|
 |
Estival Ambitions: A Linguistic Odyssey | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5206 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 57 of 242 02 July 2010 at 11:51am | IP Logged |
|
Philip, enjoy your trip!!
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ruskivyetr Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5292 days ago 769 posts - 962 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Russian, Polish, Modern Hebrew | Message 58 of 242 13 July 2010 at 12:21am | IP Logged |
|
Philip, I hope you have a fantastic time in Tanzania. I myself just returned from Germany, and I had a great time :D.
Cannot wait to hear of your trip! 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 59 of 242 16 July 2010 at 10:48am | IP Logged |
|
And I'm back! Just a few hours ago our epic journey home ended, clocking in at just over 36 continuous hours and taking us across three continents within that time. I had a really great time on this trip, although it was extremely tiring, especially the trip back. This was one of my favorite trips, but it also included the longest return trip which I just mentioned: Arusha to Kilimanjaro (the airport, not the mountain) to Dar es Salaam to Amsterdam to Chicago to Denver to Boulder...
Well, prepare yourself for a huge post. I was writing little snippets of it in my head for the entire trip, so I'll see how many of those I can remember to include. I suppose I'll sort this by language to make it easy to remember because chronologically it'll be way too complicated. DUTCH En route to Amsterdam I listened to the entire Michel Thomas Advanced Dutch course and did several lessons of TY Dutch. I think I did up through lesson 12 (of TY Dutch) on the way there. As soon as I got to the Amsterdam airport (my parents didn't think we had time to go out into the city), I bought a postcard and a stamp (annoyingly the shop clerk spoke English to me before I could start in Dutch) and wrote a short message to my friend--in Dutch of course. While in the airport, I was struck by how little Dutch I actually saw and heard. The signs in the airport were almost all in English, only a few having Dutch at all on them. That was rather disappointing, as I had been hoping to have more of an immersion experience, albeit short. While my parents and brother were having coffee and a snack, I went into the bookshops in the vicinity and tried to find an English-Dutch/Dutch-English dictionary (because the one at the back of the TY book is completely inadequate) and an authentic book in Dutch. I was able to ask in Dutch (even though the store clerk started off in English) where I might find some dictionaries, and was pointed to another shop. I found the dictionaries, but I only found ones from Dutch to English (and also an unsatisfactory Dutch phrasebook) and thus not including whether the Dutch word was a de or a het word (part of the reason why I needed the dictionary in the first place). Then in the same store I had a short conversation with the clerk asking whether she knew of any authentic books in Dutch that are good, but easy enough for someone at my level. The entire exchange was in Dutch, so I did accomplish my Dutch conversation goal, but I never found a good book in Dutch. On the flight from Amsterdam to Arusha (in Tanzania), we were also on KLM, the Dutch airline so the flight attendants would speak in either English or Dutch. I was a bit separated from my family and sitting next to a Dutch couple, so for most of the flight I had the flight attendant convinced that I was Dutch (we spoke in Dutch whenever he came around and such) until he saw my mom speaking to me in English, which ruined the whole illusion. :( Also on the plane, I indulged in a movie in English with Dutch subtitles (there were so many options for watching movies in all sorts of languages, but this is what I opted for) and I think I benefited from reading those subtitles the whole time while listening to the English...you could call it a weak attempt at L-R. While in Tanzania itself, I did very little Dutch and barely thought about it. One day I did do a little, but only about ten minutes before I decided to sleep instead. On our second-to-last day we met some people from the Netherlands at the lodge we were at and as I had not touched the language in about two weeks, I was barely able to mutter a sentence in Dutch saying that I had learned a lot, but then forgotten it all. On the return journey my Dutch reawakened since we were yet again on a Dutch airline and going through Amsterdam. While in the Amsterdam airport I revisited the bookstores from before to see if they had anything new of interest, but to no avail. Before getting on the plane, I snatched up a free newspaper in Dutch for some authentic reading material. Hopefully there's something interesting in there... On the trans-Atlantic flight I did a bit more from TY Dutch (I'm now mostly through lesson 13) and then watched some more movies (two or three, I forget) with the weak attempt at the L-R method. I feel quite successful with my Dutch, but I definitely need to take some time to learn a lot of this new vocabulary now. I think I actually got a little too used to Dutch because I noticed that when I tried to think of how to say something in German, it just wouldn't work and the Dutch words, or the German words but with Dutch pronunciation, would come instead. That was the problem the last time I started (and consequently abandoned) Dutch, so I hope it does not linger and worsen. If it does, I'm going to have to do something about it, perhaps