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Milestones during the IJK! | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6468 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes  Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 1 of 1 27 July 2009 at 6:24pm | IP Logged |
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I just came back from one week with ca. 400 young Esperanto speakers from all over the world, the IJK (Internacia Junulara Kongreso). The whole event was a lot of fun. A particular highlight for me was JoMo establishing a new Guiness world record of singing the most languages in the course of a single concert - see video excerpts interspersed with other videos of the IJK on this Flickr page.
More importantly for my personal development, I reached two milestones while there: First milestone: learning an avg. 40 brand new Chinese characters a day for the entire week. For lack of usable internet ;-) I decided to go through the entire first part of "Reading and Writing Chinese", which covers 1000+ basic characters and their not-so-basic components, and write down all characters I didn't recall or had never seen before (for my avg. 40 per day I'm only counting the "never seen before" kind). Since the characters in that book conveniently come in an order that means that I know each part of a complex character before the complex character is introduced, I was able to find logical explanations or funny stories to help link the appearance to the meaning for almost every one of them as I wrote them. Each line in my tiny notebook held 5 characters plus their Pinyin and I'd review each line after finishing it, then after finishing the next line, finishing a couple more lines and sometimes I'd do a complete review of everything written so far. This way I was able to commit all the characters to memory and I'm now using Anki to make sure they stay there, especially also when not in order. This gives me hope that my Chinese goal for the year wasn't complete madness, though I doubt the wisdom of learning lots of characters without studying the language (as Heisig suggests). Back home I'm not going to continue at this speed but first consolidate the characters to get my daily Anki revisions back to something manageable and also read some Chinese texts and lessons to get practical exposure before tackling the next big batch of characters. I did manage to speak quite a bit of Chinese during the IJK though, because there were two Chinese girls one of which had not studied Esperanto before. I felt good being able to help her better than another Esperantist who studies Chinese at university, and during the Aligatorejo I spoke Chinese almost exclusively for half an hour, with very little recourse to French. Second milestone: what language did I speak? During the IJK I believe I also breached one of the last frontiers in my Esperanto: at various points I couldn't tell whether I had just been speaking Esperanto, English or German to some polyglot friends. For English/German this has happened before, but Esperanto always felt distinct, even though in most situations it requires no effort for me to speak Esperanto rather than one of the other languages. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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