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Crush ’15: 再来一个呗! Euskara? Auskalo! | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 1 of 32 19 January 2015 at 9:43am | IP Logged | ||
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I guess it's time to start a new log. My last log didn't get used very much because my studying wasn't terribly exciting. As always there was nothing stable in my life and i ended up moving from China to Spain to the US and recently just got back to China where things have settled down quite a bit again. This year my main focus will be Chinese again. I'd put my current level around B1/B2, around HSK5 (maybe not quite there).
I've pushed Basque aside for the time being to focus on Mandarin and unexpectedly picked up a little Korean as one of my friends asked me to study it with them. While most of my effort is going towards Mandarin, i've been listening to an episode of Talk to me in Korean and KoreanClass101 daily. The accompanying PDF files to KoreanClass101 are really great. I've also been trying to convince that same friend to pick up Esperanto, if so then i expect my Esperanto will get a lot better this year, too. So this year, my focus: Mandarin Other languages: Basque Esperanto Btw, anyone interested in my Subs2SRS decks, you can check them out here. Edited by Crush on 21 April 2015 at 4:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| BOLIO Senior Member United States Joined 4662 days ago 253 posts - 366 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 2 of 32 20 January 2015 at 7:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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I will be following along with you Crush. I hope all is well!
BOLIO 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 3 of 32 21 January 2015 at 12:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks BOLIO, and i can say the same to you. I look forward to seeing all your progress this year! I have a feeling this year you'll move Spanish next to English in your profile :)
Related to my languages, for Chinese i've been keeping up with Anki (Subs2SRS) and Pleco. I've been talking to friends more in Chinese lately and some people we strictly talk in Chinese. For Korean, i'll share where i'm at in my "courses". Today i listened to episode 12 (Beginner, season 1) of KoreanClass101 and episode 22 of TTMIK (TalkToMeInKorean). I like the hosts of TTMIK more but the KoreanClass101 podcasts have less chitchat and also introduce a dialog and some new vocab every lesson. The PDF file is also a bit more comprehensive. I've been adding interesting sentences from the KC101 PDF files into Anki and using TTMIK as a sort of fun side course. We've started talking about how verbs work in both courses which has been nice, though i'd like to review a couple TTMIK lessons when i finish the first level (three more lessons). For Esperanto, i've been trying to write more and find some conversation partners, hopefully i'll be able to convince a friend here to study it with me and stick it through. I've also been reading articles online daily and browsing the Lernu forums, but haven't really participated yet. Ah, and i've started re-reading Gerda Malaperis. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 4 of 32 21 February 2015 at 5:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think i'm going to have to update my "Studies" list. To be honest, it'll be a while i think before i get back to Catalan and Basque. I really wish i could go back to Spain, but even Spanish i hardly ever use here in China.
Mandarin: I've finished another Subs2SRS deck (So Young). You can find the decks i've done (minus the Lust, Passion deck) over at the uztranslations forum. I thought So Young was a great deck, i picked up quite a few chengyu and saw a bunch of words from my Pleco lists in action. Not sure what movie to do next. With Pleco, i've been hacking away. 10 words a day. It's been probably 6 months (or longer?) since i've missed a day. I've currently got about 1100 words left in the HSK 6 deck, 4,400 learned words total. Esperanto: I've finally met several people (online) here in China who are deep into the Chinese Esperanto movement. It seems like it's mostly a "passion" project, people put a lot of time and effort into promoting the language and are really excited about everything. Esperanto definitely seems much more difficult for Chinese speakers, but i imagine it's still way easier than learning any other western language. Lately i've been thinking about certain things like using the Chinese date system (1 month, 2 month, etc. for January, February, and 1 week, 2 week for Monday/Tuesday) and other things for a language simplified for Asian speakers. I've been jumping around a bit in my "studies". Not really sure what to do at this point, i don't feel comfortable speaking it but most grammar courses are still too easy. I've been reading "Detala Gramatiko de Esperanto" and doing some online reading in Esperanto. I ordered some Chinese classics translated into Esperanto from a Chinese Esperanto shop on Taobao. It's Spring Festival now, so i'm not sure when those will get in, but i'm really looking forward to them. In particular the huge 西游记 (Pilgrimado al la okcidento) set! Korean: I've been putting a lot of focus on here lately. I'm going through season 2 of KoreanClass101 and level 2 of Talk to me in Korean, but gradually shifting my focus elsewhere. I found an old post from a member here talking about their website How to Study Korean. I've only read the first couple units, but it's got tons of information, plus all the vocabulary has been typed into Memrise for you! Each unit has tons of vocab (30-50 words), supposedly some 9,000 words altogether. So i say it's worth it for that alone. It's also entirely free. It's a wonderful site and resource! FSI: I've started going through the Korean FSI. I love the FSI method, i really can't think of a better way to learn. The Korean dialogs so far have been really formal, but supposedly the standard politeness forms are introduced in Unit 4. I've started transcribing the first volume's student text using hangul, i've just started and i can't say whether or not i will finish the entire thing (18 units), but maybe. You can find what i've done so far here. Today i finished Unit 1, tomorrow i'll start Unit 2. There's lots of formal vocab here so it was harder than most FSI courses, but as always after going through the drills about 6 times over two days i didn't have too much trouble. Work starts again in a week or two (nooo), so i'm hoping i can get the first few units done while i've got plenty of time on my hands. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 5 of 32 23 February 2015 at 4:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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I just bought a wireless USB Korean keyboard on Taobao today, can't wait for that to come in!
