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Team L live from Cairo! (T-TAC-10 ) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Woodpecker Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5815 days ago 351 posts - 590 votes  Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian) Studies: Arabic (classical) | Message 1 of 21 09 January 2010 at 1:12pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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TEAM TAC 2010 - Team L
Introduction Hello, and welcome to my Team TAC log. Team L is the Arabic team, and consists of me and the inimitable Quabazaa. Read her log too. It's pretty badass. She is studying a ridiculous number of languages. We are currently in the market for a third member for the team, so if you suddenly have the urge to drop everything for the next two to six years and dedicate your life to battling اللغة العربية let us know, because we need all the help we can get. I am currently living in Egypt and studying Arabic in a fairly full-time fashion. It is pretty much my life. It will continue to take up most of my time for a good portion of the year. My second language for the year will be French, which I hope to spend an average of an hour a day on, perhaps a bit more. I've studied it before, but not a whole lot, and never seriously. My wanderlust languages will probably be Latin, Irish Gaelic, and a random assortment of African languages (potentially including, but not limited to, Swahili, Hausa, isiZulu, and Bambara) but I intend to be fairly focused on my big two. Arabic details French details Edited by Woodpecker on 10 January 2010 at 12:35am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Woodpecker Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5815 days ago 351 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian) Studies: Arabic (classical) | Message 2 of 21 09 January 2010 at 1:21pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
[Relevant Posts from Original Log]
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| Woodpecker Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5815 days ago 351 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian) Studies: Arabic (classical) | Message 3 of 21 09 January 2010 at 1:27pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Hi jessikt! I understand you probably aren't on my team any more because you've decided to focus on Hungarian. Still, good luck to you.
يا قوابازة أدرس العربية من الصيف الماضي 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Woodpecker Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5815 days ago 351 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian) Studies: Arabic (classical) | Message 4 of 21 09 January 2010 at 1:28pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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January 6th
So I definitely haven't gotten this log off on the right foot in twenty-ten, but I have a good excuse: my family has been visiting me in Cairo for the last week, AND I've been sick. They are headed back to the snowy midwest now, and I am back on the horse today (though my lesson was canceled because my teacher is sick). I will update when I have actually finished some stuff. Edited by Woodpecker on 09 January 2010 at 1:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Woodpecker Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5815 days ago 351 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian) Studies: Arabic (classical) | Message 5 of 21 09 January 2010 at 1:31pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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January 7th
العربية ماعملت كفيةً اليوم لانّ يوم الخامس يوم الحفلة في القاهرة وكان في بيتي أَفراد كثيرون. صباحاً ذاكرت "آنكي" كثيراً وبدأت دراسة اللغة الفارنسية. مساءً عملت أوراق لتصريف الأفال في الماضي لانّني وحش جدا فيه I did not get a whole lot done today, as Thursday night is party night in Cairo, and today was also a holiday, so a lot of people stopped by. In the morning I started Michel Thomas French (see below) and studied a lot of Anki, and in the afternoon I made a bunch of verb conjugation charts and studied them up for a while to work on internalizing my ability to conjugate oddball forms in the perfect tense, something I am still terribly slow at. Not a particularly satisfying day, but I got a lot of busy work down, and I'm still kind of sick. French I'm definitely not ready to write anything yet (again, my French was not ever very good), but wow, cognate school with Michel was pretty entertaining. I forgot how much fun that guy was. He sounds so pissed when people rush their answers and make silly mistakes. Using French felt very weird, and I had to fight hard to keep the Arabic equivalents from popping up after every prompt. However, I never actually let any Arabic slip out of my mouth, so I'm hopeful that after a few more sessions I will have built up a nice little barrier. First CD done, and hopefully I will have time for two more tomorrow. Edited by Woodpecker on 09 January 2010 at 1:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Woodpecker Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5815 days ago 351 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian) Studies: Arabic (classical) | Message 6 of 21 09 January 2010 at 1:49pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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January 8th
Today was mostly logistical stuff, collecting lots of words for word lists and playing with Anki decks. I did memorize about 30 words and do the second lesson of Michel Thomas foundation, but it turned out to be a less productive day than I planned. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| jessikt Triglot Groupie Austria ichestudiolangues.co Joined 5838 days ago 98 posts - 102 votes Speaks: English*, GermanB1, French Studies: SpanishA2, Swedish | Message 7 of 21 09 January 2010 at 9:48pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Yeah I have moved to Team O! Good luck to you with your language studies and have fun in Cairo!! :)
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| Woodpecker Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5815 days ago 351 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian) Studies: Arabic (classical) | Message 8 of 21 10 January 2010 at 12:08am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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January 9th
العربية So I've been less productive than I usually am in terms of grammar and textbook study with Al-Kitaab and my ECA book and shadowing and just about everything now that I think about it, because I've been playing with vocabulary techniques. Vocabulary is my huge weakness in Arabic right now, I've decided, so my first goal for 2010 is to start learning more words per day. I've been doing about 15 to 20 a day fairly consistently for a few months, but my goal is to get that up to around 60 to 70 (basically from one wordlist up to four). My problem is that Arabic vocabulary is still pretty alien for me, so memorization takes a lot of effort. I've spent the last week trying to find work-arounds for this problem. What works best seems to be taking advantage of the جذور (the consonant root system) to learn a verb, its مصدر (masdar) and (and this is the key) a few of the other most useful derived words I find in the Hans Wehr. So for example, with the verb كتب (kataba, he wrote, because you always use kataba in examples) my word list would look like this: كتب - he wrote يكتب - he writes الكتابة - writing كاتب - writer كتّاب - writers كتبي - bookseller (this is a really important word in my life, books are like crack for me) كتبيّة - booksellers مكاتبة - correspondence اكتاب - enrollment استكتاب - dictation I can fit two verbs on a list in this fashion. If there aren't a lot of useful derived words, I'll throw in a verb form (related or unrelated) that I need (I.E. درّس with درس or إِاتحق with anything). I think after a little practice, I will be able to make and go through the first four lines (the time-consuming ones) for the four lists in about an hour and a half. Today I did two in about fifty minutes. After that, it's just an occasional four-minute study session five more times over the next two days, then into the Anki deck. We'll see how the next week goes. (Actually, because I'll be traveling Monday to Wednesday, it will be more like the next ten days.) Français Revised disc one of Michel Thomas foundation course. I still have trouble with Arabic interference with the word "and," but nothing else. After studying Arabic all day, doing French at night almost feels like speaking English with a funny accent. It's so easy it makes me want to cry. I don't even have to think about grammar, and I just use slightly different words. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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