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TAC 2010: Jinx Succumbs to Glossophilia | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5510 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes  Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 89 of 158 10 October 2010 at 10:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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*ENTRY 96* (8 October 2010)
Study goals for today: German – 1 hour French – 1 hour FRENCH (active study) 30 minutes: watched FiA 3 (Planning and Anticipating II). 30 minutes: did Pimsleur 1 lesson 15. 5 minutes: did Assimil lesson 36. 15 minutes: transcribed the dialogues for Assimil lessons 1-4. FRENCH (passive study) French total: 80 minutes (80 active/0 passive) GERMAN (active study) 120 minutes: translated DE->EN. GERMAN (passive study) German total: 120 minutes (120 active/0 passive) TOTAL STUDY TODAY: 200 minutes (3h20) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5510 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 90 of 158 10 October 2010 at 10:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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*ENTRY 97* (9 October 2010)
Study goals for today: German – 1 hour French – 1 hour FRENCH (active study) 5 minutes: reviewed vocab in Anki. 30 minutes: watched FiA 4 (Planning and Anticipating III). FRENCH (passive study) French total: 35 minutes (0 active/0 passive) GERMAN (active study) 5 minutes: reviewed vocab in Anki. GERMAN (passive study) German total: 5 minutes (0 active/0 passive) TOTAL STUDY TODAY: 40 minutes (0h40) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5510 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 91 of 158 12 October 2010 at 3:55am | IP Logged | ||
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*ENTRY 98* (10 October 2010)
Study goals for today: German – 1 hour French – 1 hour FRENCH (active study) 5 minutes: reviewed vocab in Anki. 30 minutes: watched FiA 5 (Names and Origins). 5 minutes: did Assimil lesson 37. FRENCH (passive study) French total: 40 minutes (40 active/0 passive) GERMAN (active study) GERMAN (passive study) German total: 0 minutes (0 active/0 passive) TOTAL STUDY TODAY: 40 minutes (0h40) OTHER 29 minutes: listened to tracks 1-6 of MT Mandarin CD 1. Edited by Jinx on 12 October 2010 at 6:56am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5510 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 92 of 158 12 October 2010 at 3:56am | IP Logged | ||
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11 October 2010
Today has been a lazy, skipping-around sort of day… I'm on fall break right now (which means I have Monday and Tuesday of this week off, so a four-day weekend) and haven't been getting nearly as much schoolwork done as I ought to have. I did a little French, no German yet (still planning on getting to that tonight, though; I have a paper to write in it), and continued Michel Thomas Mandarin, which I started last night. I am really enjoying it so far! I like Harold Goodman, the teacher, much more than Michel (although I didn't mind the old guy that much), and the students aren't as annoying as in the French program. Also, there's a native Chinese woman there as well, repeating everything clearly and accurately after the students try to say it, so you always end up with the correct pronunciation in your mind. Since starting it last night I'm up to track 12 of the first CD, and it's hard to make myself stop! It feels amazing to already be able to say sentences like these (forgive my strange transcription, I have no idea how to write pinyin): Wǒ men dōu shì zhōng guó rén, kě shì tā shì yīng guó rén. (We are all Chinese, but he is English.) Tā shì yīng guó rén, kě shì wǒ shì měi guó rén. (She is English, but I am American.) Tā hé wǒ dōu shì yīng guó rén, kě shì tā shì měi guó rén. (He and I are both English, but she is American.) Yes, my topics of conversation are evidently very limited, but for one day of learning, I feel pretty good about it! HG's explanation of the tones is also very effective, and I'm feeling quite confident about them, and even not so scared of the consonant sounds which were frightening me before. (I'm saying "ren" kind of like "zhen," after listening to how the lady on the recording says it. I'm sure that's not 100% accurate, but no one's ever going to mistake me for a native anyway, so I'm not too worried about it.) I also just opened up my lovely 1966 Assimil "Latin sans peine," planning only to take a peep at it, and ended up reading all the way through the introduction and doing the first lesson as well. I won't let myself go any further at the moment, but it looks like it's going to be great whenever I do get around to it. Feelings right now… I'm feeling remarkably positive about all my languages! German, of course, I never feel bad about – I remain loyal to my first love despite all my other flings. French is also being carried along quite buoyantly by French in Action, Assimil, and Pimsleur in combination with my French course, and my new interest in Mandarin is almost frighteningly strong! I'm having an absolute ball with it – what fun to be able to make those melodic, expressive tones, and actually be communicating meaning through them. I don't know how long this interest will last, but I've already made a firm decision about Mandarin: I'm not going to stress myself out over it, at ALL. If I miss studying for days or weeks on end, fine. If a certain character just doesn't