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Estival Ambitions: A Linguistic Odyssey | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| TixhiiDon Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5262 days ago 772 posts - 1474 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese, German, Russian Studies: Georgian | Message 233 of 242 24 December 2010 at 10:36am | IP Logged | |||||
In a word, no. とても面白いです is fine. If you want to emphasize "very" you can write (and say) とっても. It's not strictly grammatical but everyone does it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| darkwhispersdal Senior Member Wales Joined 5838 days ago 294 posts - 363 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Ancient Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Latin | Message 234 of 242 24 December 2010 at 4:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I like Russian poetry and have recently gotten into Japanese poetry if only I could read the original. I'm slowly learning Russian songs.
Anyway good luck with the studying 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 235 of 242 24 December 2010 at 9:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
ありがとう。 I'm not sure if I was clear about what I was asking, but I was referring to も meaning 'also.' I was hoping for the sentence to read "They're a bit difficult, but they are also very interesting." But I suppose that you can't say it like that 日本語で。 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kounotori Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5142 days ago 136 posts - 264 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Russian Studies: Mandarin | Message 236 of 242 24 December 2010 at 11:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
You could say something like 「少し難しいけど、とても面白いです。」. 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 237 of 242 27 December 2010 at 5:35am | IP Logged | |||||
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It’s been a couple days now. Christmas has now gone by, so I thought I might update to say what’s new.
For Christmas I got a nice Romanian dictionary which I needed badly, a book about the history of several languages (I don’t remember the title and am too lazy to go find it), and a DVD course on linguistics, specifically the history of language. I also got an iPod Touch, which has enabled me to work in many places where I couldn’t or where it was difficult before! Yay! I’ve been able to load a bunch of language books that I have as PDFs on there, so I can now access those without having to use the computer or print them out which is really nice. I can also review vocabulary and kanji without having to be tied to the computer, and all sorts of other things. Everything just got so much easier! I haven’t yet memorized any new poems, but I’ve selected two haiku for Japanese (from my Ultimate Japanese book), both by a person called Basho. Here they are: 古池やかわず飛び込む水の音 (Furuike ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto) 荒海や佐渡に横多雨天の川 (Araumi ya Sado ni yokotau ama-no-gawa) I’ve also posted the introduction to my TAC log finally, after starting to write it about a month ago… Go Team چ! In the next few days I’m just going to be keeping up on kanji and Anki, memorizing a couple new poems, and continuing to relax before the beginning of 2011. I’ve realized that it’s futile to study now that I’ve gotten into this “it’s okay, you can relax now” mindset. But as soon as it’s January I’m going to start up intensively again. Yay! 2 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 238 of 242 29 December 2010 at 8:53am | IP Logged | |||||
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Since I’m thinking that not much is going to be happening in terms of my language studies in the next couple of days (ahhh laziness), I thought I might as well sum up my experiences from 2010 now. I know that this log doesn’t include the first five months of the year, but that’s okay.
The goals I wrote back at the beginning of 2010 were a bit nonsensical, giving rather vague levels and just listing resources I wanted to finish going through. I had to adjust these throughout the year and I originally didn’t account for all of the languages I picked up along the way, so these are essentially useless for comparison (they’re here, if you really want to see them). Thus, I will just give an overview of how the year went for each language. SPANISH: Advanced Fluency --> Near-Native Fluency (GOALS MET) I don’t know if I have any measurable progress in my Spanish this year, but I feel that I’ve probably progressed at least some. I’ve gone through most of a vocabulary book for some more advanced words and have those going in Anki, and watch the Spanish telenovela El Internado pretty regularly. When I watch that I can understand probably 99% without any conscious effort, and I miss only a couple words per 1.5-hour-long episode (which I usually understand from context anyways so often I don’t even notice that I didn’t know the word). I passed the AP Spanish Language Exam in May with a grade of 5, the highest score possible. In addition to this, I’ve been able to switch from a strange mix of Latin American accents to a Castilian accent (the one with the ‘th’ sound for ‘z’ and soft ‘c’), which I really enjoy. I’m pretty happy with my