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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| sans-serif Tetraglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4560 days ago 298 posts - 470 votes  Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Danish | Message 1 of 37 28 December 2012 at 9:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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Welcome to my log!
In this thread, I'm going to post occasional progress reports, plan my future endeavors, and indulge in vaguely language-related monologs. In other words, if I find myself writing an entry that doesn't fit in any of the other subforums, I'll post it here. to be continued... Edited by sans-serif on 07 January 2013 at 8:47pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sans-serif Tetraglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4560 days ago 298 posts - 470 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Danish | Message 2 of 37 28 December 2012 at 11:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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Time for my first update:
DANISH I'm about 200 pages into Harry Potter og Fenixørdenen, and after some initial sluggishness I'm finding it easy to follow. Almost everything I don't understand based on my knowledge of Swedish is obvious from the context. I've tried listening to the audio book without the text on two occasions, and both times I've had to admit defeat. Part of the reason seems to be my inability to 'lock in' on the language; I do well enough as long as I can stay focused on the task of listening, but it's very hard to keep my mind from wandering. News and TV shows are much more engaging to me than plain audio at this stage, so I will keep watching Borgen, Lykke and TV Avisen when I can find the time. I also got myself a Danish grammar for Christmas, which I'm planning to read through and break down into Anki cards. Thankfully, the book is only about 65 pages long. :-) NORWEGIAN I watched another episode of Brille on NRK Play and shadowed some parts it just for laughs. Let's face it: Norwegian must be one of the funniest sounding languages on the planet. I haven't noticed any problematic sounds yet, and the prosody seems to follow the same basic structure as Swedish, without being disturbingly similar, so I'm hopeful about starting to speak as soon as I have the active vocabulary for it. Danish is going to be much trickier. GERMAN When Harry Potter in Danish starts getting on my nerves, as it always does after a chapter or two, I listen to the audio book of Der Weg in die Schatten by Brent Weeks. My verdict after about two hours: the story is interesting, the narrator and the translation are OK. Overall, I'm excited about the trilogy. It seems to be everything I was hoping for. My comprehension at this point is far from perfect. I decided to relisten to the first two hours to fill some gaps and to solidify the premise of the story in my head. A friend of mine has the book in English, which I'm probably going to borrow, since the German paperback was sold out on Adlibris, and I prefer a translation to having no text at all. There are just too many new words to take in from listening alone, and I'm not "in the story" yet, so there's not enough context to go by. Edited by sans-serif on 29 December 2012 at 9:58am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sans-serif Tetraglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4560 days ago 298 posts - 470 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Danish | Message 3 of 37 30 December 2012 at 9:57am | IP Logged | ||
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This time I thought I'd say a few words about Swedish.
I believe I'm currently somewhere in the B2–C1 range in the language, speaking being by far my weakest skill, due to fewer practice opportunities and my insecurities about pronunciation. In my mind, the major obstacles I still have to overcome are: 1) mastering the prosody 2) clocking up at least a hundred hours of conversation practice 3) learning to read faster and with greater ease 4) formal writing (which I won't won't be paying any heed to, for the time being) I'll probably follow this up with a couple more remarks on prosody and reading. Bye for now! P.S. High-five to whoever upvoted my opening post. Cracked me up. :-D Edited by sans-serif on 30 December 2012 at 10:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kez Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4358 days ago 181 posts - 212 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Swedish | Message 4 of 37 14 January 2013 at 2:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hej!
How's the learning going? Is it hard to learn Danish/Swedish & Norwegian at the same time? Not mixxing them up since they're alike? Waiting for a log update! Må kraften var med dig. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sans-serif Tetraglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4560 days ago 298 posts - 470 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Danish | Message 5 of 37 15 January 2013 at 2:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's been a while since my last update and I have no clear recollection of all the language-related things I've been doing, so I'll just mention a couple things for each language.
