language projects (little motivational friends of mine). :)
Best of luck in making big strides forward in Russian and Greek this year, as well as whipping all your other languages into shape. It sounds like you have plenty of interesting books and films to choose from, and I already know you have great passion and determination. I hope 2012 is much kinder to you, and leads you, step by step, to discover beautiful new vistas on the language landscape below. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5335 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 13 of 270 01 January 2012 at 11:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@senor smile: An Anki deck can always wait - it is our servant, not the other way around!
@teango: Thank you for your kind words. I have full confidence in 2012 being a great year, in which we all see great progress in Russian. With these team mates, how could we not :-) And here we go! I have had this interesting experiment the least few days. In an attempt to wrestle the kids away from the computers and the TV, (they have gotten an overdose during Christmas) I have ordered them to spend one hour on outside activities, one hour on housework/tidying their room, and one hour on reading/language related activities per day. When they got to the last part we have had a few interesting sessions, where my youngest daughter sits reading in English, my oldest in Spanish while our Spanish house guest started out writing down survival phrases in German (picking my brain), continued reading Twilight in French, which I had bought but so far not read, and finished off reading the Spanish based Norwegian grammar I bought her for Christmas. All excellent activities, the only catch being that they all use me as a living dictionary. So my youngest daughter was asking me about English words (fortunately, very few), my oldest about unknown Spanish words (a few more), and our Spanish guest confidently expected me to translate her survival phrases into correct German from Spanish. It was fairly basic stuff, so it was not too difficult, but since I am dyslexic and started to doubt my memory of the gender of German words I had not used for a looong time, I had to look things up in the dictionary a lot, to be sure that I got everything right. Then I had to translate the unknown French words into Spanish, and give examples of Norwegian sentences whenever her grammar book came up with something which was unclear. And I did not mind any of this; in fact I quite enjoyed it. I consider it as an investment in their future interest in languages, but it did not provide me with the quiet hour of studying Russian which was one of my ulterior motives for suggesting the whole thing. RUSSIAN Assimil – writing the text In order to get my near non existing Russian writing skills on the road, I have started copying Assimil by hand. I simply write down every chapter from the beginning, including exercises, just to get the spelling into my hand. Yes, I belong to the dinosaur generation; I need to write things by hand for them to pass by my brain. I have done this for about 2 hours so far, and reached lesson 6, and I am pushing forward. I have been intimidated by the fact that I have been unable to write even the simplest words In Russian, but that is going to change! I always get confused by what my dyslexic brain calls the “5 b’s” which would be the actual b, ( б) the b which is spelled with a b but pronounced as a v (в), the b you find in the letter i (ы) and then merkisnak (ь) and tverdisnak (ъ) And then remembering which one to use of the two “i” (и ы) , when to write a g instead of a v, when the pronunciation rules make that the B that I see, which is really a v, is not a v anymore, it is pronounced like an f. Or the o which is only o when stressed, otherwise it is an a, and all the other little details. I always get mad when someone says “But Russian is written the way it is spoken”. Well it may be to your brain mate, but most certainly not to mine! I have been trying to focus more on listening to Russian so far, since I have so much trouble with the written language, the problem then being that I understand the word when I hear it, but I do not recognize it when I read it, which of course all in all is not terribly helpful. Anyway, the words are slowly creeping back, so I’ll persevere with my writing. Since my internet connection keeps falling out, it is nice to have an activity which is not internet based either. I live in a house which is next to an electric transformer which plays all sorts of fun tricks on our electric equipment. I do not know whether it is also responsible for the failure of the internet connection, but it is high on my list of suspects. Pimsleur I am on lesson 20 in course 2 in Pimsleur, but I will probably have to go back to the beginning of the course (course 2, not course 1) and make sure I really know all the vocabulary. The thing is that I tend to get bored by the dialogue before my brain has actually absorbed the new words and structures, so I move on to the next lesson, and the next, and the next, without really having learned everything I should. Must apply for new brain whenever I get the time. Anyway, I managed to do about 20 minutes yesterday. UKRAINIAN Definitely no self control. The Ukrainian CD-Rom I got for Christmas was looking invitingly at me, and I could not resist its siren call. I went through the alphabet and had a first viewing of the alphabet and greetings for about 30 minutes. The alphabet is very close to the Russian one. The main differences seem to be regarding the i, the g, the e and the h where the letters are slightly different, and sometimes reversed. I expected the language as such to be much closer to Russian. It was actually quite different. I went through the exact same lessons of the course in Icelandic a few days ago, and Ukrainian to Russian was approximately as Icelandic to Norwegian, which means that you get a lot of words for free, and can sometimes