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Rapp’s TAC2010 Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| rapp Senior Member United States Joined 5734 days ago 129 posts - 204 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Spanish | Message 1 of 31 08 December 2009 at 7:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Since I had already decided on my language goals for the next year and begun studying before deciding to take part in this year's TAC, I thought I would go ahead and start my log a bit early.
The languages I will be tackling are Esperanto, German and Spanish. Esperanto: Goal: Fluency Current Level: Intermediate I have been studying Esperanto for several months from a smattering of different sources. While I've made good progress, and can read at a solid intermediate level and listen and speak at an upper beginner or lower intermediate level, I feel that my progress has been hampered by the lack of a textbook that I really click with. I think I might have fixed that problem recently when I acquired a copy of Teach Yourself Esperanto. I am currently on chapter 8 of 15 of that book, and making pretty quick progress. Allowing for some disruption of my schedule around Christmas and New Years, I should finish it by mid-January at the latest. I currently subscribe to the magazine Monato, and will continue reading that, along with Fajron Sentas Mi Interne, and possibly an esperanto translation of The Hobbit. For listening and speaking practice, I plan to listen to episodes of the Radio Verda podcast and various songs/albums I've downloaded. Also, I had planned to take a conversational esperanto course offered by Sprachprofi this fall, but various issues have prevented that. My fingers are crossed that she will offer the course again. German: Goal: Intermediate Current Level: Beginner I am currently a complete beginner at German. I've never studied it before; I'm starting completely from scratch. I am currently working my way through the textbook "German for Reading" by Karl Sandberg. I'm on chapter 4 right now out of 20-something. Progress is a little slow, but encouraging. The author estimates that it should take 100 to 120 hours of study to complete the book, and that at the end you should have about a 2000 word vocabulary and all the necessary grammar to read newspapers or magazines. I expect to take somewhere toward the upper end of that range, which would mean finishing somewhere around the March to April timeframe. After that, I plan to work on listening and speaking ability by using a combination of Assimil German with Ease and the "Fokus Deutsch" video series from the Annenberg Foundation. Most of my focus will be on German, since I'm planning a vacation to Germany next fall and would like to be armed with more than just tourist phrases. Spanish: Goal: Intermediate Current Level: Beginner I'm a beginner at Spanish, but not completely so. I took 2 years of it in High School, and of course came away with almost no facility in the language, but a lot of the vocabulary seems to be coming back to me so far. My plan for Spanish is similar to my plan for German. I'm currently on chapter 8 out of 15 in the book "Spanish for Reading", also by Karl Sandberg. This book has clicked with me better than any other, and I seem to be making rapid progress. In this one, the author estimates it will take 80 - 120 hours of study to complete, resulting in a vocabulary of about 2500 words and, again, the grammar necessary to read newspapers and magazines. At my current rate, I expect to be toward the bottom of that range of study time, finishing the book in late January or early February. Again, I will follow that up with Assimil Spanish with Ease and the "Destinos" course from the Annenberg Foundation. My main goal here is to be able to follow newscasts on Univision with good comprehension. For all three languages, I am making heavy use of Anki. I'm entering all the vocabulary words and sample sentences from each course into three different Anki decks, and reviewing them daily. I currently have 927 cards in my Teach Yourself Esperanto deck, 887 in the German one, and 2040 in the Spanish one. And with that, my TAC is underway. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rapp Senior Member United States Joined 5734 days ago 129 posts - 204 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Spanish | Message 2 of 31 08 December 2009 at 7:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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And here is my first update:
I just reviewed 196 cards in my Esperanto Anki deck in 15 minutes. I should add that in my initial message above, I said that I had 927 cards in that deck. That was actually the number of cards that Anki hadn't shown me yet. I actually have 1679 total cards, and 827 that are unseen. So I've been adding new cards to that deck at a pretty good clip. I might need to spend a day or two reviewing rather than adding more new stuff, to make sure that I really understand the material as well as I think I do. I have reviewed 152 German cards in 19 minutes. I have reviewed 166 Spanish cards in 20 minutes. That totals up to 54 minutes of review in Anki. Edited by rapp on 08 December 2009 at 11:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6473 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 3 of 31 08 December 2009 at 8:27pm | IP Logged | ||
We missed you! Indeed I am again offering Esperanto courses in the new year, after I'm back from the Junulara E-Semajno. You can find the listing at http://edufire.com/classes/esperanto . I'm also distance-teaching a class from Seattle now, so I hope that some of them will join the beginner conversation classes as well. The Klubo de Esperanto will probably just be the usual gang. I'll follow your log and try to help with both Esperanto and German. Note that the German used in newspapers etc. is considerably different (more formal, more difficult) from the German used in everyday conversations. So for what it's worth, I shall give you access to the slides of the 10-lesson "Rapid German" course I have successfully used to teach tourists some last-minute conversational German. The focus was on building conversational abilities very quickly without resorting to memorization of phrases. You can find the slides at http://drop.io/rapid_german . Edited by Sprachprofi on 08 December 2009 at 8:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rapp Senior Member United States Joined 5734 days ago 129 posts - 204 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Spanish | Message 4 of 31 08 December 2009 at 9:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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Awsome! I'll definitely check out those slides.
And I knew that Sandberg's "X for Reading" books teach pretty formal language, since they are intended to be used by graduate students who must satisfy a foreign language reading comprehension requirement for their degrees. So they need to be able to read journal articles and the like. I was hoping that Assimil and the Fokus Deutsch videos would balance things out with more colloquial language. But, hey, more information is never a bad thing. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6473 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 5 of 31 08 December 2009 at 9:10pm | IP Logged | ||
They probably will balance it out, if you haven't made the formal language a habit yet. I do think it's strange to study all the hardest grammar of the language before the easy stuff. Colloquial German replaces or simplifies a lot of difficult forms (such as the Conjunctive I and II) and hardly ever uses several others (such as the preterite past tense or the passive). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rapp Senior Member United States Joined 5734 days ago 129 posts - 204 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Spanish | Message 6 of 31 09 December 2009 at 2:10am | IP Logged | ||
It probably is a weird way of going about things, but here's what I'm thinking. If I could snap my fingers and instantly be fluent in a language, what would I do with that language then? Well, since I'm pretty much a news and current events junkie in English, I would probably spend a lot of time reading and listening to news and current events in the new language. And this book holds out the hope of getting to that point in one of the four language skills in pretty short order. If it works, that's a big win for me. While I'm getting my listening comprehension, speaking ability, accent, etc in order, I would at least be able to read the actual native materials that I want to read in the first place. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5989 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 7 of 31 09 December 2009 at 4:04am | IP Logged | ||
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wow, where did you find The Hobbit in Esperanto??? I want that!
I'm currently reading it in German, and I've ordered the Swedish version. If I had it in Esperanto, it'd be a perfect match :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rapp Senior Member United States Joined 5734 days ago 129 posts - 204 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Spanish | Message 8 of 31 09 December 2009 at 5:44am | IP Logged | ||
I was a little surprised to see it, too. But it is right here: http://esperanto-usa.org/retbutiko/index.php?main_page=produ ct_info&cPath=20_260&products_id=7120&zenid=779678b17f542d1f 03096862f72da5e4 1 person has voted this message useful |
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