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| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4860 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes  Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 25 of 35 02 May 2012 at 12:37am | IP Logged |
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That Shakespeare festival sounds cool! What a perfect thing for aspiring polyglots.
How was the Korean Midsummer Night's Dream? I'm suddenly curious about the Korean translation of Shakespeare, if they somehow managed to keep all the puns intact, how well the onomatopoeia lends itself to a Korean version, if they use the same kind of language in the translation that is used in 사극... A Shakespeare play in Sign Language is probably really interesting. You're so lucky your Mandarin no longer needs study. I wish I was at that point in Korean already... For how long have you been studying Mandarin? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4670 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 26 of 35 02 May 2012 at 12:33pm | IP Logged |
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I'd say I've been studying for 2 years "plus"... the intensity has varied so much, between "many hours a day" and "nothing for weeks" since 2008... so let's say between 2 and 4 years. I notice that I'm "not good", but enough for the daily conversation, reading, watching Shakespeare in Mandarin, so it's fine for now. I have no plan to do presentations in Mandarin, so I can focus on widening my skills rather than deepening them. I wouldn't really say it needs no more study though (maybe I've said that, in which case I was wrong)... let's just say, for now it doesn't, and as long as I don't lose too much, I'll be happy. :)
As for Midsummer Night's Dream, it was great. I had never read it (nor anything from Shakespeare, in fact, but I've now ordered a few, in preparation for the next plays..), but it seems to be a rather "weird" one. It's probably very heavily adapted: there was a lot of dance and singing of Korea fairies (dokkebi? I forgot), and the love story in the middle where the dialogs where apparently funny enough to have Korean people to laugh. The rest was funny as well, as the acting was clearly not only directed at a Korean audience, and it was very fun on the whole. I can say I've understood almost nothing apart from a few simple sentences, but that didn't make it annoying at all. I really enjoyed the flow of the speech, and made me quite sad I couldn't get it all, which makes me want to study more Korean. The Mandarin play, however, was mostly dialog focused, even though also very funny. Not understanding Mandarin would have made it extremely boring, I believe. Tonight I'm going to see Julius Caesar in Italian. The goal is to have a good evening, and to see how much of Italian I can get without having studied it. Cantonese is on Thursday, and at £2.5 the ticket, I see no reason not to go. It's indeed very nice for aspiring polyglots. I don't know if they do this festival every year, but that would be enough of a "goal deadline" to push me to study harder in a few languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4670 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 27 of 35 09 May 2012 at 6:24pm | IP Logged |
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First week of the 6WC: very good. After a lazy April, I've successfully managed to come back in race with 26h of studies. Hopefully I will do better for the second week, but that's already quite a good start.
German: As German is my main language for the length of the 6WC, I aimed to spend three hours a day on it. Goal achieved as I spent 22h on the week. I've managed to complete the 49 first lessons of Assimil, i.e. the passive wave, so that now I can attack the active wave at a more reasonable rythm. I'm quite happy with that achievement, and I happily see German coming back. I'm also working on the Goethe-Institut B1 vocabulary list. Being 70~ pages, I aim at learning some 1.5p/day in order to complete it within the six weeks. That seem to represent some 2000-2500 words. I'm very happy with the progress so far, my retention is relatively good, the gender of nouns has never seemed that easy (well, when half the words are -e or -ung feminine nouns, that helps..). I've also spent some time watching some videos in German: documentaries about North Korea, old school hip hop songs, hip hop battles, interviews, and I'm very happy to realise German is easy and I have a very good comprehension rate. I've always loved German but found the whole vocabulary thing too difficult for me to tackle, but this seems not to be the case anymore. This time, German will be mine, I know it. The 6WC offers a short deadline to force me to stretch myself and retain motivation. Last thing, I've read the German forums here at HTLAL and I'm a bit sad there's not more activity. Finally, I should brace up and start using my German, even if I feel a bit intimidated. (and yes, druckfehler, I still have to reply to your message!) Korean: Not much here, I'm merely reviewing the vocabulary I've gained in the first trimestre. It is not an ideal situation, but frankly I see quicker returns from German, so for now I'm fine with a stalemate or slow decay. Perhaps after the 6WC I'll be more intensive with Korean. I've received a very nice dictionary from Korea (with hanja), so this should be a motivation. I've also been reading some Korean novels (in French) and that makes me want to re-read them in Korean, when I have the appropriate level. Classical Chinese: Nothing last week, but I'm motivated to do a little every day. More to come next week. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4860 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 28 of 35 10 May 2012 at 2:30am | IP Logged |
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(lass dir ruhig Zeit :))
I'm beginning to suspect that pretty much anything becomes much easier after studying Korean. It's a real confidence booster and seems to work like a linguistic endurance training. I would guess the same goes for other East Asian languages. Any novels to recommend? I've been looking at titles, but want to wait until I can enjoy novels in the original. Korean literature seems like it'll be a lot of fun to discover. Just looking at Korean books I have to say they're beautiful. I can't wait to read a book a bought in Korea which contains ... hmm... I'd call them poetic short stories/essays. Don't really know what this genre is called, but it seems quite popular in Korea. Reading Korean poetry would also be interesting - but it's still a long way until I get to that point... Documentaries about North Korea in German? On youtube? I've been watching quite a few, but never thought of looking for documentaries in German. You're the only East Asian team representative in the 6WC, right? vermillon 화이팅! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4670 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 29 of 35 14 May 2012 at 3:28pm | IP Logged |
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Ah! The second week of the 6WC has passed, mitigated results. I've been half-ill on Thursday and completely ill on Friday through Sunday, so this is only a (bit more than a) half week, and perhaps the total of 21h is not too bad. I'm still a bit sad for all those opportunity hours I've missed.