understand a whole sentence, based on your understanding of the other language, but it is a new language you have to learn. I had half believed that Ukrainian was almost as close to Russian as Swedish is to Norwegian, but that was not the case. If so many Ukrainians understand Russian, it must more be a case of Russian being such a dominant language for a long time. I doubt that a Russian without previous exposure to Ukrainian would understand all that much Ukrainian. Spanish/ENGLISH Still lots of English conversation practice, and some Spanish. The last days approximately 9.5 English and 1.h 40 minutes in Spanish. MANDARIN I have bought a book called “The first 100 Chinese characters”, and went through the introduction today, as well as practicing the first 4 signs, which altogether took me about 45 minutes. I found out what the sign for the sun was, and that may be something which I may start using. My Norwegian name, Solfrid, means “beautiful as the sun” in old Norse, and because of my name and my sunny disposition I am often referred to as Sun, or Sunshine (or as one of my employees calls me “our great leader and Sun…” ). I therefore often sign handwritten notes with just a drawing of a sun, instead of using my name, but I think I’ll use the Chinese sign from now on. Soo much cooler. Actually it took a bit of my fright of Chinese characters away, as I saw there was a logic to them, and I saw that there were a few I could remember fairly fast. With my generally awful handwriting in any alphabet, I doubt that the written result will be very pretty, though. Nevertheless I have the first 4 down. Only 40 000 more to go. Since we had a 30 minutes car ride to my in laws house the other day, I convinced the kids that we should put on some beginner’s Greek in the car. Unfortunately I could not find the CD, so with a bright smile I put in a Mandarin CD instead, which we listened to and repeated for the full ride. My kids got a big laugh out of it, my husband almost went crazy, listening not only to the Mandarin, but to our pitiful attempts at reproducing the sounds as well. After 30 minutes I could remembers exactly 0 expressions, but my oldest daughter came in greeting everyone in Mandarin. Life is so unfair. GERMAN I have a little book called “Nackt duschen streng verboten – die verrucksten Gesetze der Welt”, and it will come as a surprise to no one that a lot of the craziest ones come from the US. It has titles like “Warum Bleichgesichter in South Dakota Indianer nur aus einem Planwagen herause erscheissen dürfen” and Warum es in Connecticut Füssgängern verboten ist, im Handstand die Strasse zu überqueren. I did the first 20 pages, which took me about 25 minutes. I am really rusty when it comes to reading German, and since this is legal language, I cannot just skip the words I do not understand, like I do in a novel. The really cool thing about German though, is that if you just read it slowly and carefully, and think through what each syllable means if translated directly to Norwegian, you can guess at least 50% of the unknown words. This means that it is time consuming to read German, but at least it is easier to figure things out than for almost any other language I know. ITALIAN The first time I went to Italy, in my twenties, I read 3000 pages of Italian crime novels before I left, to prepare myself. It worked like a charm, but between the fact that I only understood part of the language, and the fact that it is more than 20 years since I have read them, I do not remember the plot anymore. I therefore found “Vita, Morte e Miracoli di Poirot” by Agatha Christie, and have started to reread the first of the books in it. I got through 84 pages so far, and it took me about 1.5 hours. I do not read as fast in Italian as I used to. Like in German, I can understand most of it as long as I read slowly and carefully. The thing is that I do not in general have any “special powers”, but I have always been an uncommonly fast reader, as a kid I used to go through four books a day . When I have to read slowly, that makes me really cranky. I hope the speed will improve with time and practice. Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 02 January 2012 at 12:03am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5396 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 14 of 270 02 January 2012 at 3:31am | IP Logged | |||||
When I was a kid, my dad owned a used bookstore. I had access to more books than you could imagine. I used to read a lot, too, although maybe not four books a day! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5335 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 15 of 270 02 January 2012 at 8:25am | IP Logged | |||||
Keep in mind, that when I was kid we had - no PC - no DVD/video - no smart phones, hell, no mobile phones, and using the regular phone was considered very expensive! - no Ipads - no mp3 players - and only 40 minutes TV a day, maximum. That leaves a substantial amount of time for reading. And I was so into reading, that my mother would remove the light bulb in my room every night when I went to bed, to prevent me from reading at night. Not that this helped, because I would just read with help of the little light that was out in the hall :-) Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 02 January 2012 at 8:27am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4798 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 16 of 270 02 January 2012 at 10:46am | IP Logged | |||||
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I really loved that Norwegian saying. I had to google it to o see how it was pronounced in the original :) I
initially wanted to learn Greek, but decided to focus on my main two languages, as well as German or French if I can achieve my goals with the previous two. Hats off to you for your diligence with language study. It's great to be where you are! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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