even drop Dutch because German is still more important to me. However, I believe I had the same problem when I first began with Portuguese already knowing Spanish (except that I would use Spanish words/pronunciation instead of the Portuguese). SWAHILI Ugh. I don't want to write anymore; that explanation on Dutch took too long. Okay, I'll try to get through this explanation of Swahili, which will probably be of similar length. As soon as we set foot in Tanzania at the Kilimanjaro airport we were greeted by signs in Swahili (and English too). I got lots of reading practice on the trip just by reading signs on the road and in buildings. All of our guides, three in total, spoke at least three languages. They all spoke English and Swahili and two of them also spoke Maasai. One spoke Chaga (I think) and one spoke Spanish. Once they learned that I had been studying Swahili they always encouraged me by trying to speak with me, although I often couldn't understand most of what they were saying either because of speed or unfamiliar words. One of the guides always would tell people wherever we went that I speak Swahili fluently, or very well, and then I would be faced by a gush of foreign sounds, of which I could pick up only a few words. In terms of new Swahili learning, I learned a little colloquial Swahili and some slang expressions that were used all over the place but had escaped mention in my books. I heard someone say hujambo/hamjambo only once on the entire trip--they just say jambo instead. And if you hear someone say mambo to you, don't just repeat it; you have to reply poa! I got pretty good at most of the animal names since what we were mainly doing on the trip was looking for animals on game drives (simba, tembo, twiga, chui, duma, pundamilia, punda, fisi, kifaru, kiboko, mamba, ndege, mbuni, mbu, mbuzi, ng'ombe, nyati, nyani, nyoka, samaki, ngiri, etc.). I also got really good at saying asante (thank you) and asante sana (thank you very much). I spoke a lot of Swahili. I spoke with the guides, with people in a Maasai village, with children in a primary school, with workers at the lodges and camps we stayed at, with people in the market and in stores, and more. I also helped other people in our group to grasp some basic Swahili phrases like habari za asubuhi (good morning) and chakula kilikuwa kizuri sana (the food was very good). I was happy with what I was able to do with my Swahili, but it is still very much at a beginner level (or maybe a low intermediate) and I'm going to keep on studying it so keep improving. While on the trip we really didn't have much free time, and when we did we were really tired (and no one in the group could figure out why--all we did all day was eat and sit and look at animals!). Therefore I didn't do much work out of my Swahili books while I was there. One night in Arusha I finished off going through the reading text from the previous lesson in Spoken World Swahili and then I went through most of another lesson on the way from Tarangire National Park to the Ngorongoro Crater, and then I did a tiny bit more in Serengeti National Park on afternoon when we had free time. I did a tiny bit of reading from the books and a lot of random dictionary work whenever I needed to know a word, but that's all. RUSSIAN And so my Russian studies have begun. I loaded as much of the Michel Thomas Foundation course for Russian onto my ancient little iPod as would fit, and I listened to all of that during the trip. It wasn't much, because there was little room left after having put the entire advanced Dutch course on there, but it entertained me for a while. I had to rip the earphones out on several occasions though, because the teacher's voice makes me a little crazy, and it was just painful on the ears when she kept prolonging and emphasizing the "very soft 's' sound" in здесь. And apparently the people she's teaching cannot hear the soft consonants, which she was making very obvious. That was also annoying. However, where I left off it was just starting to get better, with somewhat meaningful sentences like Вы не знаете где можно купить билеты? (Do you know where you can buy tickets?), so I'll keep on doing that. SUMMARY AND PLANS This trip was truly multilingual. During the course of it, I heard and/or saw (written): English, Dutch, German, Danish, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Czech, Greek, Finnish, Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, Swahili, Maasai, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, along with some others that I wasn't able to identify when people were speaking them. I came home to be greeted by 513 new emails (mostly notifications from this site), 3794 Anki reviews, 809 expired kanji and 345 of them sitting in the restudy box. I also have to add all of the vocabulary lists that I made on the trip into Anki, which will be several hundred words probably, and I have to sort through and organize over 1200 pictures. I have a bit of work to do... Tomorrow (well, it's actually today because I'm up late because of wanting to get this post done and I'm not tired because of jet-lag) I'm supposed to start off on Day 1 (Swahili, Japanese, and German), but I was wanting to do Russian instead. I might decide to start with Day 3 (Russian, Swahili, and Japanese) or I might just tweak the schedule again so that Russian is in Day 1... Okay, I'll go see if I can sleep maybe, even though I'm wide awake because even though it's almost 3:00 in the morning here, it's almost noon in Tanzania. Good night! (Congratulate yourself and go eat a nice treat if you made it through all of that post. ;) ) Edited by ellasevia on 16 July 2010 at 10:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ruskivyetr Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5292 days ago 769 posts - 962 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Russian, Polish, Modern Hebrew | Message 60 of 242 16 July 2010 at 4:35pm | IP Logged |
