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Estival Ambitions: A Linguistic Odyssey | ||
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 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 41 of 242 23 June 2010 at 6:48pm | IP Logged | ||
Exactly--the only problem was that it was 12:30 AM (past midnight) and everyone was already asleep, so they wouldn't have taken kindly to me doing that. Unfortunately. Thanks Teango! Edited by ellasevia on 23 June 2010 at 6:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5145 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 42 of 242 23 June 2010 at 8:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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Congratulations on your great achievement!
2,042 kanji in a year: that sounds impressive! Keep up the great work, Emme 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 43 of 242 23 June 2010 at 8:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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Congratulations so what's the next challenge :-)
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 44 of 242 24 June 2010 at 1:00am | IP Logged | ||
Not forgetting them. :) Thanks to you too, Emme. 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 45 of 242 25 June 2010 at 8:54am | IP Logged | ||
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DAY 1: Swahili, Swedish, Greek
Anki Reviews: 579 repetitions in 28.56 minutes Kanji Reviews: 507 due; 0 reviewed New Kanji: (2042) 魂, 魔, 魅, 塊, 襲, 嚇, 朕, 雰, 箇, 錬, 遵, 罷, 屯, 且, 藻, 隷, 癒, 丹, 潟, 丑, 卯, 巳 What a pathetic couple of days I've had! I've been very tired, so it's understandable, but it's still not acceptable. :) Yesterday I was supposed to do my Day 8 (Iberian, Japanese, Italian) schedule, but I woke up late and then had to quickly bid our guests goodbye before having to run off to volunteer for several hours. After coming home, I was very tired and did not really feel like doing anything besides...well, nothing. I finished my Italian and that was about it. Today was similar, but I didn't have as good of an excuse. I can say that I did a good deal of thinking about how I should start working...it's just that I usually didn't follow through with those thoughts. In any case, here is my update on what I've done. I have now done one of the two hours of Iberian, filling it with Spanish because I didn't want to do Portuguese. It was just not appealing to me at the moment when I had to make the decision. I should also note that while having an internal war of whether or not I should start my studying, I watched an episode of El Internado which was, of course, in Spanish. I did my hour of Japanese, (which was actually more than an hour because I just wanted to be all done with the lesson, but whatever) and I am proud to say that when I was typing up the dialogue I could understand it very easily! I only had to refer to the English a couple times, and that was just to make sure that I understood correctly. It was post office-themed, about sending some stuff to the United States by various means. I learned the vocabulary, typed up the dialogue, and put that up on RhinoSpike. Greek, yay. I'm feeling so happy about my Greek lately. Last summer when I was in Greece, I bought a copy of Ο Χάρι Πότερ και η Κάμαρα με τα Μυστικά (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets), which was a rare find seeing as how the village we live near whilst we're there has no bookstore that I know of. Anyways, I tried to read the first bit of it last summer and I had a lot of trouble. Not only was there a ton of unknown and undecipherable vocabulary, but there were also strange grammatical constructions. It seemed impossible to read, and I resigned myself to the fact that my Greek just wasn't good enough yet and I should learn some more vocabulary and try again later. Last night I decided to start reading it again, just to see if I could. This time, although there were still a lot of unknown words, I was able to understand most of what was going on (probably 80%, plus or minus a little) and I got a lot of stuff from context. I was actually able to keep a pretty fast reading speed up too, so I was able to finish reading the entire first chapter within my allotted time of half an hour (with no dictionary help at all!), whereas it had taken me several hours last summer to get through just a few pages. I'm very pleased with this little success and hope to continue reading that book. I'm going to read the chapter or section without any dictionary help at first, and then go back and reread it, looking up any unknown words and will add them to Anki. I do want to finish the two other coursebooks that I have for Greek though, so that I can exhaust all my resources. I'm excited. :D Um... No Swahili, Swedish, the other half of my Iberian, or kanji reviews yet... Tomorrow, maybe? I promise I'll try harder tomorrow. I'm quite literally falling asleep while writing this right now, so I don't think that Swahili/Swedish/Iberian will be happening tonight. In that case, this is what I have for tomorrow, which is Day 2 (German, Iberian, Japanese): - Swahili: 2 hours - Iberian: 2 hours - German: 2 hours - Swedish: 1 hour - Japanese: ½ hour TOTAL: 7.5 hours EEEK. I'm already reconsidering my choice to just go to bed immediately. Maybe I'll do some Swedish or Swahili after all... Good night in any case. ¡Buenas noches! お休みなさい！