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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Biene Diglot Groupie Germany Joined 6223 days ago 71 posts - 73 votes  2 sounds Speaks: German*, English Studies: Dutch, Japanese | Message 1 of 39 20 February 2008 at 4:10am | IP Logged | ||
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Note 2013 After a long hiatus I've started to update this log again in Oct. 2013. The first post (message 34) can be found on page 5.
Note 2008 I'm taking part in TAC 2008, but instead of starting a new log, I'm just using this one. The first TAC-entry is the second post here. Edit: I've quit taking part in TAC 2008... I hope that starting this log will help me with setting my goals for this years language studies. The intention is to post here about once a week on my progress or questions that might come up. Currently I’m working on two languages but would like to give a third language a try. French – Since I’ve decided that I’d like to move to a francophone country sometime this year or beginning of next year, I’ve been trying to revive my French. Even though I detest(ed) the grammar of this language I love the sound, which makes more than up for the grammar, but doesn’t really help with learning the language. So, I had 3 years of French in school (5 lessens per week), but was never really good at it. Since then I’ve tried once in a while to revive my school-French but was quite lazy about it. This year I’ve started to do only a version of L-R (Listening-Reading). I'm not using a workbook or course, since I don't really like that way of learning. Currently I’m stumbling my way through the first book of the Harry Potter series (which I might add is not the best choice that I made, but I’ll see how far I’ll get with it). The main problem with Harry Potter is, that the vocabulary is quite specific and that the German translation and the French translation don’t match at all. The next book I’ll pick will certainly be from a French author. Japanese – I started learning this language last fall, and haven’t really done a lot for it. Currently my Japanese studies consist only of learning the Kanji with RTK1 from Heisig (in the 1400 so far) and watching anime with subtitles (which improves my French and English more than my Japanese). The intention is to finish Heisig before I start on grammar and vocabulary and of course the readings of the Kanji. Others – Sometime this year I’d like to give Swedish a try, by trying to use the original L-R-method as close as possible. The idea is to use some of Astrid Lindgren’s books (with audio books) to get a feel for the language and then maybe another more modern book. I’ve been kindly warned by Hampie that there have been quite some changes in the language so I’ll look into those things a bit more before I’ll start. The plan is to use a week of vacation for this project, which is still quite some time of. I’d appreciate any words of wisdom, ideas and constructive criticism. Also feel free to help me with improving my written English, since I’ve been told repeatedly that my sentence-structure tends to be heavily influenced by my German. Edited by Biene on 29 October 2013 at 10:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Biene Diglot Groupie Germany Joined 6223 days ago 71 posts - 73 votes 2 sounds Speaks: German*, English Studies: Dutch, Japanese | Message 2 of 39 22 February 2008 at 1:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, I said that sometime this year I'd give Swedish a try with the L-R-method. Being impatient as always, I've been searching for suitable reading/listening material a bit more.
The preliminary plan (even though this Swedish L-R-week is still far off) is, to start out with three books of Astrid Lindgren ("Mio, min Mio", "Bröderna Lejonhjärta", and "Ronja Rövardotter") and then move on to one or two more modern books. It seems that these three books are available in unabbreviated audio-books read by the author herself. The books them self are of course not very long, but they are all written by the same author and also recorded by the same reader, so I hope that it will help to get a feeling for the language. For the more modern book I'm not sure what to choose: - "Ondskan" by Jan Guillou which has been translated into German ("Evil- das Böse") - "The golden Compass" by Phillip Pullman which has been translated into Swedish ("Guldkompassen") I've read neither of the two and will scan the local library for a copy of each, to see how I like them. Currently without having read them I'd lean more towards "Ondskan", since it was originally written in Swedish. Does anyone know how true or literal the translations of these books are, and how good the audio books are? Also are there unabbreviated audio books in Swedish available for Tolkien's "Lord of the ring"-triology? It would be nice to know if there are ebooks of the Swedish texts available, otherwise I'd plan to scan the books and prepare parallel texts, which would be a lot of work. Here are a few links that might be of interest to some: http://runeberg.org/ - seems to be a bit like the Project Gutenberg, just for the Scandinavian countries http://www.adlibris.se/default.aspx - a Swedish online-bookshop http://www.bokus.com/se/start.shtml - another Swedish online-bookshop [Hampie] 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| CaitO'Ceallaigh Triglot Senior Member United States katiekelly.wordpress Joined 6858 days ago 795 posts - 829 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian Studies: Czech, German | Message 3 of 39 22 February 2008 at 2:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah! Another L-Rer! I will be tuning in regularly. This system fascinates me like no other.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Biene Diglot Groupie Germany Joined 6223 days ago 71 posts - 73 votes 2 sounds Speaks: German*, English Studies: Dutch, Japanese | Message 4 of 39 03 March 2008 at 2:50am | IP Logged | ||
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Didn't do much this past week...
