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TAC 2010: Jinx Succumbs to Glossophilia | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5766 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes  Studies: French | Message 57 of 158 28 April 2010 at 8:41pm | IP Logged |
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Good to hear that you have been hard at it Jinx! I was afraid you had lost either interest or the opportunity to continue with what sounded like a very cool and ambitious course of study.
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| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5503 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 58 of 158 30 April 2010 at 10:29pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks, Spanky! It's great to be back on this forum, after too long spent away from it. There's nothing like a
community of industriously-minded fellow language-learners to inspire me to keep at my studies. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5503 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 59 of 158 01 May 2010 at 5:48pm | IP Logged |
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Update: I got into an upper-intermediate French course at my college for this fall! It's called "French Through
Translation." I had emailed the professor (in French, so she could see what my level was like), asking which of the two available lower-intermediate classes she thought would be better for my amount of knowledge. To my surprise, she responded saying that I was already beyond the level of those classes and that I would have to take one of the upper-level courses. This is pretty cool to hear, but it sure doesn't mean I'm going to sit on my laurels at this point. On the contrary, I'm going to work harder than ever in the next four months on my French studies, so that I can really make the absolute best of this course in the fall. Having done a year of specialized translation studies before, I know from experience that one's knowledge of the source language (and culture and literature) can never be too good, if one wants to produce a high quality translation. So, down to the nitty-gritty: I've been pretty good about sticking to the self-imposed plan of study I had set out for myself with regards to French. I'm up to lesson 21 in Assimil and lesson 10 in TY, falling behind on the "Grammaire du Français" because I find it so deathly boring, and listening to RFI podcasts with new gusto, now that they've started including transcripts of each podcast! It feels great to be chugging along at such an active pace. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5503 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 60 of 158 14 May 2010 at 12:38am | IP Logged |
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French Update
Since my last entry, I've fallen shamefully behind in French, but a few days ago I got a new lease on life (or at least on French), and am reinspired to take up my studies. This happens from time to time – I get "dry spells" when I just don't study at all for a week or more at a time. It always passes in the end, but it usually means that I fall quite far behind in my self-imposed study plan and have to do a bit of jumping around to catch up. Right now I have to do two lessons a day of Assimil to get back on schedule, but this is turning out to be a surprisingly good thing. The phrases from the dialogues are already beginning to stick in my head, and today when I met with my Belgian friend Catherine to practice speaking French, I used several of them almost without thinking. The way I work with the lessons is as follows: 1. I listen to the audio a couple of times without looking at the text, and I try to understand as much as I can. 2. I listen to it again while reading the French text, to see how the sounds relate to the words. 3. I listen to it once more while reading the English text, to catch any words I didn't understand, and also to help link meaning to sound. 4. I re-read the text aloud to myself, slowly, pronouncing as best I can. 5. I type up the text, to force myself to slow down and pay attention to every letter of every word. 6. I listen casually (e.g. while doing something else) to the seven most recent lessons, including the lesson from today. After trying to approach Assimil from several different sides, I've finally settled into this above-described method, and am feeling quite pleased with it. It seems to build a strong connection between French and myself, which I can't really explain but which seems very important. Although I've pretty much mastered (at least in theory) more obvious differences such as the sounds "é" versus "ais," I still feel that there are mysteries of French pronunciation that will take me many years to perfect. It's okay, I've got time. My long-term target for the moment is to improve my French enough to feel completely confident about starting my "French Through Translation" course in the fall, but I've got a short-term goal too: over the last weekend of May, a friend and I are going to go to Paris for about four days. We're leaving on the evening of Wednesday the 26th, and returning on Sunday the 30th. My friend can't speak any French, so if any French- speaking is to take place, it will have to involve me. This is both a slightly exciting and mostly terrifying thought, especially considering the rumors I've heard about Parisians not being the most patient when it comes to foreigners trying to speak their language. Well, we shall see, I suppose! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5503 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 61 of 158 18 June 2010 at 10:26pm | IP Logged |
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German Update
