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1 Week Challenge - L-R Romanian | ||
Tags: Romanian | Listening-Reading (L-R) | ||
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| Thuan Triglot Senior Member GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6921 days ago 133 posts - 156 votes  Speaks: Vietnamese, German*, English Studies: French, Japanese, Romanian, Swedish, Mandarin | Message 1 of 18 20 August 2008 at 8:28am | IP Logged | |||||
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I was flirting around with Romanian last week, and now I'm in my first 1 week challenge for this language, all Romanian all the time.
The one week challenge began on August 18th in my TAC thread: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=9045&PN=1&TPN=2 August 18th I met a Romanian friend in front of a bookstore on Saturday. I mentioned that I might study Romanian someday, so she took a look at the Romanian books. Unfortunately, they had only one horrible language course and two phrasebooks. Nevertheless, we practised a few words just for fun and she told me that my pronunciation is good. Motivating enough to get started. I spontaneously decided to do a one week challenge for Romanian. I've already made it through the first five lessons of Pimsleur, but can't figure out how follow up on that one. All I have are phrasebooks. And a survival course that found online (the military one with phrases like "Drop your weapons"). I found the FSI text, but no audio. I've spent an hour looking for Romanian audiobooks, but couldn't find any. The only audiobook I could find, was the bible. If all things fail, I might try L-R with the bible. But then, I've never read the bible (some excerpts, but never a whole book). Fanatic has mentioned that he made some survival courses to learn a language fast. If I can't find any material, I'm going to make a survival course with the phrasebook and the DLI course (which has audio). August 20th Harry Potter's just saved my life. At least that of my one week challenge. There's an Romanian audiobook for Harry Potter and an ebook version. All I need to do L-R with Romanian. Sounds like much more fun wrestling around with phrasebooks. Okay, I'm spending so much time on Romanian these days that it deserves its own thread. Besides, Romanian is going to serve as my playground for my first steps into L-R, so I'll post about this experience in the new thread. So far I've rushed through the Pimsleur Romanian Compact program (10 lesson). I really have to struggle with the pronunciation, the pace is of Pimsleur is too fast for me. I didn't have this problem with Pimsleur Japanese (up until lesson 17 or 18). Nevertheless, I've around 5 hours of speaking practice in Romanian by now. I've used the Peace Corps manuals and Kauderwelsch Romanian to create my own survival course. I haven't gone very far, learnt around a hundred words with Iversen's wordlist method. I never cared about Romania, but now that I've made the decision to study this language it has become something like an obsession for me these past few days. I've watched two Romanian films ("4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days" and "Then I sentenced all to death") and both were excellent. There are quite a few Romanian films that've won prizes at various festivals in recent years, so I'll definitely have to watch more Romanian films. My plans for today were to L-R Harry Potter, but after two and a half hours I've just finished the parallel text for 3 chapters. Damn, at this pace I can only hope to finish another 3 chapters before it gets dark. And I've just slept for three hours. I guess I'll do another chapter and take a nap afterwards. I shouldn't L-R when I'm tired. My plans for today: -Create parallel text for the first six chapters of Harry Potter -Continue working on my survival course -Learn around a hundred essential words with Iversen's wordlist method -do step 2 of the L-R method with chapter 1 (listen to the Romanian audio while reading the Romanian text) Tomorrow's going to be the first day where I use step3 to L-R the book. I'm actually not sure about how to L-R a book even though I've read several threads on L-R. Leosmith mentioned that he read every chapter twice, the first time reading the English text and the second time the Japanese text. Which makes sense if you want to learn how to read Japanese. But Romanian has no Chinese characters, so I'm just curious as to how other people L-R their texts. Volte wrote that he had to sped up the audio for Russian, because he had too much time to compare and analyze the different languages. I did some L-R with French and had a hard time following the speaker, so I'm not sure how I should read the L1 and L2 texts while listening to the audio. I guess I'll see it soon. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6430 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 18 20 August 2008 at 9:33am | IP Logged | |||||
I feel your pain on both counts.
