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Tarvos - TAC 2015 Pushkin/Scan | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 1369 of 1511 13 March 2015 at 3:01am | IP Logged | ||
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An Analysis of my Weaknesses in Various Languages
To be confident of progress you always need to be aware of where your bottlenecks are. Some things are eternal hindrances (like the characters in any of the Chinese languages). Other things are only problems in passing and things you can solve (like getting used to a new alphabet). In this post I want to give an overview of the things that hold me back in my languages, including the ones I am good at and ones I am notoriously bad at. So let's start: French French is a language I'm very allround at, and I can confidently say I speak good French, but I still have weaknesses here. They are mostly in the area of listening comprehension and occasionally pop up when I am: 1) not paying proper attention or focusing or b) speech is ridiculously slurred, uses slang, or people have very thick accents. I have a lot of trouble with the Québécois accent. Reading and speaking are mostly all right, but small gender errors still persist, and I may screw up a preposition or two. However I could do with more accuracy at my level. Morphology is not an issue. Russian Stress is the kicker in Russian for me still. My vocabulary has massively improved, and I speak very good, fluent Russian with a good accent to boot. I just need to know where the stress is. There are some small grammatical details I need to fix, some preposition issues, and there's still a lot of unknown slang or idioms I don't know, but it's all coming together. Except for the stresses. Stresses HURT in Russian. German It's not Dutch. That's my biggest problem. I speak fairly good German but my knowledge of the grammar is woeful, my gender-radar is somewhere below zero, drowned in an ocean, and my vocabulary is strongly influenced by the fact I'm Dutch (syntax is never an issue). I need to pay attention to some false friends (although this doesn't occur too often), my accent, and particularly the more complex grammar that's absent in Dutch. Swedish I'm very allround at Swedish but I could do with more listening and reduce the number of prepositional and en/ett mistakes. But that's quibbles - my Swedish is very very good. There's also a lack of proper melody going round but... eh. Romanian I really miss a lot of gender cues in Romanian. There are very often formal or better ways of saying things that I don't use - however I speak very clear Romanian and my accent is pretty good. I also lack a lot of uber-slangy youth vocab and idioms that people use. I know a few, but not enough by far. But the gender issue is the biggest one. Norwegian It's basically not Swedish! That's the biggest problem. I use Norwegian words, but I need to train my pronunciation more specifically. I've already done so and eliminated the worst giveaways of my Swedish accent, but it's still very noticeable and occasionally I'll give it away by using some Swedish word obliviously without noticing. Grammar and spelling is also an issue in writing because I have to consistently check the spelling of verb endings (because they're a bit weirder than in Swedish). Mandarin What isn't a problem? But the real kicker for me is still the lack of vocab and characters that I'm going to have to put a lot of time in. I can deal with reasonably slowly spoken Chinese, but everyone has a bloody accent I don't understand which doesn't help. Argh. Listening comprehension is quite good for more standardized accents though. But characters remain the big issue for me. There's also tones, but I can generally repeat the tones and sounds pretty well even though I'm not always 100% clear on them. Greek, Spanish, Portuguese Verb forms, all of them have too many verb forms and weird shit going on! In most cases it's also listening comprehension, particularly Portuguese is awful in this regard. My Greek vocabulary is surprisingly large. Hebrew The fact I can't read texts very well really hurts with vocabulary study. And this is due to their writing system. I've also let it fade so I really need to crack down on my Hebrew at some point - but I'll do it when my Mandarin and Greek are better. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 1370 of 1511 16 March 2015 at 3:14am | IP Logged | ||
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我的新城市。
About my new home for the next 4 months or so, in Mandarin! Now for the English review of the Song of Ice and Fire Series. That's planned for this week. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6144 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 1371 of 1511 18 March 2015 at 4:35am | IP Logged | ||
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I've just finished reading your composition in Mandarin, and I have to say that you're doing quite well for how long you've been studying! There were a few constructions that didn't sound to me like correct idiomatic usage, but that's to be expected. You also had the wrong character in a few places, probably just typos due to homophony -- e.g. 根 instead of 跟, or 听的东 instead of 听得懂 -- but otherwise it was pretty good and I was able to make sense of almost everything you wrote (even though I'm not as familiar with simplified characters). I even learned a couple new words (引得，腹泻，水平).