Finally, after being here in Berlin for three and a half months, I've realized that simply being here is not in and of itself doing much for my linguistic knowledge, so I've taken to working on my German with a vengeance. I'm doing this in multiple ways. – My most beloved new discovery is the German TV show "Tatort." It's sort of like CSI but far better (in my opinion), with real character development and interesting relationships between the main characters, in addition to really compelling and intriguing crime plots. Plus, each episode is an hour and a half long, so that's a LOT of German dialogue to listen to! Luckily it's clearly spoken and interesting enough to keep my attention for the whole episode. I only started watching it three days ago, but have watched an episode every day since and plan to keep up that pace for as long as possible. I can already feel how it's improving my conversational German. – One of my courses, a historical literature class in which all the students except me are native German- speakers, had been greatly intimidating me. However, in the past few weeks I've finally begun daring to speak up more, and it always feels great when I do. This is especially important because my second course, a class about "Trauma in Comics," is far too big to provide any opportunities for talking. – My third course, my Sprachkurs/Filmkurs, is my favorite. We talk a lot about our lives and the professor corrects us when we make mistakes; we watch films in German and talk about them; and of course I chat with the other students during breaktime. Lots of German-speaking going on! If only we met more often than once a week... but it's a four-hour long class period, so that's a LOT of speaking practice every Friday. I actually have to write a presentation for that class for next week – twenty minutes of presenting in German! Strangely, I'm sort of looking forward to it. :) – I've also been reading quite a bit. Today I read another section of Brecht's wonderful play "Leben des Galilei," and then the first chapter of Eichendorff's "Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts," a charming little old-fashioned book which is actually part of my summer reading for the German course I'll be taking this fall. – Finally, the Internet. I put Facebook into German (long past time for that, actually) and have been making myself read more news articles in German recently. – Oh, I almost forgot: THE WORLD CUP. Clearly this can't be left out. Of course, I'm usually too busy breathlessly following every German player's movements on the field and shouting encouragement at the TV screen to pay any attention to the chattering of the announcer, but I like to imagine that it's doing something for my listening abilities. Those guys talk FAST, especially when they think someone's about to score a–––TOOOOOORRRRR!!! Oh, how I love Fußball. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5503 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 62 of 158 21 June 2010 at 2:14pm | IP Logged |
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Not much to report... I'm chugging away through Assimil French, and finding it quite good. I find it hard to make
time for a lesson every day, though, because every time I start studying French I feel guilty for not studying German. My German could certainly stand to improve, seeing as I have to write an academic-quality 12-15 page paper over the next month and make two presentations, all in German. It's interesting to me to see the difference between the levels of language knowledge – I feel confident (if often inaccurate) in my spoken conversational German, but when to comes to academic-level German, it's almost like another whole language, one that I can barely understand at all. Lately, my daily language-study plan looks like this: for French, one new lesson of Assimil plus a review of the last seven, and I also listen to the RFI podcast "en français facile" while reading the transcript (I guess this counts as L-R). For German, besides my daily Tatort, I generally interact with the internet about 20% in German nowadays. For example, today I checked Facebook (which is in German), read an email from a German-speaking e-pal, and read two articles about language in German. I also constantly listen to German pop music, which I keep forgetting to list as language practice, because it's some of my favorite music anyway. Oh, and as I type right now I'm listening to my daily Nachrichten from Deutsche-Welle. Fun little language-related anecdote of the day: last night I was wandering around the city, just to enjoy the strange silence of central Berlin on a Sunday night when everybody's either at home or watching the game. Waiting to cross the street, I heard a group of loudly talking Italian tourists approach behind me as I pressed the button for the crosswalk-light – which, by the way, is hidden on the bottom side of the "press me" crosswalk- signal thing (I have no idea how to describe that). Anyway, believe me that it's not immediately obvious how you press the button. As I pressed it, I heard exclamations of ecstasy from behind me: "Ooohhhh! È sotto!" and the Italians gathered around me, saying "Grazie! Grazie mille!" while I shrugged and muttered in surprise "Prego, di niente..." As I walked away, they were joyfully pressing the crosswalk button many times, in the new way they had just learned. Their happiness kind of made my evening. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5503 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 63 of 158 13 September 2010 at 12:59am | IP Logged |
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Again, it's been FOREVER since I've posted! This time it really was due to laziness. I haven't made any gigantic breakthroughs in the past two months, but rather felt my abilities in German and French advancing at a steady increase, which is very gratifying.