German: 13h. Good week start, quite a lot of new vocabulary has been learnt and I'm now in the middle of letter E (well, C and D are very small, of course). Using Assimil, I'm now in the active wave, which means that while continuing with new lessons, I go back to the first lessons and translate from French to German. This is the first time I use Assimil, and I'm very pleased: indeed, after doing the passive wave, going back and translating from French to German seems rather easy, and I've learnt a good amount of idioms. I review 3 lessons a day (instead of 1) as I need it to fit in the 6WC. After that, I think I'll have one or two extra wave, because I can really feel the benefits of repetition. I'm also a bit impatient to start using it, even if my recent attempt (check your mailbox, druckfehler!) has proven to be quite difficult. Hopefully soon it will change and I'll be able to produce more interesting content, and above all more easily. Quick question to anyone reading this: is there a German online radio (or cast or anything) that you would recommend to listen to either spoken German (I don't mean learning material) or Music (in German, of course)? Note to myself, I should really spend some time trying to find pairs of audiobooks and pdfs to listen to much more German. Classical Chinese: 7h. I said last time that I'd take a start at Classical Chinese, it is now done. I've started reading that biography of Huo Guang from the Book of the Han (Han Shu 汉书), and in a week I can see the great progress I've made, both since January and since last week: even though it comes with a glossary, which is absolutely required given the incredible amount of official titles, vehicle, place, room, etc names in the text, my general understanding is now quite good. (arguably, in some passages, once you have identified all the job titles and place names, there is little else to read...). It is probably a relatively easy text since it is a biography, but still, I'm very happy. Something I had underestimated is the power of re-reading: I usually re-read quickly what I had read in my previous reading session, and every time it brings me a better understanding of what is going on. It can even go as far as going from "I have no clue about what was just said for these 5 last lines" to "it's crystal-clear". It should take me two more weeks to finish reading this, but I plan to re-read it completely afterwards, perhaps several times. My hope is that with one or two re-reading, I will be able to get a complete understanding, perhaps to the point of translating it. Anyhow, for anyone who has studied Mandarin, I warmly recommend they try Classical Chinese: the feeling is absolutely fantastic. @druckfehler: -Indeed, I believe it clearly puts German into another perspective to have studied Mandarin and Korean. It's not anymore "more difficult than English and Spanish" but "easier than Mandarin and Korean". -As for novels, I've read the following: 한씨연대기 (Die Geschichte des Herrn Han) by 황석영(黃晳暎), which is a story happening during/slightly after the Korean war, from the perspective of Mr Han who is a doctor living in Pyongyang and fleeing to the South. It's well-written, and short: probably something you may want to read in Korean. The other I've read is 연어(salmon) by 안도현: a poetic metaphor of life and love from the point of view of a group of salmons. That one may be a bit too weird to try in Korean for now! If I read some others I'll let you know. I've one more waiting on my desk, but it's along quite a lot of other books, so it may come later. Ah, hopefully we can start a Korean reading club next year! :-) -The documentary about North Korea (there are others) is this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VIiSd4g8P0&list=UU4G2YiL6BbS n0OL0lAWXriA&index=10&feature=plcp it is in two parts, by the way. If you find some other nice ones, please let me know. -I have no idea if I'm the only one of the team in the 6WC, but as German is not an Eastern Asian language (I believe???), I suppose it doesn't count! :) Btw, I've seen you're going to do the "Super Duper challenge", I've no idea how one can manage that... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4670 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 30 of 35 21 May 2012 at 3:02pm | IP Logged |
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New week, new report. Having fully recovered, I've been able to study more than last week, with a total of around 29h, an amount I'm satisfied with.
