|
 |
Estival Ambitions: A Linguistic Odyssey | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5940 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 1 of 242 28 May 2010 at 5:00am | IP Logged | ||
|
Welcome to my new Summer Language Log!
This is a continuation of my previous log (A Linguistic Odyssey), but instead exclusively for my summer studies. I hope, however, that this log will be as cluttered and I won't ramble so much. I really hope to achieve a lot this summer in a variety of languages. I have a special schedule all planned out so that I will study my target languages for at least three and a half hours per day. My current study languages are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Swedish, Greek, Japanese, and Swahili. In July I will end my studies of the first two (and possibly also French) and will then add Russian. I know, it's a lot but I think I can handle it. So I shall now explain my study schedule. Be warned--it is a bit complicated. The first language listed is the main focus for the day. I will spend two hours studying this one. Next is the secondary language, on which I will work for approximately an hour. Finally is the minor language of the day, which will get about thirty minutes. After this, I can study more if I want. Without further ado, here is the schedule itself, which is based around eight days, not seven. Spanish and Portuguese are grouped together as simply "Iberian" (or since this uses the native word for the language, Ibérico). PRE-AFRICA EIGHT-DAY STUDY SCHEDULE DAY 1: Kiswahili, Svenska, Ελληνικά DAY 2: Deutsch, Ibérico, 日本語 DAY 3: Français, Kiswahili, Svenska DAY 4: Italiano, Deutsch, Ibérico DAY 5: Ελληνικά, Français, Kiswahili DAY 6: 日本語, Italiano, Deutsch DAY 7: Svenska, Ελληνικά, Français DAY 8: Ibérico, 日本語, Italiano Note that this is only a temporary schedule. I might have to make some slight changes to it at some point, and in July it will change permanently to a new form to remove the aforementioned culminating languages and to add in Russian. In this case, it will only be seven days and will nicely fit into the time package we call a week. :) In addition to this, I also will be doing Anki repetitions of all my languages every day and reviewing my kanji at kanji.koohii.com and learning 10 new ones per day until the end of the Heisig book. I should finish that around June 21st or 22nd. Now I'll try to briefly summarize my situation for each language. SPANISH: This is a secondary native language for me and I feel extremely proficient in it. Currently my only studies consist of entering new advanced vocabulary from a book into Anki and watching a TV show called El Internado in Spanish. Advanced or near-native fluency. PORTUGUESE: I also feel pretty confident in Portuguese, even though I have only ever spoken to a native speaker in it once, and I wasn't nearly as good then. However, I am still striving to improve my skills and am working through some more brief courses in order to do so. Advanced fluency. FRENCH: This is a a very similar situation to Portuguese. I have also taken French at school and thus have actually had lots of practice using it, even though the class was not very good. I am still working through some stuff to keep studying. Advanced fluency. ITALIAN: I can already understand Italian quite well, but I still need to work on some aspects of vocabulary, grammar, and especially using the language. I'm still working through some beginning coursebooks, but hope to move into some more difficult material soon and achieve advanced fluency by the end of the year. Basic fluency. GERMAN: I have progressed up to an intermediate level so far in German, and am currently trying to work on practicing some more advanced grammar skills while refining and adding to my vocabulary. I will be in a level 3 (or possibly level 4) German class in the next school year, so I hope to be able to reach a level where that is an appropriate fit for me and not be too difficult. Intermediate level. SWEDISH: My Swedish just started as a random idea one day in September and has developed into a full-fledged main study language. I really like the language and am soon going to be finishing my two coursebooks. After that I will probably return to some more drills for listening, in addition to continuing with more general studies. I wish to achieve basic fluency by the end of the year. Intermediate level. GREEK: Greek is a very special language for me, as it is the language of my family's ethnic origin and is actually a secondary native language for me. Through a mixture of exposure and study both with relatives (mainly my grandmother) and on my own, I have managed to reach an approximate level of basic fluency, but I really want to achieve better than this. I hope to finish all of my study materials by the end of the summer and move on to reading actual native materials for further learning. Basic fluency. JAPANESE: I love Japanese. It is the East Asian language and culture which has always fascinated me. Everything about it is so amazing for me and I just love discovering all of its new tricks. I have been pursuing an regiment of study for learning kanji whereby I learn 10 per day (I've been doing this since January). I am now at about #1700 in RTK1 and should finish it within a month. My studies of the language are also very good and I am lucky to have access to a native speaker to practice with once I am capable. High beginner/low intermediate level. SWAHILI: Like Swedish, this was not expected. In January I found out that my family will be traveling to Tanzania in July, and I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to learn some Swahili. I started learning at the end of February, but since it hasn't been a huge priority up until now with school, I have not unfortunately learned much. However, I am now very eager to learn so that I will hopefully be able to practice with natives in Africa in just over a month! Beginner. I believe that is it, however, I should also add one for Russian, just because I will be adding that soon also. RUSSIAN: I really love Russian and the other Slavic languages. Their sound, grammar, writing systems, culture, in short, everything very much appeals to me. I began to study Russian about a year ago and kept up my studies until school started up, but with my courseload I was forced to drop it. I will be starting mostly from scratch again, but I do remember some rudiments of the language such as the alphabet, basic greetings and phrases, regular verb conjugation, and a couple cases. Finally, there will probably be a good deal of dabbling during this summer. Don't be surprised if you see me mentioning the likes of Georgian, Hungarian, Finnish, Arabic, Turkish, Czech, or other exotic delicacies here. So I welcome you to and invite you to join me in a world of crazed and obsessive language studying! Please feel free to leave comments and advice for me here, or correct anything too. I will be grateful for it. I hope that this will turn out to be successful and that I will have many achievements at the end of the summer, knowing a good deal more about these languages. Thank you for reading and apologize for the lengthiness of this first post. I hope that the subsequent ones will not be so demanding on the eyes to get through. --Philip//ellasevia Edited by ellasevia on 11 September 2010 at 10:35pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5940 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 2 of 242 29 May 2010 at 7:28am | IP Logged | ||
|
DAY 1: Swahili, Swedish, Greek
Anki Reviews: 1000 repetitions in 50.8 minutes Kanji Reviews: 328 due; 108 reviewed (see explanation) New Kanji: (1700) 癖, 匿, 匠, 医, 匹, 区, 枢, 殴, 欧, 抑 Today was a pretty good start. It was naturally a bit sluggish and confusing, as is every first full day of a school holiday... I woke up much later than normal and kept feeling odd throughout the day, like I was supposed to be doing something else. Luckily, I really don't have very much summer homework, unlike last year, so I don't have to worry about that too much! My two hours of Swahili were very productive. I began by reviewing the old material which I badly needed to revisit by listening to all of the dialogues over again. Swahili is very slowly becoming easier to understand, but it still takes me a while to "digest" the words and make sense of them before I can understand. This means that I have to stop the audio every sentence or two so that I can catch up. Anyways, I was feeling much better about this at the end of the warm up and I was very excited to continue studying. I then moved on to the fourth lesson from my "Spoken World: Swahili" book (from Living Language). This is what I spent most of the rest of the time on. In this lesson I learned about daily routines and corresponding vocabulary. I also learned the habitual tense, which is very simple (just add hu- to the root of any verb--no personal or tense prefix needed!), and how to tell time in Swahili, which is not (I'm not going to get into the details here, but you can look it up if you want to confuse yourself). I also learned the days of the week, which are based on the Islamic system where Saturday is the first day of the week. This is completely new to me, because all the systems I have been acquainted with so far have had either Sunday or Monday as the first day. Anyways I finished lesson four from that book and finished off the rest of my time by doing some review exercises from some previous lessons. I later moved on to Swedish, and studied that for an hour. Within that hour I went through the entirety of my next lesson from "Beginner's Swedish." I listened to each dialogue several times in my normal way for this book: - Listen to Swedish only. - Listen to Swedish and read the Swedish text. - Listen to Swedish and read the English translation. - Listen to Swedish only. It is very effective I think and I am always pleased to see jumps in comprehension from each step. For these dialogues I was able to understand the gist of everything just from listening the first time, and then looking at the Swedish text cleared up almost everything else. The grammar explanation (comparisons) included in the lesson was review to me since it had already been covered in my other book. I learned the vocabulary in BYKI and entered it into Anki and that was the end of that lesson. Precisely