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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Biene Diglot Groupie Germany Joined 6214 days ago 71 posts - 73 votes  2 sounds Speaks: German*, English Studies: Dutch, Japanese | Message 9 of 30 04 March 2008 at 12:54pm | IP Logged |
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Ah, sorry for floodding your log like this, but I just can't resist. ;)
Most German radiostations broadcast mainly English popmusic, sometimes mixed with a few German songs. There are of course radiostations that broadcast mainly "Volksmusik" and "Schlager" but I can't name any, since I don't really like that musik. If you are looking for German musik, you might like to try searching on Youtube. Here are some names of groups and solists, in no particular order: "Seeed", "Culcha Candela" (lots of Spanish? and some German and English), "Fishmob", "Fettes Brot", "Die Ärzte", "Die Toten Hosen", "Rosenstolz", "Wir sind Helden", "Julimond", "Silbermond", "Nena Hagen", "Udo Lindenberg", "Herbert Grönemeyer", "Westernhagen", "Lensen & Mc Cartnersheim", "Annett Louisan", "Fantastische 4" (Fanta 4), "2 Raumwohnung", "Tokyohotel", "Jazzkantine", "Freundeskreis", "Kettcar", "Deichkind", "Ton Steine Scherben", "Element of Crime", "Pur", .... Hehe, sorry that list got a bit out of hand... :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rob Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6157 days ago 287 posts - 288 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 10 of 30 04 March 2008 at 3:51pm | IP Logged |
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No need to apologise! I appreciate any and all comments people would like to post. Especially when it comes to music, which is one of the things which makes me a hundred times more enthusiastic about language learning (alongside books, movies and, of course, people to speak with!). The one's you've suggested also span quite a range of styles, which is much appreciated as I like a bit of everything :-) Edited by rob on 04 March 2008 at 3:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rob Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6157 days ago 287 posts - 288 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 11 of 30 08 March 2008 at 11:08am | IP Logged |
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Japanese - I have taken a step back in order to improve my confidence. I bought this book ages ago called 中級から上級への日本語 - Progressing from Intermediate to Advanced Japanese - apparently lots of Universities use it as the basis for their advanced courses. Earlier in the week I was reading a book and looking up far too many words, so I switched to a newspaper article, and found the same thing. The textbook does still have a fair number of words which I don't recognise, but far less density per page, so I'm never overwhelmed with new vocabulary. 87.5 hours
French - In textbook terms I'm on lesson 43 of Using French. I also received some new Assimil's which have French as the base language, and I'm happy to report that I can understand a good amount of the introduction and notes. 142.5 hours German - Now on lesson 68 of German with Ease. As I previously expected, the cases which I previously had no clue about and was basically ignoring for the time being, I'm starting to understand more as I'm actually using them in the active wave. 60 hours Others - I received the Assimil's for Russian and Farsi which I'm really excited about. I spent some time editing it by hand (my computer hates audacity) and as ever I'm surprised at how much wasted space is on the CD's. Farsi was 3h 7m on CD, but 1h 1m edited, and Russian was 3h 59m on CD, 1h 20m edited! What is more amazing to me is that it will take me years to fully understand this hour's worth of material! I couldn't help myself but to listen to them a bit and try some blind shadowing. Russian - 9 hours (cumulative since the beginning of the year), Farsi - 2 hours. My intention is to put some time into these languages but I'm not sure how much yet. Whilst it's all new, I have the enthusiasm to take it all on at once, but I know after a few days that I'm going to have to employ a front burner-back burner situation. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rob Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6157 days ago 287 posts - 288 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 12 of 30 12 March 2008 at 3:50pm | IP Logged |
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Japanese - I have been neglecting Japanese a bit, which isn't a good as I'm moving to Japan in about 3 weeks. I'm now on chapter 2 of 中級から上級への日本語, hereafter referred to as I->A. It's quite an interesting book, subtly adding plenty of basic and advanced grammar points into various articles. I'm also making sure that I know all of the kanji I need to in a systematic way which I've previously lacked. I'm using this fantastic Kanji dictionary, which lists all characters by school grade 1-6, then 7 which is actually 3 years of Junior high, grade 8 which is actually Jinmei kanji and grade 9 which is miscellaneous other. I decided to start right at the beginning just to check I haven't missed anything, but I've sped through grades 1-3 and half way through 4 in the past two days. I'm sure I'll find plenty of kanji in grade 7 that I'm not overly familiar with, and I'm guessing there will be many of these in grade 8 and 9. 91 hours.
