|
 |
Sprachprofi’s TAC 2009 | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6282 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes  Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 1 of 27 23 December 2008 at 12:31pm | IP Logged |
|
I have two part-time jobs and am completing my university studies this year, so I won't be able to spend much time on language studying. However, people encouraged me to join the TAC anyway, and I will, hoping to stop procrastinating.
My goal will be to spend at least 1 hour every day on languages. I know I can spend several hours on it very occasionally, or do my Mnemosyne for a couple minutes every day, but I'd really like to build a routine of studying and reading. I don't read as much anymore in foreign languages since going to university and having to read lots of books for lectures and for research there. My languages and goals with them: Mandarin Chinese - this will the main focus, at least for the start. Current level: Right now I know about 1000 characters and I'm somewhat better at speaking because of a month of immersion in China. Method: I'm going through "Cracking the Chinese puzzles" and learning (passively) lots of characters from it. I will also study all volumes of the NPCR and possibly take some tutoring to keep my active skills sharp, and I have some reading / listening-reading materials. Goal: a good B2 level, start reading Chinese news and modern literature and reach the 3500 character mark by the end of the year. Modern Greek Current level: A2 Method: a grammar, Assimil and several other textbooks, graded readers, "The Little Prince" and songs all flowing into the 10,000 sentences method right now (which I may drop because of some doubts about it, see my pre-TAC log), I also have access to tutoring when I need it Goal: B2 by the end of the year. There's less to do than for Chinese, but I don't often feel like doing something for my Greek. Italian Current level: I used to be at basic fluency, but I haven't used it at all in over 5 years and I'm having trouble even saying basic things in it now, also due to my Esperanto getting much stronger and a short flirt with Spanish. I can still read it without much effort though. Method: books, books, books, ItalianPod101 and hopefully finding somebody to talk to me in Italian, possibly also a vacation there. Goal: being able to easily have conversations again at the end of the year. If busuu offered Italian, I'd also love to add a goal for my written Italian... French Current level: C1. I major in French studies, so I routinely have to read a lot of literature classics and research papers in French. My biggest issue is the amount of mistakes I make in writing, between 8 and 12 on 100 words depending on the matter, because my study of French has been atypical. I also don't feel quite as comfortable speaking it as I do speaking English. Method: whatever I can think of. Possibly busuu, or corectme.com to just write texts and get them corrected. Goal: a quotient of 2 mistakes on 100 words or less, and of course improving my comfort level speaking. Acquiring a Quebec accent would be nice... Other languages for this TAC are undecided yet. I definitely want to reach at least level A2 in two more languages. Possible candidates are Arabic (currently survival level), Swahili (less than survival), Indonesian (glanced at), Swedish (glanced at), Korean (know alphabet), Thai (glanced at), or whatever language catches my eye, possibly also if I need it for travel... Or I may give Spanish, Portuguese or Dutch another try, focussing on active production since passive I can understand them so well already. Edited by Sprachprofi on 23 December 2008 at 12:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| JonB Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6077 days ago 209 posts - 220 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Italian, Dutch, Greek | Message 2 of 27 23 December 2008 at 12:47pm | IP Logged |
|
Best of luck :-)
I'm going to be having a bash at learning some Modern Greek too. It seems like a very nice language - and it's not too badly inflected either! (Roughly the same amount of inflection as German, I believe.) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6282 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 3 of 27 25 December 2008 at 4:54am | IP Logged |
|
Well, I managed to fit in 2 hours of Chinese yesterday. Here are my current Mnemosyne stats, so that I can compare later:
Characters from Chinese Puzzles: 14 unknown of 219 Chinese sentences: 20 unknown of 42 Greek sentences: 32 unknown of 152 My Egyptian Arabic is all in Knuckles in Chinaland, 270 items right now I believe and I need to add more to progress in the game. Waiting until I'm home because I don't know a good source of vocabulary except for my Egyptian dictionary, which I left there. These reflect the pre-TAC stats in number of items, because I didn't add more cards yesterday. However, I did study 25 pages of "Cracking the Chinese Puzzles - volume 1" yesterday and extracted the unknown characters to my little notebook, where I will study them until I can recognize them, and only then enter them into Mnemosyne for safekeeping. EDIT: This afternoon I find I can already recognize most of the 63 new characters, yay! The book is really good to make me remember that many comparatively easily, even though I keep wondering about the jumping around and teaching irrelevant with the relevant. Edited by Sprachprofi on 25 December 2008 at 8:01am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6282 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 4 of 27 26 December 2008 at 3:18pm | IP Logged |
|
3 hours yesterday and 2 hours today. Most of it was character study / browsing NCIKU, but yesterday I also read one chapter of San Ren Xing, my easiest Chinese reader. My reading speed was really bad compared to my reading speed in other languages, but I was able to understand everything. What I like about this book is that difficult words or characters are explained in Chinese, and also the exercises at the end of each chapter are entirely in Chinese, yet I don't typically have to look up extra words in a dictionary. On NCIKU I also sometimes look at the monolingual Chinese dictionary entries but at this point they are too difficult for me. The book does a really good job of keeping everything at a simple level, so that it's enjoyable to read. I'm going to time my reading next time so that I can see if my reading speed in Chinese is improving. I hope it will.
