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| rapp Senior Member United States Joined 5734 days ago 129 posts - 204 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Spanish | Message 25 of 31 06 January 2010 at 3:25pm | IP Logged |
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Yeah, I guess I'm doing a sort of unofficial 10,000 sentences method.
All of the textbooks I'm using urge the reader to frequently review the material already covered. I figured that a good way to do that would be to enter the various example sentences presented into anki cards. I'm not a "sentences only" purist, either, so I've got additional cards for all the new vocabulary I run across. So far, the only drawback I've run into having so many cards is that you really end up with a huge backlog of reviews to do if you skip days. But I've adopted two attitudes to deal with that: 1) don't skip days - do at least a little every day and 2) remember that anki is a tool for my benefit, not something that I must become a "slave" to - do as many reviews as I can comfortably, enjoyably do, and then stop. 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 26 of 31 06 January 2010 at 6:10pm | IP Logged |
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I found a sentence in one of the translation exercises in Teach Yourself Esperanto that I'm not sure I understand. So I wanted to explain my guess as to why the answer is what it is and see if other esperantists agree.
The sentence comes from a section about participles, and the sentence is this: Ŝi estas decidinta tion antaŭ morgaŭ. The translation the book gives is: She will have decided that before tomorrow. My question is why the future tense is used there. "Estas decidinta" looks like it should mean "has decided", and other examples do in fact translate it that way. "Estos decidinta" would seem like the correct translation for "will have decided". So I guess one possibility is that there is simply a typo in the book. But let's assume not. In that case, I guess that the explanation is that the "antaŭ morgaŭ" shifts your frame of reference into the future. So at some point in the rather near future she will be in a state such that, at that time, she has decided. Does that make sense? The sentence is describing what her present state will be at some time in the future. 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 27 of 31 06 January 2010 at 10:08pm | IP Logged |
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Ya, that is a weird one. The explanation I read said that the -inta indicates something that happened before the main verb of the sentence, so based on that I would have gone with your version of "estos decidinta". But I don't know what experienced speakers would think about this.
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| 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 28 of 31 12 February 2010 at 12:14am | IP Logged |
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I'm sorry, I totally missed this question. I would also go with "estos decidinta" here,
though "estas decidinta" isn't wrong - she may be deciding about this right now, just her final conclusion will arrive before tomorrow. When you're talking about something that will happen the same day, a lot of languages allow use of the present tense instead of future. Even in English it's not unheard of, e. g. "I am going out tonight". So either this is an implied very-near future, or she is pondering the issue right at this moment. I hope you'll come back and post about your adventures with Esperanto! 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 29 of 31 17 February 2010 at 6:31am | IP Logged |
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Well, I've been meaning to update this log, so let me take a moment to do that.
I started a new job in January, and it has really cut into my language study time. But I've been sticking with it as much as possible. For all three languages, I've kept up my Anki reviews, trying not to lose what I've learned so far. For Esperanto, I finished reading Vojaĝo kun Katrina and have started reading The Hobbit. That's going pretty well. I'm about 20 pages into it, and it is very encouraging so far. I'm finding maybe 10 new vocabulary words per page, but it doesn't interrupt my flow too much, because I almost always have a good guess as to what the word means. I'm entering all of those into Anki, along with any interesting phrases I come across. Also, I spent this past weekend working through the first 9 of 16 lessons of La Pasporto al la Tuta Mondo. That has gone very well. Lesson 9 was the first one where some bits of dialog were difficult enough for me that I think I need to do the lesson again. My goal is to complete that course by the end of next weekend. I'm hoping that I can complete that course by the end of next weekend. Then I will pick up with listening to more episodes of Radio Verda. I have listend to a few episode before, but my comprehension was poor enough that it was frustrating. I really wish they had transcripts available. That would be a massively valuable resource. With German, I really haven't done very much. I had made it to lesson 32 of Assimil before starting the new job, but just haven't felt like I had enough time to keep going.I do have Der Klein Prinz waiting for me to dig into. Maybe