With a parallel text and a sufficiently foreign language, I initially read only in English. By the second pass, I start reading bits of the target language as well. I just let how it's going guide me. While everything is still a blur and I'm hoping I'm on the right paragraph (aka, the first few hours), I definitely don't have too much time to analyze. In general, I don't find overanalysis to be a large problem with L-R, as it keeps me going too quickly to sink really deeply into it (ie, I simply cannot stare at a clause for 10 minutes while doing L-R). What I do find to be a problem, eventually, is boredom: the shallow analysis is already familiar, and I simply can't do a deep one. That said, I think avoiding 'deep' analysis early on is good. Otherwise, I tend to overgeneralize from too little information; L-R lets me avoid this problem almost entirely. If I don't have a parallel text, I just read repeatedly in English. I haven't done extensive experimentation with this, though. Most other people in this situation seem to alternate reading L1 and L2, either a book or chapter at a time; that may be a better idea, but I can't say. So far, I've never met a text and language combination that led me to speed up the audio on the first reading. All other factors aside, it does introduce some distortion, so I prefer to start with the audio unmodified and as it can actually be spoken. In general, experimentation is the name of the game with L-R, with a healthy dash of intuition thrown in. Minor nitpick: you have an incorrect pronoun. I'm female. Good luck! Edited by Volte on 20 August 2008 at 9:34am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Thuan Triglot Senior Member GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6921 days ago 133 posts - 156 votes Speaks: Vietnamese, German*, English Studies: French, Japanese, Romanian, Swedish, Mandarin | Message 3 of 18 21 August 2008 at 6:46am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks for your detailed answer, Volte. You've been my main inspiration when it comes to L-R.
So, I'll listen to L2 while reading the text in English until my mind sorts out the sounds and finds a meaning in them. As my mind adjusts to the new language, I'll start to read the target language. I'll let my intuition guide me ;D My 1 Week-Challenge is about to turn into a 2 Weeks-Challenge. I spent five hours yesterday working on a parallel text for Harry Potter. Today I did my Anki reviews for Japanese (around 30 minutes) and spent one and a half hour on the parallel text. And I've just reached chapter 5. Harry Potter has yet to arrive at Hogwarts. How long does it take people here to create a parallel text for a novel? I need 25-30 minutes for 14 pages. Chapter 5 took me longer because I had to look up much more words than before. According to atamagaii, you need a lot of material in your target language (20-40 hours of listening material). Harry Potter 1 is around 10 hours. So I'll have to add Harry Potter 2 to reach the cited numbers. If I don't improve my parallel-text creating skills, this is going to take me 40 hours! According to Volte, you reach the natural-listening stage at around 45-50 hours. If I take the ideal situation where I'd spend six hours a day on this, it would take me around a week to do the parallel texts. And at least a week of L-R. This is a daunting task, but if it works (which I don't doubt), it will be time well spent. Is anybody else studying Romanian and interested in creating parallel texts? If possible I'd rather spend less time on creating the texts than studying the language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6430 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 4 of 18 21 August 2008 at 7:56am | IP Logged | |||||
Ehm, 45-50 hours is optimistic. I wouldn't say it's impossible, but I think atamagaii mentioned an upper bound of more like 80-120 at one point - and that's assuming you maintain intensity. The lower bound was close to when I hit an early stage of natural listening for Polish, but that was on my third attempt. Adding the other two, it ended up roughly midway between these upper and lower bounds. With 45 hours of Russian, I'm still not at natural listening, and I'm quite certain another 5 hours won't put me there. It's rather 'slurry' (unlike Polish or Romanian), and seems richer in morphological nuance, although this could just be an artifact of using Russian novels: translations tend to take much less advantage of the possibilities of shaping language in these ways. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Thuan Triglot Senior Member GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6921 days ago 133 posts - 156 votes Speaks: Vietnamese, German*, English Studies: French, Japanese, Romanian, Swedish, Mandarin | Message 5 of 18 21 August 2008 at 8:46am | IP Logged | |||||
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Okay, now that I think about it, 50 hours does sound pretty optimistic. I did some L-R with Romanian and I have the feeling that it would take me at least one pass through the book to develop some kind of sense for the language. And I can see why intensity is important.