French - I'm now on lesson 48 of Using French. I have begun thinking in French both at appropriate moments, and I find it unfortunately slipping in when I'm trying to think in Japanese for some reason... I don't really have much to say about French other than I'm progressing reasonably, and when I finish Using French I'll look into getting an audiobook or two... 149 hours German - I'm on lesson 73 of With Ease, and I'm having to spend a bit more time on the active wave lessons in order to fully understand them. I now have a much better idea of the use of acc. dat. gen. etc. though I'm still not 100% on it, mainly because I'm not used to the terminology. I'd be much happier if they were called things like object / subject / possessive like in Japanese, but they're not so I have to get used to it. I also got a German movie the other day, but I didn't realise it doesn't have subtitles. However, I decided I would keep it and wait until I can watch it properly, so I now have something definite to work towards. 65.5 hours Russian - I'm on lesson 5 of Sans Peine. Therefore there's not really much to report. I'm much more comfortable with Cyrillic now, though I still need to work on being able to read faster. 12 hours Farsi - I'm on lesson 6 of Sans Peine. The book is a little annoying for a number of reasons - firstly, they put the romanisation throughout the entire book, and it is placed above the French translation! This would make the active wave effectively useless if I hadn't blacked it all out. So it's a little annoying that I'm spending some free minutes going through the entire book blacking out half of it rather than studying. Secondly, I find the beginning lessons to be far too short, and they're introducing the alphabet too slowly. It's not fully introduced until lesson 28, I believe, and many of the lessons before this point are 2-4 fragmented sentences. That being said, I'm really enjoying it, I'm getting used to the letters I currently know and can't wait to learn more. 5.25 hours (obviously not including blacking out time!) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rob Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6157 days ago 287 posts - 288 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 13 of 30 20 March 2008 at 2:09pm | IP Logged |
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Things haven't worked out as much as I'd hoped over the past few days. I've had a number of long train journeys which I fully intended to spend studying, but only managed an hour or two as I forgot that trains send me to sleep! Still...
Japanese - I'm now on chapter 3 of I-->A and going through the grade 5 kanji. With the kanji, I'm now going through every one, just to pick up a few extra words here and there. There aren't that many in the lists of the first 6 grades, and I feel it's worthwhile to try and pick up some extra vocab. 96 hours French - Having finished the second wave of French With Ease I listened to the whole thing from start to finish, which took about an hour and a half (edited version), and the good thing is that I understood 99% of it (perhaps this has something to do with the fact that I've already listened to all of the lessons at least 20 times and written them all out twice?!). But it's still a good feeling to know that I really understand the whole book. I think I'll listen to the whole book perhaps once a month just to keep it fresh, whilst picking it up to do individual lessons as exercises as well. I'm still working through Using French, I'm now up to lesson 54. I believe this means I now know all of the tenses... I'm starting to think more about getting a French book - Using French has introduced Les Miserables and that seems really good. I was just wondering if anyone knows how far back you can go with French literature before things start becoming archaic? 156 hours. German - I'm finding the passive lessons increasingly easy, but the active lessons are quite hard for me. I feel that whilst I understand what I'm listening to, I can't translate from English to German with much accuracy. I'm sure this will come with time, but I don't really want to get stuck on a lesson, so I try to translate, followed by correction and scriptorium, followed by trying to translate again. I think I'll need to go through this book quite a few times before I internalise the production of the language. I've been introduced to the Konjunctiv II as the most recent grammar point; I can see this being a point of confusion in the future! 72 hours. Russian - This is definitely getting harder, and I need to slow down and repeat lessons that I've already done. I have kind of understood the last couple of Assimil lessons, but I feel I should go back over the last two just to ensure that I fully get it before moving on. If this continues in the same fashion, I'll have to accept that one lesson will take two or three days. I'm only on lesson 10 and the past tense has already been introduced, but I guess there is a lot of grammar to cover. On the positive side, I can read with increasing speed and I don't have to think too much about writing the letters. I'm also learning cursive as well as printed letters. 17.5 hours. Farsi - Surprisingly, I'm not finding this difficult at all. My reading is quite slow, but improving. I only know around 23 of the letters, but I'm following the course as recommended, and I'm happily finding that understanding a new lesson doesn't take too long. I've also discovered the Iranian calendar, which I thought was going to make dates very difficult to get used to, so I have installed an Iranian calendar plug-in for Firefox, so the Iranian date is always in front of me (Happy New Year for today, by the way :-) ). 9.5 hours Despite not having done as much this week, my daily average is still around the same point, 4.43 hours per day to be exact; I must have put in some extra early mornings somewhere! :-) Edited by rob on 20 March 2008 at 2:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rob Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6157 days ago 287 posts - 288 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 14 of 30 25 March 2008 at 2:27pm | IP Logged |
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My computer finally decided to accept Audacity. Whilst I thought I had edited the CDs very well, a quick run through Audacity removed 20 minutes of silence from each course! I can't believe I was wasting so much time listening to nothing!
