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LittleBoy’s Log (中文, Fr, Es, Eo, De) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Lianne Senior Member Canada thetoweringpile.blog Joined 4927 days ago 284 posts - 410 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Toki Pona, German, French | Message 17 of 22 01 January 2012 at 3:32am | IP Logged | ||
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Sounds a bit like my year, only I don't have the excuse of school. I just spent a whole lotta time working on my genealogy, blogging, reading (in English), and watching Queer as Folk.
Are you going to keep this log for next year, or start a new one? I'll be sure to follow. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| LittleBoy Diglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5122 days ago 84 posts - 100 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto | Message 18 of 22 01 January 2012 at 1:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Lianne - I will keep this log going, but am not planning to join a TAC team. It won't help motivation any, but I don't think I can commit the time to it. Thanks, I'll keep up with yours too.
2011 - Stuff I Forgot 1. To say that I dreamt in a foreign language for the first time last year (the dream included chatting in both French and English, if you're interested). 2. To put up French Anki numbers yesterday, as I was a bit lazy. The deck now has 1857 entries of which 272 are yet to be reviewed. This is compared to 1001 with 313 new on 5th May (page 2 of this log). Which comes to, I believe, 897 new words in near enough 8 months. Call it 900 to make the Maths easier (you can tell I'm studying it at uni...) means that, if this was continued for the first 4 months of the year (which it wasn't), I would have learnt 1350 words last year. Or, at least, reviewed them at least once on Anki. Not quite 10 a day... 3. To read down the first page of this log to look at my goals, and work out how I did. So, here goes: 2011 - The proper review French - Complete fail. 10 words a day is a huge time commitment - to find the words and create the entries, let alone the reviews. This was an implausible goal. As we saw above, I hit 1350/365 = 3.7 a day at most. 0.5/3 Mandarin - I didn't finish Heisig, as I said in my previous post. I listened to well over 50 podcasts, but haven't really done the reviews to match. I've learned a good number of words, but probably not 500, certainly not actively. 1.5/3 Esperanto - This first goal is very vague, but I didn't do much on Lernu, so I won't say I made this. 1000 words, hah! As I said, this vocab acquisition is much quicker than Mandarin, but I haven't given it enough time to get 1000. 0.5/3 Spanish - This got forgotten due to lack of time. 0/3 Toki Pona - I've forgotten the secret goal, which means it was surely successful... No, seriously, I did about half the course, then didn't have time for a couple of weeks, had switched focus to other languages and now have forgotten it all pretty much. 0.5/3 So, that's a generous grand total of 3/15. Oops... Then, as you're not allowed to double post, I have to put my 2012 plans here as well... Plan of aTac - 2012 Individual As I said at the start of this post, I'm not joining a team this year, as I can't commit the time to it. I do plan to keep learning, however. I'm also switching to hours orientated goals. So there. Anyway, without further ado. Mandarin - 52 hours. Loads of podcasts, more Heisig, possibly trying some scriptorum exercises particularly when I've got a few more characters under my belt. [Edit 01/01] I've also got an idea for speaking practice. French - 20 hours. This will be working on expanding my vocab via Anki (to get an average of 4 words a day), maybe a bit of grammar, and finally getting round to this speaking practise scheme thing. Spanish - 20 hours. I need to do this if I'm serious about moving forwards in the language. I'll take a look at some podcasts, but also going through The Little Prince listening, reading and then Anki-fying vocab. Esperanto - 10 hours. I know. It's nothing over a year. But I really want manageable goals, that I can then expand if I meet them. This is going to be a lot of vocab, as well as some more Lernu to get the grammar down. Toki Pona - 10 hours. Finish going through the lessons. That said, I'm pretty sure this one will not happen, I don't have time, or motivation for yet another language. Conlanging - 10 hours. I want to give this a decent go at least. The time will be spent initially working through http://fiziwig.com/conlang/syntax_tests.html to develop the basic. Then I'll decide where to go from there. Ideally, I will easily exceed at least the first two. But, given previous form, I'm not so sure... [Edit 01/01] I'm planning to update monthly, so as not to waste too much time on it. I will be around the forum a bit more frequently than that however. Edited by LittleBoy on 01 January 2012 at 1:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| LittleBoy Diglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5122 days ago 84 posts - 100 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto | Message 19 of 22 09 February 2012 at 6:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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2012 Update 1: 工 (gōng)
It was all going so well, then I ran headfirst into the snowdrift that is university. At the end of the first week of this year, I had done over 5 hours study, I'd hit ten hours after four weeks, and now I'm just creeping over 11. 天呀! I say 天呀 (Heavens/My word!), because I actually heard someone say it today, a Chinese girl in lectures, she'd almost tripped over or something. Indeed, today has been good for Chinese. In waiting for a class, I started properly practising speaking with my tutorial partner, who is from 中国 (China), just small phrases, simple things. But still, it felt good. I've also been cringing my way through the first episode of Happy Chinese (http://english.cntv.cn/program/learnchinese/happychinese/in dex.shtml) again. It has very high production values, I'm not belittling that, it's just the plots and situations that can induce embarrasment. I understand very little of the dialogue, but do regularly pick up words. More than anything, it's to get me used to the sounds of Chinese, something that definitely needs to happen! Indeed, to that end, I've started going through the FSI Pronunciation unit. When I've had any time for languages, it's mainly been spent trying to recover my Anki reviews - I have several hundred due currently. Other than that, I've been taking little bits of Lingq, a service that I'm slowly coming round too. The other bit of practise that I feel is worth mentioning is on Twitter (@ImRobertOK - my last two initals are OK...). I've been posting vaguely regularly in French, as practise, and as a substitute for actually keeping a full diary. Oh, and I have given English translations, showing what I'm trying to say! Anyway, back to Mandarin. Wow am I falling in love with the language, but wow is it difficult! I called this update 工 because a) it's a simple way to get a tiny bit more practise and b) the character typifies this few weeks for me. 工 means work, something I've had a lot of recently. But that's just term time. And holidays too, really. Just generally lots of work. It appears as a radical in 左 (zuǒ), meaning left, and in the two character phrases 工具 (gōngjù - tool/utensil), 员工 (yuángōng - staff/personnel) and 工人 (gōngrén - worker) among many others, picked as I've learnt the other components already. Apparently it is a pictogram of a carpenter's square. Another point of interest, I've known for years (well before I took up Chinese) that Beijing and Nanjing meant North and South Capital respectively and indeed they do. Běijīng - 北京 and Nánjīng - 南京. I found it cool. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| LittleBoy Diglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5122 days ago 84 posts - 100 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto | Message 20 of 22 29 March 2012 at 5:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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2012 Update 2: Milestones
