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Estival Ambitions: A Linguistic Odyssey | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5366 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 209 of 242 23 November 2010 at 1:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I vote you Hogwarts' new Professor of Multilingual Incantations. Immense work! :)
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| 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 210 of 242 23 November 2010 at 1:44am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thanks hribecek. :) It is a lot of work, but I wish I would have done even more than that. I haven’t done nearly as much as I had hoped the past couple months (since August, really), so I hope I’ll be able to change that soon.My proposed outline for next year is going to be even more intensive, if that’s at all possible.
You mean the one who translates the spells into various languages and derives new ones from Latin and Greek? Fun! On that note, I noticed that they actually do translate some of the spells in Harry Potter. When I was watching the Harry Potter movie in Greek last month I noticed that instead of just saying “expecto patronum” with Greek pronunciation, they translated the spell: “καλώ τον προστάτη” (lit: I invite the protector). Another one from the movie, where Hermione casts a spell on Sirius’s prison cell door to blast it open (I think it was “bombardo” in English) in Greek was just “άνοιξε η πόρτα” (lit: open, door!). Others, however, remained the same: “alohomora” was just “αλοχομόρα.” Can you believe I wrote all that from memory? I’m such a Harry Potter freak. (The new movie is excellent, by the way.) Thanks Teango! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| 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 211 of 242 24 November 2010 at 10:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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wow nice work what did you think of your brief foray into Turkish? I really love the language and I enjoy listening to it on Euronews (admittedly not good subject matter but better than nothing)
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| 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 212 of 242 24 November 2010 at 11:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I liked it, especially because I was quite literally given an excuse by someone else to learn a language a I want, as opposed to being told I should learn such-and-such a language or why do I bother studying these "useless" things at all. I didn't get very far, as most of my studying time consisted of me furtively reading the introduction and first lesson of the TY while pretending to participate in my PE class and then copying down vocabulary after I got bored of watching a video in my history class. I probably learned only about 30 words or so, but it was a fun little activity nonetheless, and a nice break from my focus languages. I do intend to learn Turkish sometime... It's a "medium priority" language on my hit list (but I'm not sure that these priorities have much significance anymore because several of my most recent additions have been from the medium category, skipping over high-priority-rated ones like Arabic). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ruskivyetr Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5291 days ago 769 posts - 962 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Russian, Polish, Modern Hebrew | Message 213 of 242 29 November 2010 at 1:46am | IP Logged | ||||||||
There are spells in Modern Greek? I thought they were just Latin D:! Wow that's a tribute to how much I pay attention to my Latin teacher. 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 214 of 242 29 November 2010 at 12:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hello everyone. I believe it is time for my weekly update. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that what I am about to compose will make little or no sense as it is almost four in the morning as I write this sentence and I can barely keep my eyes open. For the past several hours I’ve been attempting to finish reading up through chapter 25 in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which I put off reading all week), but now that I’m only up through chapter 17, I’ve given up hope that I’ll actually be able to finish and have realized that it would be an even worse idea to try to stay up the rest of the night just to finish it (and probably not understand anything).