GERMAN At the end of July I returned to the States and went through a short period of withdrawal, missing the necessity of speaking German every day. However, I used my summer vacation to finish Eichendorff's "Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts" and also read the play "Iphegenie auf Tauris" by Goethe. Both great classic works, although I preferred the Eichendorff... there's something about Iphegenie (the play and the character) that annoys me. Now I'm back at uni (it's my final year! yikes!), and taking the equivalent of two courses in German. One is a "History of 19th Century German Literature" course, taught all in German. The other isn't really a course, but is my senior project, which involves translating the novel "Die Wand" (I've mentioned it before) from German into English. Overall, I can tell that my time in Berlin really did wonders for my German, wonders that I didn't even appreciate until I returned to uni and saw how much further I've advanced in comparison to my fellow German-Studies students. I just took an online evaluation test from the Alpha Sprachinstitut Austria (here: http://www.alpha.at/learn-german/test_e.php) and got a C1-level result, which felt about right. FRENCH As I mentioned a few entries back, I got into a translation course for this semester, taught all in French. I won't lie, I was pretty nervous about starting it, but now I've been attending it for a few weeks and feel much more confident! The professor is a sweetie, and it's been a pleasant surprise to see how I easily match the level of the other students in the class, most of whom have been studying French at the university level for a good two or three years already. I guess my one year of TY was pretty effective! I also just took an online evaluation test for French from the ESL Language Studies Abroad site (http://www.esl-languages.com/en/study-abroad/online-tests/f rench-test/index.htm) and got 39/40 questions correct, which placed me at the B2 level. Nice! I can't take that entirely to heart, though, because I found the test to be absurdly easy. Maybe someone else can take it too and tell me what they think, if it's an accurate method for estimating B2 level or not? GENERAL Anyway, besides German and French I haven't got a lot going on right now, linguistically. Esperanto and Italian are both taking a break while I throw myself into my final year of uni with newfound zeal. I'm also narrowing down my linguistic focus on purpose, to make up for a summer of indulging in wanderlust. I read a few pages of my Swahili TY, flipped through an Albanian phrasebook, and spent a good week suddenly intensely studying Japanese! That hit me out of nowhere. Being a lazy sort, I avoided the script and just jumped right into the romanized language lessons, which if not a clever decision was at least a rewarding one; I very quickly found myself producing sentences such as these: - Kore-wa donna hako-no futa-de su ka? (What kind of a box does this lid belong to?) - Hoteru-no heya-wa ookii heya-de su ka? (Are the rooms of the hotel big rooms?) - Iie, hoteru-no-wa kitanai semai heya-de su. (No, those of the hotel are miserable, narrow rooms.) - Anata-wa Smith-san-de su ka? (Are you Mr. Smith?) - Iie, watakushi-wa Smith-de ari-masen. Kore-ga Smith-san-de su. (No, I am not Mr. Smith. This is Mr. Smith.) Any Japanese speakers/more advanced students, feel free to correct me, by the way! So, yes, my reasons for buckling down and focusing solely on German and French this year are actually practical ones. My family's trip to Brittany for this coming June-July is still on, and after graduation I'm hoping to move to Germany and find work there, if possible, while at the same time pursuing an advanced degree related to translation and advancing my German knowledge. By the way, random question: does anyone know if you need to take the GRE to enroll in a Master's degree program in Europe, more specifically Germany? I was assuming I wouldn't have to, but I'd better figure this out for sure ASAP. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6513 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 64 of 158 13 September 2010 at 10:00am | IP Logged |
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I also did that test in French and got a B2 as you. But I think that one answer in the test is wrong:
Question 24: Quelle est la bonne réponse à la question suivante? Il va à Marseille ? Answer:Oui... Felix y va The correct answer would be "NON ... Felix y va". You wouldn't repeat the name if "il" referred to the same person. And this of course is a problem with many multiple choice tests. The result depends not only on your knowledge but also upon you ability to guess what the test constructor was thinking when (s)he formulated the question. But that is of course even more important in a face to face test situation. Congratulations with your rapid progress, Jinx 1 person has voted this message useful |
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