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TAC Team I: Luai’s JP, EO, & FR | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5647 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 25 of 55 04 April 2010 at 3:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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Just checking in again.
I finished the 6th step of the Core 2000 series, am nearing the point in step 7 where I'll be ready to start step 8. Still arguing with my mom about buying a Skritter account. Yesterday I read through part of Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication, I want to start actually using it soon. Haven't been doing much for Esperanto, just occasionally listening to Radio Verda. I have to figure out where I last left off in Gerda Malaperis and actually get around to finishing it (which at this point I want to do just for the plot line, let alone the study value). That's it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| global_gizzy Senior Member United States maxcollege.blogspot. Joined 5522 days ago 275 posts - 310 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 26 of 55 05 April 2010 at 4:06am | IP Logged | ||
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Great to see you are still pegging away at your goal, LL! I feel swamped sometime trying to fit in Japanese but I rather crawl like a tripod on one leg than not progress at all. Always great to know that I'm not in it alone!
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| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5647 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 27 of 55 24 April 2010 at 1:55am | IP Logged | ||
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Time for another update!
Well, I stopped doing Smart.FM for a while.... I still haven't gotten into doing it every day again, but I'm doing it sporadically now. However, that's OK because I've been making up for it with a massive Bleach marathon. I started watching Bleach two saturdays ago, and I finished the series two days ago. That's 268 episodes in less than two weeks. It was great listening practice and I really felt like I learned a lot of new vocabulary.... some of which I feel stupid for not having picked up earlier, like てめい, which they say pretty much constantly. I also picked up some words they used a lot but probably won't usually be used so often, like にせもの (fake). Doesn't really matter, I would need to learn it eventually anyway and at least this way it's firmly rooted in my brain. I've also taken up listening to Japanese podcasts again, only now I can understand a LOT more of the chatting between the two hosts than before, instead of only understanding the lesson. Today a fellow Japanese student and friend of mine suggested that we start writing a shared diary- a journal in which one person writes an entry, then hands it over to another person to write an entry, etc. This way we can practice our Japanese writing skills with each other. Ideally we'd want someone who is fluent to check us but it's still a fun and helpful idea. I might start putting my entries up on lang-8 if she's OK with it, then I could get the benefit of a native speaker checking them. I've tried to do journaling before and failed, but hopefully this will be more fun and more motivating. Esperanto- still not doing much, I read a bit more of Gerda Malaperis! and I plan to finish it up soon, but otherwise I've not done any real studying or even done anything in the language at all, lately. However, today I received a free copy of the latest issue of La Revuo Esperanto, courtesy of Lernu.com (you can sign up to get the free copy after you pass the A exam). So now I have some reading material I can carry around with me, I'm hoping that will encourage me to actually read something. My real problem with Esperanto right now is that I'm not really sure what to do with it. At least in Japanese, I have a plan to follow- I know what needs work and how to fix it. In Esperanto, I really just know that I'm terrible at parsing long sentences and making my own sentences. I don't really know why that is. I'm hoping it's just lack of practice, in which case extensive reading and listening will help, although a speaking partner would help more. My vocabulary is also a bit spotty, which is easier to fix, but I'm being indecisive about what method I want to use for that. :/ At any rate, the friend who introduced me to the language is coming back from Mexico in a month or so, and I'm going to be living with her sister this summer, so I'll get plenty of chances to see her and FINALLY chat face-to- face in Esperanto! She's quite fluent, and in Mexico she teaches Esperanto classes, so I'm really looking forward to it! Speaking of summer, I've been thinking for a while now that when summer comes I will start to dabble a bit in some of the languages I want to pursue later. I suffer a lot from wanderlust, and I have a looooong list of languages I'd like to sample.... I'm not sure though how far "sample" is going to go. But one thing I'm thinking about is actually adding ASL full-time to my studies. I love sign language and I really feel it's something everyone ought to learn, and so far my experience has been that it's astonishingly easy to learn and hard to forget. Unfortunately, I have yet to find ANY online resources with actual grammar lessons or, in fact, any hint of how to make sentences whatsoever. Or drills of any kind. And I also have no one to practice it with. There are signing lessons at my local university, but you can't take them if you're not a student, so I'd have to wait another year. :/ 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5647 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 28 of 55 26 April 2010 at 2:09am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, the day before yesterday I started reading my new copy of La Revuo Esperanto, and I discovered to my pleased
