|
 |
Better than Nothing: 日本語/deutsch/español | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6940 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 25 of 40 31 March 2011 at 5:51pm | IP Logged |
|
How could I have missed these two posts from a week ago? Thanks for your kind words of
encouragement! You both made my evening :) Élan, Persian... that evil, beautiful language whose siren song constantly lures me away from my other studies :D I'm very much looking forward to diving into this language full- time! I've been having a hard time finding good resources, so I'll definitely take advantage of your offer for help! Thanks a lot. Robert, Of course I'd be glad to help, and I only wish I had noticed your questions sooner! L1, L2, L3, and so on mean "native language", "second language", and "third language", respectively (although it seems that "L2" is often used on this forum as a catch-all term for any non-native language.) L-R is the "Listening-Reading Method", whereby a learner listens to an audiobook in his L2 while reading a text with interlinear translation. The method involves many steps and is a little difficult to describe briefly, so I'll refer you to the original thread detailing the method (written by a rather colorful Polish woman who is no longer a member of this forum): http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=6366&PN=1 If anything about the method is unclear after reading the first few pages, I recommend sending a PM to Volte, who has written about his experiences using L-R successfully. Unfortunately, I was never disciplined enough to pull off the reading marathon required by the method, but I'm convinced that it works wonders for those who can. Ich interessiere mich für die Umgangssprache, aber wenn ich auf deutsch sprechen oder schreiben, bleibe ich immer vorsichtig nicht schlampig zu aussehen. Und wenn ich die Youtube-Kommentare lesen, bin ich ein bißchen stolz darauf, dass ich oft grammatische Fehler bemerken. I hope that my German was alright! Thanks again for the encouragement. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6940 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 26 of 40 02 April 2011 at 6:11am | IP Logged |
|
Update 04/02/11
I just finished an amazing English lesson, which always makes me feel pumped :) Sometimes, throughout the daily grind, I forget to be psyched at what an awesome job I have. Being a self-employed English teacher challenges me intellectually, enables me to pass my passion for language onto others, and gives me the freedom to arrange my schedule in order to best suit my language learning needs (don't tell the boyfriend/"company president" I said that, though)! The biggest news I have recently is that I've bought an iPhone! Now I can keep my heavy 電子辞書 at home (yes, I was lugging it around with me in my purse wherever I went), and I can use Anki whenever the mood strikes me. My favorite apps that I've discovered so far are: Anki Mobile WISDOM E↔J Dictionary Langenscheidt E↔G Dictionary Collins E↔G and E↔Spanish Dictionaries AEPD (I'm guessing this stands for American English-Persian Dictionary?) German Radio Radio Javan, FarsiRadio, Bia2 (all for Persian music) YouTube Amazon.com (although I'd love an easy way to be able to switch to .jp and .de at the click of a mouse, or even have all my wishlists consolidated into one...) I never thought I needed an iPhone, but I really feel that my productivity has gone up (well, down for the first week, and then up once the novelty factor wore off ;) ) and the number of gizmos and gadgets cluttering up my bag has been reduced. It's also been great for my neck and shoulders that I'm spending less time hunched over the keyboard on my PC. One things I've lost, though, is storage space for music and podcasts: I've traded in my 120GB iPod for a piddly 32 gigs! This means I have to be more selective about which media to sync. Since I don't listen to music too much, and have my radio apps anyway, I guess I'll only be syncing podcasts and other language-learning material. What I've been doing for 日本語 I've been on a Deutsch-a-thon lately, so not much to report here beyond the usual religious devotion to Anki and Harry Potter. My Anki reps have dropped to about 15 cards due/day, and I've only been adding enough to keep it at that level. What I've been doing for Deutsch * Pretty much constantly listening to Slow German, German Radio, and past Assimil lessons. * Looking up German artists based on recommendations in this forum and on Slow German. So far, I'm enjoying Fettes Brot, Fantastisches Vier, Joy Denalane, and Silbermond, but I still have a few more on my list to look up! * Reading a few times a week, particularly the German Short Stories dual-language reader and Der Fremdsprachen Hacker by Irishpolyglot. * Blitzing through Assimil lessons with such intensity that there