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Evita’s TAC 2008 - Finnish | ||
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| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6339 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes  Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 33 of 51 29 September 2008 at 4:36am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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It's Monday, three days after my last post. So what did I do during this time? My most productive day was Saturday because on Friday I wanted to relax and on Sunday I had other things to do. I spent several hours on Finnish on Saturday (I don't know how many hours exactly) and finished lesson 6 from my book. I put in all the relevant new vocabulary in Anki and that resulted in 35 new cards so I was learning them and reviewing them all weekend long. Some words were already familiar to me, some weren't.
I also read the grammar part of lesson 7. It deals with numbers, telling time and the Partitiivi case. I had seen the case in the LJ lessons so it wasn't completely new to me. However, I found out a couple of new interesting things about the usage of the case. For example, if you want to say "two books" you have to use the singular Partitive form of "book", not a plural form. You also have to use this form to say "I don't have a book." This is another nod to Latvian because we use a special case (Genitive) to express such negations, too. On Sunday I reread some of the grammar and and tried to memorize some new words, the Partitive forms and numbers 7-10. I already knew numbers 1-6 but the rest of them aren't that easy. Once I'm comfortable with them, I'll start learning 11-100. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6339 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 34 of 51 30 September 2008 at 4:42am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Today is Tuesday. In case you are wondering why I always mention days of the week in my posts, it's because I think it makes it easier to see how many days have passed since the previous post. I don't like always having to look in the right corner to see the date.
I'm reading the other language learning logs and how people are using various programs (Pimsleur, FSI etc.) to learn the languages and I feel envious. A book with no audio and no answers for exercises is a poor replacement. But nothing else is available here and ordering from abroad would be rather expensive and I'm not sure it would be worth it. But yes, sometimes I just feel envious. Anyway, the book says I have to learn all the numbers in Finnish in lesson 7. It has texts about how many days there are in a year, whether it's 365 or 366, and how many minutes there are in an hour and so on, not to mention all the ways to tell what time it is. I had initially planned to skip the numbers because I didn't think they're that essential to the language learning but now I've changed my mind. Partly because it's not hard to learn the big numbers, they're formed in a very straightforward way (can't compare them to French numbers, for instance) and partly because I can't study lesson 7 to an acceptable level without knowing the numbers. I've got numbers 1-10 firmly in my head so the rest is just practice. I reviewed the Anki cards yesterday like always but I couldn't concentrate on learning anything new because I had a headache. I tried but nothing seemed to stick so I went to bed early. Today should be a better day. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6339 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 35 of 51 01 October 2008 at 5:33am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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It's Wednesday today. Yesterday I focused on numbers like I had planned to, I was counting to myself while walking to lunch (12 min) and back. At one point I grew bored with Finnish so I counted to 10 in German, Russian and English. I was surprised to discover how easy it was for me to count in Russian and German, especially German because I haven't been using these languages actively for years. But the counting came to me automatically, probably because it was drilled in me during school years. I had more trouble counting in English, I stumbled at 6 and 9 for a moment. I think I'm always confusing these numbers with the German ones (sechs and neun).
