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TAC09: DE, RU, TR and...? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 magister Pro Member United States Joined 6401 days ago 346 posts - 421 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Turkish, Irish Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 118 29 November 2008 at 12:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello, all.
I suffer from a severe case of wanderlust, and this disease has poisoned my relationships with many languages. I have been inconsistently learning or toying with languages for over 30 years, and most of these tongues lie abandoned in dormancy, callously cast aside after being only half-mastered. They have fallen victim to my wandering eye: for once the magic wears off, I become bored, I become complacent, I become unfaithful. Like a cheating husband, I begin to crave the intoxicating passion of a new, fiery relationship with a mysterious, illicit paramour. I have married and subsequently divorced many: Romanian, Norwegian, Russian, Persian, Turkish, Hungarian, and several others. Alexander Arguelles' highly inspirational writings in general, and his initial "Languages of the World" German video in particular, have served as the catalyst for my decision to change my ways. This change will not come easy, for I am not confident I will be able to curb the momentum of decades of wanderlust. Perhaps this community will provide words of moral support over the coming months. Below you will find the 4 languages I have committed to relearning systematically in the near-term. Czech. I learned Czech in the 1980s at the Defense Language Institute in California. My sudden enlistment in the US Army shocked friends and family; I had been a university-bound waif, a 112-pound weakling. But I couldn't resist the siren call of DLI, and I took my chances on what language I would be assigned after I enlisted. One did not have the luxury of choice! I had been crossing my fingers for Russian or any "Soviet bloc" tongue, so I was ecstatic to receive my orders for Czech. My Czech is now very rusty, for I stopped actively using it in the early 1990s. My goal for 2009 is to resuscitate it to its former glory, as it were. Having only recently become familiar with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, I suppose my skill level was C1 at the time, because I had consistently tested at ILR 3/3 in reading and listening. German. After two years of training in Czech, I was stationed in Germany where my task was to listen to intercepted Czech communications, and then prepare translations or abstracts for the intelligence community. I had had three years of German in high school, and now I was living in the country for three years. One might expect that I reached a very advanced level of proficiency in German as a result, but I lived on an American base, I was (and am) married to an American, and I worked with Czech (and some Slovak) all day, every day. But German was, and has remained, one of my favorite languages. I consider it my priority for TAC, and I estimate my current level at B1. If I recall correctly, I reached ILR 2+/2+ in reading and listening. Russian. A deep sense of guilt compels me to revive and subsequently improve my Russian. This language is what sparked the linguistic obsession in the first place, when, as an 8-year-old, I found a book entitled You Can Learn Russian in the children's section of the library. I was instantly bewitched. I played around with it for many years, making little progress to be sure, and then took three years of it at the university in the 1990s. Until last month, I've rarely touched it since then. Not surprisingly, I'm finding it quite transparent thanks to my once-mastered Czech. Turkish. I began Turkish intensively in January 2007, after a very long period of linguistic inactivity. I had found this site, HTLAL, and I had realized I dearly missed language study. I wanted a new challenge, and I wanted it to lie beyond the bounds of the Indo-European family. I was pleased with the rapid progress I was making, but in January 2008 I suffered an accident which gravely affected my memory for some months. Learning was too difficult during this time, and now that I am mended I have decided to return to this fascinating language. I was delighted to find Fasulye's Turkish log, and to learn that I am not alone in this endeavour. Although I will not consider it part of the TAC, I would be remiss not to mention Latin. I am a Latin teacher at an independent prep school in the US, so I work with it on a full-time basis, albeit at a very elementary level. I do occasionally take graduate-level courses for professional development, and in fact I'm enrolled in "Latin Prose Composition" at the moment. I will include Latin in my log if anything interesting should arise, or perhaps when I dip into literature for pleasure. I also work a second job as a freelance proofreader/editor for publishers of Latin learning materials, which keeps me very occupied. Keeping a log here feels vaguely narcissistic, although I do not consider others to be vain in the least when I read their logs. Perhaps my discomfort stems from my somewhat shy disposition (which I constantly strive to reverse). If you have endured this verbosity thus far, thank you. magister Edited by magister on 23 February 2009 at 6:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| TheElvenLord Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5878 days ago 915 posts - 927 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Cornish, English* Studies: Spanish, French, German Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 2 of 118 29 November 2008 at 12:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Best of luck to you Magister. I suffer from Language Wanderlust as well, as I get the urge to drop all my languages and learn a bit of a different one everyday. But we just gotta keep going!