French: Finished the first chapter of Harry Potter 1, which is not really fast. Choosing to R-L with the German translation of said book, is turning out to be a really bad idea. It does help me to understand some of the sentences that I'd otherwise not understand, but all in all the texts differ quite a lot. So I decided to go a bit quicker through the book, and use a dictionary to look up words that come up again and again. I'll write them down and do a "vocabulary-sheet" of every chapter. I'm not sure yet, but I think I'll file these paper-pieces at the end of each chapter, so that I can quickly look up words again when I'm rereading the chapters or when I know that this word had come up before. Going to edit the audio of Assimil French I, so that I can listen to the text while walking and I'm planing to start shadowing with those texts, since they are short, easy and spoken quite slowly in the beginning. Japanese: I've been really lazy the last week, so I'm currently not adding any new Kanji but rather reviewing them. I'll probably won't add new Kanji until I've emptied the failed-stack, which is currently at 250 Kanji. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Makrasiroutioun Quadrilingual Heptaglot Senior Member Canada infowars.com Joined 6107 days ago 210 posts - 236 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Armenian*, Romanian*, Latin, German, Italian Studies: Dutch, Swedish, Turkish, Japanese, Russian, Arabic (Written) | Message 5 of 39 09 March 2008 at 1:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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http://www.amazon.fr/s/ref=nb_ss_w?__mk_fr_FR=%C5M%C5Z%D5%D1 &url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=%28%E9dition+bilingue +allemand-fran%E7ais%29++&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Go
105 hits for fully bilingual French-German books. This ought to help you. Harry Potter, as much as I personally love the series, is a fairly poor choice due to the specialised vocabulary and the latitude with which the translators non-literally translate the meaning of the story. As for your sentence structure, I can barely sniff out any German-influenced syntax. I would say that you're doing pretty well and no one would really notice unless they know both English and German nearly perfectly. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Biene Diglot Groupie Germany Joined 6223 days ago 71 posts - 73 votes 2 sounds Speaks: German*, English Studies: Dutch, Japanese | Message 6 of 39 10 March 2008 at 8:33am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks a lot for that link. I hadn't thought of using those criteria for a search in amazon.fr.
Still I guess I'll stick with Harry Potter (let's call it HP from now on, to save time) for the time being and then switch to one of the other audio books I have. The German HP book has been cast aside since I find it more hindering than helpful... damn and I only bought it for L-R.... It might be necessary to point out that I'm just plain stubborn with HP, since I bought that book and the audio book in French (even though I'm not a particular fan of that series), thinking that a book aimed at young adults should be quite easy to read. That was of course a misconception, but I'm not willing to admit that yet. Two options for other French books would be Jules Vernes "Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours" or Eric-Emmanuel Schmitts "Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran". French: Went through the first chapter of HP again this time with the dictionary and looked up all the obscure words that I encountered. I understand the text quite well, but since I want to build up my vocabulary I'm quite rigorous and thorough with this at the moment. I'm also writing down the looked up words on the page where I first encounter them, even though I don't like writing in a book. It feels a bit - well - disrespectful towards the book and the author. Even though I'll try to continue with this in the hope that I'll pick up speed with R-L this book. Organizing some stuff over the week I came across a copy of "Assimil - Französisch ohne Mühe" which I've bought sometime last year. I had all forgotten about it and am now in Lesson 3. It's very nice that they don't start with the obligatory introduction of the family, the neighbours, the cat and what not but rather start somewhere unexpected. I'll see how I'll fare with this course. Japanese: Did my reviews and relearned about 200 of the failed kanji. There are still 50+ in the failed stack and I won't continue adding new kanji until I've cleared that stack. I had a look at a copy of "Assimil - Japanisch ohne Mühe" in a bookshop and was shocked. How can they put the text in Kana and Kanji and then under it the international- and assimil-phonetics? So you have one line in Japanese followed by two lines in roman script followed by the next Japanese line. If I finish the French Assimil-course and am happy how it works I'll probably by the Japanese course as well, still having all that roman script floating in front of my eyes will be quite a bother. I'll have to do a thorough search on this course in this forum, but I'd like to know what people think of it. Is it worth it's money? Others: Found my "Teach yourself Hindi" course while sifting through stuff. I guess I'll put that language back on my list of languages-that-might-be-interesting-to-learn-one-day. In a very very distant future I might give it another try. :) Edited by Biene on 10 March 2008 at 8:35am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rob Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6166 days ago 287 posts - 288 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 7 of 39 10 March 2008 at 9:00am | IP Logged | ||
That is quite crazy. I have Le Persan sans peine and they put the romanisation underneath the -translation-! This would make the second wave effectively useless, but I recommend if you buy Japanisch ohne Mühe you also buy a thick black marker pen and start crossing out romanisation immediately! I'm a fan of Assimil, so I'd say it's worth the effort. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 8 of 39 10 March 2008 at 9:00am | IP Logged | ||
On the off-chance it helps you admit the misconception to yourself: I'm finding Andersen to be about as difficult, linguistically, as "The Master and Margarita". And Andersen is generally considered to be for kids (I remember some of his stories from when I was in elementary school), not even young adults. I tried going the H-P route for L-R, albeit not with Polish, but abandoned that fairly quickly. Between the poor quality of the translation and the fact that, although I mildly enjoyed reading the series once, I couldn't bring myself to reread it, it was a minor disaster. Good luck! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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