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Estival Ambitions: A Linguistic Odyssey | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| ruskivyetr Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5298 days ago 769 posts - 962 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Russian, Polish, Modern Hebrew | Message 65 of 242 17 July 2010 at 7:13am | IP Logged | |||||
You should take a program with the Goethe Institute or something and take a little immersion time. A lot of people there are really inclined to speak English if they figure out that you are American, but I never really had that problem because I have a partially native accent and I am relatively "native-like" when speaking. The only time I had a problem was when I had to fill out a form, and there was a required part where I had to write something. Granted my writing in English isn't top notch, and my German education as a child stopped at about 5, so my writing is worse than mediocre. The guy reviewing the form gave a weird look at my little written part (about a paragraph). You also may want to use English words a lot for stuff that you don't know (that was the problem a lot of my friends had), which showed immediately they were American, which allowed for whoever was opposite in the conversation the go ahead to switch to English. One guy started speaking in English to me because my friend right next to me was saying something in English to another one of our friends. I told him my native language was Russian and that I didn't speak any English (all of this with a Russian accent of course), so just saying that you're Greek and that you don't speak English can help if they try to switch over for some reason.
I actually find that my Russian cursive is very neat and clean, unlike my English cursive. Just practicing helps. I made myself go through my Russian notebook and rewrite every exercise in cursive one day. I was really bored, but it helped a bunch. It is EXTREMELY important to know, because no one writes in block letters. My Russian friend asked me why I wrote in block when she saw my exercise notebook filled with block letters. It's just not the norm, and it looks cooler on paper. Take your time learning the cursive letters, you won't get arrested for writing in block in Russia ;). It is actually pretty important, just don't stress about it. And YES the non-phonetic Russian keyboard is ANNOYING :O. I have a phonetic version, so it's easier for me to type, but I really should learn how to type with a real Russian keyboard. I'm gonna take an afternoon to type up a bunch of news articles from BBC Russian to get some practice with that. By the way nice job on your exams :D. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| darkwhispersdal Senior Member Wales Joined 5857 days ago 294 posts - 363 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Ancient Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Latin | Message 66 of 242 17 July 2010 at 5:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
I use a different colour for the accent in the Anki deck so I don't have to use another program red seems the best. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5373 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 67 of 242 19 July 2010 at 5:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
Welcome back, and good luck with the Russian. Sounds like you had an amazing trip... :)
On a Mac it's quite straight-forward - just ALT+e for an accent, or ALT+u for an umlaut, etc. I imagine that PCs offer something similar. Here's a comprehensive webpage on typing accented characters (and a tidier version here too), which includes a method for using the International US English keyboard for PCs. Edited by Teango on 19 July 2010 at 5:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5959 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 68 of 242 20 July 2010 at 8:10am | IP Logged | |||||
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DAYS 2, 3, and 4: Italian, Swedish, Dutch; Swahili, Russian, Japanese; Greek, Portuguese, Swedish
Anki Reviews: 2,730 repetitions in 2.24 hours [total of all three days] Kanji Reviews: 876 due; 0 reviewed; 0 restudied I suppose I should write an update now before I get too tired and put it off yet another night. Here it is. Day 2 In the morning I was feeling sick so I didn't get to start working until later than normal. I had problems concentrating on my Italian, since it was the boring practice of typing up vocabulary from the book, and so it took a while because I kept getting distracted. At lunch I started watching an episode of El Internado, and when I finished eating I didn't want to stop but I felt guilty about not doing my Italian... So I continued typing and looking up words in Italian while simultaneously trying to watch and listen closely to what was going on in the show. That was a bit crazy. The good news is that I'm now done with that Italian vocabulary book so I can do other more amusing things now. Later in the evening the jet lag started kicking in and I ended up going to bed very early because I couldn't keep my eyes open. Swedish and Dutch went unstudied. Day 3 The following day was much better. Since I had gone to bed so early and the jet lag was taking effect, I woke up before 3:00 in the morning, so I was able to do my Swedish, Japanese, and twice as much Russian as required (and some other non-language-related requirements) done before lunch. I first worked on my Swedish. I used my hour of study time to learn the 98 words from the final lesson of SEGR, which I had typed up before going to Tanzania. I finished the study just as the hour was ending, and I really wanted to just finish that book so I took an extra half hour or so to reread through the grammar section and type up and translate the ending text. I am now officially done with SEGR, unless I intend to work from the reader in the back, which I might. I don't really know yet. For my Japanese I used the half hour to learn the vocabulary from the Ultimate Japanese lesson that I had begun on Day 1. I had some time left, so I reviewed some grammar explanations and then read and typed the up the dialogue into kanji. For Russian I did a lot. While I was on a bike ride and weeding in the garden I listened to about an hour of MT Russian, but I also really wanted to do some "real" study so I got out