Good luck! TEL 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5645 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 118 29 November 2008 at 3:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hi magister,
I wish you good luck with your TAC 2009 language studies and I am also delighted to see a collegue of my target language "Turkish". Bol sanclar ve basarilar dilerim! Fasulye-Babylonia Edited by Fasulye on 29 November 2008 at 3:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| magister Pro Member United States Joined 6401 days ago 346 posts - 421 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Turkish, Irish Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 118 01 December 2008 at 2:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you, TEL and Fasulye, for your comments. I wish you much success as well!
Nov. 28 - Nov. 31 GERMAN A few days after being jolted with inspiration by means of Prof. Arguelles' videos some months ago, I happened to visit my local Goodwill (a chain of thrift stores in the US) to browse the book selection there. I found a volume of Gänsehaut, a German translation of the popular children's series Goosebumps. It served as my re-introduction to German, and I carefully read it twice over the summer, dictionary at hand. Designed for 10- to 12-year-olds, the language certainly wasn't difficult, but I encountered a great deal of forgotten vocabulary. Last week at the library I borrowed 3 volumes from the Felix & Theo "Leichte Lektüre" series, one from each of the three available levels. They are each around 30 pages of text. I read Donauwalzer and Einer singt falsch this weekend, twice each, without any difficulty, finding only a handful of unfamiliar words, such as: der Summton: buzz; buzzing sound (Mit einem Summton öffnet sich die Tür.) der Vertrag: contract (Wir haben einen neuen Vertrag geschlossen zu einem neuen Projekt.) der Vorschuss: monetary advance (Das ist ein Vorschuss auf das neue Projekt.) verhandeln: to negotiate (Da kann ich dann gleich auch über das Honorar verhandeln.) I began a Level 3 book yesterday, Müller in New York, which contains significantly more new vocabulary than the other two. RUSSIAN I have collected several textbooks over the years, and since I am unable to decide which one to use, I began in mid-November to work through each of them until one of them presents itself as most suitable to my tastes. I will write about these various choices in the near future. I downloaded the Princeton Russian Course this weekend, and I have gone through Lessons 1-5. So far I enjoy it, the audio is clear as a bell, and I appreciate the wacky dialogs ("Is that your sister?" "No, that's my husband!"). TURKISH FSI, Volume I, Lessons 1-8 (of 30). In my opening post, I explained that I had already studied Turkish. My primary tool was FSI Turkish, Vol. I, which I completed, and I had just started Volume II when I abruptly abandoned my studies. I expect my next run-through of the 30 lessons will proceed fairly rapidly. My thoughts on Turkish-language resources will follow in a subsequent post. CZECH Nothing. LATIN I spent 90 minutes yesterday preparing for my online class, "Latin Prose Composition." Strictly speaking, the title of the course is a misnomer: it involves grammar manipulation and English-Latin translation. Homework consisted of conditional clauses within indirect discourse (which is particularly grueling), as well as rewriting a selection from Cicero's In Catilinam 1 into indirect question. magister 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| TheElvenLord Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5878 days ago 915 posts - 927 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Cornish, English* Studies: Spanish, French, German Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 5 of 118 02 December 2008 at 2:48am | IP Logged | ||
Why not study them all? They will be good re-inforcers of each other! Keep up the good work! TEL EDIT: Typo Edited by TheElvenLord on 02 December 2008 at 2:48am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| magister Pro Member United States Joined 6401 days ago 346 posts - 421 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Turkish, Irish Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 118 05 December 2008 at 4:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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DEC. 1 - DEC. 4
