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TAC 2012 - Team Ne Nur - Throwing pebbles | ||
Tags: 6 Weeks Challenge (6WC) | Dead Languages | Norwegian | Esperanto | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | English | German | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5277 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 17 of 29 13 February 2012 at 10:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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Week 6: February 5 – February 11
Total this week: 6.48 hours Total 2012: 106.48 hours If last week's study-fest was a night of heavy drinking, this week was a massive hangover. I've been tired and lazy and caught up in other things so I'm afraid this update is going to be very short. I do, however, have some news; because I will take a course on Yiddish and Hebrew in Ashkenazi culture in the second half of this semester, I am adding one of those languages to my plate. I wasn't planning on taking this course but I needed an extra elective and I've always been interested in Jewish culture and history so I added it as a last-minute addition. I'm still torn on whether I'm going to study Yiddish or Hebrew because while I am slightly more interested in the second, Yiddish seems to be more useful for the course, but then I have a feeling that it will be easier to find good resources for Hebrew. Choices, choices.... Anyway, for now I am re-learning the alphabet after several previous attempts that all culminated in me forgetting every last letter. I like to think I actually knew it quite well some years ago after I visited the Jewish Historical Museum and got obsessed with a template of the alphabet I got there and some of the letters still carry a vague sense of familiarity but unfortunately, most seem to have vanished entirely. But no matter. I have another seven or eight weeks to memorize 32 Anki cards, which should be enough even for my Swiss-cheese of a brain. Français This week: 3.65 hours 2012: 48.03 hours This week was special in that it was the first time this year that I didn't finish a single thing on my list of weekly requirements. Yay for me! Ah well, I guess it's good to fail from time to time, just to remind myself to appreciate the good weeks. Esperanto This week: 2.75 hours 2012: 31.58 hours Shame on you, Renee! Have you forgotten about this little thing called the 6 week challenge that's going on right now? I plead no contest. I will do better next week. I have no further comment. --------------------------------------------------------- @ Sprachprofi: Wow, thanks so much for all those links and tips! As you can tell from the above confession, I haven't made use of any of them yet but I expect to be in an Esperanty mood tomorrow so I'm sure I'll get to some of them then. I plan on visiting my parents in Dordrecht some time this week and Rotterdam is very close so I might make use of the opportunity to visit the UEA headquarters. It sounds very interesting! @ Cristina: I'm afraid that after the past week, I can't really claim to be serious about the 6WC, or perhaps I should say I am intermittently serious about it. You on the other hand... I just looked at the twitter score (for the first time in days) and you are doing fantastic! Congratulations! Edited by ReneeMona on 22 February 2012 at 1:29am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5277 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 18 of 29 22 February 2012 at 2:44am | IP Logged | ||
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Week 7: February 12 – February 18
Total this week: 25.61 hours Total 2012: 132.1 hours The semester is now officially underway and even though I thought it was going to negatively affect my studies, it hasn’t at all, which can be explained by the fact that two of my courses just so happen to be about two of my target languages. Because of this fact, Old English ending up being the most studied language of the week, which was quite a pleasant surprise. As for the six week challenge, I feel I should say that by now, there are some discrepancies between my study times in this log and the ones on twitter that have crept in due to my faulty bookkeeping and even faultier mathematical skills (and it really comes down to a lack of skill here because I do try). Should anyone care (which I doubt, but this is my log so I can mention it anyway if I feel so inclined), the one in my log is definitely the correct one because it is the highest one. Français This week: 8.06 hours 2012: 56.09 hours Since I need to work on my listening comprehension, I’ve been looking for a fun French TV show and this week I found Fais pas çi, fais pas ça, which is very funny and more importantly, it’s about two families going about their everyday lives, which means there is plenty of useful everyday vocab to be picked up. The storylines and style of filming (it’s supposedly a sort of reality show) reminds me a little of British shows like Outnumbered and Shameless and the characters (especially the mothers) remind me very much of the kind of people I grew up with so that makes it even funnier. Apart from watching two episodes of fpc, fpc, I finally watched La fille du puisatier, which I’d