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TAC 2009 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6441 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 41 of 67 05 January 2009 at 3:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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My current focus is on reading in Esperanto. I'm hugely enjoying an anthology of the last millennium of Hungarian literature, which I've been reading over the last 3 days (with pleasure and generally understanding, though painfully slowly). Today, I needed to feel like I was making more progress, so I sidetracked into reading the Esperanto part of the tiny, bilingual Esperanto/Polish poetry book "Krakovo: en suno, nebulo, kaj poezio" (which is charming in Esperanto, but much more beautiful in Polish). I also read about 1/3rd of "Lingvistikaj aspektoj de Esperanto" this evening; it's quite useful for picking up phonetic terminology in Esperanto, though it's rather basic.
Aside from that, I'm listening to Esperanto music a fair amount, although generally the same two CDs; I haven't bothered to rip the ones I've recently bought, yet. I plan to do more reading for Esperanto vocabulary and consolidation; after that, I need to decide whether to focus on Polish or German first (I'm deeply conflicted on this, as both call me strongly, for different reasons). I think I'll successfully avoid the rest of my language list for the moment, mod minor bits of wanderlust (that means Georgian, Finnish, Hungarian, etc). I should work in some Italian maintenance (probably reading/shadowing), but I figure I'll start that after my current Esperanto sprint. Aside from that, I keep meaning to solidify my knowledge of phonetics, but I definitely won't start until I get over the worst of this cold; my voice is pretty sketchy today. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Maestro Groupie Chile Joined 5873 days ago 40 posts - 40 votes | Message 42 of 67 05 January 2009 at 6:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks, those are great resources. That "Vojagxo en Esperanto-lando" sounds great. but I found it by Boris Kolker not John Wells, are we talking about the same?
I found other great resources here, those excerpts from "Tiel sonis..." sound great. Finally I can really hear Esperanto in all its beauty, it reminds me of Latin. http://www.esperantoeducation.com/culture.html Once again thanks for your help, I had planned to devout 2009 to French but I may have to make some time for Esperanto. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6441 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 43 of 67 05 January 2009 at 7:06pm | IP Logged | ||
"Vojagxo en Esperanto-lando" is indeed by Boris Kolker, but it contains a ton of excerpts from works written in Esperanto; the excerpt on pronunciation is by John Wells. Best of luck with French and Esperanto! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6153 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 44 of 67 07 January 2009 at 5:52am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm curious. How much study did you've to put in a day to get Esperanto so quick ? Did your Italian make a big difference to your progress ? It's on my hitlist, but it's not likely I'll get to it this year.
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6441 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 45 of 67 07 January 2009 at 7:02am | IP Logged | ||
Easy question first: yes, Italian made a huge difference. Aside from making most of the roots transparent (combined with my English), I found the shared-with-English roots easier to remember, so just grabbed Italian ones when in doubt; it worked surprisingly often, and was close enough for people to correct me perhaps 80-90% of the time when I was wrong (or so it seemed to me). The pronunciation, while not identical to what I'd consider ideal Esperanto pronunciation, was also a lot closer than English pronunciation is. How much study a day: I honestly didn't keep records, but "a lot". I remembered some of the absolute grammar basics (ie, -is/as/os/i/u/us - although I mixed up -u and -us in a lot of contexts, and my mental model of how to make complicated constructions referring to multiple times was entirely wrong; I didn't understand the participles, etc; these were tattered remnants of ultra-basic Esperanto from nearly 5 years ago). Sprachprofi helped me a lot with the affix system (I rememberer it existed, but was far from comfortable using it beyond really simple examples). I spent a few hours a day on affix exercises alone at first, on top of the secondary listening I was doing to music/podcasts. With the affixes more or less in place, "Fajron mi sentas interne" went from impossibly frustrating (I got through about 3 paragraphs, originally) to quite readable; this was over the space of about 2-3 days, I think. After that, I played around with grammar stuff on lernu, did a lot of their exercises, worked on semi-systematically getting rid of my weakest points (I still have more weak points than I'd like), and listened to lots of podcasts and a bit of music. I started using Esperanto actively with a few people around then, although not that often; my Esperanto was still quite halting and mistake-filled (I'd actually pause and agglutinate the -j and -n affixes, one at a time, verbally, for example). Over the next few weeks, I continued studying it (much less intensively) and occasionally speaking it, both face-to-face and written; quite a few people were quite helpful. I then went to a week-long Esperanto meeting. The first day, I'd say I was still in the 'conversational but halting' category I'd been in for the last few weeks, although significantly less halting; I'd just recently filled in gaps like 'do' ('so/therefore'), and was no longer having to try to make horrible circumlocutions no one understood to express consequence, but I was still having trouble with some fairly common words that just wouldn't stick, like nepre and tamen ('without fail -> absolutely, certainly', 'nonetheless'). Within a few days, I'd worked out most of the roughest spots though, and was speaking entirely fluently most of the time (although not entirely correctly); I'd attribute this to Esperanto's extremely regular grammar (although it's got some odd bits I could rant about), the word-building system (I occasionally dove into Esperanto in English conversations with Esperanto speakers when there was no equally expressive English word for what I wanted to say), filling up the major gaps necessary to actually communicate, being in a situation where fluency was actively useful to me, and Esperanto's "constructed-language-ness" - people spoke relatively clearly, with a minimum of slang, etc. Edit: I kept some records, and am willing to share them - but they're mainly for the first week. Edited by Volte on 08 January 2009 at 9:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6441 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 46 of 67 07 January 2009 at 8:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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My next target language is German. I'm currently consolidating resources in it. I'm lucky enough to have three great German friends, all of whom are happy to speak it with me, offer corrections, etc; they're perhaps the largest reason that I'm choosing to do German now (it's very hard to put off Polish); secondarily, there's a lot in German I would like to be able to more comfortably read -- for instance, most decent information about Georgian, and some historical rhetorical text analysis texts that I've been wanting to read for years.