SWEDISH Watched a couple episodes of Medicinmannen with subtitles and no sound. This makes for a comic-book-like reading experience and is a nice way to get some extra reading done without sacrificing TV time. I've done most of my reading up to this point accompanied by an audio book, so my abilities are a bit skewed: I'm good at reading "visually" but my reading speed plummets if I take care to subvocalize everything, which I believe to be extremely beneficial for a language learner. GERMAN Finished Der Weg in die Schatten in L-R fashion with the book in English. A very fun read. I liked the characters and the plot exceeded my expectations. I'm probably none the wiser for having read the book, but it was definitely good entertainment. It will be another week until I get my next credit on Audible.de, so in the meanwhile I've been reading a book called Gebrauchsanweisung für Finnland. The author, Roman Schatz, originally from West Germany, was recently naturalized as a Finnish citizen and is known for speaking amazing Finnish. DANISH I'm currently on page 270 in the Harry Potter book and have decided to put it on hold in favor of other activities. It seems clear to me that I will get much more out of the book if I first acquaint myself with the inner workings of the Danish sound system and spelling. To address the situation, I've started transcribing the Book2 audio course, and I'm very happy with the results so far: after just ten two-minute lessons my accuracy has roughly doubled, and the pronunciation rules are slowly starting to make themselves known to me. I've also been flipping through my little red book of grammar, picking up some useful tidbits on each pass. SRS:ing some of the example sentences might be a good idea. NORWEGIAN Watched another episode of Nytt på nytt. Since Brille is on break, this will probably be all the Norwegian I'm going to do on a weekly basis. Well, I did preview the "Norwegian Sentences With Audio" Anki deck and do some dictation drills. I'm not that thrilled about the mix of dialects in the audio clips. Luckily, at least the first 200 or so cards were in the Oslo / East Norwegian dialect. I know I'm supposed to be focusing on Danish, but Norwegian is so much fun to speak and, frankly, so much easier that I'm tempted make more time for it. We'll have to see. ENGLISH Aside from writing here on HTLAL, which is doing wonders for my underdeveloped writing skills, I've been reading American newspapers and news magazines: The New York Times, Newsweek, The Atlantic--whatever I've been able to get my hands on. Over the years I've read lots of fiction with some textbooks and non-fiction here and there, but journalistic language remains a weak point of mine, so I'm trying to do most of my (guilty) pleasure reading within that realm. Edited by sans-serif on 15 January 2013 at 10:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sans-serif Tetraglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4560 days ago 298 posts - 470 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Danish | Message 6 of 37 15 January 2013 at 10:28pm | IP Logged | ||
So someone besides me actually reads this?-) Thanks for popping by! It's going OK so far. Some days are better, some days are worse, but I've made sure to get at least a little bit done every day. I haven't experienced any confusion, interference or mix-ups, though I'm a bit wary of Danish and Norwegian, as the ortographies are deceptively close and I haven't fully internalized either one of them yet. My Swedish appears to be strong enough not to be easily affected. I probably haven't made it very clear before, but I'm basically focusing on Danish, maintaining Swedish, and dabbling in Norwegian, which makes things easier. Edited by sans-serif on 03 February 2013 at 2:10pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Julie Heptaglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6904 days ago 1251 posts - 1733 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French | Message 7 of 37 17 January 2013 at 2:04am | IP Logged | ||
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I also read your log :). I even linked it in the Viking team thread so you might expect some more followers. (Maybe you would like to join the team after all? You're already an informal part of it anyway!)
I plan to learn Nowegian and Danish one day, so I'm very interested in your experience (and sooo jealous about your Swedish at the same time :)). About reading in English: I'm in an opposite situation. I've read quite a lot of press over the years, plus lots of scientific articles, textbooks etc. but not a lot of fiction. Now I'm trying to focus on that. And writing here on HTLAL does wonders for my underdeveloped writing skills as well :). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sans-serif Tetraglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4560 days ago 298 posts - 470 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Danish | Message 8 of 37 19 January 2013 at 10:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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This is going to be a quick one.
Over the past week I've been reading newspapers and magazines in Swedish, English and German with a web-based speed reading tool called Zap Reader. In a nutshell, you choose how fast you want read, copy-paste some text into the software, and Zap Reader displays it to you in quick flashes, a couple words at a time. This forces you to read extensively, not worrying too much about the occasional unfamiliar word, which not only helps you to cover more ground, but also makes the reading experience more engaging, I find. Edited by sans-serif on 03 February 2013 at 2:12pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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