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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Ramblurr Newbie United States binaryelysium.com Joined 4341 days ago 30 posts - 34 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Egyptian), German | Message 1 of 10 22 October 2013 at 4:45pm | IP Logged |
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Well, hello there HTAL! I've been a on-and-off lurker for a some years now, roughly corresponding to my on-and-off relationship with
language learning. I even created an account almost a year ago, though I didn't do anything with it until now. Her and I are on again. This go around I've decided to keep this log to help with motivation and accountability, yadda yadda. It'll be my first real attempt to track my language learning process, so, for me (and me alone I imagine), it'll be interesting. This time I'm in Albania, tackling Albanian or Shqip. Previously I studied Arabic in Egypt, Spanish in Peru+Ecuador, and even had a thrilling dalliance with Quechua in the Andes of Peru. Goals Albanian (Shqip): I'm waiting on the winter here in Albania, before I continue my journey eastward. So, I'm shooting for conversational proficiency in 5-6 months. I really just want to get out into the mountains of Northern Albania and Kosovo and speak with the locals. العربية (Arabic): It's been years since I lived in the middle east, and aside from the odd playing of music, I've utterly neglected my Arabic. Chatting recently with a few friends, I realize my conversational proficiency has fallen to upper-intermediate. Reading newspapers is now very difficult as is watching films I used to know quite well. For the short term I want to slowly reactivate Arabic by exposing myself to it several hours per week, and in the long term I want to actively begin practicing and reach for that elusive advanced proficiency. For now I'm only going to concentrate on my colloquial Egyptian. Español: I haven't neglected Spanish as completely as Arabic, but I certainly don't use it enough or go out of my way to expose myself to it. When I left South America in 2012, I was just beginning to read novels. I'd like to start with reading (finally a chance to try out RWT!) and watching films to better my listening comprehension. Runasimi (Quechua): Oy! Dear Quechua :-( I dabbled for ~5 months in Peru with this language. I was learning it purely in Spanish (which did wonders for my Spanish, not so much for my Quechua), which made for slow going. The lack of resources was also a hindrance. I love this language and I'd like to continue on with it, but I don't know any native speakers with Skype and, being a verbal language, there are virtually no books films or other cultural artifacts I could use here in Albania. So for now, I'll be content with listening to the recordings of my old lessons. Onwards... Edited by Ramblurr on 22 October 2013 at 4:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Ramblurr Newbie United States binaryelysium.com Joined 4341 days ago 30 posts - 34 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Egyptian), German | Message 2 of 10 22 October 2013 at 11:23pm | IP Logged |
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Strategy
TODO 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Ramblurr Newbie United States binaryelysium.com Joined 4341 days ago 30 posts - 34 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Egyptian), German | Message 3 of 10 22 October 2013 at 11:26pm | IP Logged |
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22-10-2013 Summary
Shqip Listened to two Pimsleur lessons today, two and three, the latter being new. I've been studying Shqip for over 2 weeks now, and still haven't progressed far in Pimsleur because it teaches "Standard" Albanian which seems to basically be the Tosk dialect. I want to learn the Gheg dialect, but virtually all the language learning materials are in Tosk/Standard. Met with my language helper today for session 11, but since she could only stay an hour, I'm calling it session 10.5. I recorded her reading a children's book then had her type it out, which took most of the hour. It's way too advanced for me to grasp yet, and I'm sure there's some complex grammar in there. But I'll begin mining it for vocabulary, and in a later session I'll go over the grammar with her until I get the gist. I uploaded it to piterpani">soundcloud for posterity. Now that I'm listening to it, I think she read it too fast :S We spent the remaining minutes Ghegifiying the phrases I learned in Pimsleur today. I'm adding both to Anki. I need to start planning my language sessions better. Today was productive, but the past few have been all over the place with not much structure or cohesion. Part of it comes down to I'm not sure WHAT to learn. Since I started Albanian 10 or so days ago, I've been learning lots of vocabulary but not much grammar, so I feel like I can't say anything. Of course, I'm not supposed to be able to say anything now... for this phase I resolved to focus solely on comprehension for the first several weeks. 1 hr Pimsleur Albanian 1 hr Session w/ language helper 1 hr Editing recording, creating Anki input 0.5 hr Anki reviews Spanish I was quite curious to play with Learning with Texts, I've read great things about it, so today I set about installing it. I spent way too long getting it installed. I'm on Fedora linux, so there were no existing instructions. Perhaps I should compile some and put them somewhere for others. I configured Spanish as my first language in it and pasted a short ~500 word prologue to a Quechua lesson book for the Ecuadorian dialect Kichwa. I'm not sure how to get at LWT's stats (or even if it has any), but I estimate I encountered around 15-20 new words. The text was a little easy, but it was super interesting. I'm quite satisfied with LWT and can't wait to do more reading with it. 1 hr LWT install (doesn't really count imho) 30 mi Reading intro to "Kichwa para todos" in LWT edit: Anyone know why my paragraphs are being mangled with linebreaks? Edited by Ramblurr on 22 October 2013 at 11:30pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4704 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes  Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 4 of 10 22 October 2013 at 11:46pm | IP Logged |
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I just wanted to say that I checked out your travel blog! It's a good read, sounds exciting!