stick in my brain, no worries; it'll come eventually, in its own sweet time. I don't need the language by any deadline cut-off point, so I can skip around in it (I was going to write "plod through it," but that has the wrong emotional connotation) as I wish, taking as long as I want to familiarise myself with it. The main reason I've made this decision is that I've seen other people start learning Mandarin, all excited about how easy it was to speak, and then when they started learning the characters they got stressed out and started cramming in Anki and falling behind and memorizing and generally not having fun. I don't want that to happen! I'm going to let myself learn characters at an absurdly slow pace. I can already recognize the most basic ones like 人, 口, and 山, because they look like what they mean (person, mouth, mountain). I know this won't work for the more complicated ones, but I refuse to just drill myself through them. I'm going to learn them gently, go easy on myself, and probably end up making the slowest progress towards Mandarin that anyone has ever made. What fun! :) (Edited to improve my pinyin spelling.) Edited by Jinx on 17 October 2010 at 8:00am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5959 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 93 of 158 12 October 2010 at 5:56am | IP Logged | ||
That sounds like a good choice. I personally found learning kanji for Japanese really exciting and wanted to get through it quickly, so I was one of those people who crammed and got behind and then got burned out from it (and subsequently forgot many of them after not reviewing for something like three months!). I also made a similar decision of the 'natural' and 'gentle' approach for the pronunciations of the kanji which I was learning. I figured that once I learned the kanji themselves and their meanings and as I learn more and more words in Japanese, the different pronunciations of the kanji will eventually make themselves clear naturally, as opposed to pounding multiple readings into my brain for each character, which would undoubtedly be frustrating and unpleasant. Well, several months later and I'm still not concerned with the pronunciations but am naturally noticing lots of repeating patterns in the pronunciations of certain characters through real word examples. I'm glad I made this decision, and I'm sure you will be pleased with your choice too. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5510 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 94 of 158 12 October 2010 at 7:01am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the encouragement, Philip! As you know, I'm in awe of your linguistic accomplishments, so it's good to hear that you're tried both approaches when learning characters and that you think my idea is okay. I can definitely understand the being-excited-and-wanting-to-get-through-it feeling too, haha. :) I guess I just don't feel so much of that with Chinese because (at least the way it looks right now) the number of characters is pretty much endless. :)
I think you make a good point that in simply working with the language, enough repetition causes us to start remembering stuff naturally, without having to necessarily cram it. It's good to hear that this is working out for you! Of course, from reading your log I also suspect that the intense memorization you did actually DID end up helping you – even if you feel like you forgot a lot of the kanji, I bet they came back a lot faster the second time! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5510 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 95 of 158 17 October 2010 at 8:01am | IP Logged | ||
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*ENTRY 99* (11 October 2010)
Study goals for today: German – 1 hour French – 1 hour FRENCH 5 minutes: did Assimil lesson 38. 30 minutes: watched FiA 6 (Physical Characteristics I). 30 minutes: did Pimsleur 1 lesson 16. 30 minutes: read aloud the French introduction to Assimil's "Le latin sans peine." 60 minutes: translated some newspaper articles (both directions). French total: 155 minutes MANDARIN 55 minutes: listened to tracks 7-16 of MT Mandarin CD 1 & tracks 1-2 of CD 2. TOTAL STUDY TODAY: 210 minutes (3h30) OTHER 20 minutes: did lesson 1 of Assimil "Le latin sans peine" (1966 version). It seems quite well done – I'm looking forward to using this when I return to Latin. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5510 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 96 of 158 17 October 2010 at 8:01am | IP Logged | ||
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*ENTRY 100* (12 October 2010)
Study goals for today: German – 1 hour French – 1 hour FRENCH 35 minutes: listened to MT disc 3 chapters 6-10. 30 minutes: watched FiA 6 (Physical Characteristics II). 5 minutes: wrote an entry in my French practice journal. 10 minutes: reviewed vocab in Anki. French total: 80 minutes (80 active/0 passive) GERMAN 45 minutes: read aloud Act 1 of the play "Der böse Geist Lumpazivagabundus" by Johann Nestroy. 15 minutes: reviewed vocab in Anki. German total: 60 minutes MANDARIN 40 minutes: listened to the first 6 lessons of ChinesePod. First impressions: lots of English and not a very effective teaching method. I'm not sure what all the fuss is about, but more on this later once I've given it a chance to prove itself. TOTAL STUDY TODAY: 180 minutes (3h00) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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