The problem I have with these updates is I never have any ideas for what to say. No way of making them valuable to anyone else who spends time reading them. And I care about the tumbleweed and occasional stray traveller that reads these. I've studied over 33 hours so far this year, so am on course to complete my objectives. Indeed, my records spreadsheet tells me I'm over 40% of the way for French and Esperanto. Toki Pona meanwhile, is yet to be restarted... I also abandoned conlanging early on (4 weeks in or so). For some reason, I was finding the vocabulary needed a lot more active effort than in other languages (even Mandarin) to stick. That, and it was slow and difficult, with rather too many problems along the way. So I let it fall by the wayside so I could focus more on other things. I have been bitten by the bug again, however, in the last couple of days, so we'll see where this leads. In lieu* of a blow-by-blow account of my studying, or a dry run-through of the numbers, I'm going to discuss milestones. A couple of days a go, I was listening to some music, and discovered that one song had a Mandarin version, namely: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4-pBfp64hg Listening to it first time, I was able to pick out certain words without seeing lyrics. All very simple words "Where are you at the moment?" (I really hope I got this right!), etc. It pleased me. It also got me thinking. Moses (Laoshu50500 on Youtube) makes videos of him "leveling up" - improving his skills by speaking with natives. I like the idea of the game metaphor, and milestones match up nicely with the concept of achievements, or trophies. Anyway, it started me thinking about what kind of milestones could be a used as a sort of checklist for progress in a language. First conversation in the language (even if it's just exchanging greetings), first news article, blog post or chapter you read comfortably without a dictionary, or even first time you pick up a lyric in a song. Obviously long term, harder goals, would be different. This led to the decisions, or possibly realisations, that my long term goals in Chinese are to be able to read literature in the language (particularly modernisations of the Four Classics) and to be able to converse comfortably with natives on a variety of topics. As for Esperanto, my goal is to go around the world, meeting people with the language, partly to convince myself that learning it is not completely pointless! . *I've never seen this written down before, I'm assuming this spelling from the French. Anyway, that's enough rambling for the minute. It's the holidays, so I've got a pile of work that needs doing. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5021 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 21 of 22 03 April 2012 at 3:51am | IP Logged | ||
Don't worry too much about "what to say", LittleBoy. - The "milestones" idea sounds good, but just short notes like the one you wrote about overhearing your Mandarin classmate, or the sections in the same post about the Mandarin word meaning/origins, are interesting too. Some of the logs I "follow" and like best don't necessarily have information that's actually useful for me (for example, they may be about languages I don't have any intention of learning); but it's just nice knowing that other people are plugging away at language learning, and that we can share in / vicariously enjoy their little linguistic victories and discoveries (e.g. Meetups that went well; finding cognates with vocab in a language they already know, etc.) . Congrats on your 33 hours, and hang in there..! Songlines, tumbleweed and stray traveller. Edited by songlines on 03 April 2012 at 3:56am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| LittleBoy Diglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5122 days ago 84 posts - 100 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto | Message 22 of 22 12 December 2012 at 12:31am | IP Logged | ||
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2012 Update 3: TAC Done!
2012 is not really at an end, but, as with so many people, I'm going to ignore poor old December and say it practically is. So, to finally return to this log and this stupid username for a final update. Should explain the "stupid username" comment. As I used to be somewhat short in stature for my age, it was kind of a nickname, "Rob's a little boy". So I took that when I wanted a new internet handle. Then, on Lang-8, a Japanese person reminded me of the name of the atomic bomb the Americans dropped on Hiroshima... After being very annoyed at myself for forgetting and being so thoughtless, I found I couldn't change it on this forum. Ah well. Thank you very much for the comment, songlines, it was nice to get it. Updating this log did occur to me on occasion, but I've been far too busy and there were always a dozen things which seemed more urgent whenever I tried to get around to it. This post is long enough, so I'll properly review my year in a couple of days. The headline is that by the end of November I'd basically finished TAC '12. I'd met all my time goals and absolutely smashed some. The individual plans didn't work out as expected. I'm alright with that, except for Mandarin, but more on that with the proper analysis in my next post. Instead, an anecdote. At dinner at university a few weeks ago I was talking to a Spanish friend doing his second degree (his first was French and English). He's learning Chinese as well and he used to learn Esperanto (but has turned against the language), and we were sitting next to two Chinese natives. In the space of an hour we went through all those languages (I believe I used some Esperanto), and I added the occasional word of German to a German friend sitting on my other side. It was surprisingly tiring, but great fun and gave me a huge buzz. Finally for today, if anyone has any suggestions for things a lone 19 year old can do around Zurich for a day between Christmas and New Year, I'd love to hear them. Bonus points for anything that will get me language practise! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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