|
 |
Vermillon 文言文 / Deutsch / Ænglisc | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4620 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes  Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 17 of 35 30 March 2012 at 4:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
New report, a bit late but I'll stick to reporting the work done until last Sunday. This had been quite a busy week, and being back to France for the week-end didn't really help. Anyway, even with that "half-week" on my hands, I've managed to get some 20 hours in, which is probably acceptable.
Korean: 15 hours only, and I believe it's been mostly adding vocabulary, extensive reading of my intermediate reader, and continuing my progress through the grammar book. Now I'm a bit fed up with adding vocabulary for now, and I feel it would be more beneficial to complete the grammar book and then switch to more writing practice, using that grammar that I've learnt. I also plan to do one last TOPIK paper before the big day (15 days left!), and particularly having a close look at the composition example they give. My goal is to see what kind of structures they expect us to know and to use, as I'm generally not good at writing constructed texts on boring topics... I need to push myself and consider that the goal is to show that "I know some Korean" rather than make it interesting. On the listening side, I will probably go over several papers and do a sort of L-R on the listening sections, to get myself more familiar with the pace and expressions they use. One tip, for anyone taking the TOPIK, that doesn't make your Korean better, but while you're sitting there, you may as well optimise your score, in case it would help you some day: for each section, the number of correct answers in each column (A,B,C,D) is the same: for 30 answers, the average is 7.5 so two columns have 7 and two have 8. If you lack time at the end (and you don't have time to read 5 lines to answer those two questions), it's quicker to count how many you've answered in each column and pick accordingly. I've tried it after I had finished some past exams, just to see how it would perform compared to my own reading: counting how many answers I had for the 24 first questions, I distributed the 6 last questions to fill equally each column. It is much better than purely random selection, and even better than what I had actually chosen... This works quite well, mainly because in a given section, the difficulty gets bigger in the end: assuming you've correctly answered the first questions (they're easy), you can predict quite well the last ones. This technique can also be used to decide between to answers... and this may be the point that decides if you pass level 1 or 2! Mandarin: I've started reading 余华《十个词汇里的中国》: I love it. Surprisingly, reading traditional characters vertically (two new things for me) hasn't posed any problem at all until now (90 pages) and I decided not to use any dictionary for the whole book. I'm quite happy to see that I haven't lost much on the reading side. From the beginning of April I'll have the chance to have a Mandarin speaker with me all the time, so that'll give me the opportunity to keep it! On the down side, I haven't really touched Classical Chinese, which annoys me, but it's quite difficult to spend more than 100% of one's time. And while in France, I've succumbed to the temptation of a few Assimil books: German (that "hope I can be brave enough to finally master it one day" language), Polish (have done Michel Thomas before, and I feel quite attracted to it... plus London is full of Poles, there are even free Polish newspapers distributed on the street...) and Greek (have a colleague being Greek, so why not)... but I remain commited mostly to Korean. edit: and from this week-end, I'm probably going to spend a bit of time programming, in order to implement a few of the ideas I've had over the past few months regarding tools that could help me study better. Hopefully the time investment will be acceptable compared to the learning speed increase provided. *fingers crossed* (which doesn't help programming) Edited by vermillon on 30 March 2012 at 4:20pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4810 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 18 of 35 31 March 2012 at 12:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
you call studying almost three hours per day acceptable? wow, you're VERY dedicated... I call that quite a lot :)
The TOPIK tip is great, thanks for sharing! I think I'm lucky if I understand the 3/4 of the test in October, so having a good strategy for guessing the rest is definitely going to help. Maybe that makes level 4 more attainable. I never even got the idea to count the crosses... I thought they'd distribute them more randomly. A 24-h-native speaker? That's cool! Where can I get one of those? :) Bravery is needed for German? I'm starting to understand that, now that I'm trying to teach people my language and I'm more aware of how unreasonable it is... But I think after Chinese and Korean you'll probably find it less work-intensive. Although I think I'd take Korean grammar over German grammar any day... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4620 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 19 of 35 31 March 2012 at 8:45am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Compared to a goal of five hours per day, that's quite low ;-) I just don't want to spend decades learning languages, I guess... I'm more interested in enjoying the language than learning it (I mean, I love languages, but reading some novels or chatting with friends is much better than reading a textbook, right?), so if I could make that learning period as short as possible, that would be great.
You're welcome. In fact, the answer sheets from the TOPIK have the number of answers from each column... don't see why they would bother mentioning them, except to make me notice that the distribution of answers was uniform. I hope you will be good enou not to resort to this trick, but it's good to know. Btw, I thought you were also taking the Beginner level these days? Or only the intermediate in October?
