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Danish language log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| burntgorilla Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6388 days ago 202 posts - 206 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Danish | Message 73 of 97 19 August 2007 at 2:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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I appreciate the complement, but I'm not sure I'm really that good at Danish yet. A conversation with a Dane, beyond the level of introductions and things, is well beyond me. I can't understand what a radio news bulletin is about, unless they use something similar to English like "IMF". All but the simplest news articles are meaningless without my little dictionary. I feel I have a decent grasp on the grammar, but not a great deal beyond that. I'm hoping that if I can get even ten minutes to half an hour every day or so I should be able to maintain my level. Of course, I have the Bodleian Library as well as the language faculty library at my disposal, so I won't be short of resources. At least Russian will be far enough from Danish for me not to confuse anything.
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| burntgorilla Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6388 days ago 202 posts - 206 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Danish | Message 74 of 97 22 August 2007 at 1:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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My friend got back from her trip to Denmark and places and she gave me some Danish stuff. I think they're just the newspapers and magazines you find on trains, but they still have useful articles. She also found an English newspaper which was quite interesting. I'm still trying to decide if the Homeless Football Cup they had in Copenhagen was tasteless or a good idea. I've been adding words to my flashcard program, and am currently up to over 800, which is nice. I need to look up nearly every word in a sentence, but I suppose that's to be expected if I only have a vocabulary of 800. At least I understand the grammar. I haven't yet looked at the link glossa.passion showed me, but I keep meaning too, I'm an awful procrastinator. I think it will be better to focus on vocabulary for a while, and then do listening once I'm likely to know the words that they're saying. My fear is that I might not recognise it when it's being pronounced, but that can't happen with too many words.
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| burntgorilla Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6388 days ago 202 posts - 206 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Danish | Message 75 of 97 25 August 2007 at 11:03am | IP Logged | ||
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Still mostly learning vocabulary. I hate learning vocabulary. It's so tedious, repetitive, and there's so much of it to learn. Plus, you're never really done with it. I come across the odd word in English newspapers that I don't understand. I'm taking a slightly different approach. Trying to keep on top of 800 words in a flash card program is a bit tricky, so now I am entering new words in batches of 100. I'll study each batch until I know them all quite well, and then add another 100. Previously I was learning the words by their different genders or type - nouns, verbs, etc. But when you have a couple of hundred in each group it takes a long time to go through it. I think 100 is a more manageable number. Danish vocabulary is odd. Sometimes I'll go through a sentence and not recognise any words, and then the very next sentence has so many words close to English that I can understand the whole thing straight away.
I'm now finally getting around to the link glossa.passion gave me, so I will report on that later. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| burntgorilla Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6388 days ago 202 posts - 206 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Danish | Message 76 of 97 27 August 2007 at 12:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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I looked at some of the resources on the German link and picked one called "Tur i natten", since it's a decent length. I listened through it once or twice while reading the transcript, and got the basic idea that the man was in a car with a weird guy who drove very fast and didn't like nice people. Today I went through the text more carefully and looked up new words, I got about fifty from one A4 page. I will continue through the rest until I understand the whole story. The narrator speaks quite quickly, but I'm hoping that, in time, with lots of repetition I should be able to follow along.
I'm almost up to my first thousand words in Danish. The grammar might be similar to English, but in general the vocabulary isn't that close. I read on Wikipedia that something like 90% of a text is made up of a relatively small amount of words, which makes it sound like you only need a small vocabulary to understand most of what is going on. But this ignores the fact that the remaining 10% are usually the key words that explain the whole article. "Elephant", "circus" and "rampage" aren't very common words but if you found a newspaper article about an elephant breaking out of a circus and going on a rampage, then you'd be clueless without them. So for the foreseeable future I am working on vocabulary acquisition, and figuring out some way to be more at ease with speaking in Danish. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| audiolang Diglot Senior Member Romania Joined 6264 days ago 108 posts - 109 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Romanian*, English | Message 77 of 97 27 August 2007 at 11:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've got my eyes on Danish now ,and your log :)
This is a website that claims it will improve your Danish when you play the Word games 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| burntgorilla Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6388 days ago 202 posts - 206 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Danish | Message 78 of 97 28 August 2007 at 8:51am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the link, I will check it out later. Danish is quite a fun language to learn. I found the grammar quite easy since I was coming from an English background, I don't know how you would find it. Speaking is quite hard for me.
I was tempted last night to buy a couple of Danish films, but a quick look at my bank balance put paid to that idea. :) I think I'll just wait and borrow them from the university library. I spent about an hour today adding more words to iFlash. I now have 1000 words in the program. I'm not really familiar with a couple of hundred of those, but I hope it get a decent vocabulary in time. How many words is it estimated that you need to read a newspaper article comfortably? I picked this article randomly from the front page of the newspaper's site. I can understand most of the meaning, and make a guess at some of the unknown words. I'm guessing that "krigshærgede" means something like "wartorn", for example. I would like to be able to read a paper or something with more ease. In Spanish I am quite comfortable reading a newspaper, though there are many unfamiliar words. I never really thought about how many words I know in Spanish, but since I've studied it in school for years I must actually know a fair amount. I find that I am getting better at guessing whether a verb uses -ede -et or -te -t etc. for its past forms, which saves a bit of dictionary lookup. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| burntgorilla Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6388 days ago 202 posts - 206 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Danish | Message 79 of 97 31 August 2007 at 7:05am | IP Logged | ||
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I was thinking a bit more about vocabulary today. Say I add 100 new words every two or three days. I don't think that's impossible, provided I try and review them after the initial couple of days. That would give me 200 new words a week, or 800/900 per month. This would be in keeping with my current progress - I am not yet up to two months studying Danish, and the first few weeks I didn't do any vocabulary learning at all. So if I were to learn almost 1000 words a month, then by the time I got round to Christmas or so (provided that I maintained this level during uni) I would have a pretty decent vocabulary. Does this seem like a viable aim or am I being naive? This is the first time that I have progressed far enough in a language to actually consider learning so many words (apart from Spanish in school), so I don't know what is reasonable and what is not.
I also forgot to mention a resource I am using. It's called "Dare to Danish" and is a podcast which can be found on iTunes. The site is here. It is basically a collection of 50 very short sentences. Most of them are next to useless in everyday speech, eg. "I burped through my nose" but they're easy to remember and I find that they help me to remember various little grammatical points. They also help with pronunciation, and I thought a few people might like to try them out if they're thinking about learning Danish in the future. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| glossa.passion Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6265 days ago 267 posts - 349 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, EnglishC1, Danish Studies: Spanish, Dutch | Message 80 of 97 31 August 2007 at 9:16am | IP Logged | ||
I've never counted the words I've learned and find your way interesting. And I think you should follow your idea. Nevertheless, your soon to begin studies in Russian and Spanish will not only take their amount of time, but also "brain space". So if you could maintain your level, this would be a great success! Sometimes is being naive not the worst :-) But don't be too disappointed if it won't work. Good luck with all your studies! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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