been planning to watch for ages. Since it is based on story by Marcel Pagnol and it has Daniel Auteuil in it, I was expecting quite a lot from it and it sort of lived up to it but then it went south near the ending. Unlike Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, still my two favorite French movies, it doesn’t have a big tragic ending and instead everyone ends up living happily ever after, which left me quite underwhelmed. Anyway, movie criticism aside, I was thrilled to be able to keep up with strange accents and deep male voices. English This week: 2.68 hour 2012: 16.88 hours After watching the latest adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma (which I thought was okay), I suddenly realized that I have never read the novel so I decided to choose it as my next book. I think Emma Woodhouse may be my favorite Austen-heroine, even though she’s a arrogant and a lousy matchmaker. Mr. Elton is causing me considerable annoyance as well, but the chapters in Austen’s novels are always nice and short and she makes the occasional very witty observation so I’m enjoying the book so far. Deutsch This week: 1.41 hours 2012: 12.76 Since I’ve been kind of lost on what to do about German recently, I’ve decided to start working with Assimil again. I think it will add a bit of structure to my studies and it’s been a while since I used Assimil. I have started the course once before and did the first few lessons but I made the mistake of actually studying them attentively so I was bored out of mind within minutes. This time, I worked through the first seven lessons in twenty minutes because I only skimmed through them. Ænglisc This week: 8.96 hours 2012: 10.3 hours You know you’re a language nerd when you spend all afternoon learning pronoun, noun and adjective declensions and it is by far the most fun you’ve had all week. I am finally re-taking the course on Old English that I dropped over a year ago, and our homework for the second week was to study the entire nominal system. I’m not sure if my feelings about it have changed since the last time I had to study it or if I simply never devoted enough time to it to fully appreciate it, but after spending six hours memorizing case endings (and sounding like I’m trying to speak ape; –u, -a, -e, -a, -um, etc), I am suddenly loving the grammar. It’s so satisfying to look at a phrase like þā gōdan lȳs and see exactly how all the cases and sound changes fit (the phrase means “those good lice” for anyone who cares to know how random the examples in my book are). We are not required to learn all the declensions and conjugations by heart but since I plan to learn the language to a higher level than they expect of us (and also because I suddenly enjoy complicated grammar), I’m learning them by heart anyway. Homework for next week: the verbal system. Esperanto This week: 3.65 hours 2012: 35.22 hours Had I known that I would be adding an Esperanto course to my course load at the last minute, I might have been better off not studying by myself because the course starts from scratch and the pace isn’t exactly strenuous. Still, the professor clearly knows a lot about Esperanto and about languages in general and he does that wonderful thing of taking examples from a bunch of languages without the slightest bit of explanation, clearly assuming that a class full of language students (well, and one history student) will know at least the basics of Spanish, Italian, English, Latin, French and German. Apart from attending class, I’ve started reading La eta princo, which is turning out to be quite challenging and full of unknown words. If I hadn’t read the book before, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have any idea of what was going on (and the random nature of the story wouldn’t really help either). עִבְרִית This week: 0.83 hours 2012: 0.83 hours I’ve officially decided to study Hebrew (and perhaps a little bit of Yiddish on the side) and after nearly an hour of bellowing along to this video, I can proudly say that I can sing the Aleph-bet in my sleep. I’m still working on connecting all the letters to the sounds and I’ve also been looking for resources. I’ve never used any of the FSI language courses before so I’m going to give that a try and I also have Pimsleur. I think this should be enough for now (especially because I don’t want Hebrew to take too much time away from my other target languages) but should I get bored, I have a very extensive university library at my disposal that I don’t make nearly enough use of. Edited by ReneeMona on 22 February 2012 at 2:45am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6412 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 19 of 29 22 February 2012 at 11:27am | IP Logged | ||
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Wow, looks awesome! Way to go!
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5276 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 20 of 29 28 February 2012 at 10:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hebrew. Mmm. I love it. I know that at some point I will take up Hebrew again. I may be in the nursing home before I get around to it, but I will definitely do it. You seem to be doing an amazing job!