Anyways, I could beat myself up about “how little I accomplished this week,” but then I suppose I would realize after writing all of my criticisms that I actually have accomplished quite a lot this week. So, again here is my list of accomplishments since last Saturday. DEUTSCH: 0 hours Gasp! I’m not sure how it happened, but somehow I managed to forget German and didn’t study any this week. How could I be so careless? I don’t know, but I don’t have the brainpower at the moment to find a plausible answer. SVENSKA: 7.5 hours And here is where I make up for my zero hours of German. I’m now completely caught up for where I needed to be for Swedish. So what have I been up to for these 7.5 hours of Swedish bliss? I began to work through Assimil’s Le Suédois Sans Peine this week and I simply adore it! I managed to get up through Nittonde Lektionen / Dix-Neuvième Leçon and am thoroughly enjoying the lessons. What has been particularly helpful for me is that Assimil actually describes the intonation/pitch accent of Swedish quite well and indicates the tones in each word in the text. This is a HUGE help, because before I would usually be left to guess what the pitch accent is for a given word (I suppose I was right perhaps 50-60% of the time?), but now I can practice and sound it out correctly simply by reading their bolded and italicized words! In addition to the Assimil, I also did some passive listening to Swedish radio (understanding more now I think), mostly as a background while I was studying the Assimil lessons. ROMÂNĂ: 3 hours Not quite the number I had hoped for, but it’s certainly better than zero! During these three hours I reviewed my previous lesson dialogues from Assimil Le Roumain Sans Peine and then proceeded with 23-26 of the course. I’ve left a reminder for myself in my notes that I should post the dialogue for lesson 25 here as an example for where I am a quarter of the way through the course, so here it is. Warning: it’s not a very cheerful dialogue! LECŢIA 25: Prefer să mă odihnesc acasă! - De ce eşti trist? Nu te simţi bine? - Mă simt bine, dar sunt groaznic de obosit. - Toată lumea e obosită la sfârşit de săptămână. Nu vrei să mergem la teatru în seara asta? - A, nu! Nu vreau să văd cine ştie ce piesă idioată! - Hai să mergem, sunt sigură că ai nevoie de distracţie. Ce zici de o comedie? Am chef să râd puţin! - Nu sunt dispus să stau la coadă la ghişeu! Dealtfel, sunt sigur că nu mai sunt bilete pentru astăzi! - Putem să aşteptăm la un bilet în plus... - De ce insişti? Ştii foarte bine că teatrul mă plictiseşte. Comediile nu mă fac să râd şi tragediile nu mă fac să plâng, decât poate după banii cheltuiţi. Risc să adorm în fotoliu! - Foarte bine! Eu mă amuz şi tu te odihneşti în întuneric. - Prefer să mă odihnesc pe gratis, acasă, şi să văd la televizor meciul între Steaua şi Dinamo! ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ: 3 hours Here I clocked the same number of hours as for Romanian, but the difference is that I was able to meet all of my goals with these three short hours with Greek and was not for Romanian. Oh well, just more Romanian for me. Anyways, as for Greek I did some extensive reading in Harry Potter for a short period, and then read and wrote for a bit in Greek in the Multilingual Lounge, mainly corresponding with a friendly Polish woman who speaks Greek very well! РУССКИЙ: 2.5 hours Again, a comparatively small amount of time spent on Russian but it was more than enough to meet my goals for the week. I spent this time finishing up everything in the Michel Thomas Russian Vocabulary Course. I’d highly recommend that course to other Russian learners out there (it’s on UZ-Translations if you want to sample it). It picks up from approximately where the advanced course left off, perhaps a bit more advanced even, and continues to teach not only lots and lots of good vocabulary but also a whole lot more grammar (cases, verbs of motion, verbal aspect, etc.) and usage. And to top it off, the instructor, Natasha Bershadski, is a great teacher in my opinion and the students aren’t completely clueless either—they actually seem quite invested in learning Russian! فارسى: 2.5 hours For Persian these 2.5 hours were eagerly spent studying from my Spoken World book for the first time in some time, but didn’t meet my full goal of five hours of Persian. In any case, I studied the vocabulary from lesson three in BYKI, reviewed part of lesson two, studied the grammar section for lesson three, learned the Persian numerals (٠, ١, ٢, ٣, ٤, ٥, ٦, ٧, ٨, ٩), and did some miscellaneous vocabulary entering into Anki. I have in my notes that I should include the reading section from lesson three as an example here, so اينم: شبنم و مانى يک خانه ى زيبا دارند. خانه ى آنها دو طبقه وسه اتاق خواب دارد. دستشويى، هال، سالن پذيرايى، سالن ناهار