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Evita’s TAC 2008 - Finnish | ||
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| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6340 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes  Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 25 of 51 12 September 2008 at 2:41pm | IP Logged |
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Not much to report about Wednesday and Thursday because I didn't study much. But this blog definitely keeps me motivated. I hadn't done almost anything yesterday and studied for 20 minutes just before going to bed because I wanted to have something to write about today.
My Anki now has 189 cards and I'm reviewing them regularly. I feel they are doing a really good job to help me build my vocabulary (considering how little effort I've been putting in). I use these guidelines when working with Anki: 1) I don't put in more than 10 new words at a time. That's because I also try to remember them when I enter them and I think if I do more than 10 they will all jumble together in my brain and I won't remember anything. 2) I wait at least a couple hours before starting to review new words. I do it to give myself a chance to forget them. I don't think it makes much sense to review a word 3 minutes after you've put it in. Usually the time interval is 12-24 hours for the first review. 3) Take a lot of breaks. I usually do 3-4 minutes of reviewing, then do something else on the internet or off the computer and then come back in 20-30 minutes to review a bit more. I'm not sure if this is a good way to work or not, perhaps I just grow bored easily. By the way, I guess it helped me that I complained about käytännöllinen in my last post because I hadn't reviewed the word at all today and I just wrote it from my memory (hope it's correct...) The second thing I did was read, translate and analyze the second text, the one that focused on verbs. It was great to see that word order in a sentence is not very strict and sometimes even similar to Latvian. My biggest difficulty regarding word order was at the very beginning with sentences like "What is Helsinki? - A city." In all the languages I know the word order is the same as in English - question word, verb, noun - but in Finnish it's - question word, noun, verb. Now I'm halfway used to that but it took a lot of time. This morning before going to work I wrote most of the verbs of lesson 5 on a small piece of paper (like I had decided I should). Then I put most of them to Anki so that I could start reviewing them this evening. Now I'll know better than to attempt such activities in the morning. First, kirjoittaa means 'to write' but I put it in Anki as 'to read' by mistake. 2 cards later I tried to add 'to read' and wondered why Anki would say I already have this word. Took me a while to sort it out. Second, I wrote 'lukeä' on my piece of paper instead of 'lukea' for 'to read'. Later at work I was perusing my list and wondering whatever happened to vowel harmony. So that's my lesson for today - don't write down anything in Finnish when hurrying to work. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6340 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 26 of 51 14 September 2008 at 6:36am | IP Logged |
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I'm really proud of the work I've been doing with Anki. My current card count is 208 and 80-90% of the words are in my active vocabulary. I realize that 200 words are a very tiny part of the amount of words that the Finnish language has but I've been making steady progress and the beginning is always the most difficult. My goal is to have 500 cards, the next goal - 1000 cards before the end of this year.
I didn't spend much time on Finnish on Friday and Saturday, maybe 1 hour each day. 1 hour is actually pretty decent for a weekday but not for a Saturday. Anyway, I did my Anki as always and started on one exercise in the 5th lesson. I think there are about 16 weeks left in this year and about 16 lessons left in my book so 1 lesson a week is mandatory. I've already put almost all of the vocabulary of lesson 5 in Anki so the exercises are the only thing left. I'll try to do them today. Yesterday I stumbled on this site and read through the four intro pages. I'll probably be using this resource to reinforce my knowledge and look at things from a different perspective. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6340 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 27 of 51 17 September 2008 at 11:30am | IP Logged |
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It's Wednesday and I still haven't finished lesson 5. I've been sneaking peaks at lesson 6 (the grammar part) but I still have a text about professions and some dialogs left in lesson 5. The last couple of days I've been doing very little for Finnish because of other distractions. Nothing really urgent, just more fun things to do. I can't decide if I should feel bad about it. Probably not since it's only been a couple of days. Hopefully I'll get my enthusiasm back soon.
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| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6340 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 28 of 51 21 September 2008 at 7:53am | IP Logged |
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It's Sunday again, 4 days since my last post. The last week hasn't been very productive but I did manage to finish lesson 5 and now I'm halfway through lesson 6. Lesson 6 introduces 3 more cases and explains when they should be used. It's no problem for me to memorize the endings of these cases but it's a problem to recognize when they should be used. It could be partly due to the fact that the explanations are in Russian and I'm not as comfortable with it (obviously) as with Latvian. In any case, I'm not too worried about that, I plan to listen and read in Finnish a lot before I start speaking so I hope to acquire case usage naturally. I've used this approach in all my previous languages and it's always been successful.