German: The 6WC is at half time now! I've done 55h of German in total (+20h of others), which is less than I expected, as my goal is 3h/day and therefore I'm 8h late. It's still ok as I've been sick for a week-end, and last week I studied 21h of German, which is the right amount. Vocabulary learning is faring pretty well as I've now reached letter H. I notice however that there's a good amount of words, perhaps 10%, that didn't stick with the usual method. I've spent some time yesterday trying to fix this by relearning some of them one by one, looking for examples, trying to come up with mnemonics and searching for their etymology to try to think of cognates: related to this last point, I'm quite surprised by the large number of words for which I cannot come up with an English cognate. Well, hopefully with time these tough words will stick. I've opened some German novel I have at home and tried to read a bit (without dictionary) and I can feel that the past three weeks of vocabulary have made me improve a lot in reading comprehension, which hopefully means than by the end of the challenge I'll be able to read even more, and perhaps continue with German for a few more weeks or months. Regarding Assimil, I'm late and it's quite annoying. I've simply been too tired to study anything after coming back from the theater on Friday and Saturday and the impact on my rhythm has been quite negative. Hopefully I'll be able to catch up and finish the book by the end of the challenge, or slightly after. My main goal is not to burn out and be able to find a comfortable rhythm, without adding too much stress, to study German regularly. Classical Chinese: Following last's week motivation impulse, I've managed to spend 5h this week reading Classical Chinese. I've continued my reader, applying the same method: as the reader comes with no explanation other than a glossary (that's their goal: make you read and understand yourself), I'm try to rely only on myself, reading and checking the glossary and NOT looking for some explanations online. Some passages are very easy to understand and I can read without stopping at all, while some other passages require several readings. In every session, I quickly re-read what I had read in the last session (or the end of it at least) and I usually understand what I hadn't in the first place. I'm quite happy that I've finished reading the first of the two biographies (of Huo Guang), which makes the two thirds of the total text. For the second biography, the editor apparently found it good to provide nothing else than the text, i.e. no glossary whatsoever. It makes things much more complicated, as I'm forced to look to the dictionary much more often. However, one very positive thing is that I realise how much I can read without any help, and a lot of it I couldn't have read if I hadn't read the first biography: that is to say, I've got used to the vocabulary, the structure of the sentences, some characters that have a very specific (and completely unrelated) meaning when they relate to an emperor and so on. In other words, the last week has really brought A LOT of improvement to my reading ability, and I hope to finish the second biography within a few days. My plans from there may be a complete re-read of the two biographies, possibly drawing some diagrams of all the characters (people, not hanzi..) intervening in the story, and possibly start translating it. The goal would be to force myself to be sure I've understood everything, and get a much better grasp of the language. I may also consider learning some passages by heart, but we'll see how it fares. Finally, I've bought another reader (not received yet) containing some texts from Mencius. I was not particularly interested at first, but seeing it was edited by the same person as my current reader, I decided to give it a go. My 说苑 (Garden Stories) will wait a bit more, I suppose. As usual, if there is anyone reading this and interested in Classical Chinese, please contact me, I'd be happy to chat! Others: As German and Classical Chinese take around 85-90% of my time, not much is left for the rest. However, I manage to keep my Korean deck to zero everyday, and I've resurrected my Latin one too, after one month not touching it at all. I'm quite surprised by how well I remember it, and if I manage to get the queue back to zero, I'll consider spending one hour or two weekly to study further the grammar, new vocabulary and so on. Edited by vermillon on 21 May 2012 at 3:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4670 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 31 of 35 28 May 2012 at 1:21pm | IP Logged |
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Yet another week, now having passed the two thirds of the 6WC. This is by far my most successful week of the challenge and very close to my best of the year with 34h. Keeping track of my study time every single day and comparing with other weeks, the pattern is quite clear: missing a single day in the week ruins the result of the whole week, as 5h is about my maximum during week days (rarely achieved) and therefore there's limited space to catch up.
