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Estival Ambitions: A Linguistic Odyssey | ||
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| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5953 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 105 of 242 09 August 2010 at 10:30am | IP Logged |
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DAY 6: Japanese, Dutch, Greek
Anki Reviews: 1312 repetitions in 1.17 hours Kanji Reviews: 1232 due; 57 reviewed; 8 restudied Well. Today was okay because I finished all of the actual study that was required and I did my Anki, but I've yet to do my kanji and my...er, fairly important school reading. However, it's very late so it's not good in that respect. :( I woke up really late this morning, at almost noon. However, I got started on language stuff right away, and did most of my Anki. Then I started on German. I did my two hours, consisting of completing lesson four from TYIYG and then studying the first half of the vocabulary from that (there were about 95 words total). For some reason I was particularly excited to learn words like Goldschmied (goldsmith) and Juwelier (jeweler)... For Dutch I did half an hour of listening to MT while out on my bike, and then a little later I used the second half hour to study one of the three vocabulary lists (of about 55 words each) I made from Unit 2 of RIDC. For Japanese I worked out of Ultimate Japanese as usual. I finished up lesson 30 by typing the dialogue and reviewing the grammar a bit, and then I moved on to lesson 31, entitled 就職の面接. I worked through all of that, typing the example sentences from the grammar as usual, and then closed the book. Then I realized, to my dismay that I in fact had TWO hours of Japanese, not just one. So I studied the big vocabulary list from that lesson and then typed the dialogue during that time. For Greek I studied the vocabulary from a previous Livemocha lesson, and then I blazed through several more. I decided that the review section gives me too much aggravation, so I just started clicking through without answering the questions. I don't care that I got a 0% on the exercises because only I can see that and for most of those I didn't learn a single new thing anyways. And the reviews are just so annoying, mainly because of the "magnet" exercise because the Greek translations they have are so inconsistent in terms of wording and vocabulary, and sometimes just plain wrong. Almost done with Greek 201 now, mwahahaha. My books (the Persian and Arabic ones) shipped today, and I'm really excited. I suddenly have a huge urge to learn Persian, so I'm adding it to the list of possibilities for the other-than-Arabic project. Actually, I was seriously considering dropping Dutch so that I can start studying Arabic (or something else, hehe) sooner... And Hebrew has begun to look more appealing, but it's not nearly to the level as the one's I've listed as high priority. Ach, I can't believe this though. If I keep going like this I'll just overwhelm myself and it won't be good... I think I'll try to do some kanji tonight since I have so many to review and I haven't done those for a while. I also need to do some school reading, and if I'm still conscious after all of that, some reading from the book on Finland. Tomorrow might be a little problematic. I have to go to my school for registration (the first day of school is August 18th), which may take twenty minutes or an hour and a half. Then I have to meet up with a French exchange student (I'll definitely be speaking French) who is going to be shadowing me for a few days at the beginning of the school year. I expect that to only take an hour, but I'm not exactly sure. Other than that I'll be working on Swedish, German, and Swahili for my studying. I'm going to start taking a look at Assimil le Suédois Sans Peine for Swedish (or maybe Colloquial Swedish) after studying the vocab from TY Swedish Conversation. I think I'll be doing more grammar workbook stuff for German, and for Swahili I'll be returning to work on TY Swahili... お休みなさい！ Goedenacht! Καληνύχτα! EDIT: Updated kanji. Edited by ellasevia on 09 August 2010 at 10:46am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5953 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 106 of 242 10 August 2010 at 10:29am | IP Logged |
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DAY 7: Swedish, German, Swahili