surprise that my benevolent neglect has actually improved my use of the language. I did some writing in eo today, and I found that the words were coming to me a little slowly, but my grammar was better. I don't think I've said this here before, but I had been planning for a while to teach some really basic eo classes to my friends this summer. I've now had interest from four or five people, and the end of the school year is approaching, so I've started planning out the specifics. In writing up an outline today, I discovered that I really do know a lot. I suppose I've been using mostly very advanced materials for my reading and listening, so I had gotten convinced that I was a lot further behind where I actually am. Anyway, I now have a bit more confidence that I can actually teach this. It'll be nice to have more people to talk to in esperanto. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5647 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 29 of 55 01 May 2010 at 6:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's the first day of May! Besides being Beltane, it's been four months since we began this challenge! As such, I
thought it would be a good day to review my goals for myself, see where I'm at in terms of progress, and make new goals where necesary. I've also decided that I really do want to take on two new languages: French and ASL. Fortunately for me, I already have a lot of resources for the first one, and yesterday I found someone who can teach me the second! So I will also be putting forth some small goals for those languages, and we'll see over the next four months how quickly I'm able to progress in them. Without further ado..... Japanese - Be able to follow the plotline of a drama without subtitles - Learn all 2000 most common kanji - Complete Genki 2 and Tae Kim's Grammar - Dramatically increase the size of my vocabulary (using Smart.FM's core 2000 & 6000 series) These were my original goals. So far, I've gotten much, much farther along towards #1 and I'm totally satisfied with my progress there! I started working on #2 , but hit some setbacks and put it off until school ends. Still, before I stopped I had learned to recognize about 300 kanji. I haven't worked much on #3, but I plan to start doing so soon. I've made great progress on #4, as well, although I seem to have gotten kind of burnt out at Step 8 of the core 2000. I'm hoping that taking a break from that to focus on other areas will allow me to come back to it with a fresh resolve soon. New goals/modifications: - Work through the whole "Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication" book - Be able to hold a basic conversation comfortably (e.g, improve my speaking) - Become able to read short stories in Japanese with infrequent help from a dictionary And I'm striking Tae Kim's from my goals. If I feel I don't understand something, I might read about it there, but I'm not going to actively study it. Esperanto - Finish reading Gerda Malaperis, Pipi Ŝtrumpolonga and Vere aŭ Fantazie (and hopefully many others) - Pass all Lernu's exams - Develop better speaking ability - Become able to comfortably and easily express myself in written exchanges - Finish the "Big Esperanto List" series of goals on Smart.FM My original learning goals. Of these, I am completely striking the Smart.FM goal. I made it about halfway through the second list of this series and then stopped. I didn't feel the translations were that accurate and I wasn't learning the words very effectively because completely useless ones were mixed in with very useful ones. I'm thinking of making my own eo list on Smart.FM for words I run across when reading that I want to study. I still haven't finished Gerda Malaperis because I just keep forgetting about it, but I did get several chapters further in and I'm going to make more effort to find time for this. I still plan to start Vere aŭ Fantazie after that. I did pass one of Lernu's exams! I don't think I'm ready yet for the B exam, but I'm going to look up the requirements for it and start studying for it soon. I've still had no chance for speaking practice, but that will change soon. I've gotten much more comfortable with writing, but there's still a lot of progress to be made. I make a lot of tense mistakes, for one thing (actually I do this when speaking, too). New goals: none, I think the ones above are enough. French This is a new language for this challenge, so these are all new goals: -become able to converse on basic topics (essentially, reach A1 level) -Have a comfortable grasp of conjugation, gender, and lenition -Be able to read in French with help from a dictionary (I can actually already do this, thanks to vocabulary similarities to English and a basic grasp of grammar, but I don't understand as much as I'd like) I don't want much from this language right now, because japanese and eo are still my focus, but