Now, back to the Finnish numbers... I'm going to practice them some more today but I already feel that I can say any number from 1-999 if I have a few seconds to think. The problem with numbers (at least for me) always is to correctly identify the number when I hear it spoken. And I can't practice this skill because I don't have anybody who'd say these numbers for me. I'll look around the internet, perhaps I can find something to help me with this. A couple of days ago I discovered that I have a problem with the way my book is introducing new grammar, specifically noun inflection. As you may know, Finnish has 14 or so cases and this book is introducing them one by one, not all at the same time. That would be fine, except that there are many groups of nouns and for each of them each case is formed differently. The book doesn't mention these groups in the beginning at all, then suddenly in lesson 4 or 5 I see that there are some nouns (that end in -as) that are different from the ones I learned previously. Then the next lesson mentions nouns that end in -si and it turns out they are different, too. Then the next lesson mentions another group and so on. I don't know how many new groups await me in the next lessons but that's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that, for instance, I've covered already 8 different cases up to lesson 7, Partitive is the 9th case, and when they introduce a new noun group in lesson 7, I have to learn all 9 cases for the group, not just the current case. I've realized that this causes havoc in my brain and that's not a very good situation. I think I will use Wikipedia or some other resource to learn all the noun groups and then make sure that I know how to form the cases I've studied for any noun. It should give me a lot of confidence. My current Anki card is about 345. I'm trying to add 10 cards a day to build my vocabulary but it's hard and I have to review a lot because I can't memorize the words easily. Yesterday evening I came close to not doing any reviews in Anki (I had about 35 cards, 10 of them new) but then I overcame myself and plunged in. If I don't do the cards for 1 day, it might easily become 2 days and then more days and then it would be all over. I'll try my hardest to avoid that. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6339 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 36 of 51 03 October 2008 at 4:38am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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It's Friday today. My Finnish studies during the last 2 days have been minor because I had other priorities. However I did manage about 30-40 minutes on each day to review my Anki cards, do Lesson 9 on LJ and read a couple of dialogs from my book. Lesson 9 was really easy, I had covered a lot of the vocabulary already. The dialogs from the book gave me a confidence boost about my reading comprehension. There was a dialog about one guy asking another guy if he can borrow some money (throwing in a lot of numerals, of course) and I had to look up only one word in the dictionary, the word "borrow". Curiously, Finnish has the same word for both "borrow" and "lend". Using correct cases is really important in these situations.
I did my internet research on Finnish noun groups and I couldn't find them anywhere so I decided to make the table myself. I should start on it today. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6339 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 37 of 51 04 October 2008 at 7:08am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Saturday.
Yesterday can be characterized by this page. It was exactly what I had been looking for - complete rules on how to form Genitive and other cases - and it was really eye-opening. The rules are more complicated than I expected. I especially "like" the rule where the Genitive stem depends on whether the word has been derived from a verb or a noun. Ha, as if I could know that! My book didn't even mention half of these rules. What's more, the book had given me the impression that Genitive always takes the week stem although in reality that's not the case at all. I've decided to spend a couple of days relearning the Genitive case, all these grammar rules so that I can move on to another case then, probably the Partitive. What I'm doing now is simply writing down words in my notebook with their Nominative and Genitive forms and leaving place for other cases later on. I plan to write 20-40 words from all the groups, learn their forms very well and then later use the table for reference. I had thought forming the Latvian Genitive is hard but Finnish really takes the cake. Another thing I studied yesterday was the consonant gradation. My book introduced it in lesson 3 if I'm not wrong but they only mentioned about half of them. I really like this book less and less but it's better than nothing. From now on, I think, I'll study the cases from this grammar site and generally will try to find additional information about the grammar topics mentioned in the book. The last thing I want to add is that I've found Wiktionary to be very useful. I can find all the Finnish words there, check out their meaning, and most of the nouns also have declension tables. Very handy. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6384 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 38 of 51 04 October 2008 at 2:35pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
tietokone + n = tietokoneen hinta huone + n = huoneen ikkuna Huom! osoite + n = osoitteen I hope you didn't take osoite for an exception :/ BTW, don't bother to learn all the forms for every single word of the ones you choose. Nominative, genitive, partitive and illative will do :) for others you just change the ending. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6339 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 39 of 51 04 October 2008 at 3:23pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I don't know the original word, that's the problem. I know it'll become easier with time once my vocabulary grows.
True, I just don't read a lot yet. Acquiring these rules through reading would be easier and more natural but also more time consuming and I want to really learn as much as I can now.
That's exactly what I took it for. I didn't even realize it's not an exception until you just pointed it out.
My plan looked about the same but it's nice to have verification. Thanks! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6384 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 40 of 51 05 October 2008 at 6:46am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I didn't mean completely natural acquiring of the rules :) at least for me learning what's given in the book thoroughly was enough...
1 person has voted this message useful |
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