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Language Log! (TAC 2013) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| alexheaton Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4451 days ago 12 posts - 13 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Finnish, German, Italian | Message 1 of 13 11 January 2013 at 10:56am | IP Logged |
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So…the first post of my language learning log. I’ve wanted to start one for a while and this year’s TAC seems like a good reason to start one. This is going to be where I can write my language learning exploits, my own targets, keep them updated (no doubt with a few amendments) and most importantly monitor my own progress while getting feedback from others. I also feel like it will give me extra motivation to do something to update here! My language preferences are European languages, however there are a few from outsideEurope that do interest me – Farsi for example even if I don’t really know why!
Now to those targets! I have tried to find a mid-point between realistic yet ambitious, I realise that it’ll be hard work but at the moment I have quite a bit of free time to work towards these goals. *The first target applies to French and Spanish. I hope to revise what I’ve learnt at school and college using the Complete and Perfect Your: series from Teach Yourself. I’ll also be using Memrise to expand my vocabulary as well as making an effort to read more books in these languages. I’m also going to try and watch more films. Overall; I’d like to achieve a solid B2 in both French and Spanish and maybe start pushing towards the heights of C1! Then I have targets for 4 other languages which will be my main focus for the TAC: *To further improve my Finnish. I’ll be going through my Teach Yourself again as well as working my way through the Colloquial Finnish, the FSI course and using Memrise for vocabulary in an attempt to get to B1. *Norwegian I think is my favourite sounding language, although there are many I like. I’ve been slowly going through my TY and I’m hoping to go through it again and like Finnish use Memrise for vocabulary and perhaps purchase the colloquial Norwegian too as an alternative. I think overall I’d like to aim for B1 like Finnish. *Russian. For some reason whenever I’ve tried to make some progress in a Slavic language I never seem to get too far. Therefore I think this will be quite a tricky one for me. Nevertheless I have previously learnt the script so there’s one step out of the way. Again I’ll be using TY and Memrise with a Russian grammar so I can read up on the more challenging points. I will also be trying to read some of my Russian Stories book just to improve my reading of the Cyrillic script. I think a B1 level will probably be very optimistic so I’ll be more than happy if I get to A2. *The last target is for Farsi/Persian. This is the final language I’ll be trying to get to grips with, my familiarity of the Farsi script is none though I’ve done a little on the Arabic script which should set me up well. For this language I’ll be using the Colloquial and World Language Farsi, and only once I am more comfortable with the script will I use Memrise to boost vocabulary. Like Russian, I know this is going to be more difficult for me than say Italian but with the amount of time I’ll have available I’d love to be able to get to A2 and to be reasonably comfortable with reading in the script. Well, if you’ve read this far thank you for taking the time to do so, I'll try my best to make any posts interesting to read! I’ll certainly be reading with interest some of the other logs for the TAC and hopefully find some useful tips to help me in during the challenge. No doubt I'll be "dabbling" in a few others along the way so it's likely I'll be mentioning other languages too. So let's start! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5008 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes  Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 2 of 13 12 January 2013 at 12:11am | IP Logged |
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Good luck!
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| languagenerd09 Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom youtube.com/user/Lan Joined 5099 days ago 174 posts - 267 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Mandarin, Japanese, Thai | Message 3 of 13 12 January 2013 at 2:04am | IP Logged |
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buena suerte! :)
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| alexheaton Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4451 days ago 12 posts - 13 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Finnish, German, Italian | Message 4 of 13 14 January 2013 at 2:16pm | IP Logged |
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@Cavesa; @languagenerd09 Thanks! Also, good luck to you too in the TAC, I'll try and follow your progress as well.
Just a small update here. My Colloquial Persian arrived and so far it seems very good! Especially as each dialogue is written in both the Persian script and the latin script transliteration, which is great when getting used to all the letters. I will not be getting any gold stars for handwriting yet though, so I think rewriting all the letters numerous times is what I'll be doing today! Also, for anyone else studying Finnish the Graded Reader which can be found via a link on the FSI language Finnish page is very useful. It contains 50 short texts with a glossary and summary questions for each text. Yesterday I went through the first short text translating using the glossary and a dictionary, it really is a good feeling once you can understand a longer piece of text like that! On to text 2! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| languagenerd09 Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom youtube.com/user/Lan Joined 5099 days ago 174 posts - 267 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Mandarin, Japanese, Thai | Message 5 of 13 14 January 2013 at 7:53pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for mentioning the FSI page! I might have a look into that!
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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7155 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 6 of 13 14 January 2013 at 9:20pm | IP Logged |
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If you don't have the Finnish Graded Reader*, you can try Ymmärrä suomea! which contains about a couple dozen texts for reading practice. In addition to questions for reading comprehension, it has the advantage where each text is also recorded and can be heard by a built-in .mp3 player (unfortunately, the audio for FSI Finnish Graded Reader is not available on FSI-language-courses.org or Internet Archive. For example, here are the texts, questions and audio recordings of the first set of texts "Alkutekstit".
*The text's link on FSI-language-courses.org points to ERIC which has yet to repost the .pdf of the book after it took down all .pdf files after that scare over an undetermined amount of files containing personal data. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| alexheaton Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4451 days ago 12 posts - 13 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Finnish, German, Italian | Message 7 of 13 14 January 2013 at 11:53pm | IP Logged |
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@Chung
Fortunately I do already have the Graded Reader :D Although this Ymmärrä Suomea! looks very useful too! Thanks for pointing it out! The audio will be very useful. Now though, It's time to keep up the French by watching the dubbed version of The Big Bang Theory! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| alexheaton Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4451 days ago 12 posts - 13 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Finnish, German, Italian | Message 8 of 13 19 January 2013 at 12:27am | IP Logged |
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Just thought a quick update to make anyone who has an Amazon kindle aware of something that could be quite useful!
There are many books that, as they are out of copyright, are free to download. For example; to help out my French I've got the complete Les Miserables book (all 1300 pages of it) as well as Le Compte de Monte-Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. There are quite a lot! I thought it might be useful for those of you taking part in the Super Challenge. On a related note, I have plenty of reading available for French and Spanish, I have the aforementioned FSI reader for Finnish and stories for Russian, but if there are any Norwegian speakers / learners who could suggest some stories or related reading material, I would be very grateful! As for the TAC, I seem to be getting into a routine now that is better than the haphazard learning I was doing before, so hopefully that'll relate to good progress in all my languages! Though as I thought might happen, I've been spending less time on Russian than the others...something I hope to change. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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