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1 Week Challenge - L-R Romanian | ||
Tags: Romanian | Listening-Reading (L-R) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6430 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 9 of 18 22 August 2008 at 9:21am | IP Logged | ||
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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 10 of 18 23 August 2008 at 6:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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Okay, I did L-R for the first two chapters yesterday before I went to bed. Around 1 hour.
I had to get up early today, so I felt rather tired when I came back. Did L-R for another hour, took a break and did some more L-R (30min.). Had to take a nap afterwards. I was invited to a barbecue party today, so I couldn't do more. Total: 3 hours. I'm not at the stage to understand any Romanian, but it does sound like a familiar language by now. I've watched three Romanian films this week and listen to Romanian music when I'm not studying, so you could that I've created an immersion environment. The more I listen to Romanian, the more I like the way it sounds. It's a very beautiful language that I knew nothing about. I don't regret the choice to study this language. After 3 hours of L-R I'm just getting familiar with the sounds, so the only things that I can pick out are words that sound familiar to French or English words. Mersi is thanks, motorshiclette is motorbike, masina/masine is car, nu is no,... I think that I would be able to catch more of the language if I had a literal translation. One/two word sentences are great to learn. "Sus" for "get up", "afare" for "out", "shtieu nimic" means "know nothing". Words that I can passively recognize: Owl, snake, letter, respond, say, ask, speak, room, famous, uncle, dream, mr., Except for famous and uncle, which are the same in Romanian (faimos, unkiul) the other words at least sound similar to words that I know (dream is vis, room is camera). I don't remember the verbs, but they are used so often that it's not that difficult to understand them. Two words that I expected to know but don't are "cupboard" and "aunt". I just can't really hear these two words for some reason. According to atamagaii, you need at least 20-30 hours of new text. So I'll have to add Harry Potter 2 afterwards. The audio for Harry Potter 1 and 2 together are around 20 hours. If I do three passes for each novel that would put me at 60 hours of L-R. I hope to get close to natural listening of 60 hours of L-R. I hope that I will find something else to follow-up with. I'm actually not that fond of the Harry Potter novels. It was fun reading them, but if there's an alternative to Harry Potter, I wouldn't use Harry Potter for L-R. There's an audiobook for Jules Verne's "Five weeks in a balloon". I haven't read that one yet, so I'm not sure if it will appeal to me. Edited by Thuan on 23 August 2008 at 7:39pm 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 11 of 18 25 August 2008 at 5:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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Updates:
Sunday, August 24th The Romanian Harry Potter could have come with a better speaker. I've done around 3 and a half hours of L-R today, but my brain just shut down after 3 hours. The weather's nice, gonna take a walk and might continue my L-R session in a park or at a river. It's a fascinating process, I pick up single words here and there, but hardly anything about grammar or structure. I thought that I haven't learnt anything, but when I sat down to write out the words that I'd probably recognize passively in this audiobook I realized that I have indeed learnt quite a lot of words. I recognize pronouns, frequently used verbs like "go", "say", "is" or "ask", lots of loanwords, and even simple phrases like "Get out", "wake up" and such. And I didn't consciously study anything. I have yet to read anything about Romanian grammar (I know that there are three genders and five cases, that's it). I guess that's what the first pass will look like. I will gather much more of these words until I know enough to figure out the structure of the language in a second or third pass. 3 to 4 hours to go. I'm determined to finish this book today. I have the Japanese e-text for the Harry Potter books. Perfect for parallel texts, though I won't make one for Harry Potter 1. The thought of listening to Harry Potter 1 three to four times in Japanese doesn't sound appealing to me. It works with Romanian because I can still feel the new-found enthusiasm for this language (I decided to study Romanian on a rainy afternoon a week ago). Even the the story is not that appealing to me, the thought of understanding Romanian is. This enthusiasm and the love for the sound of the language (a better speaker would be perfect) gives me the motivation to carry on. Monday, August 25th The 1 Week Challenge officially ended yesterday, but it took me one more day to finish the first pass through Harry Potter. I should make this a 4 Week Challenge. I've spent approximately 30 hours on Romanian last week, 15 hours just to prepare the parallel text, 10 hours for L-R (did the first chapter twice), 5 hours for Pimsleur (did two lessons twice). Add to that 5 hours of Romanian films and around 10 hours of passive listening to Romanian (films, news, Harry Potter) while doing other things. AJATT in action. Okay, now to the results of L-R: Nothing spectacular yet. If I listen to Romanian podcasts, I hardly understand anything. Same with movies (I can make out a few words or sentences like "you don't understand Romanian?"). But then, I didn't expect to reach that level so fast. I understand Harry Potter specific words like broom, magic wand, dragon, quidditch or philosopher's stone. Other users have reported that they were thinking in their target language after a few hours of L-R. Well, no need to say that I haven't experienced anything like that. As I've already mentioned, the only things I can pick out are single words and short phrases ("get out", "let's go" and such). I can recognize different verb forms of words like say, believe, know, know without telling the difference. Adjectives seem to come after the noun. That's all the grammar that I know about Romanian so far. I might have to L-R more consciously. I didn't feel very well this weekend (thought that I caught a cold), so this has probably affected the results of my L-R sessions. Other problems that I had were the translation and the fact that I just couldn't hear certain words. A literal translation would be great. Due to differences I often had to look at the Romanian text to find out where I was. Sentences were missing, or sentences were added. In some cases two paragraphs were merged, in other cases they just cut out several paragraphs. Most curious were the added information in the Romanian texts (there're vampires all over the Romanian text). I found it rather hard to get into a state of flow, when I got lost every two or three pages. To find out how well this method works for me, I have to try this method to the end. atamagaii mentioned 20-30 hours of new material. Harry Potter 1 is 10 hours of new material. Another Harry Potter novel would take the amount of new material above 20 hours. Three passes each would bring the L-R time above 60 hours. This should bring me into the natural listening realm. Manageable in two to three weeks (the problem is the time to prepare the parallel texts). I'm thinking about reading a short grammar guide like Volte did for Polish. My goal for this week is to do two more passes with Harry Potter 1 and then move on to another book. Maybe another Harry Potter novel. Or something else. I'd prefer something else. 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 12 of 18 26 August 2008 at 2:32am | IP Logged | ||
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It looks like L-R is going well for you. Keep up the enthusiasm!