one hour. Finally I had half an hour of Greek to do, so I just decided to start typing up some old vocabulary lists from last summer into Anki (which I only started using in January). I managed to type up seven of those in the time period, and eliminated a bunch of silly/simple words from them that had no business being in a serious word list. Returning to kanji now, I am feeling very pessimistic about it lately. In the past three weeks, I had to do a bunch for school very abruptly and had to keep putting kanji on hold, so now the reviews have been piling up and I'm almost 100 behind where I should be as per my goal of ten per day. Today I had a lot of reviews to do and I simply could not bring myself to do them all. Even doing those 108 was not easy and it was very unpleasant. I hope that my reviews aren't too many tomorrow, because I don't intend to do any more of them tonight. However, since I have Japanese as a study language tomorrow, I might use that time to work on catching up on kanji instead of beginning my new lesson. [sigh] Well that's all for today. Tomorrow is Day 2 on my schedule and I will have German, Iberian, and Japanese as study languages. Usiku mwema! God natt. Καληνύχτα! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Thatzright Diglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5470 days ago 202 posts - 311 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: French, Swedish, German, Russian | Message 3 of 242 29 May 2010 at 10:18am | IP Logged | ||
|
Haha, we have such different perceptions of those fluency levels. This is not meant to be an insult or anything and it's definitely not, but I just think it's kind of weird that you decide one day "Well, I guess I have basic fluency now!" : D I tend to think... well, differently, about it, it's hard to explain how exactly, but it's definitely not just deciding one day that I now am officially fluent in a language instead of not being. I take it you really feel that way, and in that case it's of course correct to do so - sometimes you just get a 'feeling' of being fluent and that's that. Obviously, it's no wonder you get there so fast with your organized study methods.
Oh, and, of course, good luck with the whole bunch! : D Edited by Thatzright on 29 May 2010 at 10:18am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5940 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 4 of 242 29 May 2010 at 3:35pm | IP Logged | ||
No, it's definitely not just a random decision that I make one day. Of course I try to set goals for myself and say to strive to be at a certain approximate level by a certain time, but it's never definite. I usually have to convince myself for a while by mini language gauges that I know enough to deserve that title. I also generally try to equate my definitions with those on the CEFR levels. For example: A1 = beginner (Swahili) A2 = beginner-intermediate (Japanese, maybe Swahili) B1 = intermediate (German, Swedish) B2 = basic fluency (Greek, Italian, Esperanto) C1 = advanced fluency (Spanish, French, Portuguese) C2 = native/near-native fluency (possibly Spanish) For some of these they are at in-between stages where I felt it was an understatement to say that, for example, French and Portuguese are at basic fluency but are not quite up to par with my Spanish, which I consider advanced fluency. In this case I have indeed "rounded up," also so that I would be motivated to truly get to that level so that I am not overstating my abilities. On the topic of overstating abilities, I really try not to do that, and I always cringe when people at school ask me (I have no idea how they find out that I study languages) how many I speak. My answer is usually "it depends on the level." Unfortunately, people at my school apparently have very low standards and always say something that would qualify me to say all of my languages minus Japanese and Swahili. This is rather annoying. I also wish that we could set up our profiles on the basis of more precise definitions, like the CEFR and then this "basic fluency" or "advanced fluency" thing wouldn't be so vague. At some point I might like to take an exam for one of these to "prove" the level, but I have no idea how I would go about doing that. I tried to figure it out a couple times, but kept getting confused. Could anyone here help with this? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5940 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 5 of 242 30 May 2010 at 6:04am | IP Logged | ||
|
DAY 2: German, Iberian, Japanese
