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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 17 of 118 01 January 2009 at 3:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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DEC. 26 - DEC. 31
Since I am a teacher, I have a couple of weeks off from work thanks to the holidays. We are spending several days out of town with family, which means I have plenty of time to devote to languages. For Christmas, one of my students gave me a yummy $100 gift card to a bookstore, so I picked up Mastering German Vocabulary, Katzner's Russian dictionary, Twilight in Spanish for my niece, and used copies of Latin for Even More Occasions and Essentials of Russian Grammar. GERMAN During these six days, I put in six hours of work (play?) in German, distibuting my time between Mastering German Vocabulary, a lang-8 post or two, and reading issues of Freunde. The latter is a magazine designed for young students of German at the B1/B2 level. My library carries a few years' worth of these. 6 hrs RUSSIAN Unit 11 of Introductory Russian Grammar. It has been a little disheartening to realize how much Russian I have forgotten over the years. But I'm certainly enjoying relearning it. I look forward to reading actual texts in 2009. 1 hr 15 mins TURKISH Starting Turkish and its accompanying CD kept my attention for half an hour while traveling. I cannot recommend this title to rank beginners, because there are no drills, no exercises, and very little grammatical explanation. Some valuable conversational material can be mined from it, however. This book is a loan from the library. I completed Units 4-5 of Elementary Turkish and began Unit 6. I submitted my first lang-8 entry in Turkish several days ago, but it still hasn't been corrected. I suspect there aren't many native Turks on that site. 4 hrs Cumulative time since Dec. 25: DE 7.5 hrs RU 2 hrs 15 min TR 4.5 hrs GK .5 hrs. 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 18 of 118 03 January 2009 at 2:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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YOUR AND MY TURKISH TEXTBOOKS
"Starting Turkish" gives to me the impression of being a communicative book. I find such books that are focusing on dialogues and practical situations very useful. My own study book "Güle Güle" is also of that kind, but has very good grammar explanations as well and gives information about the Turkish culture in German. Could you give me the link to your other book "Elementary Turkish", that I can have a look? My prediction is that my studypartner and I will have finished our book "Güle Güle" in about summer 2009. Then I will suggest that we will go on with ASSIMIL "Türkisch ohne Mühe", which doesn't have so much grammar excercises, but very valuable insider information about the Turkish culture. There are 4 audio CDs available for ASSIMIL Turkish, but they are quite expensive. Good luck for your language studies! Fasulye-Babylonia Edited by Fasulye on 03 January 2009 at 2:41pm 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 19 of 118 05 January 2009 at 12:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
Ja, also eigentlich habe ich das schon getan. Werfen Sie bitte einen Blick auf die zweite Seite von meinem Log. Ich hätte bloß www.elementaryturkish.com geschrieben können, aber ich wollte eine passende Entschuldigung, ein bißchen Deutsch zu üben! (Ich wäre Ihnen sehr dankbar, wenn Sie meine Fehler berichtigen...) 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 20 of 118 05 January 2009 at 2:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
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JAN. 1 - JAN. 4 GERMAN Besides working with a couple more issues of Freunde as well as some other materials mentioned in previous posts, I read the first 20 pages of a book entitled Der, Die, Was?: Ein Amerikaner in Sprachlabyrinth, which I discovered while waiting in the Freiburg train station a couple of summers ago. Fun book! It's full of anecdotes about the author's experiences in learning German to fluency over the course of a decade or so. I recently loaned it to a German parent of one of my students -- she loved it! 6 hrs Abgesehen von einem paar Nummern der Zeitschrift Freunde sowie einigen wie oben besagten Büchern, habe ich die erste 20 Seiten im Buch Der, Die, Was?: Ein Amerikaner in Sprachlabyrinth gelesen. Ich habe dieses reizvolle und anekdotereiche Buch vor zwei Sommern entdeckte, während ich im Freiburg Hauptbahnhof wartete. Es handelt sich um die Erlebnisse des Autors beim Deutschlernen im Lauf eines Jahrzehnts. In letzter Zeit habe ich es einer Deutschen Frau geliehen -- sie hat es sehr viel genossen! (Korrekturen immer willkommen!) RUSSIAN Introductory Russian Grammar, Units 11-12. 