I'd like to improve it enough that I can actually get some use out of it. ASL - learn the basics of ASL grammar - learn a LOT of signs - be able to hold a basic conversation This is my lowest-priority language right now, but I still expect to see quick progress in it, because it's so easy to learn signs and not so easy to forget them. I still remember signs I learned two years ago and have never had any reason to use. My vocabulary right now is tiny- maybe as much as 25 signs- and I know literally nothing about grammar except that there is no definite or indefinite article. I've got a ways to go. So, for my over-all progress towards these goals, I'm pretty satisfied. I'm not making progress in all areas equally, so I definitely need to put more attention to speaking and writing, but the progress I've made in listening in both languages and reading in eo is excellent and actually has gone faster than I had planned! Looking forward towards the next three quarters of the year, I'm very excited for the amount of progress I can make. I just have to keep working hard! 頑張ります！ 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lumulo Triglot Newbie CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6173 days ago 27 posts - 32 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, Italian Studies: Mandarin | Message 30 of 55 01 May 2010 at 9:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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An interesting parallel between the Esperanto community and the community of ASL signers
is that both discourage the excessive usage of calques from one's native language, and find alternatives by combining basic components. For instance, 'linguistics' in ASL is 'LANGUAGE-SYSTEM'. Isn't that beautiful? I wouldn't rush to expand your vocabulary in ASL by cramming unnaturally, since many of the signs found in online dictionaries in particular are considered improper and/or superfluous. Edited by Lumulo on 01 May 2010 at 9:38pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5647 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 31 of 55 08 May 2010 at 6:57pm | IP Logged | ||
That's really cool, thanks for sharing. :) Right now my ASL vocabulary is so small that it definitely needs some expanding. I'm skipping any words I don't regard as "super basic" right now; I'm only trying to get up to maybe a couple hundred signs at this point. So mostly, it's signs like "water" and "house" and "eat". The dictionary I have on my iPod has 1000 words in it, but a lot of them are kind of ridiculously advanced, like "african-american" and "covenant" (there's a TON of Christian words in it, oddly....), and it's lacking in some very basic words, so it's far from an ideal resource; I'll be supplementing it with bigger online dictionaries as-needed, it's just that I wanted one for on-the-go and I couldn't find any other iPod apps for ASL that actually had videos. Since I now have someone to teach me, I'm hoping she can help me with identifying which signs I should use preferentially and avoiding improper/superfluous signs. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5647 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 32 of 55 08 May 2010 at 7:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Update!
I've not had the chance this past week to work on my languages much at all, let alone begin working on a regular systematic approach to my two new ones. However, I did manage to finally finish Gerda Malaperis! I'm very pleased with myself, it's something I've been meaning to get to for a while and it was very enjoyable. I understood it all quite well. I still have the audio for it on my iPod and will probably continue to listen to parts of it occasionally, for listening practice. Last week was a very busy week for me, with a lot of personal stuff going on, and unfortunately, I will probably continue to be quite busy for a while, although not as bad as last week. I need to find a job ASAP so I'm working hard on job hunting, filling out applications, etc. And at the same time, I'm apartment hunting for next fall, when I plan to move in with my bf of 4 years. It's quite a stressful time for me so I won't always have the energy or time to work on languages, but I expect it should calm down in about a month or two, at which point I'll be done with high school forever and hopefully will have a job. Anyway, enough about my life. I managed to get through 4 lessons of Pimsleur French, but I'm hesitant to keep going. The lessons are long and very boring, so I find them extremely arduous. I think I'll try to stick to it a little longer, but if I don't find myself getting used to it by lesson 10 I'll probably drop it. I have yet to solidify any plans to get together with the person who is supposed to teach me ASL, so contacting her is on my list of things to do today. I'm feeling a bit at a loss as to where to go next in eo, but I will probably start reading either Pipi Ŝtrumpolonga or Vere aŭ Fantazie next. I'm also thinking of trying to communicate more with other Esperantists and I may start posting on forums. I think it would be best for me to start working my way through Genki 2 for jp now, but I can't seem to muster the interest. I'll keep trying to make myself do it, and hopefully start sometime this coming week. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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