|
Philip sounds like an awesome and pretty helpful trip with respect to languages! It's so inspiring to see you
improvement in Dutch. To let you know, the whole thing with wanting to interchange Dutch and German will pass eventually when you attain higher levels. I never had a problem with it because my spoken German is a native language for me, however my friend who learned German through the school system and through self study, tried to learn Dutch while still at an intermediate level in German. She was really frustrated but I told her to hang in there. She went to Germany for a few weeks and her level in German went from between A2 and B1 to full on B2, and then she finally stopped confusing the two. To mention your Swahili, it gives me hope that people are that enthusiastic about your learning of it in the country where it is spoken. People usually want to switch to English but to hear that they wanted you to speak to them in Swahili is actually really cool. Did you feel that you improved at all on a conversational level? In regards to your Russian studies, I'm so happy you've started to finally begin to learn :D. You are going to LOVE it. Have you already learned Cyrillic? Like you said with Greek in my log (and I've already learned the Greek alphabet in a matter of about 30 minutes), it will be a snap. One of my main resources in Greek is German, so I'm going to keep my English involvement to a minimum. And btw I DID read the whole post :D. I'm glad you had a nice trip and it's nice to have you back on the forums :). 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 61 of 242 16 July 2010 at 9:48pm | IP Logged |
|
Yes, it was a great trip!
I was also really impressed with my quick progress in Dutch, although I wasn't surprised because of its similarity to other Germanic languages I'm familiar with already. I guess I'll just keep trying to keep them separate and not study them on the same day (that helped to keep German and Swedish separate earlier this year) and hope that the conflict resolves itself with time. It might have been smarter of me to wait until around basic fluency or higher in German before attempting Dutch, but I've started now and I don't really want to quit AGAIN. I'd really like to go spend some time in Germany or the Netherlands or Sweden (and more) to improve quickly through an immersion environment. Unfortunately, the only times I've been to Germany have been in the Frankfurt (and last summer we had a rather long layover so we actually went out and walked around the city for a bit) and Munich airports going to and from Greece. The only times I've been in the Netherlands were just these two quick stops from this trip, and that was hardly immersion--I almost wouldn't have known that I wasn't in an English-speaking country. About Swahili, yes, that's good. Most of the people we were in contact with daily, like the guides and the workers at hotels and lodges all spoke very good English and they're in contact with it all the time, so they don't need to snatch every opportunity to speak it (if that makes sense). However, lots of the other people (in the market, at the school, in the Maasai village) spoke little or no English so they were quite happy to speak in Swahili. Actually almost everyone seemed VERY proud of the language, as it is a lingua franca for the region and is a big reason why Tanzania is united, peaceful, and quickly advancing in fields like education. They essentially required everyone on the trip to speak at least a little Swahili wherever we went, with the minimum of phrases like hello and thank you. They were probably not accustomed to having visitors to their country studying their language, so they seem to treasure the idea and help the visitor get the most out of their experience. There were lots of people who were only too willing to help teach and let me practice, and they seemed to become friendlier when I spoke to them in Swahili, even if I was only saying something like habari za mchana (good afternoon), which most tourists don't bother to learn. Русский! (Wow, the Russian keyboard is hard to figure out...) Yes, I already know the Cyrillic alphabet; I learned it about two years ago. However, I still don't know the cursive forms that all the books seem to emphasize so much. Is is really that important to know? I don't like writing in cursive usually and I think that (for now) writing in block Cyrillic letters is what I'll do unless someone strongly advises me to learn the cursive letters ASAP. I need to take some time to figure out how to type in Russian, because this keyboard does not match up well at all with Latin equivalents. I just made a little cheat-sheet for myself, but it's going to take a while to really get used to it. Now I'm going to see if I can manipulate my schedule so that I can do Russian today and still have it be Day 1. Exciting news! Today I got my AP scores from the tests I took back in May. I got a 5 (the highest possible) for Spanish and a 4 (second highest) in World History. That made me very happy. :) 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 62 of 242 16 July 2010 at 10:39pm | IP Logged |
|
Wow what a great trip glad you enjoyed yourself.