For Esperanto, i've recently ordered a ton of books. In addition to the ones i mentioned in the last post, i purchased the Lord of the Rings trilogy + The Hobbit. I never finished the trilogy in English but really enjoyed The Hobbit when i was younger. I also purchased a subscription to Monato. Mandarin has been super boring lately, just Pleco reviews. I probably won't mention that much until i finish the HSK 6 list and put my energy into more interesting things (reviewing grammar and lots of reading/watching movies!). Korean: I did more work with Unit 2 today. It was already late when i started, but i'm glad i did it. I really enjoy FSI, the first couple runthroughs are always really depressing, but after the third or fourth round things start to look up and it's really exciting. If i ever started a language company, i would base my courses on the FSI (in particular, Platiquemos) style. For grammar-heavy languages i think it works so well. My current nemesis in Korean is ㅐ and ㅔ. I mix them up every single time. In Memrise, the list of words i've missed is about 90% words with those two letters in them, about 3% words that loaded first and i missed while doing something else waiting for the page to load, and the rest stuff i forgot. Other contenders are ㅋ and ㄱ and ㅌ and ㄷ. I would probably have no trouble remembering these letters if they were spelled using Latin or Cyrillic letters, but Korean letters still don't feel like "letters" to me. I'm hoping that changes soon! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 6 of 32 06 March 2015 at 10:23am | IP Logged | ||
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A couple bits of news:
Korean: I remember hearing long ago that the mobile version of Memrise had an offline option. I didn't have a fancy phone/tablet then so didn't pay any notice to it. But as i was heading out of town again and had a long bus ride ahead of me (and several days without internet) i decided to test it out. I'm now through the first 8 levels in the HowToStudyKorean Memrise set. I got to level 5 in the written portion of the course before i went out of town. As i was out of town, i didn't advance at all in FSI. I'm currently at Unit 4. Esperanto: 快递 came by as i was out of town, i assume they were bringing me my books. I still haven't received them, thought i'd get them today. Hopefully they'll be here tomorrow. I'm about halfway through "La tempomaŝino". Mandarin: Big news (sorta) here! I ordered a DS off Taobao and have been playing Chinese translations of (remakes for the DS of) some of my favorite RPGs. I am a huge fan of RPGs (and have actually been in the process of coding my own for many years now off and on in z80 assembly for the TI-83+) since it's like an interactive story. The story is about you and you live and participate in it, i think that's really cool. Anyway, i'm surprised by how much i can understand. I rarely have to use the dictionary and it's mostly for names of places and people. I hate that in Chinese. Transliterating names in Chinese for some reason loves to use the most obscure characters ever which have no useful purpose beyond transliterating names. Sometimes i'm a bit lazy and skip over a word i know i should look up, but i've been doing a good job of talking to all NPC characters i come across and reading EVERYTHING so that it can count as actual study time and not just playing around. EDIT: Forgot to mention that i've finally broken the 4-digit mark in my HSK list, there are now less than 1,000 words left in the list to study! My current card count is 4555. All the excitement about my new study method made me forget about how excited i was to finally get under 1,000 cards! Edited by Crush on 06 March 2015 at 11:17am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4278 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 7 of 32 06 March 2015 at 2:54pm | IP Logged | ||
Hello Crush
Yes, but that's precisely the reason why (after quite a lot of reading, granted) it tends to become easier to recognize foreign words. Most of these obscure characters tend to be used specifically to transliterate foreign languages and are not often used in native Chinese words. Hence, when you spot one of them, you can suspect that there's a foreign word there, and that the characters should be read phonetically and not interpreted in any meaningful way. This subset of Chinese characters (咖, 陀, 稣, 莉, 兹, 克, 斯, 迪...) is almost an equivalent of the Japanese katakana. I don't now if there's a list somewhere. I can imagine that Chinese people themselves, journalists for instance, often need to transliterate foreign names. Hence, there must be a list or some guidelines somewhere. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 8 of 32 06 March 2015 at 4:52pm | IP Logged | ||
Thanks, and yeah, it's getting more and more obvious when it's a foreign name now though, especially in video games where names are often emphasized/highlighted somehow. Like you said, seeing those characters is one heads up, as is seeing a series of characters that looks like no word i've ever seen before. Btw, i just looked it up online and there is a Wikipedia article on the topic which states:
There's also more detail in the Mandarin version of that page. Apparently there are official manuals for foreign place names, nationalities, names, and scientific terms. The page also talks about how other Mandarin-speaking areas go about transliterating foreign names. EDIT: I forgot to mention that there's a transcription table on the English page (for English to Chinese transcription). Edited by Crush on 06 March 2015 at 5:00pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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