Anki Reviews: 882 repetitions in 46.19 minutes Kanji Reviews: 1212 due; 0 reviewed; 0 restudied BLEH. And yay. Not as good as I expected study-wise today, but I have an exciting change to announce. NO PEEKING AT MY PROFILE BEFORE YOU GET TO THE ANNOUNCEMENT!!! IT'S FORBIDDEN! Today was Swedish focus, so I began by studying the 50 words of vocabulary from TY Swedish Conversation. That was pretty easy, but I kept getting interrupted. Later I did the first lesson of Colloquial Swedish and also read through that book's pronunciation guide. I haven't looked at the rules for pronouncing Swedish for so long and I just sort of made assumptions (about the pitch accent and stress and such), and surprisingly it was all correct. :) From Colloquial it was a big vocabulary list only because the pronunciation section gave a lot of examples with words I didn't know yet. MUCH LATER in the day I started working from my German workbook, which was extremely boring, but at least I had ruskivyetr to talk to while I was doing that so I wasn't completely bored. It's mostly stuff that I know really well, but I feel like I need to finish this workbook before school starts... For Swahili I worked for half an hour out of Teach Yourself Swahili, lesson 11. It actually wasn't as bad. I think the last lessons that I had done from that were unpleasant because they were finishing up the "casual traveler's" section, so they were trying to cram a bunch of stuff into the last lessons from that section... Finally to the exciting announcement. I have been obsessing all day, and really for a couple days now, about the "other" languages that I have been wanting to learn. Like I said before, I suddenly became infatuated with Persian (all because of that evil ruskivyetr tempting me and then all of these things all over the place making it sound like such a wonderful language) a few days ago, and ever since have not been able to stop thinking about it. I was actually harassing one of my friends on a chat today about coming up with solutions to how to fit it in. And like I mentioned before, Dutch just really wasn't speaking to me anymore. So, I've decided to take on Persian and drop Dutch (sorry Nick!), so whenever I would have been doing Dutch, I'm now doing فارسی! I'll still be doing Anki reviews for Dutch (I think, that might change later) so that I can retain what I know now and actually still progress because it'll still be giving me new vocabulary, but otherwise, my Dutch studies are on hold indefinitely. It's not an easy decision, and I actually feel guilty about it still. I know I keep saying that I was going to have Arabic as my next language (I keep putting it off), but I'm feeling really attracted to Persian. It might not last, but I'm going to do it for now. Also, I was talking to my grandfather about it earlier this evening, and asked if it would be detrimental to learn both Persian and Arabic at the simultaneously. He said no, and that if I were to choose one or the other I should choose Persian (but then followed by "But if you want to learn a Middle Eastern language you should learn Turkish"). So, Persian it is. I bought the Living Language Spoken World course a few days ago, and it's projected to arrive in a couple days, but I think I'll be gone when it comes. Sadness. However, I have the first ten lessons of Pimsleur and also the PDF and audio for the TY Modern Persian course, in addition to an older version (which is falling apart because it's really really old) of the same, but by a different author. Tomorrow is my first official day of Persian study, even though I listened to about half of the first lesson from Pimsleur today. Anyways, I'll probably just be working on finishing the alphabet. I already know some of it from when I was learning the Arabic alphabet last autumn, but I need to be refreshed and learn the differences between the Persian version and the original Arabic version. So, that's my plan for now. Also, I'm going to look into buying a dictionary (and maybe an Assimil course?) once I finish writing this post. No kanji, because I stayed up too late tonight obsessing over Persian and talking with ruskivyetr... Tomorrow. Probably. Tomorrow: Русский, 日本語, فارسی (exciting exotic day!) God natt! Gute Nacht! Usiku mwema! (!شب بخير) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| darkwhispersdal Senior Member Wales Joined 5851 days ago 294 posts - 363 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Ancient Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Latin | Message 107 of 242 10 August 2010 at 9:40pm | IP Logged |
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Good luck with the new language you can always go back to Dutch at a later date :-) Lately I've been attracted to Vietnamese for some reason so understand your obsessing.