Anki Reviews: 315 repetitions in 15.97 minutes Kanji Reviews: 273 due; 203 reviewed New Kanji: (1710) 仰, 迎, 登, 澄, 発, 廃, 僚, 寮, 療, 彫 Today I was feeling a bit lazy and still sick and coughing a lot. Earlier in the morning I did do quite a bit of kanji review, but after doing over 200 reviews, I couldn't bring myself to do the remaining 70. I'll try to catch up on those tomorrow, assuming I don't have another million reviews to do. A bit later in the afternoon it dawned on me that I still hadn't even begun my two hours of German. I started off by typing up the remaining vocabulary lists into Anki from my school's German 1 textbook. I had started these last year, but then moved on to a different book. Now that I'm going to take German 3 (or possibly 4) at school next year, I thought it would be a good idea to review all of the material covered in levels 1 and 2. After that, I did a chapter from my German Grammar Drills book. It's all really simple stuff, in this case the accusative case. It was good practice and I did learn a couple new things that I was unaware of before. I then added the new words used in that lesson for examples into Anki. I only did a tiny bit of "Iberian" today because I found out last minute that I had to go to my cousin/uncle's (things get a little fuzzy, depending on if we're using the American or Greek definitions) high school graduation party and had to leave. I did a couple lists of Spanish from my vocabulary book. In the car ride down to the party, I read the introduction and beginning material (mostly) for my "Beginner's Georgian" book, which was pretty interesting. I was just beginning to read the actual first lesson when we arrived. Instead I brought in my Japanese book and fortunately my grandfather's native Japanese friend was there and she kindly went through the entire lesson with me and helped me to understand the stuff. I actually got through the entire lesson, minus typing up the dialogue into Japanese script and studying the vocabulary, which I was not expecting to do. That's about all for today. Tomorrow I'll have French, and then two repeats from yesterday--Swahili and Swedish. I'll try to do a little bit of Iberian to make up for today too. Gute Nacht! Buenas noches!/Boa noite! お休みなさい！ 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5940 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 6 of 242 31 May 2010 at 6:45am | IP Logged | ||
|
DAY 3: French, Swahili, Swedish
Anki Reviews: 341 repetitions in 18.82 minutes Kanji Reviews: about 150 due; about 100 reviewed New Kanji: (1720) 形, 影, 杉, 彩, 彰, 彦, 顔, 須, 膨, 参 Today did not turn out quite the way I wanted it to. Earlier in the day I had some stuff come up that made it so that I couldn't really start studying until later in the afternoon again, and I still haven't finished. This morning, I was watching a little bit of TV on the foreign language channel, of course. It happened to be in Albanian, which I had not really heard before. The language always looks interesting, but that does not necessarily mean it will sound nice. Albanian sounded to me like a mix of European Portuguese and Russian, both of which I like. However, Albanian is not as pleasing to my ears. Perhaps it has to do with the presence of the English-like 'r' sound, which I really dislike. Irish also has the same sound I think, and I don't really like the sound of that language either... Later I had to go to the doctor's and on the way I did some Georgian reading. I learned the numbers from 1-10 (erti, ori, sami, otxi, xuti, ekvsi, shvidi, rva, tsxra, ati) and listened to the language some more. I lightly read through the grammar explanations for the first lesson, so I now know how to conjugate verbs in the present tense for the first and second person singular. These Georgian consonant clusters are amazing. In the doctor's office while waiting, I shadowed the first lesson's dialogue. Then later I listened to most of the dialogues of the later lessons too while reading the English. I was able to learn a few words and grammatical things from this, and I also learned that Georgian has more loanwords than I expected! I then began to do my French studying. First I went through one chapter of my French Vocabulary book, and then I got bored... So I put on an episode of El Internado, which is okay since it's Spanish practice. After that I continued with my French by finishing a lesson from Teach Yourself Improve Your French and then doing another chapter from the vocabulary book. Now I am going to go upstairs and attempt to get some Swahili and Swedish study done so that this day's goals don't all fail... Tomorrow: Italian, German, Iberian Bonne nuit! Usiku mwema! God natt! Edited by ellasevia on 31 May 2010 at 6:45am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5940 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 7 of 242 01 June 2010 at 12:01am | IP Logged | ||
|
DAY 4: Italian, German, Iberian
Anki Reviews: 414 repetitions in 22.06 minutes Kanji Reviews: 153 due; all reviewed New Kanji: (1730) 惨, 修, 珍, 診, 文, 対, 紋, 蚊, 斉, 剤 I knew that I probably wouldn't get much done today, so it's not as bad a shock as it could have been if I hadn't seen it coming. Today is a holiday in the United States so my parents were throwing a party, also to celebrate the end of the school year and beginning of the summer. Well, this means that everyone in my house has been going crazy and we've been working nonstop to prepare for it. Ugh, I don't like parties. So, this morning I did a very productive two hours of Italian until it was interrupted by party preparations. I finished off a lesson from Ultimate Italian which I had started a week or two ago and then proceeded to listen to the newest production of LearnItalianPod, which was about Italian slang expressions. Then I typed up one chapter from my Italian Vocabulary book, and finally finished