Spanish…now just to maintain it! FRENCH: Basic Fluency --> Advanced Fluency (GOALS MET) I think my French has come along very nicely this year as well. I worked on it fairly intensively during the first half of the year, and then trailed off after July. I felt like my French abilities really increased a lot and peaked around the middle of June when we had a French family staying at our house, and I had a semi-immersion situation for about a week, and could communicate pretty effortlessly with them. (This same family has now invited me to spend some time in France with them next summer, and I’d really like to go!) I’ve been largely ignoring the language outside of my French-based Assimil courses for Romanian and Swedish so my skills have noticeably deteriorated since this summer, but I’m going to do a big review in the beginning of 2011 and revive (and maintain) my knowledge of la langue française. PORTUGUESE: Basic Fluency --> Advanced Fluency (GOALS MET) Like French, I worked on Portuguese intensively up through the end of May, at which point it became less of a focus, and then in August I dropped it altogether, along with French and Italian. Nevertheless, my abilities in Portuguese have progressed noticeably and can now claim an advanced level of fluency in the language (although, like French and Italian, it has deteriorated quite a bit since August). This is perhaps demonstrated by the fact that I can now understand spoken European Portuguese as well (I realized this when I was able to follow a speech by the President of Portugal in Portuguese), whereas previously it was almost incomprehensible to me, being familiar with only the Brazilian dialect. In 2011 I aim to revive and maintain my Portuguese, and possibly even try to switch accents/dialects to European Portuguese! ITALIAN: Intermediate --> Basic Fluency (GOALS MET) In 2010 I finally reached Basic Fluency in Italian, which was an exciting achievement. I reached this level significantly later than I had hoped when I began studying it in December 2008, but I was nonetheless pleased with my milestone. I continued studying the language up through August, when I finally admitted that I didn’t have much of an interest in continuing anymore. I would have liked to reach even advanced fluency even, but given some of my other achievements and that did at least get to basic fluency, I’m perfectly happy with my Italian for now. In 2011 I intend to review and maintain my level, and maybe even improve it a little. GREEK: Intermediate --> Basic Fluency (GOALS MET) Being of Greek descent, being able to finally say that I speak Greek is one of my proudest achievements of 2010. I’d studied Greek on and off for a few years, but up until the last months of 2009 I had never really put much effort into it. This year I changed all that: I worked on it faithfully all year and now I can truly say that I speak Greek. The last time I was in Greece in 2009 I was able to communicate somewhat haltingly, so I’m excited to see how much I’ve improved since then when I go again this coming summer. I can understand quite well—as I read my copy of Harry Potter in Greek, there are plenty of unknown words but I understand the vast majority of what is going on without having to focus a whole lot. I still need to expand my vocabulary and improve in general, but I think 2011 will be the year when reach Advanced Fluency στην ελληνική γλώσσα. GERMAN: Intermediate --> Basic Fluency (GOALS MET) Looking back at my writing in German from the last months of 2009 and the beginning of 2010, it’s hard to believe how far I’ve come. I literally cringe when I read what I was writing back then. Needless to say, I’ve come a long way in German this year. After a bit over two years of study I think I can claim Basic Fluency in the language now, and was able to skip three years of German classes at school to enter the level 4/5 class in August. Even since then (I have a great teacher) my abilities have improved a lot and can read, write, listen, and even speak with some confidence even though I still make many mistakes. I'm definitely continuing with Deutsch in 2011 and aiming for Advanced Fluency. Hooray! SWEDISH: Low Intermediate --> Basic Fluency (GOALS NOT MET) I didn't progress as much as I'd hoped in Swedish this year...or maybe I did, but my standards for “Basic Fluency” have just been raised since last December. Other languages took priority somewhat unexpectedly and I didn’t spend as much time on Swedish as I had predicted. I have certainly made progress however, despite not being able to update my level in my language profile. Swedish, along with Persian, will be my main focus for the first three months of 2011, and I hope to reach a level of Basic Fluency by April. If I don’t, that’s fine too; I’ll simply keep studying this lovely, charming language until I get there…and maybe even beyond. :) JAPANESE: Beginner --> High Intermediate (GOALS NOT MET) Although I did not fully reach my goals for Japanese, that is not to say that I didn’t make a TON of progress this year. And really it’s just the high intermediate that’s tripping me up; while I would probably say I’m at an intermediate level, I would definitely not say it’s a high intermediate, but rather a low or mid-intermediate. One of my biggest achievements was finishing RTK and learning all of the kanji. Through