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| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5953 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 108 of 242 11 August 2010 at 9:44am | IP Logged |
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DAY 1: Russian, Japanese, Persian
Anki Reviews: 412 repetitions in 23.48 minutes Kanji Reviews: 1245 due; 0 reviewed; 0 restudied Ugh, what an unpleasant day. I finished my main studying, but the day was just not good on the whole and the "extra yet necessary" (Anki/Kanji) just got ignored for the most part. Again. To make a very long story short, I was having some major issues with my brother today, which got me thrown off the computer (and most of my studying today required the computer) for the better part of the day. I hadn't even finished Russian by the time this happened. Whenever something like this happens, I lose all interest in doing things that don't require computer access, and instead I get rebellious and do nothing until I can scheme a way to access the computer (such as I'm doing now). Then we had two French exchange students (I spoke lots of French because their English wasn't great--they were saying by the end how astonished they were and that they couldn't believe that I spoke "completely fluently") and a friend over for dinner, and more miscellaneous delays. So it wasn't very fun at all, except for speaking some French and getting some nice compliments. Now to the few pleasant parts: my language studying! Russian: I did lesson four from TY Russian today. I worked pretty slowly and had to do the vocabulary twice (didn’t finish it this morning when I got interrupted, so I just had to do it a little while ago late at night), so that’s all for my Russian today. However, like always, Russian is such a fun and wonderful language, so it was worth it. :) Persian: I probably spent at least an hour on Persian today. I listened to the second half of the first lesson from Pimsleur, and then worked for about 45 minutes on the alphabet. I can now read it (slowly), but it was a little more complicated than I had remembered when learning it for Arabic, particularly regarding the representation of short vowels (disclaimer: I didn’t learn to read the whole Arabic alphabet before and I was mad at some of the sounds that I didn’t understand how to pronounce, so I didn’t even learn those letters back then…). Persian is exciting. Even the name is so mystical. I can write my name now: فیلیپ Japanese: I only was able to do this a bit ago with access to the computer. Everything takes a lot longer without it (I can make lists and such, but they all have to then be typed into the computer later on, and the Internet is such a useful tool for quick answers), but Japanese especially because I have to look up every vocabulary word to make sure it has the correct kanji, I understand the exact meaning, etc… Anyways I worked on lesson 32 from Ultimate Japanese and finished all except the dialogue and vocabulary. I learned a very interesting word: 過労死 (karōshi), meaning “death from overwork.” That is the exact word I’m soon going to be using to describe my life once school starts up in a few days. I had about 15 minutes left over, which was not enough to study the vocabulary (and I prefer to go through the dialogue once I’ll be able to understand the words :P), so I’ll just tack that onto my Japanese studies later this week. Tomorrow we’re leaving to go camping, but not until the early afternoon. I’ll attempt to wake up early (which will be difficult seeing how late I’m up now) so that I can get my studying for the day done before we leave. I’ll then have about four hours in the car to work on my school reading, with breaks for language. I’m bringing a bunch of books with me so that I can try to keep up with my schedule. I’m not looking forward to coming back again in a few days and seeing the numbers in my Anki and kanji… They’re much too high already! @darkwhispersdal: Thanks for the encouragement! I'm really excited for this new language, and it's so weird how it can just suddenly appear to you and seem perfect. I also took advantage of the fact that ruskivyetr is just starting right now too, so we could be like study partners! Good luck to you if you decide to tackle Vietnamese. That’s probably it. Sorry for what might be interpreted as another complaining/negative post. Hopefully tomorrow and the following days will be better. Спокойной ночи! お休みなさい！!شب بخير Edit: I don't believe that "not under the early afternoon" is correct English... ;) (under --> until) Edited by ellasevia on 11 August 2010 at 9:46am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5953 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 109 of 242 12 August 2010 at 7:28pm | IP Logged |
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Yay an Internet connection in the mountains. I have totaled up my study times and have been working whenever I can. Yesterday I did 30 min of Pimsleur Farsi and 30 more today. Also did 50 minutes of Japanese from Yookoso!, 1 hour of Cortina Russian and 30 min of German grammar workbooks. It is raining lots today so I think I will have time to work. sorry for the bad quality of this post since I am writing it on my phone. Oh and yesterday I typed up some Persian vocab for my new Anki list. Bye!
EDIT: Fixing stuff from when I wrote this on my phone. (Home now!) Edited by ellasevia on 16 August 2010 at 12:56am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| darkwhispersdal Senior Member Wales Joined 5851 days ago 294 posts - 363 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Ancient Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Latin | Message 110 of 242 12 August 2010 at 9:19pm | IP Logged |
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Nice you're even managing to do work on your hols thats dedication :-) oh and I started Vietnamese I couldn't resist its just so fascinating.
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| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5953 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 111 of 242 13 August 2010 at 10:49pm | IP Logged |
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Haha I don't like camping. It is more like a punishment so languages are like a way to cope. So I did 1 hour more of Pimsleur Farsi and Russian each.Then 1.5 hrs of Swedish and some Italian & Georgian too. Also some German. Hopefully more later...
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| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5953 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 112 of 242 16 August 2010 at 6:38am | IP Logged |
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Thank goodness, I'm back. I hate camping so much, especially this time. However, I was luckily able to do quite a bit of studying, considering I was isolated up in the mountains and being forced to do undesirable activities. I'm going to sum up what I did in this post, even though I already wrote a little before. However, it wasn't very informative because I was on my phone with limited battery power and Internet time, so I'll go into more detail now.