my copy of the New Penguin Russian Course (I'm going to be using ruskivyetr's term of "Penguin Russian" to refer to it because I really like how that sounds) and did the first lesson. Of course, it was only teaching the alphabet but there were lots and lots of example words given so I typed up all of those little gems into a vocabulary list which I'll study on my next Russian day. On the subject of Russian, my great-uncle, a former Russian professor, was at my house for dinner this evening and he said that he could bring over a collection of Russian books if I wanted. :) After lunch, my concentration faded a bit with fatigue but I still managed to fit in half an hour of Dutch study in which I typed up some of the vocabulary lists which I had made on my trip (I still have over five pages to go...ugh). After that I didn't feel like doing much more and as the episode I of El Internado I had watched the previous day had been excellent, I decided to watch another. And after that, another. So in a two-day span I watched three episodes of that, which isn't all that bad because it was about 4.5 hours of Spanish exposure (not that I need it, but it's still good). However, it took away from my other study time so I was a bit annoyed. I never got around to doing my Swahili because I chose to watch Spanish television programming instead. How silly. Day 4 Today I woke up late and then had other stuff going on in the morning so I couldn't actually start working until later in the afternoon, at which point I was already feeling lazy. Just before dinnertime I finally got into a state of mind that was welcoming to the idea of studying, so I did thirty minutes of Swedish, in which I finished the final lesson of my Beginner's Swedish book, except for studying the vocabulary. So except for that I have now also finished that book too! After dinner I began work on my Swahili. I had two hours, I was able to type up all of the vocabulary lists that I had made in Africa (not as many as I had made for Dutch though). Then I returned to the reading section of lesson 10 in Spoken World Swahili to finish that. The text was about health problems in East Africa and really wasn't very hard to understand but there were lots and lots of new words. Besides that it would have been really easy to grasp. Here is an example of what I was reading, from the English translation:
On a somewhat miscellaneous note, I'm back to the Russian keyboard dilemma. I posted a question about this in another thread and was told how I could redesign and customize my own Russian keyboard. I tried that today and made a system that was quite like the real Russian keyboard only that there was also a dead key that would allow an accent to be placed on the vowel following it, just like on the Greek keyboard. However, I couldn't figure out how to make that custom keyboard my standard keyboard for typing Russian, and for some reason the dead key didn't work when I tried it anyways... I'll see if I can revisit and fix that issue tomorrow. If not, the aggravation continues. I still have two hours of Greek and one hour of Portuguese left to do, but since I'm tired now I'll just put it off until tomorrow. So tomorrow I will have: Greek: 2 hours German: 2 hours Portuguese: 1 hour Swahili: 1 hour Russian: ½ hour I believe that's all for now. Buonanotte! God natt! Goedenacht! Usiku mwema! Спокойной ночи! お休みなさい！ Καληνύχτα! Boa noite! EDIT: I forgot to officially mention how I'm faring with my Anki catchup. I am now up to date with Russian, Italian, Swahili, and Greek, but for the latter two especially I still am having a lot of reviews per day. I have also decided to up my new words per day to 20 for all languages because even though that will make scary amounts of reviews pile up, it's summer now and I have time to deal with it. I should take advantage of that because once the school year starts again those numbers are going back down to 10 as the maximum, more likely 5. Edited by ellasevia on 20 July 2010 at 8:40am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5959 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 69 of 242 20 July 2010 at 7:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Success! I have just gotten my customized Russian keyboard to work. All I have to do now is (since I couldn't get the dead key feature to work) is press the button where \ is normally located on a Russian keyboard after (or before in the case of this site in particular because otherwise it looks weird) the letter I want an accent on. For example:
Прив́ет! Как дел́а? Мен́я зов́ут Ф́илипп и я изуч́аю р́усский яз́ык, что я любл́ю. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ruskivyetr Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5298 days ago 769 posts - 962 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Russian, Polish, Modern Hebrew | Message 70 of 242 20 July 2010 at 10:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think that it would not be что я люблю, but который я люблю. I could be wrong, but it just didn't look right with что. You seem concerned about stress and how it affects pronunciation. Just listening to a lot of Russian will help with that plenty (it did for me), and also reading through accented dialogs out loud. I tried to memorize all the rules and stuff, and I have a pretty good idea about the rules, but I learn them so much better naturally. Unfortunately Penguin Russian does not have audio, but I'm sure that there are other cheap programs that have audio for their dialogs. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5959 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 71 of 242 21 July 2010 at 9:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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DAY 5: German, Swahili, Russian
