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Attempts to focus: Italian, French, Latin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Rencat Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5463 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Italian, Latin | Message 1 of 6 18 February 2010 at 1:38am | IP Logged | ||
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This log is for the three languages that I am learning at school, French, Italian and Latin, and my attempts to NOT STUDY ANYTHING ELSE, at least until the summer holidays, when I have time to do so.
My main reason for this is my concern about time-I have an Italian exam coming up sometime this year, (I have no idea when in reality, nor do I know what this exam will entail) and as we only started Italian in a two hour block once per week from September, I've not really learned a lot. The teaching has been haphasard at best. We've not got a textbook to work from, and as I'm busy doing five A-levels, with therefore no free periods, I don't have the time to study every word I come across, on the offchance it's going to be on the exam. It's frustrating, but I'm trying to at least get a (long) paragraph that I can write/say on at least 6 topics that came up at GCSE (we're apparantly doing a half GCSE, for which I cannot find any information), including opinions and three tenses. That should be enough for the exam, and then I can drop Italian to cram French for A-level, and then pick it up again in the manner that I would like to study it. Latin can die for me for all I care-I do not enjoy the lessons, largely because they're before normal school lessons on a Monday and Tuesday morning, are half an hour long, and are very poorly structured-but it's good on ucas as I want to do a language course at university. Strangely, I enjoy studying Latin on my own with a different (actually useful) textbook, but school is killing it for me somewhat. French, however, I love. I'm doing French AS level this year, will be doing French A2 level (not on the A1 A2 B1 etc scale, in general A-level qualification terms) next year, and hope to continue it at university. I have a pretty good level of understanding of written and spoken French, especially after having spent a week in France on French exchange, however, my spoken is not up to par, and although I know grammar rules, I tend to forget to apply them. My French speaking exam will be around April 17th, which gives me time, although not a comfortable amount, to be able to develop answers to questions, and to learn a few essay arguements. Methods: Latin-learn the 'checklist' vocabulary in the Cambridge textbook, and do the exercises in my own time. Do the homework set even if it's neither useful nor relevent. Italian-Linguascope website-exercises. -Contatti audio-listen to when I can. -MT (when it arrives)-work through when I can (I'm dearly hoping it covers useful (for me) topics. Work, shopping, directions and generally practical things are brilliant, but definitely not what will be covered on the exam, from my experiance of GCSE language exams. however, will be fun to learn afterwards.) French-I've got practically an hour a day at school, and I'm working my way through a French novel bit by bit before I go to bed in the evenings (or mornings on occasion, eheh) I'm going to try to fit in a proper grammar session at least once a week, and I'll try to work out and develop answers to on topic of conversation questions per week too, as exam prep. I'll try to use my monolingual French dictionary when I can, but mostly it's far too time consuming, when I'm trying to do five hours worth of homework in two or three hours, sigh. My main problem is keeping myself from starting Russian or Swedish or Norwegian, or revisitng German before the summer holidays. I'm drowning in all these romance latin-based languages! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Rencat Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5463 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Italian, Latin | Message 2 of 6 19 February 2010 at 1:18am | IP Logged | ||
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What have I done today? Not much. I've revised four chapters of Latin vocabulary (not as much as it sounds-maybe 100 words) and figured out which topics I need to have up to scratch for the Italian exam, after much internet scouring, and searched through to find and highlight useful vocabulary, useful for learning later. Eheh.
