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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6437 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 65 of 67 08 March 2009 at 6:48pm | IP Logged | ||
Hahaha. :-) I'm a member of the unofficial worldwide academy of "people who may know a little bit of French on a good day". Peut être temps perdu; I don't think that's something I need to search harder for. As for "À la recherche du temps perdu" - someday, someday. I'm trying not to get too distracted from preparing Hungarian material, but I've learned the value of proofreading, so it's not such a quick process. 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 66 of 67 31 March 2009 at 4:38am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm taking another break from the forum.
I don't believe that defining and re-defining the difference between 'understanding' and 'information extraction', and pointing out my priorities with regards to both is currently the best use of my time. I have a fairly high bar for claiming I -understand- something - I'd be surprised if it was not in accord with people's intuitive notions of the term, but I've been surprised before. I don't consider catching every single word to always be vital for understanding, but I don't care to discuss this further. It's a waste of my time to deal with attacks on my standard for fluency; if taking classes taught in a language (which are not about that language) and participating fully in the discussions, doing business in the languages, hanging out with people and speaking it in groups without any significant limits on expressiveness don't count, I don't think I particularly care for the definition. I claim fluency in 3 languages: not native fluency, but fluency. I don't particularly care for having my thoughts on information extraction being used to question that - nor do I care to aim for fluency in every language I currently extract information from. The cost of honestly stating what I can do and my weaknesses is causing too much aggravation, and distracting me from actually studying and improving. I consider L-R to be the single most effective method I've found; it's not magic fairy powder that makes me perfect in a language after 2 hours, and I'm tired of dealing with people who seem to enjoy glorying in this, or wasting time explaining that I got far enough in Polish to read the document that I wanted to in it at a level of comprehension that I considered adequate for my own personal goals. I've checked - I can still follow Polish podcasts, imperfectly, despite being rusty. I _understood_ a long and fairly complicated joke when I was in Poland and less rusty some months ago, including translating the punchline into English after the Pole who had told it to a Pole sitting next to me tried to translate it afterward and fumbled that part. But stating what I have done doesn't get me further. I'll be back when my current language-learning experiment is over; in the meanwhile, this is a distraction I do not need. My initial rough estimate is "a few weeks". Edited by Volte on 03 April 2009 at 4:10am 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 67 of 67 24 August 2009 at 1:44am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, the experiment still hasn't been done - I ended up traveling quite a lot over the last few months. It's been at the expense of my language studies, and it's been entirely worth it regardless.
I'd say Esperanto is now my second-strongest language, ahead of my Italian, with the important exception of dealing with some everyday concrete nouns - I know the names of quite a lot more foods and household equipment in Italian. I've upgraded German to "intermediate" in my profile. I can read it increasingly well, and seem to be approaching a basic level of conversational ability. I didn't use it all that much while traveling (a bit, but only a bit), but I had a few several-minute conversations with strangers, where I did things like negotiating getting pizza sauce instead of the normal sauce on my falafals, after the guy selling them said they'd be too dry without sauce, and another conversation where several topics were discussed, including properly closing a bag of apple chips so they stay crispy. On the comprehension side, I seem to be able to read most things I come across - books, newspaper articles, catalogs, etc - but there are still some expressions that throw me, and rarely I'm left entirely in the dark. I'm still trying to minimize production and reading until I get the phonology down; after that, passing the airplane text should be a fairly small amount of work. The German I produce still isn't particularly good, whether in terms of phonology, grammar, or vocabulary - but it's sufficient increasingly often. A few other languages are creeping along, despite getting very little attention. I managed to follow quite a bit of spoken Portuguese when I sat with 5 Brazilians a couple weeks ago, for one. For some parts of the conversation, I understood 100%; for others, none; a lot depended on the presence of obvious cognates, as I've never studied the language, just had a little exposure and know a bit about how it differs from other Romance languages. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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