Anki Reviews: 590 repetitions in 27.88 minutes Kanji Reviews: 907 due; 0 reviewed; 0 restudied Today was another hard day for language study. My mother seems to take pleasure in destroying my best concentration time of the day by making me do silly things like driving lessons and weeding (in the rain, I might add). A bunch of other stuff too. So... I was not very productive because whenever I had time, I was either put in a bad mood or feeling lazy from having just kneaded dough for and hour or the like (I made some delicious bread today). Or I was disturbed by my ever-annoying brother and his friend. Yes, so I watched another episode of El Internado as a way of avoiding some work in a lazy moment today, but it was the finale of the fifth season, so I can put off starting the next season for a while so that I don't get sucked back in. While I was doing all sorts of random tasks unrelated to language study this morning, I was listening to Michel Thomas Russian, so I did get something accomplished that way. I had been intending to use my Russian study time today to learn the vocabulary from the first lesson of Penguin Russian, but since I had already spent well over half an hour of doing the MT Russian listening, I decided that it would be silly to waste time on doing even more of non-essential stuff when I was already behind. For Greek I worked for a while out of LGWT, completing two new lessons, both again very easy. I'm just in it for the vocabulary mostly. After those two lessons I didn't really want to do any more so instead I got out my Harry Potter book and started reading from the beginning again, but adding all new words into Anki, which took a really long time. I understood almost all of the unknown words from context, but if I had seen them alone I wouldn't have known them. For German I also did two hours and completed the second lesson from TYIYG. I think my German listening comprehension is getting better, but vocabulary still needs to be improved. Today's list of vocabulary had 64 words in in... Oh, and for German I have yet to do the Anki reviews. In the past couple days I kept getting email notifications from Livemocha saying that there are tons of submissions to review and to please get to them as soon as possible. Since I have to write the reviews in Portuguese, I decided to work on those (making money and preventing the people at Livemocha from getting mad at me for neglecting my work) and count it as Portuguese study. I did about 40 minutes of that until I couldn't take it any longer. I'm tired now, so that'll be all for today. Unfortunately. Tomorrow is again a volunteering day, so I will most likely not get anything done again because my mother likes to ruin my morning concentration time and then after working all afternoon I'll be tired and will probably not want to work on all the stuff that is piling up. In case I do end up doing something, however, here is what I have to work on: Dutch: 2 hours Swahili: 1 hour Greek: 1 hour French: ½ hour Portuguese: 20 minutes Ruskivyetr, you're probably right about the что/который thing. I was probably thinking of Spanish, where the single word 'que' means what, that, who, which, etc. And for stress, I agree that it will come naturally with exposure, but since I don't have all that much exposure yet and it's really important to get the pronunciation and stress right, I'm making sure I can have those accent marks. :) Gute Nacht. Usiku mwema. Скокойной ночи. Edited by ellasevia on 22 July 2010 at 5:45am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5959 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 72 of 242 22 July 2010 at 6:02am | IP Logged | |||||
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DAY 6: Dutch, Greek, French
Anki Reviews: 1365 repetitions in 1.07 hours Kanji Reviews: 926 due; 0 reviewed; 0 restudied So I was wrong about the morning part, where I said I would get nothing done. This morning before I had to leave, although I awoke later than I would have liked, I managed to study Dutch for two full hours and also complete my French time, which was actually over the required 30 minutes. For Dutch I continued to work on typing up the endless vocabulary lists that I made, which is surprisingly tiring. So that I wouldn't go crazy from silence and boredom I had the audio for the whole TY Dutch book going in the background so I was getting some listening practice in too at the same time. When I couldn't stand doing any more typing up of the vocabulary, I decided to count doing my Anki reviews as part of my Dutch studying time because that's how I'm studying that vocabulary for now. So I'm all caught up on Dutch now too in terms of Anki, and I did some extra reviews for it too. After doing some more transcribing of vocabulary, I did a very short Livemocha Dutch lesson. Only three new words there for me (handdoek, kaars, taart), but two of them were already in Anki. For French I just studied the vocabulary from the last lesson of TYIYF in BYKI. I had prepared the list before my trip, and it was all that was remaining to do from that course, so I'm now officially done. :) I started to do some Greek during my short lunch break at my volunteering thing today, but my pen started leaking all over my paper and made a mess of a page in the book, so I thought it would be better to not do anything until I got home. In addition, I listened to a little bit of MT Russian on the way to and from the volunteering job today. Once I got home, I was, as predicted, quite tired. I would have worked on stuff but didn't think I really had the energy to. A little later I had the energy back, but not the desire as I had already begun to watch a new episode of El Internado while I was brain-dead (so much for not watching that for a while). Now I have the desire to work but my body is aching and I'm really tired. However, I did do all of my Anki reviews for German just a bit ago, so it hasn't been completely unproductive this evening. I'm now caught up on Russian, Italian, Swahili, Greek, German, and Dutch. The ones I still have to do are Japanese, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Esperanto. Tomorrow I probably won't get anything done because my mother informed us of a plan she has cooked up to take me and my brother into Rocky Mountain National Park for the day. I have no idea how long she means to stay there, but I'm assuming the entire day. I'll bring some stuff to do in the car (I'll remember to get a different pen so it doesn't cause more damage), but I don't know if I'll get a chance. In any case, the things I will have to do for tomorrow are as follows: - Japanese: 2 hours - Swahili: 1.5 hours - Greek: 1 hour - German: 1 hour - Portuguese: 20 minutes Goedenacht. Καληνύχτα. Bonne nuit. EDIT: I just noticed this was my 1000th post. How exciting. :) Edited by ellasevia on 22 July 2010 at 6:03am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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