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Js6426 TAC2014- 鹊, Coconut, 旅立ち(obs) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| js6426 Diglot Senior Member Cambodia Joined 4521 days ago 277 posts - 349 votes  Speaks: English*, Khmer Studies: Mandarin | Message 1 of 40 28 December 2013 at 10:17am | IP Logged | |||||
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Ok so here is my log for the 2014 TAC! I am really excited about the TAC this year, as it helped to keep me
motivated last year. My son was born 8 weeks ago and so with work and a baby my time is probably going to be a little bit stretched this year, but I hope to be able to improve in my chosen languages nonetheless. Mandarin Right now my Mandarin is not very good. My listening and speaking are by far my two weakest areas. I can read and write around 1500 simplified hanzi. My major goal for this year is simply to improve my speaking and listening. I will not stop learning hanzi or going through my anki deck/reading, but I will definitely take the focus over to listening this year. I also need to improve my grammar so that my speaking will follow naturally, this was another thing which I didn't focus on specifically last year. I learned quite a lot of vocab, but i guess it slipped my mind to take some time out and study grammar! I will be making an anki deck of Mandarin grammar to help in this area, as well as going through 'Basic Chinese A Grammar and Workbook', 'Intermediate Chinese A Grammar and Workbook', 'Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar (+workbook)' and the Chinese Grammar Wiki online. For listening I will be watching my collection of Chinese Disney DVDs, listening to podcasts, and making use of various different Youtube listening resources. Khmer I am currently working on writing a language book to teach foreigners Khmer. We are recording native audio to go along with the book. I have never done anything like this before, but I am really enjoying it. While this might seem to be a massive undertaking, and somewhat odd for someone who doesn't have a background in linguistics or whatever, when you look at the lack of resources available to learn Khmer, I don't think it's all that crazy. I hope to have the book finished by the end of the year. Still not sure what that will look like... At present I have the first 9 chapters done in writing, with audio recorded for the first 5. A resource section on reading/writing and numbers has also been compiled. I would like at least 14 chapters in the first book. This is not being done with an immediate view to publish and sell, but rather as a resource for the foreign staff who work with my organisation. I am also in the process of editing a book which has already been translated into Khmer, although I am really struggling to find time to do this (I have done about 3 pages so far out of 200), and may end up passing it on to someone with a little more time. For my own studies in Khmer, I want to become more familiar with some of the deep Buddhist terms this year. I have a book called 'Buddhist Survival Khmer' to do that, but I am already encountering words in it which people haven't heard before, and it is quite a short book. On top of that I will continue to look at more of the new words which are being released by the government. This is great because it allows me to express myself more effectively in Khmer, but not so great because Khmer people where I live don't understand, as these words are only being used in government circles, and I don't work in the government! However, they may become more commonplace in the future, and even if they don't I still enjoy learning them. Other than that I want to increase my reading pace as it isn't very fast. I want to be able to read at a more native speed (native speed of a university educated Cambodian). Cantonese I don't have any real plans to study Cantonese this year, but I definitely want to learn it in the future. I want to get my Mandarin to a solid level first though to avoid confusion. Japanese I am in the Japanese team this year as an observer. This language fascinates me! Basically the same applies as with Cantonese. I want to get my Mandarin to a much better level before I start dabbling in Japanese, but it can't hurt to observe and have the option there! I will probably aim to update my log every 1 or 2 weeks throughout the year, and maybe more if I feel I have hit a significant milestone of some sort. Edited by js6426 on 11 January 2014 at 10:39am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| js6426 Diglot Senior Member Cambodia Joined 4521 days ago 277 posts - 349 votes Speaks: English*, Khmer Studies: Mandarin | Message 2 of 40 04 January 2014 at 11:56am | IP Logged | |||||
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4/1/2014 - Ok time for my first post of the new year! There has been a fair bit of procrastinating going on if i'm
being honest! I got an android phone for Christmas, so I have been filling it with language apps! I have my anki on there, Pleco with the flash card system and the optical character reader, Weibo, and a couple of streaming Chinese TV apps. I have gotten my anki decks back on track, and started an anki deck for Chinese grammar. Today I started on 'Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar A Practical Guide' and I am going right the way through, covering even the very basics again (I figure it can't hurt). I watched an episode of Dora the Explorer in Chinese which was cool, i'd say I understood around 75%. I also learnt the words for horn and monster! This evening I am going to watch 'Wreck it Ralph' in Chinese with my wife, and hopefully my son will sit quietly through it! For Khmer I have learnt some new Buddhist terms and have finished the Buddhist Survival Khmer book. For now I am going through a list of new vocab that I have to learn which I have taken from the national council of Khmer language website. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| js6426 Diglot Senior Member Cambodia Joined 4521 days ago 277 posts - 349 votes Speaks: English*, Khmer Studies: Mandarin | Message 3 of 40 11 January 2014 at 10:37am | IP Logged | |||||
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11/1/2014 - I have been really busy this week so haven't managed to get all that much accomplished. I have
