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Duan’s TAC 2014 (Sokoły / Triomphe) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Duan Newbie Canada Joined 4797 days ago 36 posts - 48 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Polish, French | Message 17 of 25 27 January 2014 at 5:02pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll give it a try! I've been bouncing around a couple different layouts and none has really stuck yet for French. For Polish I've pretty much given up on the Polish 214 layout in favour of the Programmers layout, which is regular Qwerty with the ability to add the accents with extra key strokes. Similar to what you're describing above, so maybe the international keyboard will be the way to go. Anyway, it's been some time since I gave an update, so I apologize. My studying continues, but unfortunately not at the levels I had at the start of the year. Which was expected, I was off from work and my responsibilities were reduced over the holidays, but it's still a shame. That said, I've managed to maintain my streak in Duolingo, even if it meant only getting in a ten minute lesson at a time. I was feeling shaky with some of the later Pimsleur lessons - probably well within the expected amount but as a perfectionist, I didn't like not being able to instantly recall words so I went back and started redoing the earlier lessons. In Polish, I did complete my short term goal of "mastering" the verbs of motion. Well, mastering may not be quite correct, but I am now able to use the correct form the majority of the time. And I did it all in a week, which was nice. Duolingo released the English course for Polish speakers this week, so I've also been giving that a try while I wait for them to complete the course the other way. It was interesting and not too hard. However, the little errors that did come up make me think that my next goal should be to work on my grammar some more. I also listened to some podcasts from realpolish.pl in a bid to improve listening comprehension, but I must admit it still eludes me. I hear individual words but putting their meaning together just doesn't work in realtime. This is where I feel my biggest hurdle, but I don't know how to improve it other than just to continue listening. Will it just become easier one day? I hope so! For the time being, I will just have to tough it out. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Duan Newbie Canada Joined 4797 days ago 36 posts - 48 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Polish, French | Message 18 of 25 20 February 2014 at 5:30am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Wow, I've let this log lie fallow for almost a month! Shameful!
Anyway, as can be expected, my initial fire did dull, as the realities of life caught up to me. But I have still done a little bit of study each day, as evidenced by my Duolingo streak not being reset since I took Damedeslangues recommendation and started playing. So there's that at least. French My progress in this language really slowed to a halt, partly due to my own procrastination, partly due to technical issues. For whatever reason, my iPod doesn't always hold a charge these days, I guess it's getting old. Well, since I listen to podcasts and Pimsleur on the commute to and from work, if the battery dies 5 minutes into my ride, I lose those twenty or so odd minutes of learning time. Additionally, I never remember to charge it which just compounds the problem. Because I am cheap and have decided not to buy a new mp3 player, I just had to suck it up and learn to remember to recharge liberally. So current progress is maybe three quarters of the way through Pimsleur 1, supplemented by Duolingo. It seems to me that the difficulty in French has just ramped up lately, where I am in far more uncomfortable waters than I was at the beginning of January. But if I want to get better I think I need to push myself harder. I really want to get speaking by next month and to that end I've signed up to the Google Plus HTLAL Language Learning Den community to meet some like-minded individuals and hopefully get talking. Since I'm at so basic a level, I feel it's hard to get any more specific with my goals right now than complete Pimsleur and then my Living Language French courses to get the introductory base, and then re-evaluate from there. I should also start looking into other media like movies, books and podcasts, and ramp up my French Anki deck (I only have a paltry 70 cards there, which is really only 35 distinct notes because I use both directions on the majority of my notes) Overall, I can say I'm not very happy with my progress but I have to remind myself that the year is far from done and that if I want results I need to work harder to obtain them. Plus, as my Duolingo reminds me, I do a little each day. And thanks to Eagle32's suggestion, I ended up going with the international keyboard, which suits me pretty well. So thanks again for that tip! Polish Polish I feel too comfortable in. I hit a plateau which seems determined to keep me in the A levels, and am having a heck of a time getting myself out of it. However I do have a weekly talk with a language partner, though I really need to ramp it up because I need a lot of practice listening. Duolingo currently has released an English course for Polish speakers and I'm working through that course as well. While the reverse course would be better, I find I'm nevertheless learning a lot. I've decided to go back to the basics and basically force myself to go through the grammar points, and basically do a bunch of drills on them. I found that when I focused on the verbs of motion, that I could get it to stick in my brain, then I need to follow that up with more practice. Listening comprehension is still my biggest problem. I gave up on the podcasts from realpolish.pl in part because of my technical difficulties, but also because it was so discouraging to me to be sitting there and not being able to understand anything. Here I think the problem is that I really need to be paying full attention to the audio, which I can't really do while I'm driving. I have to acknowledge I'm not yet at the level where I can just listen and get the gist of this conversation, even if I know a majority of the words. My new strategy for this is to devote some time every day just listening without any other distractions. Let's see if that improves my luck here. I am also thinking of starting to become more serious with my reading. Reading for me is similar to listening, which is, more than a few sentences becomes a big blob of noise to me, and I can't really make out any meaning even though I recognize a lot of the words. This seems like something that just requires more practice, as if I do slow down and spend the time to really read a sentence over and over again, I can usually eventually tease out the meaning. This is not feasible for long books, obviously, but I guess here I just have to start with baby steps. I am also interested in trying the L-R method or Shadowing, although to be honest I'm not sure I understand either method as they don't really make sense to me. L-R is the one I'm thinking of starting with, but I haven't found much in the way of parallel texts with accompanying audio yet. I did discover that my local public library has "language kits" which contain stories with parallel texts, but these are children's stories and not the novels that are suggested for L-R. Nevertheless, I will give it a try. I'm hoping that my next update (which will not have such a long break, honest!) will have me feeling better about my progress. Here's hoping! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Duan Newbie Canada Joined 4797 days ago 36 posts - 48 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Polish, French | Message 19 of 25 24 February 2014 at 5:38am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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As promised, I am committing to another update!
