|
 |
Estival Ambitions: A Linguistic Odyssey | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| darkwhispersdal Senior Member Wales Joined 5850 days ago 294 posts - 363 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Ancient Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Latin | Message 193 of 242 12 October 2010 at 11:20pm | IP Logged |
|
Congrats on the sleep schedule I have to get mine sorted so I can get more study in before I go to work as I can only get an hour in once I'm there.
I'll have to check out El Internado as I'm curious now 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5952 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 194 of 242 14 October 2010 at 2:44pm | IP Logged |
|
DAY 5/6: Greek, Romanian; German, Persian
Anki Reviews: 837 repetitions in 1.25 hours Kanji Reviews: I don't remember Note: This post was written last night, October 14, 2010, but I had Internet connectivity problems so I couldn’t submit it. I’ve been in a bit of a lazy and procrastinating state of existence lately. I’ve had plenty of time to get all of my schoolwork and language studying done, and while I have a sincere desire to do all of that (well, not really my homework), I seem to prefer to sit around doing nothing for hours on end. Yesterday I managed to do about three hours of studying, which was simply unbelievable. I did about ten or twelve minutes of Romanian from Assimil before school, and then, on a whim, grabbed my SEGR book and took that with me to school (I make a habit of bringing at least one language book with me to school every day). I wanted to do some review by doing the translation exercises (English --> Swedish) over again, so I completed those for the first five lessons of the book while at school during “idle time.” I was working on one before my German class started and someone sitting next to me asked what I was doing. I said that I was translating something, and then whether it was German. When I said that no, it was Swedish, another person by me said “Talar du svenska?” Apparently he had taken a Swedish class a year or two ago at the university here, so he spoke some, and we had a short conversation in Swedish. Once I got home I checked my translations against the version I wrote (and in some cases, had gotten corrected by natives) last autumn. They were mostly the same, with some silly elementary errors on my part, but I also found several mistakes from my earlier translations which I was able to correct. After I did those, I wanted to do something different, so I listened to all of the dialogues from my Beginner’s Swedish book, again, to review. I could understand all of them with ease up until the eighth or ninth lesson or so, which I needed to focus a little more for. After that I listened to them all again while reading the Swedish, and in the rare situation that I didn’t understand the Swedish, would glance over at the parallel English translation. Finally, I began to read the introduction to Assimil: Le Suédois Sans Peine, and got through most of that before having to put it away from sleepiness. I did all of my required time for Swedish yesterday, totaling two hours and 50 minutes. Today I didn’t do as much sadly, and I felt much more slothlike. We get out early from school on Wednesdays, but the bus schedule is crazy during this time period, so I missed the bus as usual, but this time decided to just keep walking and see how far I could get before the next bus caught up to me. All the while I was listening to my Pimsleur Farsi, and I find that when I’m simply walking or biking while listening to it is when I can absorb the material the best, so this was quite beneficial. I ended up walking all the way home because the next bus was so late, and I got through an entire lesson from Pimsleur and half of another during that time. When I got home I essentially sat around doing nothing besides a little homework for several hours, and then did one hour of German, which consisted of doing some vocabulary and writing another letter in German. I brought my Greek Harry Potter book (Ο Χάρι Πότερ και η Κάμαρα με τα Μυστικά) to school today and was reading that for a bit at various points throughout the day. I was reading it aloud to someone during the last couple minutes of my math class, which we had free, and a girl sitting nearby turned to me and said “What Spanish are you in?”, thinking that this must certainly be a very high level of Spanish since she couldn’t understand it. I gently informed her that it was not Spanish, but rather Greek, to which she reacted with an expression of shock. I found that rather amusing. I told my Japanese teacher about Anki (暗記 actually means ‘memorization’ in Japanese) and he has made an account now and seems to really like it. Today he told our class about it and recommended that they all try it out so that they can stop complaining about things like the vocabulary test over food items which we have tomorrow. He also said something along the lines of how he knows it must work, because I use it and I get a 100% on everything in the class… For my language “background music” today I listened mostly to Hungarian, but I also had some Finnish and Korean going for a little while. Now I have to go do all that environmental science and English homework that I left until the last minute – oh why, oh why didn’t I do my Romanian earlier? Tomorrow is Swedish and Japanese. I hope to finish both of those and also work on some Romanian and/or Greek and/or Swahili. :) Καληνύχτα! Noapte bună! Gute Nacht! !شب بخير P.S. Darkwhispersdal, definitely check out El Internado! I think it is definitely worth it. Edited by ellasevia on 14 October 2010 at 2:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5952 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 195 of 242 15 October 2010 at 9:56am | IP Logged |
|
DAY 7: Swedish, Japanese
Anki Reviews: 897 repetitions in 55.82 minutes Kanji Reviews: 185 due; 1 reviewed; 0 restudied Wow, fail. I had a huge homework load all of a sudden tonight, so I've been doing homework up until now, when I've given up and am going to bed (almost 2 AM). Besides the Anki/kanji I listed above I have done no studies today. Just to make it sound a little better, I'll include what we did in my language classes today. In Japanese we had a unit test on food vocabulary and some grammatical expressions using the -たことがある, -がほしい, and -たい forms. Super easy. Afterwards 先生 told a few of us to try reading some graded readers he had recently bought. I read three of them, which were very easy. I read two from level zero and one from level one. Hooray. In German today we started a new unit. (We were previously doing education.) Now we are doing multicultural societies and it sounds interesting. Some components will be making exciting posters to liven up the boring math room that we have to have class in and the final project will be a research essay on some multicultural society, anywhere. I thought I might do the large presence of Albanian and Bulgarian immigrant workers in Greece, but I don't know for sure yet. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5952 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 196 of 242 17 October 2010 at 10:46am | IP Logged |