خورى و آشپزخانه در طبقه ى پايين هستند. يک ميز ناهار خورى بزرگ در سالن ناهار خوريست. لوازم منزل شبنم و مانى خيلى قشنگ هستند. اتاق خواب ها در طبقه ى بالا هستند. حمام در آخر راهرو است. اتاق جيم منظره ى زيبايى دارد. خانه ى شبنم و مانى يک حياط هم دارد. I also wanted to comment on the fact that Persian really seems to be an easy language, and, I never thought I would be saying something like this, but I’m finding that the hardest part about it is actually the alphabet! I can read the Perso-Arabic script much more quickly than when I began to study Persian in August, but it’s still slow-going and bothersome. If the language were written in the Latin alphabet, which would actually suit it much more, it would be so much easier. But what’s the fun in everything being completely easy? KISWAHILI: 4.5 hours Most of my Swahili study this week has consisted of continuing to review the grammar lessons on the Mwana Simba website. This week I studied lessons 19-34. In addition, I did some reading and writing in the Multilingual Lounge and am quite pleased with how easy it is for me to write in Swahili. 日本語: 2.5 hours I really didn’t do much Japanese at all this week. What I counted as studying was just reviewing kanji before I started my new regiment of restudies. Before, at the end of September I made a goal of reviewing 50 kanji per day. That goal died before the week was up. On Thursday I made a seven-week plan to review all of the kanji which I’ve neglected for so many months and so far it has worked out quite well. I’ll include the schedule here: · Week 1 (11/25 – 12/01): 35 kanji per day (245/1391) · Week 2 (12/02 – 12/08): 35 kanji per day (490/1391) · Week 3 (12/09 – 12/15): 30 kanji per day (700/1391) · Week 4 (12/16 – 12/22): 30 kanji per day (910/1391) · Week 5 (12/23 – 12/29): 25 kanji per day (1085/1391) · Week 6 (12/30 – 01/05): 25 kanji per day (1260/1391) · Week 7 (01/06 – 01/12): 20 kanji per day (~1400/1391) ESPERANTO: 1.5 hours Japanese would normally be the end of my “major studies” section, but we have an old friend again in my schedule now. I’ve decided to begin restudying Esperanto in the midst of all the turmoil surrounding it on the forum of late. I really do like the language, and can get quite obsessed with it—it’s just that these obsessions are often short-lived and followed by periods when I have absolutely no interest in even so much as looking at Esperanto and I forget the whole thing. I’ve been reviewing quite a lot (almost 1000 words in Anki and grammar concepts are coming back quickly) and am feeling confident in the language again, but only at an intermediate-ish level. I’ve also done some listening (and some reading) to Gerda Malaperis, the famous mystery story in Esperanto. It’s not too difficult in general, but somewhere around chapter ten it starts getting a lot harder for me to follow by listening alone, so I haven’t progressed since there. More Esperanto news to follow though! NEDERLANDS: 15-30 minutes I’ve gone over a couple Assimil Dutch With Ease lessons and after writing to my Dutch-speaking friend in Dutch I realized how much I still like the language and want to return to it. I can understand it quite well I think, and my writing isn’t all that bad, but my speaking still needs some work. I might just work through some of these Assimil lessons at a leisurely pace when I have time, just like how I am still studying Dutch vocabulary daily with Anki. ITALIANO: 10 minutes Listened to an episode from Learn Italian Pod. Nothing special here, but I’m thinking about revisiting my Italian reader sometime in the not-so-distant future… I think that’s it for now. EEK. It took me approximately an hour to write all of that. Should I even bother going back to bed at this point only to have to drag myself out while kicking and screaming mentally in about an hour to go to school? Ugh. What a pain. Well good night, that is, if it is a good night. (Ha! That reminds me of Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh, which I was watching earlier this week…) Or I guess I should be saying "good morning" as it is almost 5:00 now... Ellasevia Edited by ellasevia on 01 December 2010 at 1:42am 4 persons have 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 215 of 242 01 December 2010 at 2:14am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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DEUTSCH
