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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| joanthemaid Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5280 days ago 483 posts - 559 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, German | Message 169 of 200 05 June 2010 at 11:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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June 5, 2010
Almost halfway through the year. Today I started a new series in Spanish, "Amar en tiempos revueltos". I watched 7 episodes, for a grand total of 6 hours of actual watching plus vocab searching (120 words). Not going to actually learn the vocab, just try to remember it passively if it pops up again. I am much better than I was in January, that's for sure: with my level then I wouldn't understand half of what's happening. But I still have some trouble understanding, especially the more 'popular' accents. And my production probably still isn't that good. I'm less and less certain that I will go to Spain next summer but I do need some conversation practice. Very badly. Russian: nothing. Taking a break, I don't know how long it will be. For the moment my Russian is barely usable: basic conversation and internet navigation. Main topic understanding in authentic oral documents (radio) and very, very slow reading with strong context (wikipedia: information with lots of dates, proper nouns and other international vocab) English: Nothing in the last month. My exam is at the end of this month though, so I should get going, but it just seems like a terribly dull way of learning: thematic vocab learning for the medical field doesn't appeal to me that much. I might start writing again to get my sentence and text building back together, plus do some specialised translation. Meh. Japanese? Know about 10 words and understand about 25 expressions/ combinations of words. Not really my priority but why not add it to my active language learning. Seriously considering the idea, fully aware that doing so would give me one more excuse to slack off on English and Russian. Edit: That would be 4 languages. Bit too many? It seems to me that I can only learn one new language at a time, which means I have to choose between Russian, which I still can't nearly consider myself as speaking, and Japanese. Plus, have to stop playing around with transparent Romance languages. My Spanish isn't yet solid enough for that. Once I get to a good level in Russian(i.e, probably in a couple of years if I get back into it) I've been considering another Slavic language instead of Arabic: I'm of the opinion that knowing a language of the same family helps you master another language really well. I was thinking of one of the Balkanese languages, or possibly Polish. I don't want something too close to Russian, but still in the same family. Or, another choice would be Turkish and Japanese, not necessarily in that order. Japanese has the advantage of being motivating, whith lots of easily understood media, while Turkish means actually being able to talk to some people here in France. And apparently they're loosely related. Anyway, rambling... So if you're still here, be brave and have fun with your own languages! If not, well, it's useless, but come back and why not try something else if you're bored! Edited by joanthemaid on 05 June 2010 at 11:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| joanthemaid Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5280 days ago 483 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, German | Message 170 of 200 06 June 2010 at 9:20am | IP Logged | |||||
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I went looking at foreign language articles and it seems I can do basic reading (wikipedia) in most italo-western romance languages (a sub-group that includes French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, Italian, etc... That's staying in strong-context articles; I haven't checked more difficult ones yet. As far as Eastern Romance goes, like Romanian, I can understand what they're talking about but not really learn anything new. Anyway, it feels good knowing languages without actually knowing them. I feel like it would take me a few weeks to learn the basic differences and with the similarities I could be operational at once. Then again it's not much of a challenge, is it?
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| joanthemaid Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5280 days ago 483 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, German | Message 171 of 200 06 June 2010 at 9:40am | IP Logged | |||||
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A PRINCIPLE FOR LEARNING FROM AUTHENTIC MATERIAL
This is something that I've found to always be true in intermediate and low- fluency language learning, from the time I followed it by pure chance (reading Harry Potter and then some fantasy series in English, like The Wheel of Time and the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett), to now with my Spanish learning: If you want the language to stick, you have to work on long authentic material. You get a lot of bilingual or annotated books with lots of short stories to "start reading in the language" or "discover a culture through original literature". Usually they're not particularly easy, they just trick you with the old "short is easy" illusion. That means: - You will keep looking at the notes or the translation and probably not enjoy the story as much. - You might look even when you don't need to, to reassure yourself - It won't feel like you can read the language, and switching constantly from one language to another won't help. - And most importantly, you might see each new word once or twice, which means except if you put it in a word list and actually learn it (which defeats the purpose of the authentic documents, which is passive/semi-passive learning), it just won't stick. What I do: The key is to choose something that's EASY and LONG. That means SERIES, whether of books or TV series. This way after a couple of chapters/ about one hour of watching you'll be able to understand most of what's being said and the new words will be fewer and farther between. I personally underline them or write them down quickly on a piece of paper, find out the meaning at the end of a couple of chapters or episodes (so as not to stop every second, which would be a pain), write it down and usually don't even need to look at it the next time it pops up. Sometimes I have to look up a word two or three times, but eventually it'll stick. And little by little, they'll be transferred into your active vocabulary. Once the first phase, where you don't actually understand everything, disappears or gets really short, THEN you can move on to novels and films (in which there are often fewer, less explicit dialogues/ writing) and THEN short stories, which require immediate, implicit comprehension to really get into. If you have anything to add or a different opinion, all comments are of course welcome, this is what my experience has taught me but I've only learned closely related languages for the moment. There might be other, better ways for different languages or simply different people. Good luck! Edited by joanthemaid on 06 June 2010 at 9:44am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| joanthemaid Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5280 days ago 483 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, German | Message 172 of 200 14 June 2010 at 11:45am | IP Logged | |||||