ended up being a 30- lesson gap between the lessons I had finished and the ones I had Anki'd. The result is that I've had to force myself to take a break at Lesson 93 and start adding past lessons - I mentioned this mentality before (with regards to reading Harry Potter) as being ridiculous and holding me back, but in this case it's a preventative measure against this very demotivating scenario: "Yeah! I finally finished lesson 100! ... but wait, I still have 30 more lessons to add to Anki. Awww." I'd rather finish lesson 100 later, and then have only the "final stretch" of few more lessons after that to add into Anki. With that in mind, my eagerness to continue with the last bit of the Passive Wave has motivated me to make rapid progress. I have currently Anki'd up to lesson 75 using a cloze-deletion based format (it might seem like a lot of work, but please keep in mind that this is my version of the Active Wave, and I enjoy it very much!), and I am averaging at about 50 cards due/day. I'm usually too hard on myself when judging my own ability in a language, but once in a while a revelation will hit me: "Hey, I'm only half-listening to this Slow German podcast, and am understanding all of it!" or "Look ma, I'm almost-comfortably enjoying material meant for native speakers!" I still have a long way to go, but I'm proud of the progress I've been making in German! What I've been doing for فارسی OK, I'm not "officially" studying this language (although sometimes I do wonder if I am in fact studying it, but am only keeping myself from acknowledging it as "official" in order to hold on to that sense of wonder and curiosity and exploration without burdening myself with any feelings of obligation.) For the record, the next languages on my hit list after German are Spanish and French, but in the meantime I've decided to keep Persian "on the side" so that I'd have a good amount of vocabulary and familiarity with the grammar stockpiled for when I really do get around to it, the same way I had some familiarity with German and Spanish. To this end, I've been adding vocab from easypersian.com and other sources to Anki, averaging about 8 cards due/day. One thing that was really frustrating me was that words weren't seeming to "stick". As soon as I got to the point where the card would show up once a week, I'd forget it the next time I saw it, and have to start over again at "Soon". This cycle would go on with any given word for months. However, if I happened to see the word written in Latin letters anywhere, the word would stick in my mind indelibly. Obviously, the problem was that I wasn't letting myself use Romanization on my cards, despite knowing that I always recall words via the mental image of how they're written. The picture on the front, and Persian script + recording on the back just weren't enough for me. I had really wanted to reduce my dependency on this tactic for vocab memorization, but if it's what works best for me, why fight it? My retention has gone through the roof since adding Romanization to my cards. I'm sure this will only be a temporary crutch, the same way it was for Japanese once upon a time (now I actually find it difficult to read romanized Japanese!) Lesson learned: there's no point in rushing a process that I deem to be "good for me", if it causes my retention to suffer so dramatically. I don't know if this is sacrificing a long-term cure for a short-term bandaid, but I do know that Persian has become fun again. Future Plans for 日本語, Deutsch, and فارسی * I'm comfortable with my current distribution: giving German the limelight, adding little by little to my Japanese, and exploring Persian. I'd like to read more extensively in German. * My plan since starting German has been C1 level by June 1st, which is my 25th birthday. After that date, I have some big, exciting plans in store for Spanish!! I guess my current level would be somewhere between B1-B2, in the Intermediate No-Man's Land. It would take a lot of work to reach my goal, but I'm progressing at such a satisfying rate that it's not impossible! Tschüss and thanks for reading! Edited by Lucky Charms on 02 April 2011 at 6:12am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5547 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 27 of 40 02 April 2011 at 12:40pm | IP Logged |
|
Great progress with listening and completing Assimil in German! :) When it comes to music, what I tend to do is check out all the German MTV charts and copy across any German titles to a spreadsheet to check out later. They used to list previous years as well, but I don't seem to be able to find these now.
Edited by Teango on 02 April 2011 at 1:13pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6940 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 28 of 40 03 April 2011 at 9:04am | IP Logged |
|
Brilliant! Thanks for the tip!!