I'll start with a list of my languages with the time I was supposed to study and how much I did study: Greek: 3.5 hours/3.5 hours (100%) Persian: 3 hours/3 hours (100%) Swahili: 0.5 hours/3 hours (16.7%) Japanese: 0.85 hours/2.85 hours (29.8%) German: 2.5 hours/2.5 hours (100%) Swedish: 1.5 hours/1.5 hours (100%) Russian: 2 hours/1.5 hours (133.3%) The low figures for Japanese and Swahili have justification. My parents decided to stay a day longer to prolong my torment, so more study time for Japanese, Persian, and Greek were added on last minute. I only had my Yookoso book with me, but I didn’t want to waste a whole two hours of Japanese studying on that horrible book, so I decided to wait until I got home to work from Ultimate Japanese. For Swahili, I simply didn’t have enough time. I did more Russian than needed because I was excruciatingly bored one day on a hike and Russian Pimsleur was the only thing I had left. Greek: I read a little (about seven minutes) from Harry Potter, but then decided to actively study instead. The book I brought with me was Cortina Modern Greek, which I had started last summer but shortly thereafter abandoned after having done eight lessons. During my study time for Greek in the past days, I managed to get up through lesson 17. However, I only made wordlists and didn’t actually study the vocabulary, since I had no computer… Persian: Since my Spoken World Persian had not arrived by the time we left, I had to make due with Pimsleur and Teach Yourself. Before I left in the morning, I listened to the lesson two from Pimsleur, and then the next day I listened to another in the morning. Then I listened to two more on a hike. I was so excited to be able to say something, albeit simple, like “Shomā meyldorin ghazā boxorin?” (that’s how it sounded, I haven’t seen it written so I didn’t try to write it in Persian script), meaning “Would you like some food to eat?” And then later I did some work out of TY Persian, and finished the first and part of the second lessons. I don’t really like that book though. Luckily, my Spoken World Persian was waiting for me when I got home this afternoon, along with Ultimate Arabic. :) Swahili: I’ve only done a little… I did some Swahili listening practice with my iPod when I was bored and my family abandoned me on a trail, and then in the car on the way back I did some of TY Swahili, but I just wasn’t feeling very motivated so I stopped. More later? Japanese: For the 50 minutes that I did on the car ride up into the mountains, I worked from Yookoso, just skimming through for vocabulary. When I do the other two hours later, I’ll be working from Ultimate Japanese. German: For my German I painstakingly worked for quite a while from my German grammar workbook, writing down all new vocabulary in a wordlist. It seemed like it took forever, but luckily I’m almost done with the workbook…I think…hope… Swedish: I got a copy of Colloquial Swedish from the public library so that I wouldn’t have to print off pages and pages of my PDF. During my study time, I went through like three lessons of that, so hooray. Like others, no vocabulary study, just lists. Russian: I worked on Russian on the way up with Cortina, doing lesson five. I learned the instrumental case, which I might need to review, but which didn’t seem all too complicated. My new method of going through those lessons is similar to that of before. I go through the first few example sentences, reading grammatical explanations and trying to understand the patterns. Then I only look at the English translations and try to translate them into Russian in my head, and if I’m wrong I study it and search for the reason until I deem that I will (hopefully) not make the mistake again. Then, like an passive/active wave for Assimil, I’m going to start going back five lessons and translating (as in, writing out) the sentences from English into Russian. By that I mean the example sentences, because I’m too lazy to do so much translating back and forth for the actual exercises (you have to translate Russian to English and then English to Russian, and it’s a pain and takes too long), and the examples are just enough and they’re already written in English, so that makes it easy. So, I did that for lesson one. After I do lesson six in Cortina, I’ll do the same for lesson two, and so on. Then, I did an hour of Pimsleur Russian on a hike when I was extremely bored. Other: On a long bike ride I realized I had nothing for anything that I was actively studying, so I had to make due with other stuff for my language salvation. I listened to two episodes from LearnItalianPod and once those were finished I tried to do a lesson of Pimsleur Egyptian Arabic. It was way too hard and I couldn’t remember the words because I couldn’t find any logic in it, not being familiar with Semitic grammar, so I gave up partway through. It sounded cool though. So, on the entire ten miles back, I