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Finished reading "El Reino del dragon de oro" last week. I've been trying to see more "Amar en tiempos revueltos" but I can't find any episode after ep.6 anymore. I didn't particularly like that series anyway, but now I'm gonna have to find something else to watch Edited by joanthemaid on 14 June 2010 at 11:47am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| OlafP Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5245 days ago 261 posts - 667 votes Speaks: German*, French, English | Message 173 of 200 14 June 2010 at 4:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
This was a good post that would deserve a bit more exposition than it might get here in this subforum. I actually do it only slightly differently. When I try to improve my skills I like to use the most difficult material that I can digest at this point. The problem is that I can't do this for a long time, say several weeks in a row, without burning out. But when I need a break I can use lighter material to get more exposure. It feels like a walk in the park when you suddenly can just read without a dictionary. You increase your exposure time and still learn a few idiomatic expressions that way, so it definitely is no waste of time. Short stories are good material for this approach if you don't study a language on a regular basis. If you use a thick novel you have to stick to it, otherwise you lose track of what is going on. Short stories often are no light material, as you mentioned, but they can be rather dense. The benefit is that you can get through one in one evening. You don't have to continue the next day(s) if you don't feel like it. I just bought a DVD collection of Molière's complete plays and will go through them one by one. At the moment I have no idea how hard that will be, because I know Molière only from translations. I expect it to be not much easier than Shakespeare in English, but again - the plays are short and can be taken one after another. In order to maintain my French I've bought a couple of books on psychology. They are very easy to read and yet quite interesting, so I can just go through one chapter before I go to sleep. I can use French at work, but it is not enough to keep it alive, and I realised that I lost some of my fluency after I left France almost three years ago. So that's how I do it. Not very different from your approach. Edited by OlafP on 14 June 2010 at 5:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| joanthemaid Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5280 days ago 483 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, German | Message 174 of 200 18 June 2010 at 6:14am | IP Logged | |||||
It makes sense to read more difficult or denser material, but as you said that's if you want to improve your vocabulary fast, and you'd have to actively learn the words. With a novel you don't necessarily have to learn them as they'll probably pop up again. As for maintaining a language you're already fluent at, I agree with you, conversation isn't enough. I'm married to an American so I speak English all the time but for a while now I haven't read any heavy English texts (I try to read in Spanish, I should probably alternate) and my skills have gone downhill pretty fast. The choice of difficulty definitely depends on your level of fluency too. You're obviously better at French that I at Spanish, so you can afford to "risk" getting into harder stuff. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| joanthemaid Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5280 days ago 483 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, German | Message 175 of 200 26 July 2010 at 10:26am | IP Logged | |||||
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July 26 - back from holidays
Back from holidays, and there was no Spain, because my bike got stolen (again, after I bought it a month before) in my building staircase. Which means, even if I bought another one, it would probably be stolen again. So no more biking, and as Barcelona was part of the whole biking project, no Barcelona. It would probably be better to go to Castilla anyway. No I ended up near Narbonne, France, with lots of foreigners but only of languages I don't know, like Dutch or Swiss German, and everyone seemed to know perfectly where they were and didn't need help with anything at all. Oh, yes, there was an Italian person at one point,whose slow Italian I understood and she understood my Spanench, so that was fun... and lasted about 30 seconds :) Other than that I didn't read much Spanish, but a little I suppose (did I mention I finished El Reino del Dragon de Oro?) Since then I read a few short stories, a bit of wikipedia. The most I've been doing in Russian has been reading food packaging and speaking to myself (not much). So I'm already starting to forget vocab, but also declensions etc... As for my English, the decay is accelerating, which I blamed at first on lack of reading and my progress in Spanish, and now think is due largely to the pidgin I speak with my husband. My French is pretty stable, although some words don't come as easily as they should and I use a few anglicisms, but that's been happening for a while and when I'm careful it's all right. So, that was a pretty bleak picture of my language status... In the coming months I think I'll focus on English as part of my studies, and Spanish to get to real fluency (now only my reading is fluent, and barely). As for my future goals, from now on I think I'll start with languages that I actually have opportunities to speak, otherwise motivation goes down pretty fast. Strangely enough, I learned Spanish to be able to speak and Russian for reading, and my skills - and learning are completely reversed: the cyrillic alphabet is still an obstacle for Russian although I've had a few convos with Russians and all I can do in Spanish IS read. I feel like I'm cheating in a way by writing in here because I've pretty much given up on intensive learning... Then again I guess the "down phases" should be documented too. Anyhow, good luck and congrats to all of you still in, and see you... Edit: For the regular followers, I did pass my exam , so starting in October I will be training as a translator (first at university, and then a professional internship). Hoping to see some improvement or at least less degradation of my English Edited by joanthemaid on 26 July 2010 at 5:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Quabazaa Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5419 days ago 414 posts - 543 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German, French Studies: Japanese, Korean, Maori, Scottish Gaelic, Arabic (Levantine), Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (Written) | Message 176 of 200 26 July 2010 at 10:47am | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi Joan, great to see you posting again :) Don't worry, the point of TAC is to keep you motivated and get started again after the down phases.. well that's what I'm using it for anyway! You should definitely stick around if you can!
Sorry you couldn't get to Spain, that sucks about your bike :( Good luck with your studies!!! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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