Today I gave a presentation in my German class about the multicultural/multilingual situation in Belgium. I was unaware of the fact that I was not simply allowed to read the paragraphs off of my poster, so I had to speak unguided, only with quick glances at my poster to remember general topics and dates. I think I can tentatively announce an improvement in my German. A few months back if I tried to speak in German (probably my worst skill at this point) I would have stammered along with many pauses for thinking things out and racking my brains for vocabulary, and making tons and tons of mistakes. Today I noticed that I was able to communicate a lot more fluently and didn't have to think about what I was trying to say quite so much, but still was making an unacceptable amount of mistakes per utterance. I think most of the mistakes had to do with wrong case declension and gender for articles and adjectives (and perhaps the occasional mistake with word order), which are no problem for me at all when writing, but when speaking it's another matter altogether. I did have to stop a couple times for vocabulary, but not as noticeably as it probably would have been a few months ago; I was usually able to recall the word I needed or a suitable substitution by the time I needed to use it in my sentence. The other troubling thing was that I realized I still have difficulty with numbers! Such a simple thing, but now that I think about it, the only languages where I feel completely comfortable with numbers are English and Spanish (although they're not too difficult in Greek, French, Portuguese, or Italian) . Numbers are hard for me in any language, as my performance in my math class indicates, but after two years of studying German I don't think I should still have to think for long before saying achtzehnhundertsechsundneunzig when I see 1896. In Swahili numbers aren't usually a huge problem for me, yet I still confuse the words for "three" and "four" (tatu and nne) almost every time; in fact I started to write them in the wrong order just now too! Ugh, numbers. NEDERLANDS I just "signed up" today for the January Dutch Challenge which several forum members will be taking part in at the beginning of the new year. What a coincidence that I start wanting to learn Dutch again right before an invitation to study Dutch for a month with other forum members is posted! Like I said, I was intending to go through some of Assimil's Dutch With Ease and have completed several of those already and am going to continue in order to review the stuff I already learned this summer. I hope I'm not violating the rules of the challenge by having begun a little early... That's all for now. I've had a crazy couple of days, but so far have been able to keep up at least with my kanji and Anki, which I definitely don't want to fall behind on. Off to study! Edited by ellasevia on 01 December 2010 at 2:15am 2 persons have 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 216 of 242 03 December 2010 at 3:36am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Happy December! It seems like just yesterday that I was writing "Happy November" in this log...
As it's now December, I've kept my promise which I made at the beginning of last month and scrapped all of those lingering hours which I was trying to catch up on for the past two months. Although it was painful to let go of those studying hours, I reminded myself that I'll have a better feeling of accomplishment and achievement when I see that I complete all my goals for once instead of floundering along, 15+ hours behind... Also, if I finish all of the required study, I can always do more if I want and have time. So win-win, I suppose. :) Moving on, I'm extremely excited for the new year! I can't believe how quickly 2010 has gone by and how much I've accomplished, if not exactly the things I set out to do in January. For example, Esperanto, Kiswahili, Nederlands, Русский, فارسى, and Română (and Polski, now that I think of it...) were all unexpected surprises. Next year I'll be participating in TAC like I mentioned before, and I'll be using an interesting study organizational technique of dividing the year into quarters with two focus languages per quarter, as inspired by Sprachprofi. I'm not 100% sure on the layout yet, but I'll put the final touches on that by the end of the month and I'll open a new TAC log in a couple weeks. In addition, I'll be participating in the forum's intensive Dutch challenge in January (see previous post), and I have a strange feeling that Dutch might be here to stay this time... On that subject, in my year layout I've left two possible spaces open throughout the year to substitute a new language in, one starting in April and one in July, and some likely candidates are Nederlands, Čeština, Suomi, and ქართული (I'm going to wait on العربية a while yet). Otherwise, it will be primarily the same languages as now, as well as returning to some of my old languages (Español, Português, Français, Italiano) for weekly maintenance. I think that's all the news for now. Updates on Sunday night. :) Edited by ellasevia on 03 December 2010 at 3:46am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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