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Total Annihilation 2 - Volte | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6431 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 33 of 39 06 May 2008 at 9:01am | IP Logged | |||||
Honestly, I'm not; atamagaii knows it much better than I do, and several other forum members have done it more effectively. I've written fairly extensively about my experiments with it here, under various learning logs ("Polish - another attempt" has the bulk of it, along with "thoughts on L-R"). I've written a little about it on the HTLAL wiki as well, but not that much.
I go through a whole book at a time, rather than sections; this is how I've done it in every language I've experimented with L-R with, including Polish (I had never previously studied any Slavic language). There's a certain amount of fuzziness at first, especially when it's both an entirely new language and the first time you try L-R. Keep experimenting, and find what's fun for you, and hopefully it should turn out. I know that's terribly vague and fuzzy, but if you read my logs, you'll find that they consist of a lot of experimentation, and doing whatever feels most interesting at the time; I'd be surprised if we exactly coincided, and I'm certain I wouldn't have been able to follow an external program to do exactly what I did. How much I understand varies greatly. In the beginning, with Polish, I was happy when I was usually reading the right clause (chunk of a sentence); I couldn't even start matching words that weren't clear cognates. Names of people and places, and loan words, were absolutely critical, as was having a narrator with clear intonation. I seriously doubt I could have done it with some of the narrators I've heard, who blur everything together; clear pauses between clauses, sentences, and paragraphs are extremely useful at this stage. With Spanish, I understood basically everything from the start, which I expected, as I understand it well even when I only have audio or text, without a translation. Doing L-R was good for vocabulary acquisition and comparing it structurally with other romance languages, among other things. With Dutch and German at the beginning, and Polish now, I can usually associate individual words (and identify when they don't correspond - which happens with idioms, loose translations, etc), and I tend to zoom in on vocabulary and how to fit words together to express concepts and sometimes shades of meaning. With Polish, I get much more strongly into this mode after about an hour of solid L-R; before that, it's a bit iffier. All three are languages I can read for the gist, but which I miss far too much in, Polish especially - it leaves me stumped more often than the other two. L-R feels much less 'fuzzy' at the stage I described last, contrasted with the initial stage for a totally new language, for lack of a better description. At first, it does involve a certain amount of feeling around in the dark, focusing on the story and trying to match things up, and being happy when cognates show that you actually are in the right place, because you weren't sure (and, occasionally, annoyed when cognates show that you're off by a few sentences!) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6431 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 34 of 39 06 May 2008 at 9:07am | IP Logged | |||||
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Day 5:
Lots of music; a bit over 2 hours of L-R. I started playing with audacity to remove gaps in Assimil Polish, since I plan to try "Listening-Reading" it. There was only one word in the first lesson which didn't come to mind nearly instantly, and it was one that I half-knew, which was nice; I had no trouble understanding the lesson as a whole before looking at the text in French or Polish. I also did some calculations on timescales for language learning. My Polish music comprehension varies from zero to almost complete stanzas, depending on the song. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Russianbear Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6767 days ago 358 posts - 422 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, Ukrainian Studies: Spanish | Message 35 of 39 06 May 2008 at 3:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't mean to hijack Volte's thread or anything, but just to answer an earlier question
Try http://lib.ru/TOLKIEN/ http://lib.ru in general is a great source of literature in Russian - both things that were originally written in Russian, as well as the translated stuff. Finding audiobooks may be a bit harder, but if you google something like "Толкиен аудиокнига", you can probably find something useful. Hope that helps. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6431 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 36 of 39 06 May 2008 at 9:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Day 6:
Between my headphones dying, my external harddisk being rather problematic, a bug in Audacity, etc, I listened to a few hours of music but only did 45 minutes of L-R, since the second sound file I wanted to use was corrupted on the external disk. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6431 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 37 of 39 06 May 2008 at 9:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Note: I've cleared out some space in my messenger inbox again. If anyone has tried to send me a PM and had it fail, it should work now.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6431 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 38 of 39 07 May 2008 at 8:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Day 7:
I did about 45 minutes of L-R with Tolkien. I also tried an L-R variant with Assimil Polish. I spent a bit over 4 hours with the (edited to reduce gaps) audio, listening to each lesson once without looking at the text, followed immediately by a second repetition where I looked at the text. Overall, I consider the attempt to L-R Assimil to have been time relatively poorly spent, other than in that I now know what it's like. The alternation of listening once without looking at the text, then reading the text worked fairly poorly: I didn't understand everything I would have with a few more repetitions, and I didn't understand everything before I went on. I think either repeated listening in an 'onion' approach, repeated reading until I understood everything, or going on as in pure L-R would have been better than this hybrid. There are three major reasons I dislike Assimil for L-R: - The texts aren't aligned well, especially the exercises. This makes comparing them without several repetitions more difficult. - There's no sense of narrative; the lessons are disconnected. This prevents getting into a flow state doing one lesson after another, I find, unlike repeating an Assimil lesson or L-R'ing a novel. - Assimil is carefully designed to be progressively more difficult. This is actually a terrible thing for intensive work of this sort. The beginning is rather easy, but by the end, while I could pick out bits, I wasn't learning much with the way I approached it. Input at my current level or 'i+1' was scarce in the later lessons; some words and phrases I knew were reinforced, but I didn't get the hang of the more complicated structures. In contrast, in novels, easy and difficult bits are more uniformly intermixed, which makes them far more immersive. I consider Assimil the best program I know of for spending a small amount of time per day on a language and learning it quite efficiently. Exactly the virtues which make it so effective at this make it a poor choice for L-R. A further problem for me was that Assimil Polish only has a book for French speakers. I had no problem getting the gist of things, but I would miss the meaning of occasional sentences due to not understanding a critical word in both French and Polish. If my Polish had been weaker, it would have been somewhat worse. As it was, I learned a few French words from the Polish, though significantly less than I learned Polish words from the French. It helped that the kinds of French words, like 'jamais', that I'm quite weak on tend to be ones I know in Polish, while unusual nouns and verbs tend to be close to Italian or English in French. Note: I did some phonetics work a few days ago, and forgot to mention it; the only thing of interest was working on glottalic initiation for stops, which I actually managed to consistently do this time, unlike with previous attempts. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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