up with doing one more lesson from Ultimate Italian (but not quite finishing--I still have to finish studying the vocabulary). Later, in my lunch break from helping with party preparations, I worked on typing up Portuguese vocabulary from my frequency list. I did half an hour of that and that was nice. Oh--an update from last night. I was able to do an hour of Swahili study from the TY Swahili book (lesson 4), learning about all sorts of food vocabulary, the (ji)/ma class, object infixes, and so on. It was very nice and all I have to do to finish that lesson is to learn the vocabulary. But since I have a hard time learning Swahili vocabulary, I gave up on learning it all at once in BYKI, and just put it into Anki to present to me at a pace of 10 new words per day. This is much more effective. I did not do my half an hour of Swedish, though, because it was too late. I need to find time to do that, along with my hour of German from today. For the former I intend to begin going through and deciphering the beginning text from my SEGR (Swedish: And Elementary Grammar-Reader) lesson, to finish on my Swedish focus day. For the latter, I intend to go through as much of my German Grammar Drills book as I can, since I will not have access to the computer later to type up vocabulary. Oh, and lately I've been conflicted about whether or not I want to take up Georgian as an actual study language. I've been flirting with it, and have moved it up to high priority, but since I'm starting Russian in July I don't think I'll have time for another difficult language. I really like Georgian though and look forward to learning more about it, even if I'm not actually studying it. That's all for now! Tomorrow is Day 5 of the schedule and is going to be Greek, French, and Swahili. Ciao! Tschau! Tchau! (hehe, I used the same way of saying 'bye' in all the languages for today!) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5940 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 8 of 242 02 June 2010 at 6:46am | IP Logged | ||
|
DAY 5: Greek, French, Swahili
Anki Reviews: 521 repetitions in 28.31 minutes Kanji Reviews: 99 due; all reviewed New Kanji: (1740) 済, 斎, 粛, 塁, 楽, 薬, 率, 渋, 摂, 央 Today was not great. I woke up late because of getting tired out from the party and thus got a late start on everything. Then we had to go and get immunized for all sorts of colorful diseases like yellow fever (oh, wow, I didn't even notice the pun on colorful when I was first writing that) for our upcoming trip to Africa, and that took longer than expected. The morning before the doctor's appointment (why I am I having so many of these lately!?) was spent doing kanji and Anki reviews and beginning my Greek lesson from my book, Νέα Ελληνικά, by Theodore Papaloizos. While waiting at the appointment I tried to do a bit of French, but only did about fifteen minutes. After we came back I procrastinated. A lot. This site is really a problem because of that. I had installed a program that would limit my time on here, but then I would find myself in the middle of writing a complicated post and then it would suddenly shut down the tab and all my writing would be lost. I got tired of that happening, so I disabled the program, and now I'm spending too much time on here again. Sigh. In terms of Greek, I did two lessons...mostly. Lesson 29 from my book was nice and easy, and not complicated in terms of vocabulary. That was all done in less than an hour. Then lesson 30 was huge. It had a lot of unknown vocabulary--about 80 words. I didn't have time in my two hours to do more than read through the entire thing and make my vocabulary lists and type it all into Anki. I'll have to study the vocabulary on Day 7, when I have Greek again for an hour. Like I mentioned before, I started doing some French at the immunization office, doing a lesson from TYIYF (TY Improve Your French). I am going to finish doing the remaining 45 minutes of that once I finish this post. I then used my 30 minutes of Swahili to type up my vocabulary from the TY lesson I studied a couple days ago into Anki. Yesterday: I did do my German. I did the lesson from GGD (German Grammar Drills) on the dative case, also very easy. I had 10 minutes left after I finished that, so tomorrow I might add the unknown words from that into my Anki list. I did not have time for Swedish, but if I have time tonight after my French, I'll see about doing that. It WILL get done eventually. I hope things stop being so crazy soon. I thought summer was time for not having tons of unpleasant stuff to do and having to be flung all over town and such... I know I do have a couple more doctor's appointments coming up within the next week (my doctor is crazy!) and then an SAT II test for world history on Saturday. And THEN I get the pleasure of starting driving school, which I am really not looking forward to. Eight and a half hours a day for four days. What a joy. I'll have to remember to thank my dad for that. Ah, well, let's cast this negative attitude away for now and focus on some nice French study! Tomorrow: (Day 6) Japanese, Italian, German Καληνύχτα! Bonne nuit! Usiku mwema! 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
