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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 33 of 71 30 May 2008 at 4:20pm | IP Logged |
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Friday, May 30th
Japanese: 1 hour Heisig kanjis. After deciding I was a bit bored with Heisig I changed my mind, again, and am really enjoying those kanjis now. I'm cheating! I use Firefox, because of the tabs. I add 50-100 kanji per day and pass myself on every kanji, except the ones that for one reason or another I'm not interested in at present, opening in separate tabs the ones I don't really know but would like to. I then concentrate on those by reading the most popular story and borrowing it if I find it convincing and memorable. If I need a primitive or radical I look it up in the Heisig pdf and copy and paste that into the frame as well. Yesterday I did 39 (some of those I did know, but wasn't secure enough), today I did 41. They stay in their tabs till the next day and are quickly revised once or twice more today, and again tomorrow morning before being replaced by new ones. There are so many in the 2nd half of the book that I know (or could do with) which, at 10-20 kanjis per day would take forever to get to. This way I get there 5 times quicker. And any I have discarded for the moment are still accessible if necessary, just fill in the search combo and add to the day's list. Of course I can only do that because I already know, at least passively, quite a number of kanji from before. But often only in the context I learnt them in. Ancient Greek 45 minutes. Finished reading Book I, the Argonauts get to Colchis, Medea helps Jason get the golden fleece in exchange for his marrying her, the flight, the gruesome ways Medea had of dealing with emergencies and what happened next. Another very good, though rather grisly tale. Russian: Some easy Assimil lesson making me think about my family and friends, photographs, jobs, looks etc. And talking about climate, weather, natural catastrophes: earthquakes in China and Africa, floods in England, Italy etc. We have a Ukrainian woman come to do the housework we don't specially want to do, like ironing and cleaning windows for instance. As she speaks only Ukrainian and Russian I get a lot of practice and by now am very good at talking about domestic chores (that I am not interested in). She comes by bus but as there isn't one when she's finished we take her home, a 10-15 minute drive. So, unless it's my turn to stay home and do the cooking, I get some practice listening/talking about all sorts of topics. Some involving a lot of paraphrasing because I just haven't got the necessary vocabulary (philosophy, religion, politics.....). She used to be a teacher, so she is an educated woman who is interested in all sorts of things and likes to talk. Good practice, but sometimes a little tiring. Italian: Italian: After 20 minutes of jokes with Assimil my day went pear-shaped. No more languages today! 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 34 of 71 31 May 2008 at 5:06pm | IP Logged |
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Saturday, May 31st
Ancient Greek Apollodoros, first 5 pages of 'The Liberary' Book II. Not all that interesting, just more genealogy of gods and men and in-betweens. Italian: No Assimil, but much better, though mainly passive. I found this blog written in Italian about Japan. It started with "Il terremoto... KINKYUUJISHINSOKUHO" (in kanji: 緊急地震速報 avviso urgente di terremoto). That beautifully tied in with my Russian conversation yesterday about floods and earthquakes (землестрясение in Russian). I didn't know the Russian word yesterday, but I did know the Japanese and could have guessed the Italian one. Anyway, I read the latest 3 pages of that blog, learnt quite a bit about Japan, all in Italian. I learnt more Italian reading those pages than I would have in days with Assimil. But only because I have a solid Romance base to build the Italian language up on, not only for words, but for grammatical structures too. I just have to pay attention to the difference, it's all variations on a theme. What sounds right in Spanish doesn't automatically sound right in Italian: prepositions, use of tenses and moods, use of auxiliaries, it's all a question of sounding right or wrong and concentrating on right sound for right language. The rest of the blog is written in English, so I haven't read it yet, but it seems some of it is about Japan, a first visit there, so could be interesting. Will have to wait for some other day though. Japanese: 50 Heisig kanji plus the above mentioned 緊急地震速報 1374 緊 キン<br>tense, 1146 急キュウ<br>いそ-ぐ<br>hurry, 517 地チ<br>ジ<br>ground (already covered in Heisig) 2010 震シン<br>ふる-う<br>ふる-える<br&g t;quake 1669 速ソク<br>はや-い<br>はや-める<br&g t;すみ-やか<br>quick 1507 報ホウ<br>むく-いる<br>report 15 minutes activating: shopping, always useful, never fluent and confident enough when faced with pushy shopkeepers/assistants. Hungarian: L-R L'Etranger part 2, chapter 3. Unfortunately, the recording is faulty, halfway through chapter 3 it stops being chapter 3 but something else. I have no idea what. I understood nothing because I was hunting around for the correct place which just wasn't there. And the end of the recording was definitely not the end of chapter 3. So that was not a great success. 15 minutes activating based on Assimil: afraid of the dentist and other little problems, pains, injections, having to wait.... 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 36 of 71 20 June 2008 at 10:51am | IP Logged |
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I haven't given up on TAC but refrained from posting. It's supposed to be a personal language learning journal, not a place for some idiot troll to make stupid remarks totally unrelated to anything I wrote. He rendered me a service though, as keeping that diary did take up quite a lot of time.
But I find just stating how many minutes I spend on languages per day pretty useless. I wanted a record of what I did, how I did it and then, if the results weren't what I had in mind, go back over my log and find out where I went wrong and why. And then try and improve my method (of learning kanjis for instance). Anyway, I do spend quite some time on languages every day and so far seem to be more or less on schedule in all areas except for Cervantes. Well, and Anna Karenina still has to appear in her book, but I've done quite a bit of Russian elsewhere and she's sure to make her entrance soon. I'll finish reading Greek Apollodoros first and making Alice into a parallel French-Hungarian text, both demanding quite a lot of concentration. Then I'll have more time for her. I certainly don't want to take 6 months reading one book, however long. 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 37 of 71 22 June 2008 at 12:00pm | IP Logged |
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I've had some more trolling that has now thankfully been deleted, but I've decided to refrain from posting regularly anyway.
I'll update around September 1st at the latest. So I still have the incentive to continue with my TAC, without the aggro of seeing unwanted messages left here. In the meantime I keep logs on my computer and will occasionally update one or the other, if I think that I'm getting better results with a more efficient way of learning that might be of interest to others. I'm not very pleased with my present way of [not] mastering kanji for instance, maybe I'm too impatient and expect too much too soon. We'll see. 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 39 of 71 22 June 2008 at 5:36pm | IP Logged |
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Deleted because now obsolete and therefore inconsequential. Edited by charlmartell on 23 June 2008 at 4:42am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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