Unfortunately, the weird line breaks are just part of this forum's outdated software. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Ramblurr Newbie United States binaryelysium.com Joined 4341 days ago 30 posts - 34 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Egyptian), German | Message 5 of 10 24 October 2013 at 11:47am | IP Logged |
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Thanks Hekje! I'm quite behind on my travelogue posts, as my plans have changed
significantly. I'm staying in Albania, maybe Kosovo, for the winter to focus on Albanian (and my other L2s) and also get some work done. Peddling+Paddling 8hrs per day for months doesn't leave much time to study :( 23-10-2013 Shqip I made a sweet discovery today! I believe the DLI Albanian courses are in Gheg! They aren't really designed for self study, but the recordings will be a good resource for native Gheg audio. Another discovery: This Albanian language website with sample recordings in Shqip from various regions showcasing the differences in dialect. The audio quality is quite good, but I'm not sure how useful they'll be without transcriptions or translations. Perhaps I can have my language helper transcribe them, or I can turn it into a writing activity. Skimmed Reference Grammar at the beginning of "Readings in Albanian Part 1", paying attention to use of cases. I OCRed some text, fixed it up, and added it to my grammar notes journal, a little file where I keep notes I might want to reference often. The use of the particle/article (??) 'i' and 'e' like in "Topi është i varur në mur" or "Dera është e hapur" is something I don't really understand yet. I wasted too much time today looking for more resources and not enough time actually learning. I'm pretty confident I've found and evaluated every Albanian language resource readily available online, there aren't many. One book I'd like to get is the new edition (published 2012!) of Colloquial Albanian by Linda Mëniku, but, while it has an ebook version (sweet!), the audio doesn't seem to be available yet, neither in CD nor MP3 form. I found this hidden product page on Amazon that is for the audio, and it looks like it will come out on Nov 30, we'll see. 20 min Anki Reviews 50 min Grammar Review Arabic Looking at the list of assimil books available in French base, I slightly wish I had learned French somewhere along the way. I've never used Assimil, but would love to if the English selection wasn't so paltry. Today I had a one hour skype session with a tutor from italki, I had another hour scheduled but the other tutor canceled. In the session we listened to a song and went through the lyrics phrase by phrase. I learned several knew words and some new usages of older words. The exercise was motivating but somewhat boring, possibly because the song didn't interest me. Next time we'll be doing another song or a clip from a film. After reading about the goldlist method and scriptorium I think I'm going to begin both techniques with Arabic on alternating days for 30ish minutes each. The goldlist method is particularly intriguing; I'm keen to see how my long-term vocab retention fares with it. 1 hr italki skype session 12 min Anki input & reviews Spanish Found a few films and an e-book (el alquimista) in Spanish that I'm going to watch soon. Didn't spend any time in the language though. Edited by Ramblurr on 24 October 2013 at 11:49am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Ramblurr Newbie United States binaryelysium.com Joined 4341 days ago 30 posts - 34 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Egyptian), German | Message 6 of 10 25 October 2013 at 4:54pm | IP Logged |
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24-10-2012
Shqip Had a 1.5 hour session with my language helper. Today we learned the numbers > 10. We spent quite a bit of time doing a simple exercise where she said a number and I wrote it down as fast as I could. She started saying them unnaturally slowly, then I had her speed up to normal conversational speed. The currency here is large, so it's common to be quoted prices > 1000, so I need to be able to recognize larger quantities. I got pretty good at it during the exercise, but I'm still rubbish at speaking them myself. 30 min Pimsleur 15 min Anki reviews 1.5 hr Language helper session Arabic Just Anki reviews. 15 min Anki review Spanish Found the sweet language learning magazine Veinte Mundos. I subscribed and meant to read the article, but got distracted. Edited by Ramblurr on 25 October 2013 at 4:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 7 of 10 25 October 2013 at 6:32pm | IP Logged |
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Looking What a nice pool of languages you've chosen, Ramblurr! Looking forward to hearing
more about your studies. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Vos Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5567 days ago 766 posts - 1020 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Polish | Message 8 of 10 26 October 2013 at 4:10pm | IP Logged |
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Hola Ramblurr, bienvenido al foro y como ya ha dicho Expugnator, ¡qué interesante tu lista de lenguas! Como tú, me
interesa mucho Quechua y espero que algún día tenga la oportunidad de aprender un poco. A propóstio de Quechua, hace algunos meses encontré un podcast que hace la universidad de nueva York que se llama Rimasun - Quechua Language Podcast, si lo buscas en iTunes puedes descargar una buen cantidad de podcasts. No sé si son de buena calidad en cuanto a las lecciones, pero me parecen que sí. De todos modos, son gratis así que siempre puedes echar un vistazo y ver lo que piensas. Bueno, mucha suerte con todas las lenguas que has elegido y tengo muchas ganas de leer tus experiencias. p.s. Acabo de encontrar su página web - Rimasun: Quechua Podcasts 1 person has voted this message useful |
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