German: This week has simply been excellent, as I've accumulated above 26h for German alone, which is around the total amount of time, all languages included, that I've spent in the previous weeks. I have managed to keep consistent with the vocabulary intake, setting on an amount of 56 a day (using Inversen's list with 8 blocks of 7 words so as to fill up a page) which should bring me to the end of my word list by the end of the 6WC or shortly after. To avoid burning out, I've decided not to aim for completing it on that deadline but just follow my natural rythm. I've also been able to kill some leeches: these consist mainly of verbs (or nouns coming from verbs) with separable particles, especially when they come in groups and I feel their meaning is rather vague (thanks to the -setzen and -stellen families...). Etymology has helped me a lot in finding mnemonics to tackle them. The benefits of this intensive vocabulary intake are very clear: day after day, I see words that I've just learnt appearing in text or in speech that I listen to. This gives me a lot of motivation to continue with German, as I see the reward coming quite quickly and as I enjoy very much the language. Continueing with this, I've caught up with my Assimil lessons and now plan to do two per day (passive) and five per day (active) so as to finish the book by the end of the challenge. I'll continue using it after, especially I'll try to remember idioms, study the structure of the sentences a bit more, listen continuously to the audio and add to anki the words that will have escaped from the vocabulary list. I'm very happy with Assimil, but I suspect the fact that I was a false-beginner helps me enjoying it. Finally, real (passive...) use of the language: I've bought a few "Easy Readers" the other day (for a big pile of money, that's the bad part) and I've read my first during the week. This "Easy Readers" series, written entirely in German (no English or anything else) has 4 levels (from A to D) claiming required knowledge of 600 and 1200 words for levels A and B (forgot for the others), so I've tried a level A, thinking it would be extremely easy but I merely wanted to have something to read and enjoy and not open a dictionary. I've read the one about Till Eulenspiegel: I believe it requires more than 600 words (or perhaps 600 words but omitting a very large part of the easy vocabulary and adding some more advanced), but I could read and understand everything without opening a dictionary: they provide short explanations (in German) of the words that they consider more complicated (their choice here is sometimes surprising, as they explain "rennen" and not some clearly more complex words...). It was really an enjoyable read, but I'm now going to read level B ones as they seem to be just at my level or slightly above: at least I can read extensively and acquire vocabulary and expressions. I've just started reading one about die weiße Rose (in which they believe a note is needed to explain who Hitler was, another weird "difficult vocabulary" choice), and I really like it. Hopefully I can gain a quick proficiency in reading these simplified texts, and soon perhaps I'll dare trying to read real novels. Classical Chinese: Good news on this side as well! As like week, I've read some 5h, but in a very irregular fashion, being able to read for 1h30 in a row and then nothing for days. I think it's mainly because I try to push myself to do more German, as it's my goal for the 6WC and in my range are very close competitors I would like to pass. More Classical Chinese will come after the challenge... or perhaps not, as this rhythm suits me quite well, I'm not too tired and I don't have the feeling of overworking: slowly improving in Classical Chinese and getting stronger in German is enough for me. So, the good news for this week: I've managed to finish reading the biographies of Huo Guang and Jin Midi. As said last time, the biography of Jin Midi comes with no glossary, so this has been an absolute nightmare: Classical Chinese, as opposed to what is commonly claimed, does NOT have one character per word but very often several. The problem with that is that my classical chinese dictionary is a character dictionary, which was often enough for the texts in my textbooks, but is clearly not anymore for reading this text, and I would probably need something decent like Ciyuan or Cihai (which cost a lot of money and take a lot of space, and can't be handeld in a lying position as I often read...). Anyway, I've finished it, but I can't really say that second biography was any interesting: merely an enumeration of facts, a sort of patchwork telling the genealogical tree of that guy. In total, it took me 14h to read these two biographies which consisted of 290 lines vertical lines in my book: that's almost 3 minutes per line! Admittedly, Classical Chinese is packed with much more information per vertical line than would be a French translation of that given text (1 line = 2~3 French lines? would be interesting to see) and a lot of re-reading is necessary for me to understand some passages. I've then decided to re-read entirely these two texts. I haven't completed this task, but in 1h40 I had completed 90 lines, and have gained a much better understanding of what is going on as well as who is who and why some things happened. Extrapolating, it should take me under 7h (possibly 5?) to finish reading the text, which would be a clear improvement. I'd still like to "work" the text in a productive way: diagrams (family relationships, governmental jobs of the characters, etc), chronological alignment of the events. I don't really know how to format it however, but I'm thinking of a sort of enriched translation, perhaps a translation with links to diagrams, wikipedia articles and so on. Not sure if anyone would be interested in seeing that however, as I've seen no sign of someone who would like to read some books in Classical Chinese. I might do this for myself alone anyway, when I feel a bit more confident about the text I want to work. Mandarin: I've had lunch with some people from Quanzhou yesterday, and I was very pleased to notice that I really understand very well what they say (even when speech is not directed at me), despite their rather thick Minnan accent. Although it was the first time I met them, I could communicate very easily and they didn't seem not to understand what I said even once. I take it as a sign my listening comprehension has improved (as I used to be able to understand mostly people talking "at me" or broadcasts or people that I know well and am used to), and that my pronunciation is probably acceptable as I was fully understood. Yeah! Others: As last week, 2h spent on Latin + Korean, only on Anki. I'm fine with this. An interesting thing however was watching Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost in British Sign Language: this has been my favourite (after Mandarin of course) performance so far, and this continues making me interested in Sign Language, though I don't think I'll ever try, considering how related to one country it has to be. Edited by vermillon on 28 May 2012 at 1:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4658 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 32 of 35 28 May 2012 at 4:27pm | IP Logged |
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Hi, I have some comments on your Classical Chinese reading.