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| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5277 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 21 of 29 07 March 2012 at 12:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Weeks 8 & 9: February 19 – March 3
Total these weeks: 32.88 hours Total 2012: 164.98 hours Since I was too lazy to write last week, this week's post will cover two weeks while not being any longer than usual. I hope everyone is okay with that. I have been working steadily on all my languages and made some exciting breakthroughs in French and Old English (I don't like to play favorites but I'm afraid I just don't love all my languages equally and these two are definitely my favorites) but I've strayed from my original weekly requirements concept, which has made my studying somewhat disorderly so I am going to try to reinforce that this week. Français These weeks: 14.52 hours 2012: 70. 62 hours Even though I was too lazy to write about it, I did actually have something exciting to share. A couple of weeks ago, I got a message on SharedTalk from a French girl who is living in Amsterdam for eight months and who wants to learn a bit of Dutch so we made an arrangement to help each other. We met up on a Saturday afternoon and though I had I been trying to control my great expectations of the plan (these things never pan out as I hoped) she turned out to be a very friendly girl whom I have quite a lot in common with and most amazingly, she seemed perfectly fine with speaking nothing but French with me for the entire four-hour duration of our first meeting, including the half-hour or so when we read Op zoek naar Nemo together to help her with her Dutch. Since she knows English and German as well, I sometimes draw on these languages when I can't think of a word in French or want to make a comparison to Dutch but other than that, I have so far muddled my way through a good seven hours of speaking French with a native speaker. Yay! Since the first meeting was a success, we met up again last Saturday and next week we're going to the Rijksmuseum together. During the first exchange, I was quite underwhelmed by my own performance but the second time was already better, at least in terms of confidence, so if we keep this up I think I'll benefit from it hugely. English These weeks: 1.05 hour 2012: 17.93 hours I'm not making much progress in Emma at the moment because I need to be in a certain mood to appreciate Austen. Even so, one hour in two weeks is an extremely meagre result so I plan to reinforce the rule of at least an hour a week. Deutsch These weeks: 3.4 hours 2012: 16.15 Because I ran out of things to do with German again (it's now officially a recurring problem), I decided to start listening to a Harry Potter audio book, the second this time because I couldn't remember if I ever finished the first. I've already listened to almost half the book and for some reason, the narrator's pace doesn't feel nearly as annoyingly slow as it was on the first book. Something which is annoying me, however, is the fact that German feels so familiar and natural that when something is actually quite different from Dutch, it's kind of a shock. It makes it much harder to get used to so I try to make a metal note of it every time I hear it so it will hopefully stay in my brain somewhere, if only deep down in my subconscious. I believe I did some Assimil as well but it must have been pretty easy/boring because it seems to have made no impression on me whatsoever. Ænglisc These weeks: 6.1 hours 2012: 16.04 hours I think I've said this before but it bears repeating; I freaking love Old English! We've started translating authentic texts about kings called Oswald slaying dragons and such and I think it's going rather well. My knowledge of the verbal system still needs some brushing up and I need to expand my vocabulary to make translating a little easier but during my last class, my teacher told me I am amazing and that she is proud of me (I am not kidding) so it seems I now have a reputation to uphold. The big mid-term is in three weeks and after that my class will move on to middle English so I will have to continue studying on my own. I still have Teach Yourself and my book of poetry and there is plenty available online so that shouldn't be a problem. Esperanto These weeks: 7.58 hours 2012: 42.82 hours Last week I started watching Mazi en Gondolando on Youtube, which isn't very difficult but it's nice to hear the language spoken a bit more often. I've been focusing a lot on reading and vocabulary so my listening skills were kind of lagging behind. I'm still really enjoying my class, especially now that the homework is getting a little bit more challenging. I had my first test last week and got a 7.3, which isn't very impressive but I do know exactly what I did wrong so I'm pretty sure I'll do better on the next test, which is in three weeks. --------------------------------------------------------- @ Sprachprofi: Thank you! @ Cristina: I have no trouble at all imagining you in a nursing home studying Hebrew and still writing on this forum. And as for me doing an amazing job, have you seen your own scores on twitter recently? You completely blow me away every time I look at the bot. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5276 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 22 of 29 07 March 2012 at 12:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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I am sorry that you need to be in a certain mood to appreciate Emma. I just love Jane Austen, she is my favourite English author, so any time is good for an Austen book or film. I was not too much into Persuasion, but otherwise I love all her books. The language exchange thing seems to be great! I am sure you will learn masses of French with it.
And yes, I have been extremely focused on this 6WC. Perhaps a tad too focused. When you study so much on vacation that it brings on a migraine attack, you are overdoing it. And as for the nursing home I got this brilliant idea of getting together some of the mature learners from HTLAL in 30 years from now, and start up a polyglot nursing home. I was thinking of one with wine for dinner, and Mandarin and Japanese classes instead of knitting and religious services. And at dancing time, we would get to dance to rock music or Argentinian tango in stead of the really boring bland music they present the poor old things with now. And obviously tapas and meze rather than fish balls in white sauce with over cooked carrots. Who's in? :-) Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 07 March 2012 at 1:00pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4649 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 23 of 29 07 March 2012 at 2:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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I am in. But where's the salsa?
On topic: Hebrew is an interesting language, actually. I wish you lots of luck studying that. I know from a few Hebrew speakers that they are very good at using limited roots to dream up related words (as a Semitic language, this is not strange I guess). They also apparently don't have many loanwords. Hanging around Jews took its toll on me. Edited by tarvos on 07 March 2012 at 2:23pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5276 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 24 of 29 07 March 2012 at 4:00pm | IP Logged | ||
There will obviously be lots of salsa. Both on the table and on the dance floor :-) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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