decided that Anki is simply taking up too much of my time, and leaving me with little time to focus on anything else. The problem is that my decks use cards that go both ways L1 - L2 and vice versa. So today I have switched it so that it will only contain cards going from L2-L1, which means I should only be spending half the time on Anki and so increase the time I can spend listening and doing grammar. I am continuing on through the grammar book and adding everything into my anki deck in MCD form. Learnt some new vocab today and watched China's got talent which was really entertaining, even though I didn't understand all that much of it! Khmer I am continuing on with my list of vocab. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| js6426 Diglot Senior Member Cambodia Joined 4521 days ago 277 posts - 349 votes Speaks: English*, Khmer Studies: Mandarin | Message 4 of 40 18 January 2014 at 12:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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18/1/2014 - Another busy week! My anki decks are now much more manageable (sort of). I now have notes with
cards that only go from L1-L2 for Chinese vocab, and so this has much reduced the time I spend reviewing. I decided that I want to continue both ways with the hanzi as I want to be able to read and write, unfortunately I am not very good with Anki and so I messed up my deck a bit. I have restored it but I now have over 1000 cards to do, all written Hanzi! I am just doing them 20 a day, and will do more when I have the chance. I have also increased the easy interval so that the ones I know really well will be further off, and I won't end up with huge stacks of reviews every day for the next year! My Khmer deck is just a mix of L2-L1 and vice versa, I am not really concerned about this as new vocab is fairly easy for me to retain in Khmer when compared with Chinese! I am continuing to watch China's got talent and I am really enjoying it. I have noticed a very slight improvement in my listening comprehension, and so keeping in mind that this is a marathon and not a sprint I am very happy with that! I think this is the way to go for me for now. It seems to be a good thing to watch because it contains ordinary conversation, and also some fairly random things. I watch it with Pleco open so I can try and work out vocab that I am quick enough to catch. I also like the fact that there are Chinese subtitles. I just got home from a 2 day trip to Siem Reap, and although I didn't have much chance to study, I found some Chinese comic/children's books discounted to 50 cents each! So I have bought 10 which I will read as and when. Didn't have any time to do grammar this week, but hopefully next week I should be able to get some done. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4848 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 5 of 40 18 January 2014 at 1:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yeah, for Chinese characters I've found that even if I have L1-L2 cards, I still need to have L2-L1 cards simply because it is important to know how to read the characters. That said, all of my cards are L2-L1 nowadays. I often have a lot of trouble with L1-L2 cards. I get synonyms mixed up, etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| js6426 Diglot Senior Member Cambodia Joined 4521 days ago 277 posts - 349 votes Speaks: English*, Khmer Studies: Mandarin | Message 6 of 40 18 January 2014 at 1:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
Totally. When it comes to actually writing down hanzi I use a character add-on, and so it has a 'pinyin' button that I can click which shows me the pinyin for the character, helping to prevent confusion over synonyms! It's a great anki add-on actually, the only issue was I used it for both my vocab and straight up hanzi decks, and so when I wanted to revert only one of those decks to just L2-L1 it ruined the whole lot! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| js6426 Diglot Senior Member Cambodia Joined 4521 days ago 277 posts - 349 votes Speaks: English*, Khmer Studies: Mandarin | Message 7 of 40 21 January 2014 at 2:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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21/1/2014 - I just uploaded my introduction for the January challenge onto the China team thread, but I wanted to
upload it here also. I will upload a corrected version once I have some feedback on Lang-8 too so that I can see where I went wrong and what I should have said. 大家好！我的名字是 Jonny 和我是英国人，可是我现在住在柬埔寨。我是 二十五岁和我也有一位二月半的儿子。我还没 去过中 国， 可是有找一日我很想去因为中国的文学和语言 对我很有趣。这年我想进步我的听力，因为现 在它相当不好了。 可惜我的语法 是一样。我需要更好的理解关于用词在它对的 语境。我的简介可能不太好了，可是我想挑战 自己，所以我包括一些不太熟悉的汉 字和一些不太清楚怎么用的词。我也要放我的 简介在 lang-8 得上以便改善，可是我先想在这呈报即使我觉 得它会有很多错误！ 我很激动这年我可以跟你们在一样的团队，和 我希望我们可以一起进步！ Hey everyone! My name is Jonny and I am English, but now I live in Cambodia. I'm 25 and I have a 2.5 month old son. I have never been to China, but one day I would really love to go as the culture and the language both really interest me. This year I really want to improve my listening, as right now it's fairly poor. Unfortunately my grammar is the same. I also need a better understanding of using words in the right context. My introduction probably isn't all that good, but I wanted to try and stretch myself and so I have included characters that I am not yet familiar with, as well as vocabulary that i'm not certain of how to use. I am also going to put this on lang-8 for corrections, but I wanted to submit it here first, even though I am sure there are many mistakes! I am excited about being on the same team as you all this year, and I hope we can all improve together! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| js6426 Diglot Senior Member Cambodia Joined 4521 days ago 277 posts - 349 votes Speaks: English*, Khmer Studies: Mandarin | Message 8 of 40 25 January 2014 at 1:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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25/1/2014 - Here is the corrected version of my intro:
大家好！我的名字是 Jonny 我是英国人，我现在住在柬埔寨。我是 二十五岁和我也有一位二月半岁的儿子。我还 没 去过中 国， 可是有朝一日我很想去因为中国的文学和语言 都很吸引我。这年我想进步我的听力，因为现 在它相当不好了。 可惜我的语 法 是一样不好。我需要更好的理解用词和它的 语境。我的简介可能不太好，可是我想挑战 自己，所以我使用一些不太熟悉的汉 字和一些不太清楚怎么用的词在里面。我也要 放我的 简介在 lang-8 得上以便改善，可是我先想放在这呈报即使我 知道它会有很 多错误！ 我很激动这年我可以跟你们在同一个团队 我希望我们可以一起进步！ Obviously there were a few different corrections given, and so I just chose one that I liked and used that! This week I have been continuing to watch 'China's got talent' on youtube, as well as keeping on top of my anki decks. I am slowly cracking through all the characters I have stored up! I have learnt some new vocab and I am now in chapter 5 of my grammar book, still taking it nice and slowly and putting it all into an anki deck. I have also learnt some new Khmer vocab this week, which has gone into anki. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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