I'll try to finish my parallel text by this weekend, so I can start off with a high intensity L-R session. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Thuan Triglot Senior Member GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6921 days ago 133 posts - 156 votes Speaks: Vietnamese, German*, English Studies: French, Japanese, Romanian, Swedish, Mandarin | Message 6 of 18 21 August 2008 at 1:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Harry Potter is draining my energy. I've just finished chapter 7 ("The sorting hat") and I can feel my enthusiasm leaving me. Should take a break and watch a Romanian film. And study some Romanian afterwards. I could do one of the Pimsleur lessons again. Creating these texts doesn't feel like studying. It feels like work.
I remember that there was a discussion about Prof.Arguelle's instruction to to shadowing while walking. I used to do that a lot when I was studying Japanese with Assimil (spent 30-60 minutes walking/riding the bicycle while shadowing my Japanese lessons). I got back to this habit with Romanian. No shadowing, but doing Pimsleur while walking around is also a great excercise. I feel more concentrated while moving around. Walking around I can shadow or practise with Pimsleur for hours and stay focussed. A great way to end your day. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Thuan Triglot Senior Member GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6921 days ago 133 posts - 156 votes Speaks: Vietnamese, German*, English Studies: French, Japanese, Romanian, Swedish, Mandarin | Message 7 of 18 22 August 2008 at 6:12am | IP Logged | |||||
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Update
Reading the original L-R actually sparked my passion again last night, so I continued and finished chapter 9. I have to do this every now and then, looking for the emotions that I had when I embarked on this journey (becoming a polyglot). When I lost the motivation to study Japanese, I'd go to AJAAT, browse through some Japanese forums, read part of Farber's book, etc. Reading the L-R thread ignited a the fire again (the passion for languages, my wish to become a polyglot). I used to do 6-8 hour sessions to study the Heisig kanji, I shouldn't have a problem with this. I wanted to do an hour of L-R before going to sleep, but I was just too tired. Had to stop half an hour. But that's okay, it was fun and gave me a taste of what to expect. I had the feeling that I could L-R for several hours in a row. I'll see if I was right. Today. This morning I made myself a can of green tea (bancha) and continued to work on my parallel text for "Harry Potter". I don't really know why, but things just went so well so far. I've just finished chapter 14. And I thought that I wouldn't do more than two chapters. I'm trying to keep this feeling alive, so I'll move on to chapter 15 now. I want to know Romanian and I want to use L-R. One thing that makes the creation of parallel texts so difficult are the different structures between the texts. The parts that are left out. The Romanian version is shorter, most of the times it's just one or two sentences that are left out. Sometimes a whole paragraph, but there was a whole page missing in chapter 14! It took me ten minutes to realize that. I was like "Damn, the translation is just so different, I can't find the right parts to align the text", basic knowledge in Romanian would've helped. Didn't help that two paragraphs later a few sentences were missing. Gonna work on chapter 15 now and get some breakfast afterwards. Or lunch. If I continue at this pace I'll have the whole book finished today. L-R, I'm coming! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Thuan Triglot Senior Member GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6921 days ago 133 posts - 156 votes Speaks: Vietnamese, German*, English Studies: French, Japanese, Romanian, Swedish, Mandarin | Message 8 of 18 22 August 2008 at 9:09am | IP Logged | |||||
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やった。
I did it, I have a parallel text for Romanian. I've been sitting here at my desk since 9 am (3:50pm now) just to get this thing done. I'm so excited, can't wait to start L-R with Romanian, though I should take a short break and reward myself with something to eat. Getting some fresh air doesn't sound like a bad idea either. Anybody else studying Romanian, right now? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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