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Rob’s language log 2008 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| polikaru Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6140 days ago 206 posts - 215 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Italian, Dutch | Message 17 of 30 05 April 2008 at 7:39am | IP Logged |
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I have just began following your log. It's great! Thanks.
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| ChristopherB Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 6308 days ago 851 posts - 1074 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, German, French | Message 18 of 30 07 April 2008 at 4:38am | IP Logged |
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I've been reading through it just now as well (didn't see it before for some reason). Interesting and substantial posts; good stuff! Keeps reminding me I need to stop procrastinating...ugh.
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| 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 19 of 30 14 May 2008 at 9:04pm | IP Logged |
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Thank you to everyone who said you are reading this with interest.
I still don't have the internet at home, but hope to by the end of this month. Anyway, here is a quick update: Japanese I am now living in Japan so I can study whenever I turn on the TV, which is a great plus. However, I have discovered that I really can't communicate as effectively as I would have hoped. I can watch TV and understand quite a bit, and I can read books and understand a lot more, but I really can't speak very well at all. I'm considering downgrading my profile from basic fluency to intermediate because of this. I bought a Nintendo DS and the 250 Man Nin No Kanken game, which is a fantastic resource, and worth buying a DS alone! I also bought some books from Z-Kai which are meant for Japanese people learning English but they are bilingual so can work both ways. I think it's also a great resource. I'm currently looking for a Japanese teacher to practice conversation. French I am considering upgrading my profile from intermediate to basic fluency in this. Whenever I hear French on TV I can understand quite a lot and I am using French every day with Assimil and I understand everything I read. However, similar to Japanese I'm sure I couldn't really hold a conversation in French, so that means I won't upgrade my status yet. I'm not studying actively at the moment because I have less time than before. German I have reached a conscious plateau with German, so I have stopped actively studying it. I haven't given up though, and will continue to review what I already know so that I don't forget it, and I will pick it up again in the near future. Russian I am now working harder on Russian. I am using Assimil and the Princeton course. I was working on Assimil more before but recently I have switched to Princeton. They're both great resources and I hope to progress quickly. For some reason, studying Russian makes me want to study Finnish... I have no idea why... Farsi I am still working through Assimil and when I have the internet I found a great resource to use, called easypersian.com. I will use this when I actually have the internet. So basically, I'm most motivated to learn Japanese, Russian and Farsi now. I've stopped actively studying French and German, but I am maintaining German and I'm happy with my current level of French, but will of course study actively in the future. I've also been flirting with Italian, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, but I really don't have time to pick up one of these at the minute. I will wait until I'm at a better level in something else. I think a problem with self study is that it's leaving me able to understand TV and printed materials, but completely unable to communicate independently through speach. I think I will need lessons in each language to practice speaking. Of course it's unrealistic to do this with many languages, so I'll just work on reading and listening for the majority of languages, and only pick a few, or maybe even just one (Japanese) to have lessons in. Of course, if I can find French or Russian lessons in my area, that would be fantastic! On a personal note, I'm really enjoying my new job teaching English, getting to work with language every day is fantastic, especially grammar questions I have never even considered before. I even teach shadowing once in a while! 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 20 of 30 27 July 2008 at 10:46am | IP Logged |
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Ok, it has been a long time since I last updated, so I feel I should do something for fear of losing motivation otherwise.