a series of unfortunate events coinciding with the very difficult last lessons of the book and followed by a two-week trip to Africa however, the number of reviews skyrocketed and I abandoned kanji for several months. I’m now in the process of review, and am making quick progress in reviewing them, so my time was quite well spent in studying them for the first half of the year. In addition to kanji, I progressed in the actual language, enabling me to skip two years of Japanese at school and to pass the first semester with almost a 100% in the class while doing almost no work (actually I did in German too…). I can communicate and understand in a basic way and intend to build on this base in the coming year to strengthen my abilities in Japanese so that I can try to springboard up to Basic Fluency by the end of 2012. I adore Japanese and very much look forward to my continued study of it. My original goals for 2010 only included goals for Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, German, Swedish, and Japanese. (Actually there were some for English too, but those were silly and not worth spending time on.) The rest of the languages in my studies list were all unexpected surprises along the way. I’ll chronicle my progress in them too, but I should also note when I started each to gauge how much time I had to reach my current level. Esperanto: Mid-January through May; started again at the end of November Swahili: End of February to present; didn’t study much from March-May or August-September though Dutch: End of June to beginning of August; started again at the beginning of December Russian: Beginning of July to present Persian: Beginning of August to present Romanian: End of August to present ESPERANTO: “False Beginner” --> Basic Fluency (GOALS SOMEWHAT MET) Esperanto was the first deviation from my prescribed path in 2010. I rediscovered the language (after having studied it a couple times before) in mid-January, and decided to keep it. Five months later, by the end of May I had reached a level of Basic Fluency, as it’s a very easy language. Unfortunately I ignored it largely for the next six months and I had to downgrade my abilities to intermediate, where I’m at now. I’ve picked up the language again and everything is coming back very easily, so I hope to regain my previous fluency level in the coming months. SWAHILI: Complete Beginner --> High Beginner (GOALS MET) Swahili was one of the most surprising bits of my year. I distinctly remember deciding in January that Swahili was going to be one of my higher priorities and that I’d hopefully get around to it within the next couple years, and then a month later I found out that we’re going to Tanzania in July. I knew very little about the difficulty level of the language and didn’t know how much I wanted to concentrate on it, so I only set the goal of a high-ish beginner level by the end of this year. I vastly overestimated the difficulty of Swahili (nor did I predict how much I would grow to love it) as I believe I’ve reached a solid intermediate level now. By July I had gained enough knowledge to communicate somewhat with the local people and this was a great experience—my first time studying a language specifically for a trip. Now I can read and write fairly comfortably in Swahili and my listening comprehension isn’t that bad either, but I wouldn’t say it’s comfortable yet. My speaking is very slow-going since it’s difficult to form all of the agglutinations quickly enough while speaking, but somehow it’s not a problem to understand them when reading or listening, or forming them while writing. I’m very happy with my Swahili and am aiming for basic fluency in 2011. DUTCH: Beginner --> Basic Fluency (GOALS NOT MET) Yay, Dutch! Dutch is such a great language. I originally began studying it at the end of June in preparation for being in Amsterdam for a grand total of eight hours on the way to and from Tanzania. (My goal there was to be able to hold a short conversation in Dutch with someone, which I did with an employee in a bookstore at the airport.) I discovered that I really liked the language, so I continued with it even after returning from Africa and my goal was to reach basic fluency by the end of this year. That was very unreasonable and I don’t know quite what I was thinking…even if I had not decided to drop it in August I don’t know if I would have made it. But I’ve enjoyed working with this language anyways and I’ll continue with it into 2011. RUSSIAN: “False Beginner” --> High Beginner/Low Intermediate (GOALS MOSTLY MET) I adore Russian. Slavic languages in general are just so fascinating, so I’m glad to finally be studying one in earnest. I finally (re)started Russian in July and have been working steadily ever since. I wanted to reach a high beginner or low intermediate level by the end of 2010, which I think I’ve accomplished (the former). I think I’ve made a lot of progress in these almost six months and am excited to see where 2011 takes me with Russian. I’m even thinking about beginning another Slavic language, probably Polish or Czech, but I’ll try to refrain from that for a while. 