|
DAY 8/1: Russian, Swahili; Japanese, German
Anki Reviews: 1001 repetitions in 58.34 minutes Kanji Reviews: 273 due; 0 reviewed; 0 restudied Today and yesterday were quite hectic days, and as it turns out, most of my weekend will continue to be like this. On Friday due to my overwhelming homework situation I went to bed so late that I was barely functioning when I awoke, so my mother excused me from my first two classes. Once I got to school I realized I had forgotten my "evidence log" for my English class which I had worked on for several hours the previous night and which we needed to write an essay in class that day. At lunch I ended up having to bike home and back as quickly as possible at peak heat and all uphill to get my stuff, just barely getting to my German class (mostly) on time. I was completely tired out and nearly having an asthma attack. To add insult to injury, it turned out that we had a fire drill in my English class later so we didn't have the essay after all. I was furious, to say the least. So I was quite tired and not exactly wanting to work much once I got home on Friday, so all I really did was watch one episode of El Internado and read a little bit from Ο Χάρι Πότερ και η Κάμαρα με τα Μυστικά. Today I had to take the PSAT in the morning, which ate up a large chunk of the morning, and then later we had to go to a dinner party all evening. Tomorrow we're going on a hike and picnic with someone who was on our Tanzania trip, so combining that with homework and I'm struggling to find time to squeeze in my languages! I have, however, managed to work for three hours and ten minutes on Greek. It was all reading from Χάρι Πότερ. I read through most of the second chapter and also went back and looked up every single unknown word in the first chapter. I'm at a point where if I'm just reading I can understand probably 80% or so of it, grasping the plot and the main points, but most of the details and descriptive vocabulary escape me. As I'm aiming for a near-native level in Greek, I want to know every word that I come across (unless I can't find a good translation or explanation) so I think it's worth the considerable effort. So I'm reading ahead in the story and not looking up anything, and then going back later and analyzing every sentence. I think it's a combination of what people here would call extensive vs. intensive reading, right? I also have the English version of the book for reference if I really don't understand something, which is very uncommon. I just conducted an extremely short reading quiz for myself, whereby I opened to a random page in the middle of the book and read a paragraph. At first reading, I understood everything except two words, but on reexamination I realized that I actually understood one of them, so one word out of 29 unknown (96.5% understood). A second reading test revealed a similar result. Out of a longer passage of 67 words, only seven were unknown to me, and two of these I understood from context (92.5% understood). I think those are pretty good scores, although Teango easily puts me to shame by consistently achieving similar scores in his reading after only a week or so of studying a language! In other news, I watched yet another episode of El Internado this evening. I absolutely adore this show. It's really scary watching it late at night too... I was wrapped under a blanket, cold and frightened, not wanting to take my eyes off the computer screen but at the same time wanting to look around to make sure there was nothing or nobody to jump out at me. I don't know how they manage it, but the writers of this show manage to make almost every episode stand out and seem incredibly pivotal and of the utmost importance. The last one wasn't so exciting, but this one was...I liked it, a lot. These fifth and sixth seasons are by far the best that I've seen so far--hopefully they continue to get better and better! Just some of the names of the episodes invoke such a sense of mystery: "La maldición," "Premonición," "La traición," "El baile de los culpables," "La Leyenda de Eva," "La princesa de hielo," "Alaska." Next up? The season finale is called "Después de la luz." I'm excited. (The medical term here, I think, is 'addicted.') Oh, and my grandparents are going to be arriving back from Greece on Monday night! I'm extremely excited about that too! Sorry for yet another rambling, off-topic "update." Good night. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| zamie Groupie Australia Joined 5063 days ago 83 posts - 126 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Modern Hebrew | Message 197 of 242 17 October 2010 at 11:46am | IP Logged |
|
Hi ell, I just started to read through your posts , and they are really quite
entertaining -) I'm really impressed too, keep going -) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5952 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 198 of 242 27 October 2010 at 12:18am | IP Logged |
|
Well apparently I joined this forum 1000 days ago now. :) 1000 days of blissful language study and discussion. What a wonderful heaven for language enthusiasts this forum is!
I just wanted to check back in and say that I'm still alive. I'm refraining from posting my progress until I'm completely caught up which hopefully will be quite soon. I designed a new layout for my goal sheet this past weekend and somehow this has made a huge difference in how much I've gotten done (or at least how much I think I've done). Some exciting stuff has been happening, so I can't wait to get all up to date and share it. A potential problem is that I'm going to California on Thursday through Sunday to look at colleges, so I am unsure of how much I'll be able to do while there... Until then! 2 persons have 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 199 of 242 27 October 2010 at 1:04am | IP Logged |
|
Congratulations on the 1000-day mark! :)
Which colleges are you looking at? I visited a few in CA myself, but since I'm from the East Coast, I ended up deciding it was a bit too much of a jaunt for me. My favorite was UC Berkeley, although I also checked out the U of SF, UC Santa Cruz, and Pitzer down near L.A. I can't wait to hear your new updates! (P.S. I am also partly posting this message to see if you get a notification about it... crossing my fingers that you do!) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5952 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 200 of 242 27 October 2010 at 1:53am | IP Logged |
|
Thanks. :)
This was a completely last-minute trip because one of my friends is going this weekend and my father decided that it would be a nice idea to tag along, so basically I had no say in the matter. Apparently we're visiting Berkeley and Stanford. I think...? Nope, no notifications yet for me sadly. Ironic, as I was the one who opened the thread on that and everyone else has gotten their notifications but me. :( But thanks for checking. 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. |