Japanese - Before, Japanese TV seemed unreasonably fast, but after living here for only a short period I'm finding that it's not too difficult to understand. My teacher also encouraged me to start reading comics aimed at teenagers, which actually works really well for learning common casual speech. I never realised how much I spoke like a book before! I'm now at 391 hours. French - I still haven't changed my profile to basic fluency as, even though I have started reading Steve Kaufmann's book in French on Lingq and I understand a high percentage of it, I wouldn't say I'm at all capable of speaking well with native speaking friends. Though I will be starting proper French lessons very soon, which I'm excited about! 178.5 hours German - I took a long break from this for a while but I'm starting to study again. I tried listening to something on Lingq but I didn't understand as much as I would have hoped to. I stopped on Assimil lesson 80 or something so I'm thinking of starting again from the beginning, but doing like 7 lessons a day, as I'm already very familiar with them and I don't think they'll need much review, but I should definitely finish German with Ease before trying Lingq again. 81.5 hours Russian - This has also been a bit on and off. I keep on starting Assimil and Princeton but I can't stick with it for some reason. Because of this I'm now very familiar with lessons 1-20 of Assimil and the first few units of Princeton, but I'm not really making much progress, which is a shame because I really want to get stuck in to this language more. 41.25 hours Spanish - I've started learning Spanish as I feel comfortable with the basics of French now. I'm on Assimil lesson 30. I'm just working through it systematically. 17 hours. I have also been readjusting my long term goals. I still hold strong that I would like to learn a bit of 20 languages - at least enough to be able to pick up a few things from a conversation, but more to understand how different languages work, but in order to combat wanderlust, I've decided to cut down my list, and I've tried to half it, in order to concentrate on getting some languages really good before exploring others. My original list was (is) as follows: German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Polish, Greek, Arabic, Farsi, Japanese, Korean, Chinese. My new list is as follows: German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Farsi, Japanese. I think it's a more attainable goal to achieve a good standard in these languages than my original list, and I have solid, concrete reasons and a high level of motivation to learn these ones, in a systematic way. By the way, I don't expect to be able to speak these well, I just wish to be able to have a good passive knowledge of them, except Japanese whereby I want a good well-rounded advanced fluency level in the long term. For the others, if I can understand a book/movie/song then I'm happy. I also figure, there's a high level of transparency between the Romance languages, between German and Dutch and a mutual intelligibility between Swedish and Norwegian so it's more like 7 than 12 languages... kind of. Anyway, I'm in no hurry to learn them so I will take my time and enjoy the journey, and if it takes me 40 years, I don't really care. Edited by rob on 27 July 2008 at 10:47am 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 21 of 30 01 August 2008 at 9:45am | IP Logged |
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Ok, I have been asked some questions, and I thought I would answer them here, just in case anyone else is interested :~) Thank you to anyone who has taken an interest already!
"Since you're quite advanced in Japanese, how do you study now?" My teacher actually recommended reading the Conan series - it's aimed at high-schoolers and has furigana, so if I don't know a reading I don't have to waste loads of time with a kanji dictionary. I normally read this book with jisho.org open in front of me. Any word I don't know, I look up, but I don't normally write it down. This is because I find I will read it again very soon, and after I have seen the same word in different contexts about 10 times, I can remember what it means. After I see particularly interesting new words, I try to use them in conversation as soon as possible. Speaking a word out loud is also very good for my memory. It's also not really study, but I watch Japanese TV whilst doing other things, e.g. cooking, cleaning, etc. I'm not sure whether I actually learn anything by watching TV, but I believe the exposure gets you used to the language, and I might subliminally learn certain common patterns. Otherwise, I might hear something very common but not really understand it, in which case I will ask my teacher about it. "You mentioned that you told your students about shadowing. Did any of them tried that method and have you seen any improvement in their pronunciation and recognition of certain sounds" Of course I can't go into details regarding my students, but basically, yes I have noticed a difference in pronunciation and fluency of the target grammar and vocabulary, so it's very encouraging both for me and them. "Why the heck Icelandic?" I have 4 big reasons. I love Icelandic music and literature, from a linguistic point of view it's a fascinating language, and according to the HDI, Iceland is the number 1 place in the world to live, so in case I change my mind about where I want to live in later life, I'd like to have the option of this highly desirable place! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| polikaru Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6140 days ago 206 posts - 215 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Italian, Dutch | Message 22 of 30 03 August 2008 at 3:01pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the updates. =)
polikaru 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 23 of 30 04 August 2008 at 7:56am | IP Logged |
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I've recently been using Lingq more and more for various languages and I'm thinking rather positively of the system. I'm also rediscovering Teach Yourself and Colloquial, which I didn't think were much good before, but now I'm changing my mind.