While I'm on the subject of reading and listening in Finnish, I should mention that this week I got my first taste of how different the spoken Finnish and the written Finnish are. I had heard about it before I started studying the language but soon I forgot about it because my book didn't mention it anywhere. Then I suddenly found some colloquial Finnish here in the Livejournal lessons. Now I see it will be an additional challenge. I was browsing Youtube today and watched Fairytale Gone Bad by Sunrise Avenue. I've liked this song for quite a while but I had no idea the band apparently is from Finland. I started reading the comments and I was very happy that I could recognize some words from the Finnish comments. I think this might be the first time for me that some Finnish knowledge has turned out to be useful. My Anki has 248 cards at the moment. I've started to write down some words in a notebook in addition to Anki because quite often this week I would put in some words and not remember them even after 2 or 3 tries simply because I can't repeat them often enough and they don't stick in my memory. Let's see how that works out. The prize for the hardest word of the week (most difficult to remember) goes to tarjoilija - 'waiter'. The easiest word - ajaa 'to drive'. Edited by Evita on 21 September 2008 at 7:54am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6385 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 29 of 51 21 September 2008 at 3:12pm | IP Logged |
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The textbook does have a bit on puhekieli in the last lesson :)
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| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6340 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 30 of 51 24 September 2008 at 7:05am | IP Logged |
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It's Wednesday today and I've come to the conclusion that I won't reach my goal by the end of this TAC unless I put more hours in. The 20-30 minutes a day average that I've been doing these past 2 weeks is simply not enough. The goal that I set for myself was to be able to read and post in the Finnish thread of this forum by the end of this year. I still think it's doable and I'm going to try to do it.
I've finished with the exercises part of lesson 6 although, to be honest, I really did only a couple of exercises and skipped over the rest of them. Well, not exactly skipped, I read through them (most of them were sentences with some kind of missing word) and tried to figure out the meaning of each sentence, to record new vocabulary. But I'm not really doing the exercises because I have no one to check if they are correct. And it would also take away much of my precious time so I think I'll keep the same attitude towards exercises during the next lessons, too. I've still got one text left in lesson 6 and some dialogs. That one text is about as long as the three previous texts combined and I'm very excited to work through it. I already started a little bit and it's about a man who travels from Finland to Russia by plane. By the way, tietokone - computer, lentokone - airplane. I wonder what kone actually means. Serpent, thanks for the tip, you are correct. It's nice to know the last lesson won't be too hard because I'll already be familiar with many of the expressions. I'm continuing to read through the LJ lessons, I'm at lesson 5b now. I like them. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6340 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 31 of 51 25 September 2008 at 6:52am | IP Logged |
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It's Thursday and I'm happy to report that I spent about 3 hours on Finnish yesterday evening and half an hour this morning. I was working with my book, reading and translating that long text in lesson 6. It was fun enough and I recorded more than 20 new words in Anki. I should reread the text today in order to become more familiar with the vocabulary and the grammar. Another good idea would be to take some parts of the text, translate them into Latvian, write it down and then translate it back to Finnish and compare the result to the original text. But I'm not willing to spend so much time on this exercise so I'm not going to do it.
I have to write about Anki again and congratulate myself on my decision to use it. It's one of the main reasons for my relative success so far. Without Anki, my passive vocabulary would be twice smaller and my active vocabulary would probably be 4-5 times smaller. It's so easy with Anki, the only thing I have to do is put in the words and Anki makes sure I memorize them. There have been instances where I click on "Completely forgot" 5 times for a new word but in the end I memorize it, I just don't have a choice. Anki will keep bugging me until I do. It's great. Some posts ago I wrote that I don't put in more than 10 new words at a time. This is not true anymore because I realized I can use the "maximum new words per day" feature that Anki has. I've set it to 12 at the moment. The current Anki card count is over 280, I've put in a lot of new words over the last week or so. It's very important that I keep reviewing them each day because they're not well-memorized yet and it could be really discouraging if I let them pile up for 3 days and it's 60-70 cards already. I've had some pleasant surprises regarding Finnish grammar this past week. The best one is that Finnish uses the same verb to express both "to be" and "to have" because that's what Latvian does, too. And the expression is formed exactly the same way as in Latvian, too, - you take the word "I" in a specific case and then write "is" and it means "I have". It's so familiar but at the same time so strange in a foreign language. Another similarity is the expression of location that's done with the preposition "in" in English and with similar prepositions in all the other languages I've learned. Latvian has no such preposition and neither does Finnish, it's expressed with a particular case of a noun in both languages. It doesn't make it any easier to learn but it makes me like Finnish more and therefore gives me more motivation. I love discovering little things like that. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6340 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 32 of 51 26 September 2008 at 7:49am | IP Logged |
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So today is Friday. I spent about two hours on Finnish yesterday, this time working on Lesson 6 on LJ, not from the book. This lesson focuses on verbs. I read through the grammar part and decided to do the exercises, too, because I could check the right answers and the subject seemed important enough. I'm glad I did them. I realized that although I know many verbs (I've been putting them in Anki) I don't know how to conjugate them and sometimes don't even recognize them in texts. So I spent a lot of time on the online Finnish verb conjugator putting in various verbs and reading aloud their simple present forms. That was a good exercise, too, and I'll probably keep doing that for some time.
So yesterday was more like a reviewing session, not learning new things. I know the reviewing sessions are necessary but I may not have time for a lot of them. We'll see. I wanted to reread that text, too, but I could do only half of it before I was too tired to continue. I also did Anki like always, can't let the cards pile up. I had 12 new words from the day before. My enthusiasm for studying Finnish is high at the moment so I'll try to keep it that way and study as much as I can on Saturday and Sunday. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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