Buonanotte! Usiku mwema! God natt! Καληνύχτα! EDIT: I forgot to mention that while doing my volunteering yesterday, I was able to exercise my Spanish by guiding some monolinguals of that language through the food bank. And yet again I was told by a native English speaker that I have a strange foreign accent--in English! I suppose that must just come from all of the strange accents and languages I was exposed to when I was little. I had my native English all around me, I had much of my family speaking Greek and Greek-influenced and -accented English, Spanish all day at school (I went to an bilingual immersion elementary school), a German nanny for a while who spoke German and German-accented English, and some Japanese and probably some French were thrown into the mix there too... Combine that with me focusing more on my target languages' pronunciation than on English and it's no wonder I have a rather apparent foreign accent in my native language. I like the idea though. :D Edited by ellasevia on 25 June 2010 at 10:35pm 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 46 of 242 26 June 2010 at 7:25am | IP Logged | ||
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DAY 2: German, Iberian, Japanese, (Dutch)
Anki Reviews: 450 repetitions in 22.34 minutes Kanji Reviews: 571 due; 6 reviewed Today was better than yesterday and the day before, but I still have quite a bit to do tonight if I am to finish all of the tasks I had assigned myself today. Part of the reason why I didn't finish as much of the prescribed tasks was because I started Dutch today. I'm not going to be studying it seriously, and this is only temporary. I just thought that since we'll be stopping in Amsterdam for a while on our way to Tanzania, it would be fun to learn a little Dutch. I have found Dutch to be ridiculously easy so far because of the synergy effect of knowing English and being at a high intermediate level in German and Swedish. The only problems I have really encountered so far have been of me accidentally saying things like in German--for example mispronouncing zien (to see) and saying it like its German equivalent, sehen. I'm working on it anyways, and after only a very short time of study I composed a short text earlier today in Dutch, which I posted in the Dutch thread in the Multilingual Lounge. Here it is: Dag! Vaandag ben ik begonnen om Nederlands te leren, en het is echt leuk. Het is heel gemakkelijk voor mij, want ik kan nu al praten een beetje Duits en Zweeds, en Engels is mijn moedertaal. Ik ben begonnen om Nederlands te leren, want in een week zal ik in Amsterdam zijn, en terwijl ik daar ben, wil ik en beetje van de taal weten. Currently I'm speeding through the Michel Thomas Foundation Course (I intend to finish it and get through the advanced course too), and I might go through a bit of Teach Yourself and/or Colloquial in addition to the audio regimen. Now, back to my focus languages. This morning I worked for an hour on the ninth lesson from my Beginner's Swedish book, which was longer than usual. Because of this, the hour finished just as I finished reading through the lesson and I did not have time to learn the vocabulary. I'll do that in my next Swedish study time. For Iberian I had two hours, which I divided into one hour of Spanish and one hour of Portuguese. For the Spanish hour I simply continued working through my vocab book, which was boring, but I'm thankfully close to the end. For the Portuguese hour, I worked for half an hour out of my frequency dictionary and for the remaining half and hour I did a lesson from my Colloquial Portuguese of Brazil 2 book. I also was able to download the accompanying audio, which hadn't been included when I bought the book. The audio is very nice and I really am happy to have found it. Lesson two from that book is now complete, minus learning the vocabulary. I spent half an hour studying Japanese from the Yookoso! textbook, which has gotten a bit better--at least most things are written in authentic Japanese script now and it is throwing in a bunch of good vocabulary. I've finished at this point 35 minutes of my two hours of Swahili, which I spent finishing up and reviewing the lesson from my TY book which I was on. It was a huge help that just a couple days ago my Swahili dictionary arrived. For some reason when I was looking for a dictionary to buy in February, I couldn't find a good-looking one that was reasonably priced. I don't know how I managed to miss this dictionary, which is very good, by Nicholas Awde. It has been extremely helpful already. So, for the remaining hour and 25 minutes of Swahili which I'll do tonight, I'm going to get as far as I can with my TY book. I leave a week from today for Tanzania! I haven't yet done any German, but I might be able to squeeze in at least a little tonight if I'm not too tired when I finish my Swahili. I still haven't done many kanji reviews, which is definitely not good. I'm going to assume that I'm going to finish my German tonight, even though that's unlikely, and say that since tomorrow will be a normal day, I want to get a lot of kanji reviewing done. I want to get the number down to a normal, manageable amount before I leave (even though I'll come back to probably about 1000 reviews...eek). That's it for tonight. Gute Nacht! ¡Buenas noches! Boa noite! お休みなさい！