I guess it's mostly the result of having ""studied"" (many quotes are needed, let's say I "sat in a class of") German in high school, but I wasn't really interested at the time (until teen age would make me listen to Das Ich early works, which I would spend quite a lot of time translating...) and I didn't know one could learn languages outside of a class anyway. Since then, I've tried several times to restart, but the fail was on the motivation side: I couldn't admit that though having spent time on it, I was still a beginner, and my expectations for myself were too high (I should know German already!). I just have to convince myself that I'm just bad and spend the months required to learn lots of vocabulary, expose myself to texts etc. As you say, I try to convince myself that if I've learnt Mandarin, German should be doable (not quite convinced Mandarin is more difficult though, but I can try to pretend to myself...). Ah, just talking about it makes me want to dedicate some time to it... listening to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIkA628zqsw&feature=related as well... (warning: may be one of those "if I was a native speaker, I wouldn't like it" kind of songs.) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4620 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 20 of 35 02 April 2012 at 3:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
The first trimester has gone, time for a short summary. Since the beginning of the year, I've managed to study the following languages:
Korean: 188h, Icelandic: 50h, Classical Chinese: 45h, Latin: 44h, Chinese: 43h (many more hours as I've been reading a lot at the beginning of the year but didn't count for it at the time... perhaps around 30 more hours), German: 6h, Modern Greek: 4h and a few others less than that. That's a total of 380h, i.e. around 4h10 a day (or 4h30 if I count the Chinese reading estimate). My goal being 5h/day, I consider it quite good and I'm very satisfied with how I've managed to keep motivated on this middle-term period. My goal for the next trimester is to manage to keep up with that pace, and as I can't study more in quantity, I'll try to improve the efficiency, namely try to activate the skills I've recently gained passively. Finally, I think it is likely that Icelandic will be put on the side for a while, perhaps definitely, and it may be the case (to a lesser extent?) for Latin as well. I'm happy with what I've learnt in these two already, and though I really like them, some other languages could be more useful for me as a person and possibly in my career. I'm considering trying to start again with German and Polish (both of which I'm really attracted to and can open some doors for me), but I don't want them to make my Korean progress slower, so it will be a delicate balance to reach. As for the normal weekly log: Korean: 23h30 this week, which is much more reasonable than last week, and I'm very happy with the progress. I've managed to finish the Korean Intermediate Grammar book, which was one of my short term goals to expand my reading ability. From now I won't be looking actively forward to learning grammar, but rather look up the structures I come across and that I don't understand. The TOPIK is in 13 days now, and from the two last tests I've done, it should be alright. I still want to do the final adjustments: look up what were my mistakes and try to pay more attention to them if they follow a certain pattern, and also start practicing writing. I'm usually bad at writing, but perhaps looking at the examples provided in past papers, I can get an idea of what they're expecting. Moreover, as I now want to activate all the Korean that I've been cramming into my brain for the past three months, writing daily will be one of my goals for perhaps a month. I will reduce the vocabulary intake to 0-15 words a day, just to feel like I'm learning some, but I don't want it to take time on the rest. Finally, I'd like to try reading the manhwa I bought month ago, as well as my reader, just to reward myself for the quick progress of the last few months. I hope this "reward" will act as a motivation boost and quickly I will want to go through an intensive period of Korean study again! Edited by vermillon on 02 April 2012 at 3:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4620 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 21 of 35 03 April 2012 at 12:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
It's surely not the best place to share this, but perhaps some people interested will find it... let's pretend it's part of my log.
Discovered this wiki, which originally applied to be an official Wikipedia version but never made it, so they exist on wikia: a mixed script encyclopedia. I have to check, but it's possible that they use automatic conversion of Wikipedia articles, in which case I'd be interested in their conversion software. http://kore.wikia.com/wiki/%E9%9F%93%E6%96%87%E6%BC%A2%E5%AD %97 Isn't it beautiful? :) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4810 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 22 of 35 03 April 2012 at 1:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Congrats on studying 4:30h per day in the past three months! The Mange should be interesting with all the colloquial speech and the many, many words for sounds in Korean.
I know it's hard to write something every day, so I wish you good luck! Are you going to use lang-8 or some other community to get your texts corrected?
Actually, I already passed the Beginner last April. I just never studied much for it, so I went through the Beginner vocab list only now, because it's also relevant for Intermediate and as far as I know they didn't include the Beginner vocab in the Intermediate list. Are you planning to try the Intermediate test in October as well? Mixed script wikipedia looks great! It definitely looks nicer than Hangul only. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4620 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 23 of 35 04 April 2012 at 10:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think the manhwa will be intersting first because I will have to learn gigatons of vocabulary... yesterday I've read the first half page... I understood entirely the first bubble, its grammar and vocabulary, while the first time I opened the book about a year ago, I could understand nothing. But then, from the second bubble, vocabulary + grammar started to pose a problem, so I'll probably have to use some strategy to read. Perhaps that's what people call intensive reading, looking up every unknown word and research grammar points that I don't know yet. If I could do this very regularly (daily), then probably after a month I would start to see the need to look up grammar go down to almost zero (assuming the grammar in a manhwa is not that of a novel), and possibly a bit less for vocabulary. I may start logging that for myself, the number of words and grammar structures looked up.. hopefully in a year I'll be able to produce a nice graph with a decreasing curve!
