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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 6400 days ago 346 posts - 421 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Turkish, Irish Personal Language Map | Message 105 of 118 19 November 2009 at 12:34am | IP Logged | ||
I should clarify that I'm not doing it bilingually: I'm reading the German while listening to the German. I don't have any profound methodological reasons for it -- I just find it enjoyable and it's a deviation from my usual modus operandi. I read the first two Harry Potter books in English many years ago, before losing interest completely. I'm more of a Lord of the Rings man, myself. HP: 198/335 Edited by magister on 19 November 2009 at 12:35am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| magister Pro Member United States Joined 6400 days ago 346 posts - 421 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Turkish, Irish Personal Language Map | Message 106 of 118 20 November 2009 at 12:47am | IP Logged | ||
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I found out today that I will be chaperoning a student trip to Costa Rica next August, if I choose to accept the responsibility (uh, yeah). That means I need to modify my language priorities...with much hesitation.
One thing that this logging experience has made clear is that it is better to focus on a sıngle language at a time -- not several. I hasten to add that this is true for me, at this stage of my life. So what does this sudden and unexpected opportunity mean for my language studies? I'm guessing that my now-neglected Russian and Turkish will be abandoned; this pains me to no end, but I have to be realistic! My hope is that I will be able to muster up enough willpower to reduce my daily German reading by half, and enough willpower to begin daily Spanish practice. You see, I'm not really a fan of Spanish. It doesn't thrill me, like German, Turkish, Czech, etc. Too many vowels...that's the problem with Spanish. Sure, Turkish is a vowel-rich language, but it's got cool vowels, like the undotted ı! And rules for vowel harmony! I wouldn't be starting from scratch: I can read Spanish at an advanced level. But as I've mentioned more than once in my log, I like my languages passive! Hence the aforementioned willpower: I would much rather read novels or magazines or websites in Spanish than expend the effort required to develop decent oral skills. I suppose I'll start tomorrow. Nah, I'll wait until the weekend. Or no, maybe I'll enjoy a final marathon German reading weekend, and then start up the Spanish activation on Monday. No, maybe I'll wait until nex-- Sigh. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 meramarina Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5764 days ago 1341 posts - 2303 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Italian, French Personal Language Map | Message 107 of 118 20 November 2009 at 3:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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You are working with my current languages now, German and Spanish! I understand what you mean, because the truth for me, too at this point, is that I'm far more interested in German. But the Spanish is returning, the more I work on it.
That sounds like a fantastic trip, unless you will be chasing kids and forcing them to behave the entire time! At any rate, you can return to your other languages later; they will wait for you. Languages are good that way. And thank you for reading my language log. I really did not think anyone would be much interested! Good luck with Spanish--knowing that you will need to use a language can be the best motivation--it worked for me!. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| magister Pro Member United States Joined 6400 days ago 346 posts - 421 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Turkish, Irish Personal Language Map | Message 108 of 118 20 November 2009 at 7:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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Nope, no chasing or forcing involved--it's a small group of well-behaved highschoolers on a "global service" trip. And who is going to be the second chaperone? My wife! That makes the trip even more fantastic. She and I have teamed up before: about three years ago we led another small group on a three-week graduation trip throughout Europe, backpacking and staying in hostels.
