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Revive my old languages and add ...... | ||
Tags: Brushing up a language | Multilingual | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5030 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu | Message 9 of 17 03 September 2010 at 6:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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SPANISH: I have now completed three weeks of fairly intensive Spanish revision/input: usually 2 - 3 hours per day of audiovisual including MT Advanced for the last ten days. I have worked through half of my Spanish grammar textbook which I really enjoy.
I have got the most common 1000 Spanish words under my belt with 95% correct. I have 1000 Spanish sentences where I can instantly recognise the English equivalent: I have a huge problem thinking of something in English and saying it in Spanish and I am sure my accent is terrible. The cat is only 12 weeks old so she doesn't mind what I say as long as I say something to her. I can happily read and understand parallel texts. I am pleased: I will continue to think in Spanish for another couple of weeks before I start to speak to the boss. POLISH: Eek. I can READ polish and pronounce words on the page so that my language buddy can actually understand what I say. Ten days to learn to read like a five year old is, in my opinion, not that bad. I still don't have a clue what I am reading. Though I feel there are some Russian cognates in there. NIHONGO: Slowly picking up Kanji again. Not rushing anything here as I have no Japanese language buddy and won't be going back to Japan for some time yet! RUSSIAN: can slowly read block print: it is not all completely dead to me. GERMAN: Oooooh. Now there's a tricky one. I can put together a sentence but as I never really studied German grammar before I feel I am missing something. Task is to look for a simple German grammar over the weekend. FRENCH: ooh la la. I have a reasonable grasp of French input though my command of vernacular language is out of date...... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5030 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu | Message 10 of 17 22 September 2010 at 5:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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POLISH
Well I've hit the brick wall in Polish because on Monday I couldn't do plurals or remember any verbs whatsoever. It's now Wednesday and I am not actively studying any Polish this week [and possibly next] in an attempt to let my brain sort itself out: on reflection though I have done at least 150 hours of Polish study, excluding recaps. I have worked on it every day for six weeks. New stuff during week days and recapping at the weekends. I feel I have made some progress. I am going to have a dalliance with my other rusty languages and see how that pans out while I am not actively studying Polish but then again I am not actively studying French either. FRENCH I am really enjoying native French stuff: french wiki, podcasts and films are my main sources. The french recap has actually made Spanish much easier than I expected, plus some Italian helps. SPANISH Remains my major, so to speak, I have finished my Ab initio Grammar text as recommended by Cambridge University and am happily ensconced in my easy reader. I struggle with recieving spoken (adult) Spanish at the moment mainly due to the speed. Learner stuff is quite simple. Written Spanish is atrocious but that is not a biggie at the moment. I will check the dates and time of the DELE and assess whether I can go for one of them in a fairly short timescale. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5030 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu | Message 11 of 17 27 September 2010 at 10:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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SPANISH: I have finished my Spanish grammar book and am now looking for a local Spanish language partner. I may just join Instituto Cervantes in Manchester for the craic. I can happily read and understand parallel texts nearly 80% - newspapers are a bit less but that includes the sports pages and I can't read them in English. B2 looks positively do-able next year which could take three years out of my Spanish language plan.
I start to speak to the boss in Spanish today. He had to call his wife to listen to me, she say I sound French !!!!! POLISH: I had a crap time last Monday so took some time off Polish but on opening the books yesterday i can READ polish and pronounce words on the page. I can conjugate verbs and have a damn good go at putting the right noun declension into a sentence. My language partner is not a linguist so doesnt understand my errors and I am learning like a Polish child, I have option of a more linguistically trained Polish speaker to help but as Polish isn't a 'do or die' experience for me I am testing the methodology of learning from a 'generic' speaker of the language. Hey this is how children learn! Russian: Reading block is easy, hand script is not. Russian not a priority so I am not too bothered. French: doing at least one hour of native input per day: I also do at least 20 minutes of French reading (Wikipedia etc) where I sometimes need to dip into a dictionary. NIHONGO: Continue picking up Kanji again. Not rushing anything here. GERMAN: Really tricky one. I can put together and understand sentences but as I never studied German grammar I really don't know why some things are right and some are wrong. Task was to look for a simple German grammar [but I failed this one]. I will push German up the tree as I am hoping to get back to Berlin before Christmas, though in the worst case in Spring. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| wadek Newbie Canada Joined 4891 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes | Message 12 of 17 28 December 2010 at 1:39am | IP Logged | ||
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Did you ever complete that list of 500 common Polish words. My GF is Polish and I would like to get started on the language but I am having difficulty finding a common word list. If you have one and will share, thanks. robert
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| maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5030 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu | Message 13 of 17 03 August 2011 at 9:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well here is an annual update almost to the day.
I have spent most of this year concentrating on Spanish with little bits of dabbling in re-educating myself to read Cyrillic and brushing up my French for business purposes. I am now at roughly a B2 level in Spanish, and have a vocabulary of about 2000-3000 lemmata (headwords) but as I have been able to live using just Spanish 95% of the time I think that passes for basic fluency. Polish had to take something of a back seat for personal reasons though I can follow an audio book if I have the text too. I don't understand too much but I can 'get by' which is a good thing as we are off to visit Polish friends next year sometime. I am at a crossroads now, whether to rejuvenate German or concentrate on Persian following Sprachprofi's TAC from August..... looks like I'm going to be doing an intensive fortnight of Italian as we are off there in a couple of weeks for a break. Edited by maydayayday on 07 August 2011 at 5:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Élan Senior Member United States Joined 5255 days ago 165 posts - 211 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Persian | Message 14 of 17 08 August 2011 at 11:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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Are you studying Persian or just thinking about studying it? I'm always happy when I see another Persian learner on the site. :)
Congrats on reaching B2 in Spanish! Fantastic! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5504 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 15 of 17 09 August 2011 at 1:31am | IP Logged | ||
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Hey maydayayday, I don't know if you've been continuing to work on German during the past year, but I noticed that one of your entries from last year said you found it difficult to understand the logic behind some grammar issues. If you're still having trouble with this, I'd be glad to offer whatever help I can give you – having struggled through all that stuff over the past few years, I figured out several aspects of it in ways that make sense to me. Just drop me a PM or comment in my log if you want. In any case, I take my hat off to you – what an impressive array of languages!
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5030 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu | Message 16 of 17 09 August 2011 at 9:24am | IP Logged | ||
lan, I'm having a dalliance with Persian through TY at about one lesson per week, which serves the purpose of clearing my mind a little. To be truthful my reading of Persian was the most difficult thing to get on track, but thanks for asking. Jinx, I'll pm you and thanks for the offer! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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