GERMAN Following a link I came across in josht's log, I read and listened to a few slowly-spoken articles on Deutsche Welle, multiple times each: Zum Zahnarzt nach Ungarn Obama: Ein Präsident mit ehrgeizigen Zielen Buch Digital: Das E-Book Wie deutsche Mode die Welt erobert Although I am not harvesting a great deal of new vocabulary from these articles (I like Iversen's use of "harvest" in this context!), I find them to be very useful for "extensive reading" practice and for lubricating the rusty ears. A year or two ago I tried some sort of SRS software (SuperMemo, maybe?) and it was too much for me. At 40, I'm not a member of the so-called digital generation, so very little about computers is intuitive. With that in mind, would anyone care to recommend an SRS that's user-friendly? I know this question has been asked in innumerable threads, and I do know how to use the search button, so I'll do my own research as well. I also finished Müller in New York and started reading a book of Calvin & Hobbes comics (Auf dem Sprung). A goal of mine is to break out of my little shell and write in German in the Multilingual Lounge. RUSSIAN Princeton Russian, Lessons 6-7. My chronic wanderlust is not confined to languages. I also fight a strong impulse within the study of each language to roam from textbook to textbook. Historically, this has never been an efficient use of my time. This time around, I want to limit myself to two or three resources before proceeding to "authentic" reading as soon as possible. I've dug up some of my old books and am going through each of them: Introductory Russian Grammar, Stilman, Stilman, and Harkins, 2nd ed., 1972. 27 units, 1500-word vocabulary. This is the textbook I used in a college course in the mid-1990s. I'm leaning toward this one because of nostalgia. I've gone over units 1-5 this last week. Colloquial Russian, Harrison, Clarkson, Le Fleming, 1978. I really am not happy with the modern versions of the Colloquial and Teach Yourself series. I've (re)studied Lessons 1-8. Russian for English-Speaking Learners, V.N. Wagner, 1983, Moscow. Over 600 dense pages, no pictures, very little empty space, 54 lessons, 5000-word vocabulary. Why don't they make introductory texts like this anymore? Author predicts 2-3 years of self-study to complete. I actually picked this up just last year at a used book sale hosted by the local library. I've studied Lessons 1-5, and so far I think this is a gem. TURKISH FSI, Volume I, Lessons 9-13. Comments on Turkish will have to wait until next time. CZECH Nothing, still. Edited by magister on 06 December 2008 at 8:43am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| JonB Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6063 days ago 209 posts - 220 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Italian, Dutch, Greek | Message 7 of 118 06 December 2008 at 4:25am | IP Logged | ||
As one who has also suffered from bouts of 'Linguifidelity', I can greatly sympathize with your predicament. In my youth I had a passionate three year relationship with a fiery Latin tongue (Italian). She was my first true love, and you could say that we were a very steady couple at that time. I quite frequently stopped over for many nights at her country, and she revealed many of her innermost secrets to me. However, before I got to make the longer term commitment of a university-major, my eye was caught by a blond teutonic bombshell (German) and I was completely swept away. She proved to be quite a tongue, and it took me a long while to tame her. But we eventually settled down together, and I moved in with her at home for a long time. Technically we are still together now - although we no longer live together on a daily basis. But I fear that my eye is starting to wander. I must unashamedly confess that I have active plans to four-time her. For some time I was greatly tempted to have a serious fling with one of my ex-tongues' sisters (Spanish.) However, I recently saw the ex-tongue herself in a bookstore, and I have been unable to resist trying to rekindle our earlier passion. True, many people say that things are never as good the second time around. But with a little age and experience under my belt, I believe I can take her places this time that we didn't reach before. Apropos age and experience, I am also seeing a very hot older woman (Greek.) And I have plans to get right down to business with an exotic middle eastern lady too (Arabic.) I have a feeling that - beneath her mysterious alphabetic veil - she is a tongue which I have only been able to imagine in my most torrid dreams... Edited by JonB on 06 December 2008 at 9:36am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| josht Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6244 days ago 635 posts - 857 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Spanish, Russian, Dutch | Message 8 of 118 06 December 2008 at 9:43am | IP Logged | ||
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Regarding SuperMemo, it has nothing to do with your age or you not being a member of the "digital generation"; there is nothing particularly intuitive about SuperMemo, whether you're 22 or 82. It's a junky, bloated piece of software.
I'm using Anki now, and I certainly recommend it. It's free; it allows you to sync your decks across multiple computers (again, for free); it's intuitive. You can download it at http://ichi2.net/anki/. Edited by josht on 06 December 2008 at 9:43am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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