我希望你繼續這樣進步！加油！ 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 1372 of 1511 18 March 2015 at 6:37am | IP Logged | ||
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Homophony is the bane of writing Chinese on your laptop. But I didn't even know the
characters for tingdedong were wrong - thanks for pointing it out. My Hanzi are abominable... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5011 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 1373 of 1511 18 March 2015 at 10:36am | IP Logged | ||
This made my day, thanks!!! ¨ Good analysis, thanks for the information. A recurring theme is "it is similar but not the same", isn't it? I am a bit scared of this as well, as I am slowly diving into similar languages as well. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 1374 of 1511 18 March 2015 at 10:45am | IP Logged | ||
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On the whole that's more of an advantage, because it means it's really easy for me to be
understood. Especially when it comes to all the Germanic languages, the only one I would be lost in at this point is Icelandic (or some of the really small ones like Frisian but even Frisian I can work out in writing). The problem is that it becomes a weakness if you're looking for areas to improve; keep in mind that for German and Norwegian, we're talking high B-level abilities, I can converse normally in both languages for the most part. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5336 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 1375 of 1511 18 March 2015 at 11:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Kinesiske templer
With corrections – and I know capital letters come across as screaming, but bold or italics are too difficult here. Where there were superfluous letters I have just deleted them, so you may want to compare the texts carefully. The text is actually really good – even if it may not seem so when you see the corrections. With a single exception – I have absolutely no idea what “trommetåren” is supposed to mean – everything was perfectly comprehensible, and I have been strict when correcting it. På mandag fikk jeg DRA til noe kjente STEDER i Peking, deriblant Lama-templet (også kalt Yonghegong), og tromme- og klokketårnene i Beijing (Gulou og Zhonglou). Gulou er vel kjent fOr trommene sine: HVER time kan man se en trommeforestilling av kinesiske medlemmer (?) som slår virkelig hArdt på trommenE: Jeg tror jeg STO kanskje fem eller ti meter fra trommene – det gjorde VONDT i hodet, så HARDT SLO DE. Det var virkelig imponerende. DE SOM SLO var veltrenTe og hadde god rytme – det var som en symfoni. De HADDE alle samme uniform også (virkelig kommunal følelse, som er vanlig i Kina), med unntak for lederen, SOM BAR ET rødT kostyme, ikke eT hviT. (To Tarvos: Vi ville antagelig heller ha brukt kommunistisk enn kommunal her). Yonghegong, som jEg besøkte før trommetåren (???), var fullt AV folk som kom for å be til Buddha – eTtersom jeg er ikke religiøs I DET HELE TATT (vil man vite hvorfor, må man se på mine andre innlegg på russisk som forklarer forholdet mitt til religion og guder – man kan vel si AT deT helt MANGLER). Jeg vet ikke heller hva det nå er folk må gjøre når de går TIL gudstjeneste – det virker som de BØYER seg hele tiden for å bevege Buddha til å VURDERE DEM TIL Å VÆRE verdig hans GUNST. Som jeg ser det har det kun bidraTT til AT religionen hEr ble stenrik MED årenE – alt er fuLlt av gYLLENE statuer og andre rikdommer. Dessuten må man betale 40 kuai for å gå inn, så templet HAR sikkert TJENT SEG RIKE PÅ ANDRE INNTEKTER. Det LUKTER AV RØKELSE og andre rituelle saker, man kan vel si at deT stinker. KlokketårnET gir EN en bra utsikt over Peking, og MAN FÅR HELLER FOKUSERE PÅ DET: Dessuten er klokken selv virkelig gigantisk: Jeg har gjort mer I LØPET AV uken men det finnes ikke noe foto SOM fortelleR om DET, så dere MÅ vente på nye (foto) BILDER fra Chengde. Jeg kommer TIL å flytte dit i morgen – jeg håper at dere VIL lEse om mine eventyr derFRA også. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 1376 of 1511 18 March 2015 at 11:54am | IP Logged | ||
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A couple things: I did not mean communist. I meant communal, which I say because in
China things are often done together and shared. There is a communal feeling about the way Chinese live because of how often things are meant to be done in unison. This hasn't got anything to do with communist politics. Trommetåren - I meant trommetårnet. The thing is that it's a drum tower and those guys hit hard! I probably made a typo of some egregious sort. I am aware my written production still rests heavily on my Swedish, but as you know my Swedish is even better than my Norwegian. I would describe my Norwegian as basic fluency, which was the goal. Thanks for the corrections, I will update my blog when I have the time to do so :) Edited by tarvos on 18 March 2015 at 11:57am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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