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Emme’s Small Steps - Team Sleipnir TAC’15 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5345 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes  Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 9 of 360 12 April 2010 at 11:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi ManicGenius! Thanks for replying. Well, it seems that having a Romance language as my mother tongue and having already dabbled in French in the past is giving me the leg-up you were anticipating in your post from last week. Admittedly I’m still only on lesson 12 so the hard work is just beginning, but I generally understand > 90% of each lesson after listening to the track for a couple of times. I guess I will trust the method and just keep doing it the way it’s meant. After all it seems that a lot of people on this forum have been very successful with it. Regarding Anki: probably it’s just the fact that I don’t feel tech savvy enough, but to me it seems like a lot of work putting all those sentences into Anki. Doesn’t it take such a long time that in the end it defeats its purpose of making language learning actually easier and faster?
Keep up the good work and good luck! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ManicGenius Senior Member United States Joined 5479 days ago 288 posts - 420 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, French, Japanese | Message 10 of 360 12 April 2010 at 8:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
It takes me all of 15-25 minutes to put in 14 sentences from each Assimil lesson with audio. I work with computers all day and have for most of my life so I'm rather fast at it. Plus I usually do this with a TV show/music on in the background so I'm still learning passively while entering sentences. Plus Assimil repeats a lot of sentences. This doesn't happen as much later on but in the first 25 or so lessons there's a lot of repetition. I assume it's planned repetition. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5345 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 11 of 360 18 April 2010 at 6:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This week I’ve continued with Assimil, a lesson each day. Once I reached lesson 14, dedicated to revision, I did a further quick review of all previous lessons as well. I’m satisfied with my progress so far, but at this point I’m starting to feel the familiar restlessness which makes me drop any project after a couple of weeks at most.
It’s not unusual for me to work on a language at a steady pace for ten days or even two weeks, but then my interest regularly wanes and I look for something else to do. This week I’ve managed to keep on track and do the planned lessons, but I feel that the enthusiasm is fading and I long for something new and different. I’m in such a spirit that when I found a Chinese character book in my local library I couldn’t help but borrow it. And so in the past couple of days I’ve been learning some 20 hanzi (and I don’t even intend to study Chinese!) Now my problem is how to find a study method that affords me enough variety to sustain my interest and motivation long term and at the same time keeps me working on a reasonable path that, even if seemingly meandering, has a clear goal and is leading me there. Assimil may be an answer to the latter requirement, but I need to find something else for the variety thing. Apart form Assimil I have other materials for French (podcasts, textbooks etc.), and I’m wondering whether it’s a good idea to pick one or two of these and use them alongside Assimil or whether that would end up being another distracting and fruitless proposition. The main point now is, I think, to knuckle down with Assimil, even if some days I don’t feel like doing it at all. This week I also began working on my Swedish again: as a warm-up I chose to do some elementary exercises and to listen again to the audio of the lessons in TYS Swedish and in another ‘Lerhrbuch’ that I had already done some years ago. It was a very easy approach to tackling Swedish again and I didn’t spend much time either on that nor on the short post on the Svenska för nybörjare thread. But what matters to me the most is that finally I actually did something learning related as opposed to just watching tv or listening to the radio in Swedish. That must count as my first goal, I guess. Moreover, this week I’ve learnt one truly and completely new word for me (and I don’t know why it took me so long to encounter it, as it seems a fairly common word): bullrig = noisy. Talk about small steps indeed! ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5345 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 12 of 360 25 April 2010 at 3:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don’t have much to report about this week’s progress: I kept doing Assimil French (now I’m on lesson 23) but unfortunately I haven’t worked much on my Swedish (yet again!).
With Assimil I’m trying to overcome the feeling that I’m not working hard enough and that I’m not dedicating enough time and energy to each lesson. In other words, I’m trying to convince myself that not overlearning the material is what this method is all about in the passive wave. It’s hard for me because I’ve acquired some habits and attitudes (like the feeling that you need to recall—not just recognize—all the new vocabulary, its spelling and its pronunciation as soon as it is introduced) through years of traditional language study and it’s difficult to change them in just a couple of weeks. Let’s hope next week my Swedish gets the attention it deserves! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5345 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 13 of 360 01 May 2010 at 9:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I’m quite happy with the work I’ve done this week: not only have I kept up as planned with my daily Assimil French lesson (I’m on lesson 29 today), but I’ve also managed to do a little Swedish every day (which is already a success for me, as you can see if you read the previous posts on this log). In particular I started a Swedish reader called ‘Folk i Sverige’ (I did the first 4 lessons), I did daily listening comprehension exercises (I found a cool link in ellasevia’s log), and I even began to create an Anki deck for memorizing new Swedish words. I haven’t spent much time on either language: perhaps an average of 30-40 minutes a day for each, but I supplemented my active studying of Swedish with quite a lot of passive tv watching: among other things I caught up with the entire season of Saltön on the SVTPlayer. It’s a 4-hour tv drama (or maybe dramedy), the kind of thing I would never watch in Italian, but as many on this forum have noticed before, you actually watch and enjoy different things in your foreign languages than you do in your native one. I guess much of it comes down to the huge satisfaction one gets from the simple fact that one can follow a programme in a language that was totally obscure just some months (or years) before. I must admit that this forum is really influencing the way I approach language learning: just as I decided to try out Assimil French after reading so many positive things about it here, I also decided to employ SRS because it seems that it’s worked for many forum members. The only drawback I hear mentioned about SRS is the fact that you may end up with so many items due in a single session that you get discouraged and ends up avoiding reviewing at all. So I’m wondering, does anyone who has used SRS know how many words is a reasonable amount to add each day in order not to end up being overwhelmed? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6140 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 14 of 360 01 May 2010 at 9:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
I was having exactly this problem of being very overwhelmed and having to review about 1000 facts every day in Anki, which was definitely not fun and ate up a lot of time. This was because I was having the program give me 30 new words in my stronger languages, 25 in my intermediate ones, and 20 in my weaker ones. Now, I am instead having it introduce 5 new words per language every day. This is much more manageable and as a result I usually have around 400 cards to review per day (but this is the total for 10 different languages in there, so it's really only about 40 per language including new words). Edited by ellasevia on 01 May 2010 at 9:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5345 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 15 of 360 01 May 2010 at 11:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks ellasevia for your input. By the way, I read your log and find it quite inspiring: I wonder how you manage to keep on working on so many languages at the same time. You’re quite incredible! I follow in particular your progress in Swedish: as a language with fewer learners it’s rather nice to find someone else trying to delve into it on their own and to see how they tackle the same difficulties. Keep up the great work (and don’t forget to get a good night’s sleep once in a while!) Edited by Emme on 01 May 2010 at 11:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6140 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 16 of 360 01 May 2010 at 11:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
Non c’è problema, e mille grazie per il complimento. Anch’io leggo il tuo log. Spero che non ti importa che ho scritto in Italiano...bisogna che io pratichi un po’. (A proposito, parli l’inglese perfettamente!) Edited by ellasevia on 01 May 2010 at 11:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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