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Hindi with Mandarin & Spanish on the side | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Aquilves Diglot Newbie Austria Joined 4444 days ago 5 posts - 8 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2 Studies: Mandarin, Hindi | Message 1 of 1 31 May 2013 at 11:52pm | IP Logged |
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I decided to start a language learning log to document my progress and how much (or how little) I actually achieve.
The languages I will be learning are Hindi, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. My approaches, goals and motivations for each of these languages are quite different so I want to explain everything briefly. Hindi I can read and write Devanagari. I can say basic things like "have you seen the white cat?" or "I hope to live in India in the future". As far as pronunciation goes, I still have some trouble pronouncing aspirated consonants, and I sometimes can't tell whether what I am hearing is (un)voiced and/or (un)aspirated and/or (for t and d) dental or retroflex. That is definitely an area I need to work on. My level in this language needs to be functional in everyday situations by early 2014. Hindi has absolute priority and I need to spend at least 70% of my language learning time on it. I am currently using Assimil where I am at lesson 17 and I intend to finish it by late July, and then use "A Primer of Modern Standard Hindi" alongside books and comics. I'm not sure if I should be worried that most of the Hindi music I listen to was released before I was born. I just prefer "old/classic" music and movies as opposed to whatever is trending now. The best way for me to learn is by watching/hearing something. I will certainly try to incorporate that but I'm not entirely sure how. There aren't any audiobooks in Hindi (I was only able to locate audiobooks for the blind, but I now only have the audio, and can't find accompanying books), not many TV shows are dubbed in the language, and watching a Bollywood movie every day is simply unrealistic (as they are usually 3 hours long). I have some episodes of Ducktales, Oggy and the Cockroaches and Malgudi Days so I will make use of that for now. Chinese I will be flying to Singapore in four weeks and I want to learn some Mandarin in preparation for my trip. Ideally I want to finish the first 10 lessons of "Intensive Spoken Chinese", which means finishing one lesson every 2-3 days. My goal is to communicate and be able to do basic things - buying a train ticket or asking whether a dish is with meat etc. Maybe I can find a native speaker in Singapore willing to help me with getting the tones right. Spanish I tried learning Spanish with Assimil before but I quit at around lesson 80 because I suddenly found it terribly boring. That was two years ago. I have read a few childrens books since then and watched about 200 hours of TV and movies in Spanish. I'm not quite sure what my level is. I think that my listening comprehension is fairly good but my reading skills are much below that, to my dismay. It would probably take me half a day to string together some coherent sentences - I don't find that troublesome however, as I have no Spanish-speaking friends and don't intend to travel to any Spanish-speaking places anytime soon. Basically, I want to mirror what I did with English: a gigantonormous amount of reading books and websites and watching hundreds of hours of TV. I don't mind if it takes me a decade to achieve a level where I can effortlessly understand everything. First of all I want to improve my reading comprehension, which led me to register for Tadoku where I am aiming to read at least 750 pages in June. So, starting tomorrow, I need to read at least 25 pages and watch one episode of a TV show in Spanish per day. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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