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Ellasevia’s TAC 2011: Team Ohana | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Amerykanka Hexaglot Senior Member United States Joined 4960 days ago 657 posts - 890 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Polish, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian | Message 81 of 392 05 February 2011 at 3:46pm | IP Logged | ||
Zgadzam sie! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5931 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 82 of 392 06 February 2011 at 6:13am | IP Logged | ||
 I was just reviewing some of the recent lessons from my Assimil Swedish book, when I have across this amusing bit. It’s from a dialogue where someone (a native Spanish-speaker, judging by the name Pedro) is complaining about some of the peculiarities of the Swedish language. This one was particularly interesting:
Det finns värre, lyssna bara! Förstår jag rätt är en äldre dam yngre än en gammal dam, och en yngre man äldre än en ung man. This made me realize that English also has a similar problem. Here’s an English translation: It gets worse, just listen! If I understand correctly, an older woman is younger than an old woman, and a younger man is older than a young man. Of course an “older woman” (en äldre dam) would refer to a woman who is older than middle aged (perhaps 50s-60s?), while an “old woman” (en gammal dam) would refer to an elderly woman. A “younger man” (en yngre man) refers to a man who is on the younger side (perhaps 20s-30s?), while a “young man” (en ung man) is not actually a man, but rather a teenager. When you think about it and what the words sound like they should mean and what they actually mean, it really is illogical, especially to a native Spanish or French speaker. Edited by ellasevia on 25 February 2011 at 9:52pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| joanthemaid Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5259 days ago 483 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, German | Message 83 of 392 06 February 2011 at 11:37am | IP Logged | ||
Happy birthday! Five languages in three years sounds amazing! How did you do it? I think if I can add one language a year to my "spoken" list, it'll already be a miracle... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5931 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 84 of 392 06 February 2011 at 6:14pm | IP Logged | ||
Thanks! I think it was a combination of several factors: 1. I was quite young (13) and had lots of free time. Language learning came extremely naturally to me and I barely had to do any work to make a lot of progress. It was then that I developed my nasty habit of skipping the exercises in my books, because by the time I got to them I had already mastered whatever they were having you practice. 2. I already had a base in a couple of the languages, namely Greek and French (and some experience with dabbling in Portuguese). I was probably at a (low) intermediate level in both of them. 3. Most of the languages I was learning were closely related (Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian), so that was an extra benefit. Learning Portuguese and Italian when you already know Spanish and French is a laughably simple task. Greek and German were the exceptions there. Learning Russian and German without the help of closely related languages is not the same as learning Portuguese after you know Spanish, so don't be discouraged. Your English is already fantastic, and your Spanish isn't bad at all either (I read your log), so you're doing just fine. I'll also be lucky if I can achieve even half of the goals I set for myself this year. It took me almost two years before I decided my German was good enough to say I was at basic fluency, and I've been studying Russian for a bit over six months now and I'd say I'm still an advanced beginner. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5931 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 85 of 392 08 February 2011 at 9:23am | IP Logged | ||
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(Note: This is written from my iPod at a rather late hour, so please forgive me if the following is complete
gobbledigook. I just had this idea and want to explain it before I forget. Also, it probably will not make sense as it is unless you are familiar with both my unfortunate history with kanji and the kanji.koohii website, as I don't feel like giving extraneous explanations right now.)  NEW STRATEGY FOR KANJI
This is just not working out. I was going so strong with kanji last winter/spring, but then in May and June things just exploded and never particularly got better. The trip to Africa is really what did it, I think. Of course I'm not complaining about having gone on the trip, it was just bad timing. Anyways, since then I've been struggling to get back onto the awesome track I was on previously. I've tried a ridiculous number of times, all im vain. Sometimes it was going quite well and I almost succeeded...but something always came up. Thinking that it would magically be different this time, on Saturday I wrote up an elegant "Kanji Recovery Plan" as promised, but never actually did any of the things I outlined in the plan (which were largely the same as past attempts). It's time for a change. In desperation, I finally decided to do something I probably should have a long time ago: start completely anew. Before this just meant clicking through the reviews in a blind fit of rage and ending up with a gigantomungulous (I think that word is my own creation) stack of failed cards. Now, as we've previously established, numbers frighten me, especially big numbers, so that was a huge flaw in my old strategy. This time, I simply deleted all of the cards. Gone. Poof. Problem solved. Yay. (Really, I don't know how it took me half a year to think of this.) From here, my strategy is to add approximately 100 kanji cards at a time and integrate them into my reviews. To ward off unwanted, intimidating review towers, I shall refrain from adding the next set until all of the current cards are safely in at least the "three reviews" compartment. I'm hoping that I'll be able to introduce two new sets of 100 per week, at least in the beginning because it's my assumption that I know the first ~1200 kanji in the book fairly well already. After that it gets harder, so I'll gladly take it more slowly so as not to fall into a six-month-long pit of despair like last time. The process started tonight with me adding in the first 100 kanji and reviewing them to get them into the repetition system. I feel so pathetic having to do this, but I feel even more pathetic every time I have to consult my dictionary in my Japanese class to remember how to write a character or word which would have been second nature to me back in April, May, or even June. I feel like reworking through the book like this might actually get me somewhere (preferably before July, when I'll begin to focus on Japanese and Russian intensively), so it's worth it. In other news, my shiny new Anki review schedule has been almost equally abysmal in getting me to work so far, so I'll try to create an innovative new solution for getting back on top of those reviews as well. Unfortunately, starting over is just not an option for Anki... お休みなさい！ Edited by ellasevia on 25 February 2011 at 9:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5123 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 86 of 392 08 February 2011 at 9:45am | IP Logged | ||
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Great!! I was a bit worried that you were setting your goals so high that they were unreachable, but this seems like an excellent strategy. Well done, ellasevia!!
Sometimes we are so afraid of failing,that we set ourselves up for failure. As you,I am not a quitter, and therefore at the age of 20 I almost went down because I did not want to quit majoring in Spanish,even if I saw that it was killing me. I ended up majoring in English instead, and it literally saved my life (and my future carreer). I am sure you will do great with your new strategy (and if you find a good way to reduce the amount of Anki cards dew, let me know - I am drowning as well). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6259 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 87 of 392 08 February 2011 at 10:19am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't like the solution of deleting cards, as it means more work adding them, and also
losing progress information. Did you consider rescheduling the cards? It's as easy as selecting them all and choosing a date by which you want to know them all; Anki will spread them out equally. Then if you know a card, Anki can put it straight into the long- term storage without bothering with it again in 21 days or so. Edited by Sprachprofi on 08 February 2011 at 10:20am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5931 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 88 of 392 08 February 2011 at 2:16pm | IP Logged | ||
The thing is that I've been using a website especially made for RTK as opposed to Anki. Adding new cards is as easy as typing in the number in the book you wanted to be up through. Last night, for example, I just typed in 100 and it added them automatically. It also saves all of the mnemonics you've come up with (or copied from other people, as it was often the case for me), so you won't have to recreate those either. As for the review progress, this system is not as developed as Anki in that respect (it uses the exact same progression for every card and all it saves is the number of times you've gotten it correct or incorrect) and all your progress is lost as soon as you mark a card as incorrect, and it us sent right back to the failed box. I also tried to figure out how to reschedule or pause the reviews before I went to Africa (to avoid the very problem which ended up killing my progress for months) but unfortunately it's not a feature of that website. For that rescheduling in Anki (telling it when you want to know everything by), I didn't actually know you could do that but it sounds very useful. I think I need to try that out. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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