listened to and shadowed the first two dialogues from Dodona Kiziria’s Beginner’s Georgian over and over and over and over until I could (or so I thought) understand most of them. I must have scared people—I filthy-looking (camping is dirty), crazed-looking teenager riding his bike yelling things like “ვსწავლობ და ვმუშაობ. ინგლისურს ვასწავლი სკოლაში” (Vsts’avlob da vmushaob. Inglisurs vasts’avli sk’olashi; ‘I am studying and working, teaching English in a school.’) and “თქვენ აქ ცხოვრობთ?” (Tkven ak tsxovrobt?; ‘Do you live here?’). And then I got bored again the next day when my family abandoned me, so I did some random listening stuff for Swahili, German, Russian, and Dutch, which for some reason was still lingering on my iPod. That’s probably it. I have a lot of Anki and kanji reviews to do and of course my Swahili and Japanese, and also that diabolical school reading. I should start. On the subject of school, it starts on Wednesday! I can’t believe the summer has gone so quickly, although it also seems like it’s been a long time as well. In any case, in order to catch up and also to get accustomed to my new scholastic life, tomorrow is the beginning of yet another schedule—my reduced-study school schedule. It’s sad, but it’s how it has to be. Here is how it’ll work: Monday: Russian, (Greek) Tuesday: Swedish, (Japanese) Wednesday: Swahili, (Persian) Thursday: German, (Russian) Friday: Greek, (Swedish) Saturday: Japanese, (Swahili) Sunday: Persian, (German) The main language is the one not in parenthesis. I’ll try to study this one for as long as possible, preferably at least 30 minutes, but really as long as possible like I said. If I have enough time, I’ll also allow myself to work on the second language in parenthesis for however much time I have left. Unfortunately school comes first, and I’m anticipating lots and lots of homework this year, although I’d really not like that… I also now have my school schedule. I have German 3 wedged between the rigorous academic classes of Advanced Algebra 2 and AP United States History, so it’ll be a nice break. Then after that, (AP US), I have Japanese 3, which was to be followed by AP French 5. However, I only signed up for French after being coerced by my French teacher from two years ago, who promised that my teacher from last year would not be teaching it. However, the schedule says otherwise, and I’ll be dropping that class immediately. I gave her the chance all of last year, and I hardly learned any French all year (although I learned a bunch of Italian and German in that class, because that’s what I did while she was pretending to teach). Anyways, I’ll be taking the AP French exam regardless and just not the class. So, tomorrow is going to be Russian along with catching up on Anki/kanji/school reading (oops, I still have a lot of that…and school starts in two days!) and putting vocabulary into Anki and studying in BYKI. I’ll also probably be doing some exploring into Persian with Spoken World tomorrow since I’m very motivated at the moment and excited to see what this beautiful crimson book has to offer. Just look at how pretty it is! 
Oh. Some more random Persian stuff that happened recently: So I was planning on starting to make some BYKI lists for Persian, and discovered to my dismay that my ancient four-year-old version of it does not support Persian (I checked under Farsi too). So I was going to try English encoding with special diacritics to distinguish between different identically-pronounced letters (like ذ, ز, ض, and ظ, for example, all pronounced ‘z’), but it doesn’t work. So it looks like I’m going to have to just write things out without distinguishing the correct spelling and just learn it elsewhere. While I was on the same mental track, I created a convenient custom keyboard for Persian that MAKES SENSE. So the letters mostly match up to their English equivalents and such. It makes me happy. Finally, I forgot to mention that on Wednesday before I left, I bought this Persian dictionary along with Colloquial Persian. I hope they arrive soon! Okay, I think it’s safe to say that this is a long enough post, so I’ll just stop writing and get to working now. Good night! --Philip P.S. Oops, forgot to mention that I'm extending this log until the end of the calendar year, even though it was specifically for the summer only. I’m too lazy to change the title because I can’t think of anything good, and I don’t want to make some random other log for the rest of the year (because now that I finally understand what TAC is, I want to join for 2011) instead of um, yeah, I don’t know where that sentence was going. But anyways, expect to see this log continue growing until the end of December. :) Maybe I should edit the name to be “Estival and Autumnal Ambitions”? I'm actually done now. Probably. ;) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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