Japanese - I'm now on chapter 4 of I->A and I'm up to the grade 6 kanji. I've decided to go through 6 kanji per day as I feel that's a reasonable number to be able to fully take in all of the information. Considering that, what I've already gone through and the fact that I'll skip over ones that I feel I already know very well, I should get through the 3200ish kanji I want to learn within a year. Non-language related: tomorrow I'm going to pick up my passport from the Japanese Embassy, newly stamped with my work visa! 103.25 hours French - I've very nearly finished Using French. I'm on lesson 65. The very last grammar lesson summed up the different forms of the subjunctive, and I didn't really get it, but hopefully it will become clearer on the 2nd and 3rd read through. At any rate, I'm sure I'll probably never produce them, I'll only ever read them. I'm also going to start watching French In Action, as someone on the board said that if you fully understand both Assimil's and FIA then you can be pretty confident that you're fluent. I'm not sure if that's entirely true, but new material is always a good thing, and I'm looking forward to the videos. 161.5 hours German - New passive lessons are getting increasingly easy to understand, but second wave lessons remain difficult to produce more than 50% correctly. I'm now on lesson 85 of German With Ease, but whilst I have Perfectionnement Allemand I'm not going to go straight into it after I finish GWE. I shall go through the book at least twice more, until I feel that I can produce enough of it naturally to say that I mostly understand it. The biggest problem I seem to have is sentence order and cases. 79.25 hours Russian - I've reached lesson 15 of Le Russe Sans Peine and progress is feeling quite slow. It has now introduced future and past, and it has apparently introduced all of the cases, though I can't really identify any of them yet. My handwriting is becoming more natural though. 22.5 hours Farsi - I really love this language at the minute, and thus I've powered ahead with the lessons. I'm on lesson 28 of Le Persan Sans Peine. This means that I now know the entire alphabet (finally!). The future has been introduced, but they're still avoiding the present for some reason. I'm having difficulty figuring out how to pronounce the Qaf. The book says to pronounce it like a French R but it sounds more like a throaty glottal stop to me... On the whole I'm finding the language very easy at the minute, I'm not sure whether the lessons have been kept deliberately easy whilst they introduced the whole alphabet or whether it is simply a language which is a good fit for me... I guess I'll find out in the coming weeks and months! 18.75 hours Edited by rob on 25 March 2008 at 2:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| rob Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6157 days ago 287 posts - 288 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 15 of 30 01 April 2008 at 7:10am | IP Logged |
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I'm not sure if many people follow this log, but just in case, because of getting ready for the move and then I guess I'll possibly be too busy to devote an enormous amount of time to study whilst I get the hang of my new job, I doubt I'll be in a regular pattern again for another month. I may not even have the internet for this long. But more updates will come, eventually.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| fcavalheiro Diglot Groupie Brazil Joined 6088 days ago 54 posts - 54 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: German, Mandarin | Message 16 of 30 01 April 2008 at 10:57pm | IP Logged |
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I do follow your log! Good luck with your new job!
1 person has voted this message useful |
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