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Splog at University | ||
Tags: Czech | College/University | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5459 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes  Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 65 of 72 17 April 2011 at 4:35pm | IP Logged | ||
Yes indeed. Well, Russian I am certainly learning via Czech. It is quite closely related, so it is better to "see the differences", rather than coming from English which is (of course) totally different. Mandarin, though, I am learning through English and French - since I am more comfortable with these languages, and the available resources for learning Mandarin are much better than those available in Czech. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5459 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 66 of 72 17 April 2011 at 4:37pm | IP Logged | ||
Fantastic. Thanks for this. I shall confront my history professor at the university next week about this. It is great to see a different history of things from the one we have been taught. Much appreciated. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5459 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 67 of 72 22 April 2011 at 5:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yet another new student joined the class. This one isn't Russian. She is a native Czech
speaker. She lived in the Czech republic until she was 14 I believe, then spent the past four years in Spain. She joined our conversational class to get back up to speed. The fact she continued to speak Czech at home in Spain with her parents means, at least in my opinion, she has no need for the class at all. In fact, one of the professors said she is wasting her time and money. Still, she seems to think she will get something out of it. The group size is now 14 or 15. This is far too big. Last semester, with a group of 3, was perfect for fast flowing intensive interaction all day long. With a group of 15, the group dynamic changes significantly: you are lucky to get 15 minutes a day each of talk-time. Plus, much more focus seems to be focused on the professors than on the students. The result is that I find my mind drifting a lot, and find myself twiddling my thumbs a lot. Earlier in this thread I had stated that I see language classes as a wonderful complement to the (often) isolated work of self-teaching. I now wish to refine that. For me, at least, it now only seems to be true when the group size is small enough to make it intimate. Less than five seems to be ideal. Any more than that, and it seems to degrade into a more traditional classroom setting. I can see, now, that small invitation-only study groups may be a useful middle-ground. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5459 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 68 of 72 11 May 2011 at 9:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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You might think that "1" is always singular, but in Czech there is also a plural
"1". So, "1 apple" would use the singular 1, just as in English. However, 1 door would use the plural form of 1, since door is a plural word in Czech. We do something similar in English, where we say things like "1 pair of jeans" - the word "pair" here makes the 1 (in effect) refer to something plural. Czech, though, wouldn't need the word "pair" since the plural form of "1" captures this concept. This applies to other numbers too, except it is even more weird. The number 2 is, of course, plural (e.g. 2 apples), but there is a different number 2 in Czech - a sort of double plural - meaning 2 plurals (e.g. 2 jeans). Worse still, there is yet another form of each of these numbers when you are referring to different groups. In English, we would say "I have 3 pairs of 2 types of jeans" whereas in Czech it wouldn't need the words pairs and types, it would use different categories of the numbers 3 and 2, giving something like "3 2 jeans". On top of all this, there is another (literary) category of these numbers when it is referring to fixed expressions. So, "I sailed the 7 seas" would use the literary form of "7". All of this is, of course, talking just about cardinal numbers. Then we have ordinals and other complexities on top. In short, numbers are a nightmare, with concepts that can make your head explode. Why am I telling you all this? Because today I met a Russian woman who speaks Czech really well, but she had never heard of these weird number forms. She seemed a bit doubtful that they exist in the language, so asked a native speaker. After which, she burst into tears. It broke my heart to see it. She was destroyed emotionally by such a tiny aspect of the grammar. When asked what was wrong she said "Even after a couple of years of concentrated effort I am still missing things and making mistakes". I tried to calm her, by explaining that she spoke Czech really well, and that mastery was a life-long journey. This seemed to upset her even more. For some reason, this took my mind back to the book "The Agony and the Ecstasy", which is about the life of an artist being full of ups and downs. The same seems to be true of language learning. As much as we can all enjoy the highs of language learning, for some people there are mighty deep lows too. The only reassurance here is that for most people, the agony, in time, is replaced once again by the ecstasy. Edited by Splog on 12 May 2011 at 7:55am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5459 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 69 of 72 10 June 2011 at 5:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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Today was my last day at University.
I can certainly say that my conversational abilities have increased considerably throughout the course. Throughout the course, the language has shifted from being something intellectual, trapped in my brain, to being part of me. In many respect, I can now speak Czech as painlessly as I speak English. Sometimes, I don't realise which language I have just used. However, it is still not quite as natural as my mother tongue. In some way, I sometimes still sense that it is foreign, and that my success has simply come down to thousands of hours of hard work. In effect, brute-forcing the language into me. I recently read a quote that said something like: "You can walk effortlessly in your mother tongue, but in all other languages you will only ever be swimming. You can become a perfect swimmer in them, but it will never be as natural as walking." I think that sums up my feeling, that I can now swim very well in Czech, and have no fear of drowning. However, it is still not as natural as my mother tongue. I was talking about this with one of the Russians in my group, and she said that she believes you can learn to "walk effortlessly" in another language from the same family as your mother tongue, but once you jump language families, she agrees that the best you can achieve is to be an excellent swimmer. Maybe it is correct, or maybe it is just a matter of 20 more years of immersion. We will see. For now, though, I am satisfied with my Czech abilities, and am switching most of my active effort to another language. So, this will be the last official entry in the "Splog at University" thread. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5459 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 71 of 72 10 June 2011 at 6:56pm | IP Logged | ||
German is a language I have been studying for a very long time already. I am not very proficient in it, to be honest, but can get by well enough in German. It is one of my ongoing "background languages". Czech has been my "foreground" language for long enough, and I am moving it to the background. I am bring Vietnamese to the foreground. It is a language I have dabbled in before, but never bitten into seriously. Maybe it will prove too much, and I will end up giving up after a few months. Nevertheless, it will be a nice challenge for me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Theodisce Octoglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5676 days ago 127 posts - 167 votes Speaks: Polish*, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian, Czech, French, English, German Studies: Italian, Spanish, Slovak, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Greek, Portuguese | Message 72 of 72 15 July 2011 at 10:10pm | IP Logged | ||
It seems to be a common phenomenon in Indo-European languages and such nouns are often referred to as "pluralia tantum". Polish word for a door follows the Czech pattern. I'd like to thank you for creating such a valuable log. I will continue to come back to what you wrote here, and it's not only because I'm studying Czech, the material is just rich and, I believe, of general interest. Edited by Theodisce on 15 July 2011 at 10:10pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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