|
 |
All’s Fair in Tongues and War | ||
Tags: Swedish | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| pbromide Bilingual Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4546 days ago 76 posts - 98 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Swedish | Message 41 of 92 27 August 2012 at 3:37am | IP Logged | ||
It's nice to know that my "sj" sound is not as bad as I thought. I've been pronouncing it /çʷ/ or /xʷ/. I can imagine that my prosody is very strange - I've done very little Swedish listening (I've mostly listened to Swedish songs). I've tried to find some videos to shadow or copy, but the ones I've found either don't match the Swedish subtitles they have (the person will say something like "jag älskar dig så mycket kära" and the subtitle will say "jag älskar dig") or they're from Scania (a comedy series I found called Robins - there's this woman who shows up who has a uvular-sounding "r") and I'm not sure I want to end up with a Scanian accent (though I guess it beats having an Arabic accent?). I wouldn't mind, but I just like the rolled r better. There were a few documentaries I found that I think might have worked for shadowing. I need the text to have subtitles because otherwise I will most definitely mishear everything. The music documentaries I posted above could work for shadowing. Truth be told, I haven't really thought about it. I definitely should, though, if my accent is "very foreign." I'm reading aloud the first passage in "Swedish: An Elementary Grammar-Reader." I tried taking a few cues from Google Translate for pronunciation, but it sounded a bit monotone to my untrained ears. Thank you both very much for your critique. Hopefully I'll get a little better at the prosody after practicing speaking more. @montmorency - I can see what you mean about being extroverted - I was really exaggerating the prosody (or what I imagined the prosody was) when I was reading that out loud. Most Swedes I've heard don't "swing around" like that. Edited by pbromide on 27 August 2012 at 3:39am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| pbromide Bilingual Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4546 days ago 76 posts - 98 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Swedish | Message 42 of 92 27 August 2012 at 6:24am | IP Logged | ||
|
FIRST OF ALL: I am renaming this blog. Why? As of Tuesday (class was canceled Monday
because hurricanes exist), I will be starting to study Russian seriously again and it would not be fair to call this blog "Sensationally Swedish" when I'm also keeping up my Russian studies. So I thought about calling it "All's fair in tongues and war" or some language-y pun like that. It's also deep and meaningful because it reflects how I'm not going to discount any method - all that matters is that it works. Or something like that. Most of my progress will be about Swedish because I'm still a beginner in the language (three weeks of study does not an intermediate level make. Not in my case, at least). I will post about Russian when I think it deserves a post, but it will definitely not be as frequent as with Swedish. Swedish is running 400k while Russian is more of a marathon. A race against what, precisely? Time, perhaps. Time is the currency which we use to invest in languages. Now that I've gotten that pseudo-intellectual statement out of the way, I looked at my results for the spoof CEFR test on the folkuniversetet website and saw I scored an A2 on all three actual test results. Seems like a pretty good estimate of my Swedish - I still don't feel confident enough. I'd guess my Russian is at about a B1~2 and my French at a C1. I'm going to plan out my language learning schedule a bit. Until the start of the next academic year, I'm going to focus solely on Swedish, Russian, and French. I'd like to take my Swedish to a B2 level, my Russian to a C1, and keep my French at a C1 level (I wouldn't know how to go about getting to C2 - reading a lot, I assume?). Basically, I'm not going to start any new languages for the entirety of this academic year (including the following summer). When I start my next year in college, I'll start Japanese, which will take up most of my active language learning efforts, and just keep S+R+F on the backburner. Definitely going to read more books in the language - hopefully by then I'll be able to read simple stories in Swedish. After Japanese, I have a dream of studying Yoruba. Why? Well for one, it's part of my cultural heritage. Even though I'm a white Cuban, Yoruba culture has played an important part in black Cuban culture. The language is still used to a limited extent in prayers and such, and Santeria is, if I recall correctly, related to the Yoruba religion. So basically I have a reason to learn Yoruba as opposed to Zulu or Swahili. Secondly, Yoruba is an isolating language, if I recall correctly. I have never studied a purely isolating language. It's also tonal, which would be an interesting challenge. Being that I'll have studied two pitch-accented languages before this (Swedish and Japanese), I might be slightly more prepared than if I went in blind. Thirdly, Yoruba actually has a booming industry. Ever hear of Mollywood? There are a ton of Yoruba films on YouTube (because copyright laws are for suckahs, or something along those lines) and a lot of other media. Finding printed books will be a challenge, but it's about time I learned an actually non-mainstream language. ;) This is all, of course, very far in the future. I'll always be kind of studying at least two languages at a time - one will be "kept up" and the other will be actively studied. For any language besides Russian and French, I'd be pretty satisfied with a B2 level. A C1 would be really nice, but the amount of work I'd have to put in to achieve that probably wouldn't be worth the results. I'm a language hoarder - I love to look at their morphologies and compare the syntax and see how words are related. Perhaps I am commitment-phobic? Well, time to read a little of the French crime novel I'd been reading before. I'm also going to look up French review books so that, if I ever get tired of Russian and Swedish, I'll at least have something to do. Well, besides my other hobbies of course. I've had to put my music aside for my short study of Swedish. I will not have time in the future, however, to study both piano and Swedish+my other languages. Unless I start ordering piano materials in Swedish... My A2 results in Swedish are explanatory - I feel less bad about being able to read Aftonbladet. I've got to stick to 8sidor for the moment. But there will come a time when I can read Aftonbladet. Let's make that my goal, a goal past "understand pop songs in Swedish" (which is variable - I've found multiple songs where I literally knew every word, and songs where everything was incomprehensible). I think once I can read a Swedish newspaper without wanting to engage in self-flagellation, I can move on to Japanese. I've got a year to work on Swedish, a year to improve my Russian, a year to work on my musical dreams, and a year of college up ahead. How am I going to do this? Well, I'll find out soon enough. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4827 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 43 of 92 27 August 2012 at 12:35pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Only 3 weeks and you can sound like that? Now I'm even more impressed!