No, I think I'm going to write them correctly the first time, that'll save some time! (hahaha?) More seriously, I think I'm going to take my grammar notebook (reformulated what I've picked from my grammar reference) and "work out" each structure, perhaps write 5 sentences containing it, forcing myself to use them. Then when I get a better grip of them, I'll start writing small paragraph, there again trying to force myself to use as many as possible. I haven't started yet, at the moment I'm reviewing the grammar I've studied and adding it to Anki for reinforcement.
By all means, yes. If the place I live in at that time offers the TOPIK in October, then I'll try to get it. Perhaps I'll try one intermediate past paper in a few weeks, just to see how far I am at the moment. Also, I'm a bit burnt out at the moment. Not fed up with studying, but I've used quite a lot of energy and now I feel tired quite early every day. -------------------------- Finally, I'd like to report on my work from tonight. As part of my preparation for the TOPIK, I have looked at various past papers to compare their composition questions and models. The pattern is very clear: -the question asks you about someone/something/somewhere you like/want to go to, and you then have to explain why you like it: no surprise here. -the models seem to show that you don't have to be interesting: sticking to a boring story of going to Jeju Island and that'll do... the register is formal (-습니다 all along, while the intermediate level expects you to know of the plain register), and there is the widest possible use of the structures one is supposed to know. This confirms what once my English teacher said about passing some exam: "even if the topic is boring, your task is to show that you know some English. So force yourself to use some structures, to show you know them." The result tend to look quite unnatural, because there's such a high density of structure it hurts the eyes: it's even better if you can chain structures together. There are 9 days left to prepare, I'll try to think of how I can plan my use of structures to develop of short narrative. It may sound like I'm too focused on the exam and not enough on the language, but actually I believe it has helped and is still helping my progress a lot. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4620 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 24 of 35 30 April 2012 at 12:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Hmm, it's been a month I haven't posted anything here, and it's of course not a very good sign. I've been quite busy in April and haven't really had anytime for study, unfortunately. On the whole month, I've studied 52h, which is less than half the rythm I was able to sustain until now.
Mandarin: In that time, I'm not including the many hours of chatting in Mandarin that I now have in my daily life. It's quite good, but chatting all the time doesn't make you "good", it only makes you intermediate. As I've "passed" (perhaps) intermediate already some time ago, chatting doesn't really help me, but at least it doesn't hurt... perhaps it'll do some good to my tones. I now feel Mandarin is not a big problem for me, and I don't want to study it anymore: I want to use it to live and learn other things instead. That way, I hope I can continuously improve without really noticing it, and also have time to spend on the other languages I'm interested in. Finally, the most interesting point for me language-wise is that yesterday I went to see the play of Shakespeare "Richard III", part of a multi-language Shakespeare festival in London, and it was in Mandarin. That alone would make learning the language worth. I understood almost everything and was extremely pleased. The acting was excellent, they included some Chinese flavour (martial arts movements, opera singing techniques) in some places. Now I want to follow that festival to see all the funny languages they have! I also plan to spend more time watching Chinese movies. One thing to note is that I should really ban subtitles (even in Mandarin) because I can't avoid reading them while I could actually understand if I listened without that distraction. Classical Chinese: didn't do a lot, but I have managed to finish my second textbook, which involved (I believe) the full of Autumn Waters from Zhuangzi. I struggled a bit on that, but considering I'm still a beginner, I'm very happy. What also makes me extremely satisfied is, looking back, the very quick progress I've had in the past few months. I now feel more or less ready to tackle real texts. Don't know yet if I'll go to my third textbook, an extract of the book of Han (汉书), which has the lexicon coming with it to help save time, or if I'll go directly to the Garden of Stories 说怨 because I know it does contain a lot of things I'd like to read in it... if only I had more time! :( Korean: I took the TOPIK. Absolutely no progress from that on, I haven't spent any time writing as I said I would, I merely reviewed my vocabulary on Anki. This is clearly not good, but well, life is like this sometimes. I somehow regret it, because tomorrow I'm going to see Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in Korean, and perhaps having had one more month of intense study would have made much more enjoyable. Anyway, we'll see how it goes. I plan to spend only 40mn-1h/day on Korean during the 6WC... German: Not a report, but just to mention I'm starting intense study (let's say 2h45 or more per day) during the 6WC. One of my goals is to go and see Shakespeare's "Timon of Athens" in German on the 1st of June. I've never been good at German, but I see I have a passive knowledge of some vocabulary, so I hope one month will be enough to boost that. A more intermediate-term goal will possibly be to take the Zertifikat Deutsch which is a B1 exam. That would be a good start, but my desire for German is C1 on a more long term. Wanderlust: The Shakespeare multi-language festival is a terrible thing for someone like me trying to resist wanderlust. Anyway, I'm planning on going to watch the following languages (don't know which plays they are...): Korean, German, British Sign Language, Polish, French, and possibly Cantonese, Georgian. I'm quite sad that I've missed Swahili and Hindi, would have been nice. Finally, I've managed to re-plan my life and normally May should be more like January~March than like April. I expect 25 to 30h of language studies, which is slightly less than before, but I'd like to devote some time to other activities as well. 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. |
