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Total Annihilation - Charlmartell | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| charlmartell Super Polyglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6242 days ago 286 posts - 298 votes  Speaks: French, English, German, Luxembourgish*, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 1 of 71 03 May 2008 at 10:32am | IP Logged | ||
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I had thought I'd spend 3 months each on Russian, Hungarian and Japanese this year, but knowing myself I'd do some Russian, then get into Turkish for instance, get half-way through my 3 months of Japanese and take up God knows what, so this challenge gives me the necessary motivation to actually stick to a programme, at least sort of.
So what'll I try to achieve by January 1st? 1. Spanish. I have read very widely, but have never touched Cervantes "Don Quijote". I'm not going to read it now either, but have found the whole 2 books (126 chapters) as mp3 files and am determined to at least listen. I'll put it on a separate mp3 player. Let's see if that will get me to appreciate good old Quixote more. The voice of the recording is quite nice, which should help. 2. Russian. If I find the audio for Anna Karenina, I should be able to read the book (which I've had sitting on my shelves for years). Despite the fact that I speak Russian fairly well, I'm a rather slow reader where Cyrillic is concerned, keep stumbling over words, which makes reading longer texts rather tedious. No audio, no Anna Karenina, I'll have to find something else. In the meantime I'm going to go over shorter texts (with audio) to improve my active vocabulary. 3. Hungarian. I once spent 2 months on Hungarian prior to going to Hungary on a holiday. I won't pretend I got to advanced fluency, but I managed to get by in everyday situations and had no trouble reading the all in Hungarian menus in the various inns we went to. I have forgotten some, but the grammar stuck (it was too interestingly different to be forgettable) and passive vocabulary is still somewhere round the 2500 mark. I'll try to extend that and get my active vocabulary into shape. I'll use Assimil and an old American book called "Hungarian in Words and Pictures", too many drill-like exercises, but some good background material (in Hungarian) towards the back of the book. A vocabulary of some 3500 words should do my active vocabulary a lot of good. I've also got the Little Prince in Hungarian on mp3, so I'll use that for L-R. And any other material I'll come across on the Net. 4. Heisig: Remembering the Kanji. I was up to about 500 when I got distracted into doing something else. The bane of my life. Maybe this challenge will help keep me on the straight and narrow. 5. Italian. It's a bit ridiculous knowing Latin and Spanish but not Italian, so I'll spend some time on that. I've got myself quite a nice mix of materials, Assimil (Sans Peine and Perfectionnement) for active oral, and assorted reading matter for passive listening-reading. Shouldn't be too difficult to get to an acceptable level in 8 months. 6. Ancient Greek. I've made myself a parallel version of Pseudo-Apollodoros' "The Library" (3 books and the Epitome) and will read that first, then, if there is time, some Demosthenes (speeches, again with the possibility to make parallel versions E-G, with the texts I get off the Perseus site). Homer will have to wait for next year, I'm not that very keen on Homeric, prefer Attic. I think that's it. For the moment. Sounds more of a challenge than it actually is, as I know Spanish, and my Greek is quite good, even if vocabulary is still a little less advanced than I would like it to be. Japanese kanji I've tried to learn before, with all sorts of methods and can read up to 5th grade (I've got the whole primary school curriculum: kokugo, rikai and shakai (text-books and sankoosho) and the drat kanji doriru jiken books. Heisig is just supposed to get my active knowledge of all kanji actively activated. I might or might not do some listening-reading, have got enough material sitting on my shelves and in the depths of my computer but will have to see how it goes. I will go over the Assimil course again, type the lessons out and insert them into the kanji.koohii "Reading" section, to hammer the kanji meanings home. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| KSaku39 Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6828 days ago 30 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 2 of 71 03 May 2008 at 10:42am | IP Logged | ||
If you don't mind telling, where did you find these mp3s? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6437 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 4 of 71 03 May 2008 at 10:56am | IP Logged | ||
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The Spanish government put it online.
It's also mirrored here. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| KSaku39 Diglot Newbie United States Joined 6828 days ago 30 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 5 of 71 03 May 2008 at 11:20am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks!
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Goindol Senior Member United States Joined 6072 days ago 165 posts - 203 votes | Message 6 of 71 03 May 2008 at 1:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Someone has posted this link before, which has Anna Karenina in Russian:
http://audiobooks.ulitka.com/ Good luck! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| charlmartell Super Polyglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6242 days ago 286 posts - 298 votes Speaks: French, English, German, Luxembourgish*, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 7 of 71 03 May 2008 at 2:19pm | IP Logged | ||
Thanks, for the "Good luck!" mainly, as Volte had already sent me that URL by PM. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| charlmartell Super Polyglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6242 days ago 286 posts - 298 votes Speaks: French, English, German, Luxembourgish*, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 8 of 71 04 May 2008 at 1:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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Did the easy bits first, while downloading "Anna Karenina" in 90+ Mb chunks, each taking over 20 minutes to download. My broadband is that broad! So I shared the waiting time out between
Hungarian Assimil (first 14 lessons), an easy re-immersion into that language and not a total waste of time as I did manage to learn some 20 new words/expressions. Heisig kanji (went over some of my old expired cards on the kanji.koohii website, about 100 of them, then felt deflated, not because I'd forgotten too many, but because it became so boring. The ones I had forgotten were easy to reactivate though, so that wasn't a total waste of time either. Another 400 or so to revise before I get to add new ones. Italian Assimil, 10 lessons, not too difficult, but not quite as easy as I had imagined. The speed is not too bad, the first few lessons are recorded twice, once slow, once near normal (I think). I don't need anything faster, at least for the moment. It certainly is practical stuff and I suppose that words like "noisy", "crowded", "on strike" and "broken down" are quite useful when applied to Italy. Right bang in the first 10 lessons. Russian Assimil "Le Nouveau Russe sans peine", jumped around, looking for situations I might be interested in. I do agree that the speed of the audio is a little on the slow side, a lot actually, but I don't know why that should be such a bad thing. The language is difficult for beginners, the pronunciation a mouthful and the day when a beginner gets to speak Russian fast is far, far in the future. One just has to supplement the slowness of the learning material with listening to radio and other media provided by the Internet. It is like for reading: intensive versus extensive. The intensive is always slow but thorough. But as far as usability on a daily basis is concerned I disagree with Prof. Arguelles, this new series is a whole lot better than the old ones. I've now got all 3 versions, the very old one (no audio, because available only on records, finicky to use and extremely expensive), far too difficult and just too ambituous. It's book-Russian, not everyday. The second one, with cassettes, is a slightly more user-friendly edition, but still a little on the boring side, still too literary, and lessons still far too long for comfort. We're supposed to learn a-lesson-a-day in 20-minutes-a-day, it would take a beginner 20 minutes to just read through it once (at least that's what it took me when I first started). Again, all right for who has a good foundation already, but some of the texts are really not very exciting besides being totally useless for everyday talk. And the cassettes, though more convenient than records, are a liability, better transfer them to the computer before the drat cassette-player chews them up, especially the car cassette-player, a big consumer of tapes. Mine loved mangling tapes. While my umpteenth download is slowly crawling down from cyber-space I can write this report about the start of my challenge, I won't update more than once a week and will try to stick to weekly goals as there certainly won't be visible daily improvements. And I'll try to give my thoughts on method rather than on how many hours, minutes and seconds spent on this venture. Oh yes, nearly forgot, I have listened to the opening 3 chapter of Don Quijote. No problem there, but will reserve judgement till later. No ancient Greek, I totally forgot, might do some later, unless there's something worthwile on TV. Curtains for today. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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