I also have a very ambitious plan in mind, and it could work, but I need to test it out before I post whether it was successful or not. As much as I can, I want to sample a bit of all the languages I have long term goals for, to see which one's cry out to me for the most attention. I imagine this experiment will last a couple of weeks, but it should show me what's important if nothing else. Today, I also had my first French lesson in 7 years! It's exciting to be taking lessons with various teachers in multiple languages as well as studying on my own. And I think it's necessary for those languages I want to be able to actually speak, rather than just being able to understand passively. 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 24 of 30 09 August 2008 at 8:20am | IP Logged |
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Ok, so recently I've been experimenting a bit, and I've come to some discoveries, but I want to come to more. If anyone has any comments, I'd be happy to hear them.
To discover what is really important to me, I experimented with learning each of the above 12 for half an hour a day for the past week, and I have accordingly shortened my list of one's I want to study right now, based on the one's I'm most interested in / enjoying the most. Here's a run down of what I did. First, the languages I decided to keep for now: Japanese - Of course this is my principle language, and I want to study this for at least 1 hour, preferably an hour and a half a day. There is no question about this. French - Another principle language which I want to continue to build my competence in as much as possible. I want to dedicate an hour to this every day if possible. German - Whilst I've finished Assimil German, when I listen to stuff on Lingq, I barely understand anything. Though when I return to Teach Yourself etc it's not too much of a problem... I wonder why I'm experiencing such a gap between teaching materials and real material. I don't want to give up German, but I am most discouraged by my progress, compared with other languages. Russian - I'm now working through the Princeton course and trying to listen to a little bit on Lingq, though of course I don't understand much. But I am really interested in this one so I hope I can keep my motivation to study. I want to be able to eventually be able to read Russian literature, and there is also a significant Russian minority in Japan. Farsi - Another fascinating language which I want to know more about. Similarly with Russian, I eventually want to be able to read literature, and there is a significant Iranian community in Japan. Spanish - A language which I hear a lot of in American TV, and I love the music. There are also immense travel opportunities with Spanish and I hope the transparency with French will allow me to pick up this language relatively easily, though I'm by no means expecting "easily" and "easy" to have the same meaning. Dutch - Of all the languages I was experimenting with, I'm most glad I tested the waters with Dutch. I love this language. It's so easy to understand! This makes it really fun to learn. Norwegian - I want to travel to Norway again in the near future, I want to read Norwegian books and I think it's a fascinating language. Icelandic - Again this is an absolutely fascinating languages from a linguistic point of view. I want to read the books and I'd like to travel there some time in the not too distant future. Now here are the other one's which I decided not to continue with for now: Swedish - With the transparency with Norwegian, it is pointless to try to learn them both at the same time. Unfortunately for Swedish, Norwegian interests me more. Portuguese - It would actually make more sense for me to learn Portuguese than Spanish, as there is a very significant Brazilian minority in Japan. However, for some reason I don't find it as easy to learn as Spanish, so I've decided to concentrate more on the latter for now. Italian - Again, with the transparency with Spanish, I feel it's not a good idea to try both at the same time, and I have stronger reasons for learning Spanish than Italian for now. I have a vacation for a week and a half starting from today, so my plan is to study each of the languages I have chosen for 1 hour a day, and perhaps my instincts with cry out to me to spend more time with some languages over the others. Right now, I'm unfortunately less happy with German, but I don't want to give it up. Also, as Russian and Farsi are harder languages in my list, I wonder if I should postpone them until after I have learned easier languages. On the contrary, I'm afraid that if I spend a lot of time with those languages that I really love, namely Dutch and Icelandic, I'll be left being able to understand those really well, but unfortunately in an international sense they are not the more useful languages. However, of course I'm just going to do whatever feels right for me. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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