Russian is great to learn once you get past the alphabet I tend to look forward to my Russian study over my Spanish study everyday. I prefer writing in block letters just to make it easier on myself. I only learnt cursive script a few weeks ago and it still confuses me I've found it harder to get used to than the block letters. Congrats on the AP scores as well hope you're proud :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| TixhiiDon Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5275 days ago 772 posts - 1474 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, German, Russian Studies: Georgian | Message 63 of 242 17 July 2010 at 12:01am | IP Logged |
|
Welcome back! Sounds like you had a great time. I would love to go to Africa and see
the animals so I am very jealous! There was a long thread not so long ago on whether or not one should learn to write Russian in cursive. I would say that you should, since no Russian writes in block letters, everyone uses the cursive forms. It's good to be authentic in your language- learning right? Just see it as one extra challenge with Russian. Once you get used to it it is actually a really pleasant way to write, and much faster than printing everything out. 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 64 of 242 17 July 2010 at 6:46am | IP Logged |
|
DAY 1: Russian, Japanese, German
Anki Reviews: 369 repetitions in 30.04 minutes Kanji Reviews: 809 due; 0 reviewed; 10 restudied Today was a nice sleepy start back into my study schedule. I started to actually work around 2:00 in the afternoon and was able to finish all my work by an early hour. Although I could and should certainly do more Anki and kanji, I'm tired and I'm going to go to bed after I compose this update. I tweaked the study schedule from the previous page to make today a Russian day instead of a Swahili day. I was feeling very motivated for Russian today apparently, and I would study more than the two hours I already have done, but I'm tired now. I started off by continuing to listen to the MT course. I did that for about an hour, while going back through the booklet and adding all the new vocabulary introduced into my Anki deck, which I began to study from today. After I did an hour of Michel Thomas, I completed all of Lesson 1 from Cortina Russian. That book looks nice and simple. The lesson was very easy, but I did learn a few new words like лошадь (horse), платье (dress), вещь (thing), and деревня (village, countryside). In addition to all that I was able to familiarize myself a bit with the Russian keyboard so that I know where most of the letters are now, but it still takes a long time to type. Does anyone know how I could add accent marks to Russian words without having to open another program? Whenever I want to add a word to Anki, I have to open BYKI to type the word there to add an accent, which is quite annoying. Next I worked on Japanese from Ultimate Japanese. Lesson 24 is about restaurants and I typed up all of the vocabulary into a BYKI list and into Anki. Then I read through all of the grammar explanations, paying close attention to the example sentences by typing them into kanji and trying to understand them before peeking at the English meaning. The grammar section was concerning the usage of 前 and how to form the comparative and superlative, all of which was very easy to understand, which was a nice change from some of the nearly incomprehensible grammar points from recent lessons. After all of that I submitted the example sentences for pronunciation on RhinoSpike. Finally I worked on German for 30 minutes. I decided on working from TYIYG, and I reviewed the dialogues from the first lesson before moving onto the second. I then did the first bit of the lesson, but there's still a lot left of it. My plan for catching up on Anki was I am going to do the reviews for one language (unless I'm particularly motivated) per day, which is the day's focus language. Today was Russian, and I had nothing to review because the deck hadn't been started yet, so instead I went through some of what I put in and started activating some of the words. Then I did about half or so of my Japanese reviews. I'm going to go easy on kanji until I'm caught up with my Anki because otherwise it will be too much to handle at once. Tomorrow I will be studying Italian, Swedish, and Dutch for Day 2 of my new schedule. Before falling asleep tonight I think I'll listen to some more MT Russian since I want to do more, but I don't have the energy right now to do more active study. Спокойной ночи! お休みなさい！ Gute Nacht! 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. |