French I am almost done Pimsleur I after some rocky technological issues. It seems like I can't get anything to go right in that regard - after adjusting to my aging iPod's leaky battery, just yesterday the sound went all distorted. I can still hear everything, but it has this disconcerting reverb effect. It's annoying and I'm planning to transfer all my podcasts and audiobooks over to my tablet. Less portable, but I'm usually sitting at a desk anyway, so it shouldn't be a big deal. With that out of the way, I can speak about my actual French progress. As I mentioned, I'm almost completed the first Pimsleur course. The audio anyway, I will go back and do the reading lessons in one big chunk. I had planned to do them while I was going through the lessons, but it was never convenient. Next, I plan to move onto the Living Language French course. Since it's another beginner course, I hope it helps to reinforce the learning that's already taken place. I still free pretty shaky with this language and still spontaneously produce polish for French when I'm under pressure, but I suspect this will go away once I get more of a handle on things here. Little observations/questions: - My French r is getting a lot better. I didn't realize until I started studying French again (and thus actually paying attention) that the Polish R and French R are completely different! Laugh if you must, but I never heard of aveolar or uvular in any of my language classes. - At least according to Pimsleur, the word dix (and similarly six) has some strange reverse liaison thing going on. When you say it by itself it seems like you pronounce the ending, unlike in most French words. However, it sounds like the ending is dropped in other situations "J'ai dix dollars". - Speaking of liaison, it seems like the word "cent" drops the ending t even before vowels "cent euros". Is that just a rule with some words? I noticed that with "et" too and just assumed that it was such a common word that it had an exception. - Still haven't sussed out why adjectives sometimes go before and sometimes after the noun. Not really any rhyme or reason that I can make out, yet. I plan to supplement my Duolingo with some more French media to work on comprehension. That seems to be a big issue in Polish, so might as well get started on that now too. I will try to listen to a podcast, watch a movie or a show at least once every other day. Polish I've gotten a little farther in my L-R experiment. Last March when I was in Poland, I picked up a couple of books, one of which was the first book in Andrzej Sapkowski's Wiedźmin series. I went to the library and was able to find the English version of the same book (conveniently enough, since they didn't seem to have any of the other books in the series) and now I have a few leads on the Polish audio. Thus I can put L-R through it's paces with some real content (ąpproximately 300 page books). Just starting to read through the English novel now. Another book I picked up in the same trip was Najnowsze przygody Mikołajka (or the Newest adventures of Little Nicolas), but I can't find an English translation so I may just continue to use it for instensive reading practice. Other than that, I need to do some more grammar study and continue working on my comprehension. I'm hoping that will be aided by all the reading I plan on doing in the next little while, but I will also try to listen to podcasts. I guess even if I still can't understand everything, I can still make the effort! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Duan Newbie Canada Joined 4797 days ago 36 posts - 48 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Polish, French | Message 20 of 25 03 March 2014 at 4:56pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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French
French continues to plod along. I have slowed down in my Duolingo work; I am spending a lot more time going back and reinforcing earlier learning rather than blasting forward through the trees. I feel that this is the right approach, since you need a good base before building on that, but it feels pretty slow. I also have 0 confidence on my production (written or spoken) after two months of study. Maybe I need to ramp up and start tracking hours to see how much I'm actually spending on each language. I think I need to just get over the initial reluctance/hesitation/fear and force myself to write stuff so I get more practice writing. I finished the Pimsleur 1 course a few days ago and went back to doing all the reading lessons in one go. It was pretty rocky, and I recalled what made me so discouraged in learning French in the first place. I really don't have a good flow or pronunciation when I'm reading aloud, and it sounds so bad to my ear that I just give up. I'm not sure how to best counter this though. Maybe more input is the key, but I'm not confident in that. Perhaps I need to take a lesson from my Polish studies and get my hands on audio and texts, to train myself to associate the right sounds with the text that way. In the meantime by finally setting aside to go through the other TAC logs, I have learned of several new possible sources of interesting input, so I'm going to start there first. Polish My Duolingo progress in Polish is similar to that in French, just more advanced. Since I am stronger in both Polish and English than French, I can get further into the tree, but I'm not just breezing through them anymore as I was at the beginning. I