Mnemosyne now contains all the characters and interesting words up to the end of chapter 13 of Cracking Chinese Puzzles now, a plus of 100, and my sentence database has been expanded to 142 items already as I'm typically entering several sentences for each new character, gleaned from NCIKU, which is really an invaluable resource. My little notebook contains some characters from chapter 14 already, which I studied this morning. Today I was visiting my relatives for Christmas, a big family reunion during which I talked to my aunt, who speaks Modern Greek pretty well. This gave me the impulse to do something for my Greek again, so I booked a set of 10 Greek lessons on Myngle to be taken probably after the IS. Edited by Sprachprofi on 26 December 2008 at 3:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6282 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 5 of 27 28 December 2008 at 4:52am | IP Logged |
|
I am now at the Internacia Seminario until January 3rd.
Bad news: wireless internet access is limited, so I won't be updating this journal as often meanwhile and I also won't be able to use NCIKU. Good news: I get to speak lots of Esperanto and various other languages. I did bring my Assimil Greek book, my Chinese reader, Cracking the Chinese puzzles, etc. and I just received lots of Italian books! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6282 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 6 of 27 30 December 2008 at 1:17pm | IP Logged |
|
Dec 27: 1 hour of Cracking the Chinese puzzles while in the train
Dec 28: nothing beyond keeping up in Mnemosyne (Chinese and Greek) Dec 29: 1 hour of vocabulary review and reading further in Cracking the Chinese puzzles Dec 30: vocabulary review, progressing in "Cracking the Chinese puzzles", adding more words and sample sentences to Mnemosyne for a total of 2 1/2 hours. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6282 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 7 of 27 04 January 2009 at 6:12am | IP Logged |
|
I've managed to keep up an average of 1 hour of study every day, mostly spent on Chinese characters, but also the 10,000 sentences method for Chinese and Greek. I read chapter 4 of The Little Prince in Greek.
Statistics for January 3rd, 2008, 10 days into the TAC: Characters and words from Chinese Puzzles: 458 items, of which 263 are individual characters, up to parts of chapter 14. I have actually completed the chapter and moved on to the next, but some words and characters are still in my notebook. Chinese sentences: 61 unknown of 261 Greek sentences: 97 unknown of 262 Hours spent: 16 263 of the target of 2500 characters learned, that's an average of 26 characters a day and it's already a tenth of the target! If I continue at this speed, I might be done 3 months from now instead of by the end of the year, WOW! I have to consider that these were "holidays" for me though, meaning I didn't have to work much on the side, and I did not yet work on any other language besides Greek. Last night I started to read a bit in Italian, but that's it. And now I'm thinking of Swahili... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6282 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 8 of 27 05 January 2009 at 2:37pm | IP Logged |
|
Yesterday (Jan 4th) I continued on Chinese and Greek as before, about 2 hours spent on that, plus an extra half hour on Swahili, reviewing the Assimil lessons 1-3 I did a while ago. Similarly today. Plus the Italian book keeps calling to me. Wanderlust, I see you coming...
...Especially since today I went to the post office to pick up some packages that had arrived in my absense and I am now the proud owner of a French exercise book for C1/C2 level and an Egyptian Arabic coursebook (an unexpected gift from a friend in Cairo). Wonder what to focus on now. I definitely want to keep at Chinese characters, but that alone isn't enough for me. -- Why didn't anybody tell me that Anki is way better than Mnemosyne??? Even though there isn't even a 1.0 version, it already has so many more functions. I really like the idea of being able to select what fields are available for cards, what fields I'm tested on and in what manner, what the standard intervals are for testing... I imported my Mnemosyne words/characters database into Anki now and the new cards for chapter 15 of Cracking the Chinese Puzzles contain special fields for my sample sentences. Also, whenever a new vocabulary item is HSK level 1 or 2, I now have Anki quiz me on English to Chinese as well, and I will extend that later. I even sometimes have it quiz me on production of sentences, if they contain a useful pattern. I didn't use this feature for Mnemosyne because Mnemosyne tended to ask me the same thing in both directions shortly one after the other, so that results were screwed. 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
