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NeonQwerty’s Italian and German thread | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| neonqwerty Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5973 days ago 229 posts - 239 votes  Speaks: French*, English* Studies: Spanish | Message 177 of 206 01 October 2009 at 1:29am | IP Logged | ||
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Italian,
More podcasts, which I am really enjoying. The ankis are getting more sparse, since I'm not adding new ones. Unfortunately, I don't have time right now to do any reading.. truth be told, I shouldn't have time to be writing this post! German, Listened to the Ruben podcast yesterday and today. I'm liking this "listening to authentic German" thing! :) Pimsleur 14 (want to redo): 25 minutes Total time: 1442.5 minutes 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| neonqwerty Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5973 days ago 229 posts - 239 votes Speaks: French*, English* Studies: Spanish | Message 178 of 206 03 October 2009 at 7:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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Italian,
More news podcasts... Yesterday I had a really good and funny moment. The beginning of the podcast featured an Australian reporter talking to one of Berlusconi's female ministers about the sex-related allegations made against him. I remember a time when even slow Italian was mostly guesswork for me. Yesterday I was very happy to notice that I was understanding her perfectly, even as she got more and more excited and agitated. Think of a hyper, super-excited Italian stereotype. That was her. And I understood it all! For once the lack of coherence was the speaker's fault, not mine! :-D German, I listened to some more slow news. First, I really do enjoy it a lot. Second, I realized that the second time I listen to it, I grasp a lot more than I would have expected. Which brings me to my impromptu theory of language learning! :) My experience with Italian is that my enthusiasm tended to follow a sort of stretched out U shape over time. At the beginning, everything is exciting because it's so easy to focus on the little stuff that you DO know. When you hear a broadcast or read an article, the words that you know just jump out at you, and that's pretty fun! Eventually, though, the proportion of words you know grows, and it's the ones that you don't know that draw your attention. So you're by default shifting from a focus on your successes to a focus on your failures. You also eventually stop feeling great for making simple declarative sentences and need to learn more complex grammar, and that can be a bear. So you get stuck in a sort of trough, and you grind through it, hopefully with your enthusiasm intact. The good news is that after a while, something "clicks" and you start getting better again. It's as though at first here's rapid improvement, then work with very little noticeable improvement, and then BAM, you start improving again! BTW, when I say "you", I of course mean "me". Maybe some of you can relate, though. In any event, I'm in those initial stages for German. Pimsleur 15: 25 minutes Total time: 1467.5 minutes 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| neonqwerty Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5973 days ago 229 posts - 239 votes Speaks: French*, English* Studies: Spanish | Message 179 of 206 09 October 2009 at 5:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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Grad school.
It's a doozy. So yeah, grad school has been really nasty in terms of monopolizing my life. I have very little downtime for sleep, let alone language learning. :( And reading until words become incoherent... yeah, that doesn't help. Here's what I've done since the last post: Italian, Did not do ankis; will get back to it today. I haven't been listening to many podcasts either, but I have been listening to Italian rap. :) No reading, but remember a looong time ago I did 3/5 of the Michel Thomas vocabulary builder CDs? I did #4 just recently. German, Still listening to slow podcasts, plus very little Pimsleur: Pimsleur 15 (again): 25 minutes Pimsleur 16: 25 minutes TOTAL: 1517.5 mintes 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 magister Pro Member United States Joined 6413 days ago 346 posts - 421 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Turkish, Irish Personal Language Map | Message 180 of 206 09 October 2009 at 8:50pm | IP Logged | ||
Ich bin echt froh, dass du der "Slow German" Podcast geniesst! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| neonqwerty Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5973 days ago 229 posts - 239 votes Speaks: French*, English* Studies: Spanish | Message 181 of 206 17 October 2009 at 5:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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Danke sehr, Magister. :)
--- So it's been a while! I'm still chugging along with my school stuff; working all the time is exhausting! I still had time to fit in a bit of learning... Italian, The bad: still almost no reading. I don't see this changing much in the immediate future. A corollary to this is that I have not been adding new anki words The good: I finished the Michel Thomas Vocabulary course. :) I may eventually go through it again; I made just enough errors to justify doing so. I'm still reviewing existing ankis, albeit not every day. Still listening to about half an hour (sometimes more) of spoken Italian per day, along with decent amounts of Italian rap German, I started German ankis. :) I found the anki process really helpful, but it's like a diet: it's especially effective if you started a long time ago. It's the nature of ankis; it requires long-term objectives. So on certain days I've added 10 words; I'm now up to 40. I found lists of the 100, 200, and 500 most common German words. I'm going through those lists, and adding the spoken version of the word from LEO to the card. This way I get much more exposure to how each word sounds. This is especially helpful because German sounds are not as intuitive to me as Italian ones. And of course, slow news + Pimlseur. Pimlseur 16 (again): 25 mins Pimsleur 17 (twice): 50 minutes Pimlseur 18 (twice): 51.5 minutes TOTAL: 1644 minutes 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| neonqwerty Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5973 days ago 229 posts - 239 votes Speaks: French*, English* Studies: Spanish | Message 182 of 206 20 October 2009 at 12:36am | IP Logged | ||
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Italian,
I did a bit more Italian reading, as well as some Italian television watching and podcast listening. In other words: lots of authentic media. Plus ankis. But at this point, that goes without saying :-) German, Listened to more slow news; I was distracted and didn't get much out of it, unfortunately. I also added 10 words to my ankis and, of course... Pimlseur 19 (twice): 54 minutes Total: 1698 minutes 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| neonqwerty Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5973 days ago 229 posts - 239 votes Speaks: French*, English* Studies: Spanish | Message 183 of 206 22 October 2009 at 9:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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Exhausted, so: everything is the same, except that I also did Pimsleur 20 (26 mins)
Total for German (not counting Anki): 1724 minutes Grad school argggggggggggg........... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| neonqwerty Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5973 days ago 229 posts - 239 votes Speaks: French*, English* Studies: Spanish | Message 184 of 206 31 October 2009 at 6:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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I more or less took a week off from the language stuff. But the good news is that all my school work got done. :) Back on the horse as of today.
Pimsleur 20: 26 mins Pimsleur 21: 26 mins Total: 1776 minutes 1 person has voted this message useful |
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