I've just spent an hour on www.polarfle.com, though, which is absolutely incredible, and a brilliant resource for practicing French. I may well spend a lot of time on there, and I might tell my French teachers about it-or at least my friends in the class, and the not-so-scary teacher :). I also wrote three conversation question answers, although I really need to get the accuracy checked-grammar wise they're okay, but I have a feeling they'd sound clunky to native/fluent ears. I want to put some new language material on my ipod, unfortunately, I can't find my link cable (or my old one, or the old one a friend gave me the last time this happened...) =[ Tomorrow, languages are going to be ignored in favour of chemistry and maths homework, I'm afraid, so I'll probably just go over that Latin vocab again, adding on an extra chapter or two. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6474 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 6 19 February 2010 at 11:02am | IP Logged | ||
If it's any consolation, Latin is not considered to be a Romance language ;-) But I know your problem. Maybe, on the days that you can find absolutely no motivation to start studying those languages, you could promise yourself some Russian/Swedish/Norwegian/German/Chinese/Indonesian/Swahili for "dessert". I have successfully used this. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Rencat Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5463 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Italian, Latin | Message 4 of 6 19 February 2010 at 3:41pm | IP Logged | ||
Heh, it's a slight consolation-Latin's certainly different enough from Italian and French to give me a bit of a break, and knowing that stops me from grouping them together quite so much =] The 'dessert' idea seems to be a good one-I went through re-learning the first 12 or so letters of cursive cyrillic early this morning, and it seems to have given me enough of a break to go back to French/Italian/Latin with more of a fresh mind =] (I'm also tackling two things at once through that-I did all of the practice left-handed, in my attempt to become ambidextrous). Cheers =] 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Rencat Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5463 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Italian, Latin | Message 5 of 6 19 February 2010 at 4:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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Today, unexpectedly, I have already found time to spend an hour studying Latin, thanks to completely failing at the chemistry questions, to the point that I can't do them at all...I hate missing school, although the French exchange was brilliant =]
That hour was spent re-revising the checklist vocabulary from chapters 1-4, and learning the checklist vocab from chapters 5 and 6 of Cambridge Latin Course Book 1. I then did the first lesson including exercises of 'Learn Latin' by Peter Jones ('The Book of The Daily Telegraph QED series'). I love this textbook. It is far superior to the Cambridge Latin Course. The layout is a little tricky to navigate-I keep losing my place on the page-but it has basically been lifted straight from a newspaper column, and the content is excellent. It goes straight in to grammar-but useful grammar, neither overexplained nor oversimplified, and puts everything into use in that lesson. For example, this lesson started with conjugating the verb 'to love' in the present tense. It then quickly explains the verb-stem, endings, dropping 'I', 'you' etc, and general rule for all 1st conjugation verbs-and then goes on to exercises. The first set of exercises involved taking a given verb ('amat' for example) then translating it to English in all possible ways (he loves/is loving/does love, she it etc), then the English is given for a selection of phrases, and you translate to latin. Then we get some basic vocabulary ('always', 'now', 'and' etc) and then some sentences to translate from latin to English, and vice versa. Then we get answers (conveniently located separate from the exercises, but not at the back of the textbook), then some information about 'The World of Rome' in this case, a quick and interesting overview of its origins, then 'Word Play' which discusses how some words drifted into the English language. It's not necessary to read those two sections, but it's nice to have a bit of story sometimes =] All in all, I'm very happy with my £10.99 investment-not bad for a decent textbook without audio, I've found. Hopefully my studies should progress more steadily now that I'm not relying on the school textbook and sheets, which are terrible... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Rencat Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5463 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Italian, Latin | Message 6 of 6 21 February 2010 at 11:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yesterday, I ended up doing half my Italian homework, and a bit of revision based around that, and revised through chpters 1-6 of Latin again. I probably spent about an hour in total-not much.
Today, I've half done my French homework, which doesn't really count as language learning in my opinion, but I have spent 2 1/2 hours straight learning/revising Latin. Hopefully, it should pay off tomorrow morning. I've still got two chapters of vocabulary to learn, but I'm assuming that I can do that in the morning - it shouldn't take long. I also did half of chapter two of 'Learn Latin'. I'm going to go through it and the previous one again next weekend, I think, which will be my next Latin opportunity. Going to try to finish my Italian homework now, then sleep =] 1 person has voted this message useful |
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