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| pbromide Bilingual Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4546 days ago 76 posts - 98 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Swedish | Message 44 of 92 27 August 2012 at 7:32pm | IP Logged | ||
|
@montmorency - Truth be told, it would not be fair to say I've studied only three weeks.
I did a little studying of Swedish around a year ago, nothing serious, but I did listen to a lot of Swedish music and so I got familiar with a lot of common words and such. I can't say exactly how long I've been studying Swedish because the first "study" I did was pretty casual and it consisted of reading my book and not doing any of the exercises. :P I basically got by using English-Swedish cognates and context. Tomorrow school starts, and if the stars are aligned, I should have my Russian class. I feel like I should write something in Russian to celebrate, but I'm on a Swedish kick now so I won't. :P I'll be editing this post throughout the day so as not to clog up the forum with a bunch of unnecessary posts. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| pbromide Bilingual Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4546 days ago 76 posts - 98 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Swedish | Message 45 of 92 28 August 2012 at 12:54am | IP Logged | ||
|
So I just spent around a few hours copying down nearly every verb in "Swedish - An
Elementary Grammar-Reader." I feel a little bit accomplished. I categorized them into 1, 2, 3, and 4 like in the book because I didn't really know the conjugations. Now I know! And I can color code them for flashcards. LOTS of flashcards. I don't plan to do this again with the nouns - or at least, not in one sitting. That is too much! Instead as I go through the book and find words I don't know (or just ett words), I'll write them down and practice them. I'm a little tired of all this writing. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| pbromide Bilingual Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4546 days ago 76 posts - 98 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Swedish | Message 46 of 92 29 August 2012 at 3:13am | IP Logged | ||
|
First day of Russian class. As I expected, it was for people with no previous knowledge
of Russian. The class was delightfully small, though. There are some possibilities for me to advance to the second elementary level, but unfortunately intermediate and advanced levels are not offered. I went through Assimil up until Chapter 23. Why 23? That's where I started finding large quantities of words I did not understand. The process of having to listen to every chapter was a bit tiring, especially as the audio does not match up to the written words sometimes. I took a look at FSI as well. One thing is clear - having to start from the very beginning is not endearing to me. Still, I want to make sure I have a solid foundation, so it's necessary. Lots of new words await! I thought about purchasing Le Suedois Sans Peine, but it is ridiculously expensive! I think I'll stick with the materials I have now. I'm not in a situation where I can just buy whatever I want anyway. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| pbromide Bilingual Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4546 days ago 76 posts - 98 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Swedish | Message 47 of 92 31 August 2012 at 1:19am | IP Logged | ||
|
Jag såg en fransk film idag. Nåväl, inte fransk "per se" men en Disney film på franska.
Lejonkungen. Jag måste sig eftersom jag växer äldre, denna film får fler och fler tårar från mig. När Mufasa dog, jag var så sörjlig! Jag kan säga att ja förståde... åtminstone 60%. Jag säger utan stolt att mitt värsta fel är min lyssnande. I also dug out some old Russian films I had. Time to watch those. Being that Russian films are plentiful on the internet, I could also find a few with subtitles and burn them to DVD. Don't ask why, but I hate watching movies on my laptop or computer - it doesn't feel right. I tried reading the first chapter of "Blomsterkungen" and found I could understand what was going on, though I missed a lot of words. At this moment I realized, much to my dismay, that this is more or less what happens to me in Russian. After four years of Russian, I'm at the same level as after four weeks in Swedish. Not fun. But I hope to improve these languages to a B2 (currently A2 in Swedish, possibly hovering between A2 and B1 in Russian?). "Time for my favorite part of language learning - looking up new words!" said she sarcastically. Gonna go through the first chapter (more like the first page) of Blomsterkungen and mark unknown words. Later on I might watch a Russian film. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| pbromide Bilingual Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4546 days ago 76 posts - 98 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Swedish | Message 48 of 92 31 August 2012 at 4:29am | IP Logged | ||
|
Bought one of the Håkan Nesser books. It... doesn't have an English translation, but it
was really cheap and the other books were a bit too expensive for right now. Watched a Russian movie: Стиляги. It was cute, but it showed I'm not that great at understanding the spoken word. I used a "fan made" (if such a term is appropriate here) translation for the movie. I liked the style shown throughout the movie; I've recently gotten into fashion and so I'm always on the lookout for interesting new styles. Stilyagi certainly showed that you can definitely make outrageous color combinations work. But this is my language log, not my fashion log, so enough of that. I'm going to be trying to watch as many Russian movies as I can. Because of my dislike of watching movies on the laptop, I'm burning them all to disk and watching them. Unfortunately the last part of Stilyagi was corrupted so that I couldn't see how it ended, but I'd read the Wikipedia page for it before so I knew what would happen. Clearly need to watch it again and actually write down words and such. Tomorrow is Кавказский Пленник. There are a few other war films with English translations available which I'll be watching later on (I've been told Russians make great war films - not a big fan of the genre but I'll give it a try). If I can find Russian subtitles for this film, great - if not, I won't lose any sleep. 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