I read the text you are using (the Hanshu biography of Huo Guang) for the third-semester class in Classical Chinese at my uni. There were only three students, and the class progressed in a similar way to classes in Ancient Greek or Latin – we prepared a translation of a few lines for each meeting, and in class the students took turns reading out their version, which the prof would question or correct as needed. In fact, we didn’t get through the book over the whole semester – I think we skipped a bit in order to get to the end, with the interesting description of HG’s funeral and burial in the jade armor of the type that has subsequently been found by archeologists. So we went much more slowly than you are doing. One reason for this is that we also paid attention to the notes. The really neat thing about Classical Chinese is that many points in these texts are obscure even today – the various commentators come up with different interpretations of things, like for example the layout of the Han palace and how it was decorated. Also the older edition of the text that the editor includes is interesting, you experience the extra level of difficulty involved in reading it. Maybe the most relevant thing I can tell you is about dictionaries. Our prof didn’t encourage us to use the glossary, just to check it if we couldn’t find anything on our own. Yes, you could use the Ciyuan for this kind of text (but not the Cihai). But that is actually a bit out-dated, in my view there are only two dictionaries where you can find almost everything. These are the 漢語大辭典 and Le Grand Ricci (if you’re French you might enjoy the latter, the definitions are in French, see this link: http://www.grandricci.org/.) Both are huge and expensive, so best used in libraries, although you can get a 3-volume version of the Hanyu dacidian for around 300 yuan, I think. Other good dictionaries for Classical Chinese are the 王力古漢語字典, which I didn’t use that much but which is quite handy, and the 遠東漢語大辭典, which is the dictionary of choice for either contemporary or classical if you’re in Taiwan. There’s a smaller volume called the 古漢語常用字字典, which is great for learning the usage of common characters, but not useful if you are looking for more obscure ones. On the question of dictionaries, it’s really worth checking a book called “Chinese History: A Manual” by Endymion Wilkinson. Chapter 2 is all about dictionaries, most of what I have written above I found out there. I haven’t done much with Classical Chinese since finishing that course – I’m more focused on Southeast Asian languages now. But when I do dip into old Chinese texts, I usually make use of parallel text editions, like for instance the ones with turquoise covers put out by 三民書局 publishers in Taiwan. This sort of edition has a section of the original, classical text with pronunciation given in Bopomofo, then a translation in putonghua, along with notes. For instance I’ve read a good portion of the Sanmin edition of 列女傳 or Biographies of Virtuous Women, a Han-era text, the biographies are quite short and didactic in an odd kind of way. I just skip between the original and the translation, looking up parts that look interesting. Something similar must exist on the mainland. Anyway, best of luck with your studies in Classical Chinese. To me, it’s not really like learning a living language, but of course it gives you access to an extremely rich cultural legacy, and will deepen your understanding of the contemporary language too. Another sort of text you might try is the type produced for students taking their college entrance exams in Classical Chinese. I had one from Taiwan (again, not sure if there is an exact equivalent on the mainland) which was quite challenging, teaching characters that were obscure even for native speakers and presenting a wider variety of texts than just Han-era ones. But maybe a better strategy if you want to get a solid grounding is to read the standard texts, e.g. things like the Hanshu, until you are quite familiar with that idiom, then move on from there. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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