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6940 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 29 of 40 05 April 2011 at 9:03am | IP Logged |
|
Making Connections between Unrelated Languages
For me, one of the most fascinating aspects of learning languages is uncovering the similarities between them; not only among languages where it would be expected (e.g. English, German, and Spanish), but among languages where it's completely unexpected as well! When I started playing around with Persian, and Indo-European language, I expected to discover some similarities to European languages in the form of fundamental vocabulary (numbers, kinship terms, and the like) and perhaps even in the rules of conjugation. This has been more or less the case, but what I was surprised to find is that Japanese has been a huge help in understanding Persian! The first similarity I came across was the word order. Both Japanese and Persian are SOV languages, with the verb in the final position. When I first learned Japanese, it took a lot of effort to get myself used to this, but now that I have, the word order of Persian is like second nature. (Note that although I've seen some people in this forum claim that German is an SOV language, this is not the case. German is an SVO language like English, so German didn't help me at all with Japanese or Persian word order.) The second similarity was the object marker. Persian marks direct objects by following them with /rɔ:/, which is exactly how the Japanese particle /o/ is used. Also, I'm not completely sure of this yet, but the preposition /beh/ seems to match up surprisingly well with the Japanese particle /ni/, with its various usages ranging from "at" to "to" to "against", but basically denoting the location or target of something. (However, /beh/ is placed before the noun rather than after, as in Japanese.) My most recent discovery was also perhaps the most surprising. One of the resources I've been using since the beginning is the popular easypersian.com (which I'm disliking more and more as a learning resource, despite the hard work and lovely intentions of the author.) A lot of the verbs which I was struggling to memorize there were composed of two words, and the second word was quite often /kærdæn/. I'm an analytical type who has to understand the system underlying things, so this was driving me crazy, just memorizing things without knowing the rhyme or reason. Finally, at a website advertising a Persian learning product (spiderfarsi.com), I came across the following table (halfway down the page) about how many Persian verbs are formed: To suggest to make suggestion to protect to make protection to pay &nb sp; to make payment[...] To visit to beat head to brush to beat tooth-brush to call &n bsp; to beat sound[...] To teach to give lesson to prefer to give prefration to order to give order[...] A lightbulb went off, and I realized that /kærdæn/ must be one of these words. Sure enough, after cross-checking some of the verbs I knew in an online Farsi↔English dictionary (linked below), I confirmed that it means "make, do", and that the first part of these compound verbs are regular nouns, just as in Japanese! Thus, in both Persian (soxbæt kærdæn) and Japanese (kaiwa suru), "to speak" can be rendered as "to do a conversation". Furthermore, in both languages this system has historically been used most often with foreign loanwords (Arabic and Chinese, respectively), and in many cases there are "native" verbs with meanings that overlap with these compound verbs. (By the way, in case you're wondering, the most common verbs used in Japanese compound verbs besides "make/do" might be "hang", "stick to", and "hit", off the top of my head, but the underlying concept is the same.) After a bit of research, this phenomenon is called "light verbs" and is also found in Romance languages and in English, in such constructions as "take a bath" and "have a party". These small epiphanies have also occurred with other languages I've studied. Even languages for which I've only dabbled in the basics (Chinese, Vietnamese, Latin, Spanish, Dutch) have helped me in some way or another to understand a concept in another (often unrelated) language. For example, the broad application of 給 ("give") in Mandarin might help me understand the "give" listed above as being used in many Persian compound verbs, which apparently has a broader interpretation than its equivalent in English. Pronouncing vowels distinctly in Spanish has helped me do the same in Japanese. Nasal assimilation is pretty much the same rule across languages. Mastering the German "r" has made the Persian "gh" a piece of cake. Japanese /kau/ "to buy" sounds a lot like German /kaufen/ "to buy". I'm constantly made more and more aware of what turns of phrase are unique to my native tongue, and constantly surprised by how much that seems idiomatic can be translated literally across languages. And so on, and so forth. These mini "light bulb moments" convince me of the importance of familiarity with a breadth of languages, even if it's at a beginner level. The syntax, phonology, vocabulary, and turns of phrase across different languages reinforce my understanding of those in all my languages, which both speeds up my ability to grasp concepts in new languages and adds another layer of depth to the ones I'm trying to master. In this way, I feel that dipping one's toes in a wide array of languages, as Moses McCormick has done, can be just as fulfilling of a linguistic experience as reaching a near- native level in just a few. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6940 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 30 of 40 13 April 2011 at 6:48am | IP Logged |
|
Update 04/13/11