4 hrs 15 mins TURKISH FSI, Units 20-21 2 hrs 15 mins WANDERLUST Irish: I have always loved Irish and Welsh, but I never have spent enough quality time with them. Occasionally I get the urge to browse through some materials; yesterday Irish called to me during a period of Wanderlust Weakness, and I succumbed. I reviewed a couple of these lessons briefly until the wanderlust subsided. 30 mins Cumulative time since Dec. 25: DE: 13.5 hrs RU: 6.5 hrs TR: 6.75 hrs GK: .5 hrs IR: .5 hrs 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 21 of 118 06 January 2009 at 9:49am | IP Logged | |||||
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Random thought:
It really struck me today that the Irish ag obair is cognate with the Russian обрабатывать, Czech obrábět, obrábění, etc. At least I assume it is. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at this, since both are Indo-European languages. Nevertheless, I don't recall making a Celtic - Slavic connection before. 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 22 of 118 06 January 2009 at 1:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
Fasulye-Babylonia 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 23 of 118 06 January 2009 at 1:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
Fasulye-Babylonia Edited by Fasulye on 06 January 2009 at 2:04pm 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 24 of 118 12 January 2009 at 2:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
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JAN. 5 - JAN. 11
This was a good week. I found a great deal of time to devote to languages. So far, keeping a log has proven to be an effective motivator: I've already experienced a palpable improvement in my German, for one, which has been thrilling. Of course, the novelty of logging has not worn off yet. It remains to be seen if I will keep this up for another 11 months. By the way, thank you again, Fasulye, for your corrections above. GERMAN In an effort to improve my active skills, I began participating in the Multicultural Lounge. Because one of my stated goals for this year was "to break out of my shell" and practice writing there, I consider this one small victory. Otherwise, much of my time was spent reading Der, Die, Was? and reviewing unfamiliar words/phrases which I've harvested from this book. A small sample: überflüssig - superfluous (I didn't need the dictionary for this, thanks to Latin) umstritten - disputed; controversial zu meinem Leidwesen - to my chagrin verzerren - to distort quälen - to torment sich quälen - to struggle (e.g., ich quäle mich jeden Morgen aus dem Bett.) abwertend - pejorative berücksichtigen - to take into consideration wortkarg - taciturn das Bestreben - endeavour 5 hrs RUSSIAN Tons of reading and drilling in the Stilman textbook. Thanks to my computer situation at home, I can only listen to Princeton Russian at work, and there's rarely time for that. 4 hrs 45 mins TURKISH FSI, Vol. I: Finished Unit 21, working on Unit 22. I love this section of the course: it's an introduction to verbal nouns, as in Ne yapacağınızı söylemediniz (You didn't say what you were going to do). Replacing entire subordinate clauses with verbal nouns (which of course agglutinate) is such a vastly different way of thinking. 2 hrs CZECH What I suspected has proven to be true -- namely, if I can force myself to read some Czech, I'll eventually get excited about it again. It was sparked by reading the word třpitivý, glittering, and understanding it without hesitation. I'm sure I haven't seen this word in a decade and a half! After such a long period of neglecting my Czech, why did my brain understand it? Context wasn't a factor in this case. In any event, I experienced the direct motivation I needed to keep reading in Zákulisí pana prstenů and begin noting vocabulary for further review. 1 hr 15 mins WANDERLUST GREEK: Played around a bit with the Cortina Greek book. I'm quite pleased with myself for resisting the temptation to yield to wanderlust. This week my Hungarian and Finnish materials were especially tantalizing, but I conquered the urge and retained my focus! Another small victory! 15 mins Cumulative time since Dec. 25: DE: 18.5 hrs RU: 11.25 hrs TR: 8.75 hrs CZ: 1.25 hrs GK: .75 hrs IR: .5 hrs 1 person has voted this message useful |
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