am seeing a lot of new vocabulary though, and reinforcing a lot of inflections which I am generally very weak on. I started a notebook to note down any interested language related things I come across. So I have questions, and I'd appreciate if anyone has the answers to them: 1) "To" i "Być": I have trouble figuring out when I can use one or the other. Here's my understanding, maybe someone can drop by and tell me where I'm going wrong. "To" is a demonstrative, roughly meaning "That, this". "Być" is the verb that means "to be". To jest książka (This is a book/ That is a book/ It is a book). But it seems that sometimes you can drop one or the other. This is what I'm not 100% sure of, though. Co to jest? Jest książka (What is it? It's a book) I'm pretty sure this is right. I'm pretty sure the following isn't though: Co to jest? To książka. However, in Duolingo I was asked to translate "Is it far from here?" And I provided "Czy jest daleko stąd?" which was marked wrong. The correct translations were "To jest daleko stąd?" and "Czy to daleko stąd?" Now, I get the first one, but why is the second correct? And why was my translation incorrect? Here's another one: I wrote "To jest może słoń" It was marked wrong and I got the following as correct answers: To być może słon To jest prawdopodobnie słon. I get the second one, but not the first. Why are we allowed to use the infinitive here? And why is my answer incorrect? Is there some nuance that makes the meaning of my translation different from the other two? 2) Piję vs Pijam Another interesting thing that came up on Duolingo was that there was another way to conjugate the verb "Pić" for first person. The one I am familiar with is "Piję", but I also saw that "Pijam" is correct. When explaining it, someone said that the first "I am drinking" but the second is "I drink" as in, this is a habit, I always do it this way. Is this an exception for certain verbs, or is it common that you can do this? Finally, there was some movement in my attempts at preparing for my L-R experiment. I now have the audio and book in Polish, and an English translation I am making my way through. The pages on L-R suggest that you have 20 hours worth of audio and listen to it three times. My audio is only about 11 hours, but hopefully I can still see something. It was hard enough getting my hands on a translation of something I had access to! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| pesahson Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5729 days ago 448 posts - 840 votes  Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: French, Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 21 of 25 06 March 2014 at 6:24pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
There are two ways to ask this question: Co to jest? or Co to? The verb can be omitted but everybody knows which verb it is. Two correct answers would be: To jest książka or To książka. Jest książka means something else but let's not get into it. It could be confusing. The two sentences above are the only ways to correctly answer the asked question.
The corrections were right. As with the first example, you can leave out the verb, but not the subject (it). Your answer goes: Is far from here? What is? You need to put "it".
"To jest może słoń" is understandable but no native would say it. "być może" literally would mean "can be" so it fits in this scenario.
It's a grammar feature typical for Slavic languages (and others as well probably) called verb aspects. You have different forms for all verbs, which vary slightly in meaning. In this case, "pijam" is used only in writing. I have never heard anyone say it, so you don't have to worry about it. Whichever meaning you want to convey, you can say "piję". 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Duan Newbie Canada Joined 4797 days ago 36 posts - 48 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Polish, French | Message 22 of 25 06 March 2014 at 6:52pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Pesahson, thanks for the quick response! That was very helpful indeed. Though now I am
very curious what "Jestem książka" means :) Dziękuję bardzo za pomoc! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| pesahson Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5729 days ago 448 posts - 840 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: French, Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 23 of 25 06 March 2014 at 8:10pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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"Jestem książka" Would be I am a book in a sense My name is book.
"Jestem książkĄ" would mean I am a book as in I am a girl, I am a bird, etc "Jest książka?" Is there this book we have been talking about/Do you have the book (a specific one). "Jest książka" would be an affirmative answer to this question. But it's a very very specific situation. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Duan Newbie Canada Joined 4797 days ago 36 posts - 48 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Polish, French | Message 24 of 25 06 March 2014 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Yes, that is what I meant :) JEST książka, not JESTEM książka.
I know what the latter means, and thought the former was the same as "To jest książka". Thanks again for clarifying that this is not necessarily the case :) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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