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Spanish, someday - German probably never! | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4982 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 41 of 48 18 November 2010 at 8:24am | IP Logged | |||||
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Not this last weekend but the weekend before I put Spanish on hold to read The Towers of Midnight which just came out. Funny how this really disrupted my Spanish studying and I had a hard time getting back into it when I finished the book. I really had to force myself to focus on Spanish. Reading English was just so pleasant - I understood everything with ease and got through the material really fast. Oh well.
So I made myself go back to Spanish and I'm making progress again. I think. I'm mostly done with the La Sombra del Viento. I think because it's originally written in Spanish instead of a translation it's harder to follow everything. I am probably going to go back and reread this soon. I did put it down and I'm halfway through another novel - El Castillo de Magía by David Eddings. It's a really easy series of novels I read when I was a kid and I'm enjoying it. One thing I noticed with this novel is that i can't really do the text to speech and enjoy the book. I have to sit down and read it to myself. Even though it's terribly straightforward the characters' humor uses a lot of sarcasm and somehow, unlike other books I'm reading, I just couldn't enjoy it on my computer. So I'm reading it on my Kindle which is nice because it was just collecting dust. I'm using my ipod Flashcards Deluxe app a lot more recently. It's based on Anki, which I have read a lot about on the forums. Apparently the author of this program wasn't happy with Anki so he wrote this program and tailored it to his needs for studying Chinese. I haven't read all the details but he felt Anki wasn't testing him often enough on cards. I haven't really gone in and figured out his formula and how it's different than Anki but I'm thinking it's not that different. I was thinking of trying Anki out but since this is similar anyway and I've got 600 cards invested in it and it's paid for I think I'll just stay with it. I am pretty sure the extra flashcard usage is helping with new words. I'm going back to exclusively seeing the Spanish and then thinking of the English. IE testing myself on my passive knowledge. There's a few exceptions but that's pretty much the case. I was using the alternate option but I just couldn't get the more difficult option of English (or Spanish def) to the target Spanish word and with 600 words (and counting) I gave it up. I hope making it easier will encourage me to do it more too. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4982 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 42 of 48 01 December 2010 at 4:44am | IP Logged | |||||
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Ok I've been slacking in terms of updating here. Part of that is that there's not a whole lot to talk about but still an update is good especially for when I look back at this later on. I haven't been slacking on Spanish. I'm still going at it. I've read a couple more David Eddings books in Spanish which are fun, light, and easy since I've already read them. Also I grabbed a Kindle book on Amazon that was fun and easy. El secreto de tío Óscar. I think it was like a 100 page book or so but it's hard to say for Kindle books. It cost like 2 bucks so that was nice. I love that I can get foreign language books on Kindle. I tried getting ebooks previously in German and was rebuffed since I didn't live in the European Union they told me it was illegal to sell me the books. Audible.de didn't have that problem - I got a ton of great audio books in mp3 from them. I never asked them why they could sell me the audio books but other sellers couldn't sell me good ol regular ebooks. Didn't want them to think oops sorry, but we can't sell you anything. Thanks for bringing this to our attention! That would have bee awful.
I started a Spanish conversation on Skype with a tutor and it was going pretty well. I was actually having a conversation but then the internet connection went to hell and we had to type stuff which isn't much fun. I was really pleased about that. It was the 1st conversation in Spanish I've had that wasn't really really one sided with the other person doing all the talking. It seems my Spanish -is- improving. It's hard for me to see it since it's so gradual. But I did notice that my writing assignment I didn't cause me quite the headache that it did a month ago or so when I last tried. Very very good sign. I was reviewing my writing assignment though and I can't help notice that I make careless mistakes on conjugations for stuff I atually know which is awfully frustrating considering it adds to the mistakes for stuff I have no clue about. What I would give for a language like English that had no conjugations or noun gender or anything difficult to learn. Esperanto doesn't count since it's not a living language. I'm currently reading Stephen King's IT in Spanish ESO. I did read this book back in High school but that was many years ago now and I have forgotten a ton. It's a translation but I can tell it's a definite step up from the Fantasy stuff I've been reading so far. King is a really good author even if Horror novels don't get any respect. I'm going to read a couple more of his books before moving on I think. They're nice and long and easy to get into - perfect for language learning I think. Also I'm slowly adding some verb conjugation flash cards to my deck. It really seems to be helping my ability to speak and write. I guess that would make a lot of sense. Verb tense is awfully important when you try to express a thought. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| NorseRonin Pro Member United States youtube.com/user/NorRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5076 days ago 47 posts - 55 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Icelandic Personal Language Map | Message 43 of 48 01 December 2010 at 6:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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Farsi (Persian) has no conjugations and no noun gender, but the alphabet is actually very difficult to master. Chinese