I keep up with your log because 1) you know how to write, and 2) you're learning German! And thanks for your comments here. HP: 228/335 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| meramarina Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5764 days ago 1341 posts - 2303 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Italian, French Personal Language Map | Message 109 of 118 22 November 2009 at 9:42pm | IP Logged | ||
. . . and I thought you read it for the doom and gloom! Only kidding: Thank you very kindly, it is always encouraging to hear that someone likes my writing! Good luck with German and Spanish and with your trip. It sounds like a wonderful opportunity! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| magister Pro Member United States Joined 6400 days ago 346 posts - 421 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Turkish, Irish Personal Language Map | Message 110 of 118 02 December 2009 at 6:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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GERMAN
After finishing Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen I picked up the second volume in the series at the library (HP und die Kammer des Schreckens). I didn't expect to do this, because I had vowed to return to reading only native materials as opposed to translations. But I have to admit I'm kind of "into" the story! SPANISH I've only read a couple of chapters in the aforementioned book because the majority of my attention has been diverted to Spanish, thanks to the high-school Costa Rica trip next summer. Instead of reading literature I'm trying to concentrate on the spoken language, and to that end I make it a point to converse with our school's Spanish teacher on a daily basis. In addition, I've been mining interesting and illustrative sentences from various sources and typing them into my new iPod Touch (a great way to review, since I don't bother with Anki, and I can't keep track of paper wordlists). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| magister Pro Member United States Joined 6400 days ago 346 posts - 421 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Turkish, Irish Personal Language Map | Message 111 of 118 02 January 2011 at 9:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I officially "closed" this log 13 months ago, but I've decided to reopen it. I had some
difficulty locating it, for it was buried on page 19 or 20! I had stopped writing primarily because I felt that I was deriving little benefit from it (and secondarily that few others were deriving benefit from it). But I reread the entire thing this morning -- literally the first time I have revisited it in a year. I am thankful I didn't delete the log, as I had once considered doing. It was a nostalgic experience, and I've learned or relearned several things about myself. I have realized that excessive "bean counting" has a detrimental effect on learning, maintaining, or improving my languages. I returned to Anki for a few months in 2010, in order to give it another try, but I quickly became a slave to it: I was overly concerned with numbers of words/sentences, number of minutes spent on review, and so on. It slowed my learning. Although it satisfied my bean-counting "left-brain" tendencies, too much of my interaction with language felt artificially cold, disconnected, clinical. This last year, 2010, has shown me that, for me anyway, a holistic, "natural" approach involving exposure through massive amounts of reading and listening most effectively and most pleasurably accelerates my learning -- especially after cutting the umbilical cord to my dictionary and to Anki. By coupling all this extensive reading with uninhibited speaking practice in "natural" situations, i.e. in areas where the language in question is spoken, rather than (shudder) finding strangers on Skype, my progress skyrocketed. It goes without saying that I have found the above to be true for me, and that I don't prescribe my methodological beliefs for others as The Only True Way. I admit I remain skeptical that the incredibly detailed multilingual study schedules, which involve counting study time by the minute and allocating certain days of the week to certain languages, are antithetical to a learner's goals if those goals are to gain deep and automated proficiency in multiple languages. For me, spending so much time trying to organize my time ends up being a waste of my time! If my stated goals at the beginning of my log were to revive my dormant languages, then I can count 2009 and 2010 as successes. The past year has been especially productive, as I've resuscitated my German, Spanish, French, Russian, and Czech, by reading whatever I've felt like reading, whenever I've felt like it, and by speaking as much as possible whenever I had the opportunity in Real Life -- especially in Spanish, since we were in Costa Rica for ten days. We had garrulous, monolingual Spanish-speaking drivers take us around the country to various outlying regions, so I spent hours and hours in conversation with them. Experiences like this are key! And, unfortunately, few and far between for me. I don't know for sure what shape this log will assume now, but I will likely do little more than keep track of my reading here. Somewhere on the Net I read about some Japanese students and their goal of one million words of extensive reading in English. Perhaps I will try to read a million words in 2011 -- across several languages, not just one. The bean counting aspect is minimal; I'll just estimate the number of words in a book by counting the words of a representative page and multiplying by the number of pages in order to get an approximation. I've done this before -- it only takes a couple of minutes. This should satisfy whatever lingering tendencies I may still harbor toward quantifying my language practice. I don't spend much time looking at logs, especially with this sudden proliferation of team TAC logs, which -- sorry -- I just don't "get," but I do remember one where someone was working on reading a million words (of German, I think). I'd like to take a look at that one -- can anyone point me to it? It would take me forever to page through all these logs to find it! I'm on a Russian literature kick right now, so I'll start keeping track here with Turgenev's novella Asya. Unfortunately, it's an abridged version, and slightly adapted, but it's all I could find. I did locate the full text online, somewhere on the Runet, but reading literature on a screen is distasteful and inconvenient. When I have a chance, I'll slip over to the local university library and pick up a real, unadapted copy of Asya. All for now. Thanks for reading all of this. Now stop wasting your time here and go work on your target languages instead! 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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