What I've been doing for 日本語 Nothing beyond the usual maintainence, for now. Still maintaining about 20 Anki reps due/day. What I've been doing for Deutsch 
I'VE COMPLETED ASSIMIL DEUTSCH OHNE MÜHE!!!! /cue brass band ... although I've still only input up to lesson 80 in Anki. My average cards due/day remains around 50. * I've also listened to and read along with every episode of Slow German, without looking up unfamiliar vocab. I plan to keep listening to the podcast on shuffle, and will finally look up/Anki words that are bugging me after I've finished Ankiing the Assimil lessons. * I've been listening to GermanPod101. I've nearly finished the first season of the Intermediate series, which translate song lyrics and ties them in to a cultural note and grammar point. The American host is pretty annoying, and I sometimes feel a little overwhelmed when the otherwise-fanstastic Judith rattles off complicated grammatical terms at a rapidfire pace, but all in all it's been very fun and educational! I've been thrilled to recognize vocabulary in the songs from Assimil, from past episodes, or even from my formal German education way back when. The grammar presented in the podcast has been mostly review, but there was one tip I learned that has been a real lifesaver (or at least a sanity-saver): Most verbs use the 3rd person conjugation to form the participle (kaufen → gekauft), but the so-called "vowel-changing verbs" form it with the infinitive (sehen → gesehen). Why, oh why had the Germans been keeping this a secret from me?! Here I had been thinking that it was completely unpredictable, and in fact the most frustrating cause of failed Anki cards had been not remembering whether a past tense verb ended in -t or -en. Now I can skip merrily past those, and just focus my efforts on the countless exceptions ;) What I've been doing for فارسی * I've been continuing to add vocab from easypersian.com into Anki, and my average has increased to around 12 Anki reps/day. As I described in the last update, adding romanization alongside the Persian script as well as understanding the composition of many of the verbs has helped me retain the words much more quickly, and naturally I've continued to add images (from google) and audio (from easypersian.com or forvo) to practically every card. * I've finally learned to type in Persian without pecking at the keyboard! This came about quite by accident: after accidentally spilling milk on my keyboard with the Persian alphabet labels on the keys (ordered off Amazon), I was forced to type on a new keyboard and memorize the positions of each letter by trial-and-error. I quickly got better and better at guessing, and it only took a few days before I could type quickly without thinking much. (By the way, it's not like I'm typing essays in Persian or anything - I only use the keyboard for google searches, dictionary lookups, and creating Anki cards.) Who knew that the keyboard labels were holding me back so much? What I plan to do for 日本語 and فرسی No changes planned. What I plan to do for Deutsch * Finish putting Assimil lessons into Anki * re-listen to Slow German episodes on shuffle at times when I can't give listening my full attention * Engage in some other series of Germanpod101, such as Intermediate Season 2 (grammar points and vocab based on dialogues), Upper Intermediate, or Audio Blogs (these are very fast for me, and I can only follow along if I'm reading the text - but then again, I was in the same boat with Slow German only a few months ago!) * Obviously this has been very audio-course-centered so far, so I want to venture more into native materials and into the realms of speaking, reading, and writing. This means reading more Harry Potter or parallel texts, Lang-8ing more, and listening to more TV, movies, and radio that depict natural conversation. I won't force myself to speak yet, although that should be coming soon :) Rather, I think that composing journals and being exposed to colloquial dialogue for at least a few weeks will prepare me for this. * Speaking of speaking, I already have a potential conversation partner or two: in the prefectural capital, about 40 mins from here, there's an "English Cafe" that allows patrons to pay for an all-you-can-drink deal, and converse with English-speaking staff for a few hours. However, some of the English-speaking staff are actually native speakers of other languages (Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, Spanish, German, and others) who are just very good at English, and this includes two German speakers! I talked to the owner about whether I could use one for German practice, and he said that since this would make him unavailable to speak English with the other patrons, he would have to set up a date where the German speakers would be available for all German learners. So it looks like I'd be part of a small German discussion group, for about ￥3000 including unlimited drinks! But whether I do it at the English Cafe or not, I definitely plan to have my first German conversation by the end of the month! Bis bald! Edited by Lucky Charms on 13 April 2011 at 7:10am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| FDppkaul Groupie Norfolk Island Joined 5232 days ago 36 posts - 38 votes Speaks: English* | Message 31 of 40 13 April 2011 at 7:19pm | IP Logged |
|
Do you play Zelda? That's very nice :D I play Zelda: Wind Waker in English, however i'm really wanting to play it in Russian. I'm just waiting as the translation gets finished hehe :)
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6940 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 32 of 40 14 April 2011 at 3:29am | IP Logged |
|
Yeah, I love Zelda!! I really think I should play more video games in foreign languages!
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. |