I intend to keep better logs than I did for Esperanto. My first target with German is pronunciation; I've gotten horribly sloppy about the rounded/unrounded vowel distinctions, the pronunciation of 'ch', etc, and I'm still wandering out of the swamps of being incomprehensible to native speakers (and making mistakes in my writing based on missing those distinctions). So much for the idea of a few hundred hours of listening being enough for good pronunciation, eh? As for my approach: I plan to be quite flexible, and mix active use, lots of exposure, exercises on weak points, reading parts of reference grammars, and probably oddly-remixed versions of L-R and Assimil; except for the latter two components, this is a variation on how I went after Esperanto. I'll continue reading Esperanto, but I'm shifting it more into 'maintenance mode' again, despite not yet doing several things I want to with it (expanding my vocabulary, reading a lot more books, properly working through Vojagxo and PMEG, etc). I should probably find some material I really like (with an accent I really like) to shadow (after years of non-use, my Esperanto vowels had gotten 'strange' enough to make me hard to understand, at least according to one very fluent speaker; I'd prefer not to repeat that). So far, Italian maintenance doesn't seem to be a problem. I don't think my Italian has significantly weakened, despite my neglecting it a fair amount over the last couple of months; I can speak it fluently on a moment's notice*. My accent has consistently been poor enough that I don't feel like I have much to lose in that regard. * There was an article linked to in another forum topic earlier today about suppressing more-fluent languages while not yet fluent in a new one. I ran into this at the Esperanto meeting - there were several days where I literally could not make myself speak Italian, and would lapse into Esperanto within 4 words; later in the conference, I found myself suppressing Esperanto for my (weaker) German, though only for a few minutes at a time before I could force myself to switch back (I also found it difficult to force myself to speak English during these times). This was, happily, a very temporary effect; I'm back to being able to comfortably switch between the Esperanto and Italian (whether only those two (whether for extemporaneous speech, or translating from one to the other) or, as I tried with a friend earlier today, while switching between English, Italian, Esperanto, German, and French every couple of sentences.) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6441 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 47 of 67 13 January 2009 at 10:28pm | IP Logged | ||
I've filled out the 'how I learned Esperanto' part of my profile. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6441 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 48 of 67 27 January 2009 at 1:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've been studying German over the last few weeks, but not with the intensity that I'm seeking - I've been quite ill with two bad colds/fevers.
Where I'm currently at: - my pronunciation has gone from 'barely comprehensible, and sometimes incomprehensible' to 'quite foreign, but quite comprehensible'; that said, final rs still give me trouble, my ch is sometimes too much like sch, my vowel length distinctions aren't quite right... I've done this through lots of listening, a bit of reading about German phonology, and repeatedly shadowing a few very short (one sentence or even one word) recordings. - my comprehension has improved; I can watch "Türkisch für Anfänger" while missing fairly minimal amounts (some words/phrases, but generally getting the gist of every scene and almost every phrase). In higher registers, like that of Deutsche Welle, I miss even less. - I've read a short cookbook; I occasionally missed words; every once in a while, I missed a significant piece of the meaning as a result. Overall, though, it was pretty easy. - My active use is increasingly, but very slowly. - I've done several hours of listening to "Die Blechtrommel" while using a parallel English/German text; it's helped a lot. I sometimes spontaneously 'shadow' it (having read the English and the German ahead of time, I say the German at the same time as the recording, stopping if my pronunciation is too far off; I generally do this for a few words at a time). I've also engaged in some minimal wanderlust (concerning Scottish Gaelic, Georgian, and Mandarin, primarily; I don't really count listening to French or Esperanto in moderation as wanderlust). My goal now is to become conversational before I head back to Germany, about 2 weeks from now. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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