The only languages I found myself thinking in after a few hours of L-R were ones I already had a base in. German is something I've been able to think intermittently in for years; Dutch and Spanish are rattling around and L-R makes them a bit more active in my head. For farther-away languages that I had no base in, like Polish and Russian, I didn't start thinking in them until after quite a lot of L-R, and even then, more rudimentarily. 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 13 of 18 26 August 2008 at 3:38am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks, I've read a few other L-R threads and vanityx wrote about thinking in French after 4 hours. But then, it's French. Another L-R thread was on German.
I was looking for your first Polish L-R thread, but couldn't find it. How long did it take you to understand more than a few words here and there? I might have to put more effort in to listen "actively" to get more out of L-R. I'm not sure, the problem is that I don't hear a lot of words. Aunt Petunia is mentioned in every single paragraph for the first four chapters, but I don't have any sounds in my head to map the meaning to. I had the same problem with the Romanian word for Quidditch. I really had to concentrate on that word to hear it (I still don't know how to pronounce that word, but I would probably recognize it). Japanese was much easier in this regard. But then, things may simply clear up after another ten hours of L-R. Time for the second pass. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6694 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 18 26 August 2008 at 3:54am | IP Logged | ||
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It seems that the L-R method is working well for you, congratulations. But at some stage you will hopefully have encountered some puzzling constructions which might be worth reading about to understand the principles. I'll give you an example:
The use of the infinitive is more limited in Romanian than in both English and the other languages on your list. For instance "I want to do something" would be rendered as something like "I want that I do something" (with 'do' in the subjunctive). Maybe you can get the meaning of a sentence without analyzing it in detail, and eventually the Romanian way of construction sentences will just seem 'the way to do it' for you. But I'm curious about WHEN a pure L-R learner discovers such a pattern just from listening to a Romanian voice, and I'm curious about WHAT you do about it. Do you try to find more examples in the Romanian text, or do you just let it seep in without any specific action because you expect things to sort themselves out? Or have you planned only to look into that kind of problems after your challenge week? In any case, it seems that your crash course in Romanian is going well and that it will give you a good foundation for really learning 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 15 of 18 26 August 2008 at 4:26am | IP Logged | ||
I can't speak for anyone else, but I find that kind of pattern to be quite easy to (passively) pick up from L-R. I tend to do a lot of analysis during my 2nd/3rd passes through a book after I have a few dozen hours of exposure (whether the exposure is from the current book or other ones). Different use of tenses tends to be one of the things that stands out clearly and is easy to pick up. What's harder is when there are new distinctions of a sort that I haven't internalized from another language. I'm still not entirely comfortable with the instrumental case, for instance. If I didn't know any languages which use a subjunctive mood (English is so rudimentary in this regard that it hardly counts), it would also fit in this category; as I do, adjusting to differences in its use for passive understanding tend to be fairly easy. As for how I go about trying to learn the more difficult things: I have a few ways of doing so. They are still very open to revision, though. I glance at grammars, and for a few points, I've tried writing out tables (specifically, I did this for cases in Polish). However, so far, my main approach is simply to learn to recognize the phenomenon, then pay very close attention every time I encounter it. Core parts of a language tend to occur fairly frequently in literature; if something is so rare that it doesn't, I don't see any harm in waiting a few weeks to learn it. 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 16 of 18 26 August 2008 at 4:41am | IP Logged | ||
My TAC 1 log has my first attempt at L-R interwoven with my other studies. The first thing I wrote was "Today's log: 4 hours Polish (audiobook + parallel text method; I went through all of "Animal Farm"). This was my first non-trivial exposure to Polish, or really to any Slavic language. It went fairly well; I largely managed to follow along, and found quite a few cognates. Basic connectives and superlatives are starting to become passively clear." Unfortunately, you'll need to wade through a bunch of stuff about what I was reading in Italian and on theoretical linguistics, etc, as I wasn't totally focused on Polish. "Polish: another attempt" is more focused, although it's not my first attempt. Page 7 of this log (day 13-15, but I wasn't working intensively) mentions starting to think in Polish, and being able to get the gist of the parts of the audiobook that I didn't have a translation for. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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