2011 is about finishing prior linguistic commitments and improving the languages I already have going. PERSIAN: Complete Beginner --> Higher than complete beginner (GOALS MET) Persian was another language that just appeared out of nowhere. I suddenly became interested in it right around the time I was considering dropping Dutch (sadness) and jumped at the opportunity to snag Persian. I knew very little about the language so it’s been interesting wading through the beginning stages of it. Like Swahili, it’s been moving slowly for the first few months, but I’m hoping that it will pick up soon as it will be one of my focus languages for the first part of 2011. I can construct simple sentences and understand simple things, but not much more than that. I’ve finished Pimsleur’s Farsi (it only has 30 lessons) and can comfortably understand that material if that gives you any idea of my level… I really don’t know how far I’ll get in 2011, but a solid intermediate level would be nice. ROMANIAN: Beginner --> Intermediate (GOALS NOT MET) I love Romanian too. Perhaps the Slavic influence on the language is why I consider this to be my favorite Romance language, but it’s been fun learning it, whatever the reason. I also have a Romanian friend to practice with and the prospect of going to see her in Romania next summer, so that has been good motivation. My goal of a B1 level was way too high (I forgot about the little thing called school), but I think I’ve reached approximately the same as my Russian so probably a low-ish A2…? I’m hoping for Basic Fluency by this time next year, so here I go… Those are all the languages that I’ve actually studied this year. But there were some other ones that deserve some mention as well. POLISH I flirted with/studied Polish for about a month this spring, partly as an experiment to see how good the Michel Thomas Course is, partly because I had no other language material to listen to at the moment on my iPod, and partly because I was getting just a tad bored with the languages on hand and wanted to try something different. I really enjoyed learning some Polish this April/May and it helped kindle my motivation for beginning with Russian later on in the year. I can still remember just a little bit of what I learned (Jeszcze nie mówię dobrze po polsku, ale rozumiem trochę ponieważ teraz uczę się języka rosyjskiego, i obie są języki słowańskie.) I’m anxious to return to a West Slavic language, and am thinking Polish might be the one, although I was planning on Czech. Hm… I’d better move onto the next language before I add this one to my profile! GEORGIAN Thanks to TixhiiDon and ruskivyetr, I discovered the awesomeness of the Georgian language this year and was able to delve into its mysteries a little bit. I learned the alphabet (which is half-forgotten by now), some basic phrases, and shadowed some dialogues from Beginner’s Georgian over and over so that I can now recite them from memory and understand them… Anyways, Georgian is definitely an interesting language which I’d like to return to in the future. Here’s my attempt at saying a few phrases in Georgian: გამარჯობათ! თქვენ აქ ცხოვრობთ? ძალიან სასიამოვნოა? ჩემი სახელია ფილიფ. ამერიკელი ვარ და სტუდენტი ვარ. თქვენ ქართველი ხართ? ლაპარაკობთ ინგლისურად? ვლაპარაკობ ცუდად ქართულად. გმადლობთ! ნახვამდის! კარგად იყავით! FINNISH I’ve been interested in Finnish for a while, so this autumn I decided to start learning some words/phrases in the language to curb my wanderlust and to prevent myself from taking on another language. It seems to be effective as I still haven’t burdened myself with an eleventh active study language (although Polish came veeeeeeeery close a moment ago) and I’ve learned a little Finnish too. I can now say a tiny bit in Finnish, although it’s very underwhelming, I must warn you: Hyvää päivää! Nimeni on Philip. Minä ymmärrän hieman, mutta en osaa suomea hyvin. Puhutteko englantia? I believe that’s it. I also took a look at some other languages such as Lithuanian, Basque, Turkish, Hungarian, Slovenian, Arabic, Korean, and Nahuatl, but not enough to come up with anything to say about them in particular. Well, here’s to a wonderful year with lots of successes and happiness! I hope that next year will be just as fruitful, and that all of you have great success in all of your linguistic endeavors. Thank you very much for all you help, support, and encouragement throughout the year. From now on, anything that happens will be recorded in my new TAC log, which I linked to previously. Ellasevia 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ruskivyetr Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5279 days ago 769 posts - 962 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Russian, Polish, Modern Hebrew | Message 239 of 242 29 December 2010 at 10:08am | IP Logged | |||||
YES. I was mentioned in your final post. MIGHT I ADD THAT I INTRODUCED YOU TO PERSIAN AS WELL. And corrected your Polish. CONGRATZ. Good job ellasevia. HAVE A GREAT NEW YEAR. HUZZAH! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| TixhiiDon Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5262 days ago 772 posts - 1474 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, German, Russian Studies: Georgian | Message 240 of 242 29 December 2010 at 10:34am | IP Logged | |||||
Your Georgian, needless to say, is perfect! Thanks to you too for being an inspiration throughout the year. 良いお年をお迎えください。来年もよろしく お願いします。 TixhiiDon 1 person has voted this message useful |
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