Goedenacht! EDIT: Here's a quick update. I am going to finish up doing formal study for the night right now. I still have 25 minutes of Swahili left, but I'll just add that onto my hour of it for tomorrow. I might still do some more Dutch tonight, since that's easy and requires little brain power. If it works on my phone, I might see about watching a bit of El Internado in bed... German is not going to happen tonight. Here is my plan for tomorrow: - Deutsch: 2 hours - Français: 2 hours - Kiswahili: 1 hour, 25 minutes - Svenska: 30 minutes - Nederlands: CD2 - Kanji: lots Edited by ellasevia on 28 June 2010 at 8:54am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| anamsc Triglot Senior Member Andorra Joined 6001 days ago 296 posts - 382 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Catalan Studies: Arabic (Levantine), Arabic (Written), French | Message 47 of 242 26 June 2010 at 6:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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Great job! I can't believe you study so long every day. Keep up the good work! :)
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 48 of 242 27 June 2010 at 10:02am | IP Logged | ||
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DAY 3: French, Swahili, Swedish, (Dutch)
Anki Reviews: 609 repetitions in 32.88 minutes Kanji Reviews: 604 due; 121 reviewed I had a lot of obstacles preventing me from doing study today, yet I managed to do most of what I intended. I think you'll notice that there is a common theme of Lesson 9 going on today. FRENCH I finished Lesson 9 from the TYIYF book today, and I learned all of the vocabulary from it too. I spent a good deal of the two hours not only doing that but also going through all of the audio material for all of the previous lessons. It was only today that I found out that I had the audio for the book, so I listened to all of it. It was extremely easy. Just one more lesson in the book. :) SWEDISH For my 30 minutes I learned the vocabulary from my Beginner's Swedish lesson in BYKI. I'm now done with Lesson 9 in that book, and have only one more left. SWAHILI Swahili is getting really difficult. I'm having a hard time keeping up with all the new vocabulary (BYKI didn't really work well for Swahili when I tried it a couple months ago...maybe I should try again?) and the grammar has become more and more complex. It all makes sense, but it takes a long time to sink in before it starts to feel natural. I can use most of the noun classes pretty well (one or two are still problematic), and now they're doing a lot of new verbal infixes, like -po- (when), -ki- (if/-ing), and the relative pronouns, which are also verbal infixes. I went through all of Lesson 8 today, which seemed pretty hard. Then I did all of Lesson 9 (here we are again!), and it seemed a little easier. I think I'm going to have to do a huge grammar review session while I'm on the plane... DUTCH I did a bunch of Dutch today, just not quite what I had intended. I researched a couple things about some basic grammar and I created an Anki deck and added about 200 new cards. Dutch is still very easy. This morning I wrote another text, slightly longer this time, in Dutch in the multilingual lounge. It's answering some questions that were posed to me in a reply to my text from yesterday. Here it is: Ik zal naar Amsterdam komen want we (ik en mijn familie) gaan naar Tanzania en we moeten eerst in Amsterdam stoppen. We zullen alleen op de luchthaven zijn, maar ik hoop dat ik met iemand een beetje Nederlands spreken kan. Nu weet ik het niet erg veel en ik waarschijnlijk maak vele fouten (bij voorbeeld, ik gebruik Duitse woordvolgorde), maar ik heb alleen gestudeerd voor ongeveer een uur. Ja, ik begrijp wat je gezegd hebt over de Amerikaanse toeristen. Mijn vader is een goede voorbeeld, want hij hat gedacht dat het was dom om Nederlands te leren omdat "iedereen in Nederland Engels spreekt." I'll try to finish the second CD from the Michel Thomas course tonight before going to bed. GERMAN Do Anki reviews count? Sigh. Tomorrow. Plans for Tomorrow - German: 3 hours - Italian: 2 hours - Iberian: 30 minutes - Dutch: CD3 - Kanji: lots (ie, more than today) That's all. Bonne nuit! Usiku mwema! God natt! Goedenacht! Edited by ellasevia on 28 June 2010 at 8:54am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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