is actually relatively easy with no conjugations of any kind and no gender, but the immense vocabulary and characters makes it difficult. Also, Vietnamese has kinda easy grammar, but it's not for the faint of heart :P Anyway, glad to see you're making progress in Spanish. I'm finding that I have to focus on one language now for some reason, I've cut back on Icelandic a lot (even though I love it) for more German. Well, needless to say my German has been improving steadily as a result. Edited by NorseRonin on 01 December 2010 at 6:39am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4982 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 44 of 48 02 December 2010 at 3:15am | IP Logged | |||||
I may actually give Chinese a try at some point. I don't know - the alphabet or whatever they use is rather intimidating. Plus I think I've heard that you have to 'sing' it sort of - your pitch can affect what word you say. I might be wrong. I can't sing so that would be a put off.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| NorseRonin Pro Member United States youtube.com/user/NorRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5076 days ago 47 posts - 55 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Icelandic Personal Language Map | Message 45 of 48 02 December 2010 at 3:42am | IP Logged | |||||
yeah, chinese is actually very easy grammatically, I took it for a year in high school. Of course I forgot everything I've learned from it, but it's not hard (very similar to English grammar and actually a little simpler). Like I said the only hard thing is the chinese characters, and the tones can take some time getting used to. It's a tonal language like Vietnamese (which I speak) and you don't have to be able to sing to speak it, trust me I know a lot of people who speak tonal languages who can't hold a note to save their lives. It has singing qualities about it, but actually singing is optional :P And just for your info, Japanese is said to be the most difficult Asian language to master (grammatically) from people who know several Asian languages, but Vietnamese is said to be the most difficult pronunciation wise, whereas Japanese is fairly easy to pronounce. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4982 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 46 of 48 05 December 2010 at 10:59am | IP Logged | |||||
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I went ahead and bought another ereader. I have the Kindle and it works ok but I was a bit frustrated with the cheap Merriam Webster dictionary (There's also a free dictionary developed by a a bored programmer, which is actually superior to it). And I don't like the interface - you have to scroll down with the cursor to your word - you can't just tap the word for example.
I was looking at the ipad and I was shocked to find that you can't change the dictionary in ibooks. I looked at the dictionary apps you can get which look to be very good dictionaries but there's no mention of their being integrated for use while reading books or browsing the web etc. So I got a Sony pocket reader 350. It was like 160$ or so. I found a thread on here that discussed it and the other people seemed quite happy with it. It comes with two mono English dictionaries and also English/Spanish, English/French, English/German, English/Dutch, and English/Italian. The bilingual dictionaries of from Oxford Hachette and are very good. It's a nice step up from what I was using on my Kindle. I am sure in a year or so the Kindle will get better dictionary support but it has yet to appear. Really a shame. This device is touch so I can just double tap a word and get the definition. It's faster and easier than on the Kindle. My screen is 5'' as opposed to 6'' which I like as it's more portable and still big enough to hold enough information on a screen. I don't anticipate using it to read raw PDF's however but I think it might work ok in landscape mode. It also saves the last 100 dictionary words you look up in a book along with the definitions. As of now I can't find a way to export a list of the words so I'm just going down the list entering the words and definitions in my ipod flashcard app and then deleting them. It uses a 5 buttons on the bottom along with the touch screen interace. I think the buttons require little more effort to push down than I would like. The buttons are as follows: 1 turn page back 2 turn page forward 3 home 4 zoom 5 options. I would have liked a general back button to be included. The e-ink technology is the same as the Kindle. I don't notice any difference except that the screen is smaller. This device doesn't do wifi or any kind of wireless - you have to purchase your books on your computer and then download them to the device via USB. This helps keep you from impulsively purchasing books that you don't really have time to read - ie I think Sony made a big mistake in not including it but it doesn't hurt my reading experience in the least. So I wanted to write about my language learning toy. Maybe someone shopping for ebook readers will find this useful =). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| NorseRonin Pro Member United States youtube.com/user/NorRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5076 days ago 47 posts - 55 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Icelandic Personal Language Map | Message 47 of 48 05 December 2010 at 9:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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wow, that's pretty cool, I'll actually consider buying it so thanks for the review. That built in dictionary thing seems
very handy. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4982 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 48 of 48 12 January 2011 at 6:00am | IP Logged | |||||
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Well I took a break for the holidays. And the new Warcraft expasion =D. I'm signed up for a Spanish course at my local community college though which should be fun. I'll get back into Stephen Kings IT in Spanish too soon. It's a good book.
Right now I'm watching a Denmark Film = Terribly Happy. It looks good. I was curious if I would understand anything with my intermediate German and I'm surprised I do quite a bit.. as the movie goes it gets easier. Some sentences sound like German it's so close and others sound pretty damn foreign though heh. I'm a bit surprised to see that they say "moin" to each other in this movie (it's a country town and apparently a country expresion. They spell it differently than they do in German though. I always wondered where the hell this word came from. Maybe it's not really German in origin but Danish? Still Germanic obviously though. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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