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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| SarahjaneBell Tetraglot Newbie New Zealand Joined 6051 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Speaks: Maori, English*, French, Latin Studies: German, Russian | Message 1 of 1 01 May 2008 at 10:12am | IP Logged |
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I joined the forum about a week ago, and was prompted into delurking (unusually for me) by the initiation of the Total Annihiliation challenge. I am a native speaker of English, who learned Maori as a child at a bilingual school, studied French and Latin for years at high school and university, took one year of university-level German (mostly forgotten) and a marvellous intensive course in Ancient Greek (which has largely stuck). My ultimate aim is to speak about 15 languages fluently. Just now, I am concentrating on French, German and Russian.
Total Annihiliation 2008 Goals Today, I'm starting Russian from scratch, having spent the last few weeks accumulating materials. I'd like to have passed TORFL 1 by January 1st and, ideally, be in a position to read my favourite short story, Tolstoy's "Master and Man," in the original. I'd also like to be able to enjoy an opera at the Mariinsky Theatre in Petersburg without relying on the English surtitles. As I have a few friends in Moscow (and will doubtless make more on moving there in June), I hope to be able to "use" them for conversation practice, and either join a class or engage a tutor to help keep me on track and provide companionship. Becoming truly fluent in French is also a high priority for me. I revived my French during a recent trip to Morocco and was able to get by very well on what I had, but it would be great to able to use it in a more sophisticated context than buying thuya wood camels. My aim is to achieve C1 level (DALF) and to have read ten French novels by January 1st, the former goal being the more ambitious. It is my hope to engage a French tutor in Russia to help me assess my current level, pinpoint my errors and give me all-important conversational practice. I'll also hunt out a good DALF course book, continue to listen to plenty of lovely old Charles Aznavour records and watch Le diner de cons for a millionth time. For German, I'm going to take a different approach: reading a Christa Wolf novel with (extensive) help from a dictionary, and working through exercises in an intermediate German grammar book. Perhaps I may subscribe to a German audiomagazine for listening practice. I will likely only be able to dedicate a few hours' work per week to this, but as I intend to visit a dear friend in Dresden this year or the next, I intend to keep this language warm, albeit on the backburner. Day 1 Tonight, I had only an hour or so to play in, so I got started on the first lesson on Pimsleur Russian, where I MOST usefully learned to say, "I am American." Trouble is, I'm a Kiwi, but these language programs never give the target language's word for "New Zealand." Even the Lonely Planet phrasebooks, published in neighbouring Australia, never list our country's name, but I digress... I also practiced the Cyrillic alphabet, using the guidelines in the Oxford "Take off in Russian" book. It is fun to form the new shapes on paper, though I haven't yet figured out if the handwritten forms of the letters ought to be joined together or not. I made flashcards for the first 15 of so vocab words in the book. Earlier today, I watched an episode of Magnum PI dubbed into French with the subtitles off, and was able to follow the gist pretty well (having seen it in English some years ago doubtless helped, mind). I also spend an ungodly amount of time chopping up paper into nice little stacks of flashcards, in preparation for some serious language learning. I've never really consciously taught myself any language before (apart from a not very successful attempt to learn Esperanto when I was about twelve), so I am excited and intrigued, taking plenty of inspiration from the posts of this forum and pages on Mr Micheloud's wonderful Web site. Kia ora ra, SJ Edited by SarahjaneBell on 01 May 2008 at 10:16am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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