if I do finish La Pasporto this weekend, I'll start that next week. For Spanish, I found a book with an interesting premise that I've been working through. It is called "Listen 'n Learn Spanish with your Favorite Movies". Basically, it has 16 popular movies arranged by difficulty, and for each one it goes scence by scene explaining the language used. It doesn't really have much in the way of grammar explanations, but does have tons of vocabulary and common phrases. I'm hoping it will work something like Assimil, gradually absorbing patterns as I progress through the movies. It couldn't hurt anyway, and it does cover a bunch of movies I like - The Princess Bride, Finding Nemo, the Incredibles, Rocky III, The Chronicles of Narnia. The biggest obstacle, though, is that the book starts off with an introduction that contains about 600 words and phrases that they say will cover about 80% of the language used in all the movies. Each of those also has a sample sentence from one of the movies. So I've been entering all of that into Anki, which has taken a long time. I'm just about done, though, and after that will probably jump into March of the Penguins. Getting over that hump should free up some time to get back to German, too. Hmm, even though it feels like I've slowed down lately, now that I write all this out it seems like a pretty decent amount of effort. And I've been trying to keep in mind something I read on AJATT that I found inspirational: "People tend to overestimate what they can do in a day, and underestimate what they can accomplish in a year." So just keep putting out a good, honest effort, have fun along the way, and let time take care of the rest. 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 30 of 31 17 February 2010 at 5:30pm | IP Logged |
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I find that when I've got less time, it's a bit easier to chop some of the projects back and focus on one. Right now I'm trying to push ahead a bit with Swedish, while maintaining minimum contact with German and Esperanto. Usually this means that I carry a Swedish book around with me everywhere, and add some cards to my Swedish anki deck, whereas for German and Esperanto I just keep up with my reps and occasionally watch some German TV or read a few pages in an Esperanto book.
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| rapp Senior Member United States Joined 5734 days ago 129 posts - 204 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Spanish | Message 31 of 31 06 April 2010 at 8:18pm | IP Logged |
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Well, it has been a few weeks since I updated my log, so I thought I would do so.
My heavy workload at my new job has continued, and will for at least several more weeks until the current project I'm working on comes to an end, so I've had to streamline my language studies. In both German and Spanish, I've decided to focus on their respective Assimil * with Ease course. I've been using audacity to chop up the audio for each lesson and make Anki flashcards. My database has fields for German text, German audio, and English text (and the same for Spanish) and I have card templates that go German text + German audio --> English text, German audio --> English text, German audio --> German text (I have to type the German text), and English --> German text + German audio. It takes about an hour for each language on the weekend to prepare the next week's set of lessons, and then each weekday I just activate the tag for the next lesson and do my reviews. Also, I have the dialogs loaded on my ipod, so when I have time at work I'll listen to those a few times. I really feel like that has been working well. And my pronunciation has markedly improved, as I have made a point of repeating the L2 aloud during each review. It is fun to have a sentence go from being a real tongue-twister one day to much smoother just a few days later. On the Esperanto front, I finished La Pasporto al la Tuta Mondo, and have begun a course called "Ĉu vi aŭdis, ke..." to continue working on listening comprehension. I had not heard of that course before, but it was pretty cheap and I decided to take a chance on it when I was ordering some other stuff, and I think it is pretty good. It consists of 25 lessons read by various speakers, where the lessons are each 2 to 3 minutes long and are excerpted from various stories, articles in Monato, etc. I'm hoping that this course will bring my listening comprehension to a point where Radio Verda is within easier reach. Right now, I can get the gist of that podcast pretty well, but understanding details requires repeated listening. More like N+3 on the comprehensible input scale, rather than N+1. I'm also reading The Hobbit in Esperanto. I usually manage to read 3 or 4 pages per day during lunch. I'm about 1/3 of the way through the book and it is quite enjoyable. There is a decent amount of new vocabulary, but not enough to be distracting, and on a couple of occasions I have "forgotten" that I wasn't reading English. I would read a few paragraphs and eventually run into a word I didn't know and that would snap me out of it and I'd realize that I had simply been enjoying the story. That's a pretty exciting feeling. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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