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Ellasevia’s TAC 2011: Team Ohana | ||
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| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5929 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 193 of 392 01 April 2011 at 2:23am | IP Logged | |||||
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Weekly Study Schedule For April 1 to May 10
Monday:   
Tuesday:  
Wednesday:  
Thursday:   
Friday:  
Saturday: 
Sunday:  
Each occurrence of a flag represents one hour of study of that language. For example:  = 1 hour of Japanese
As you can see, the new focus languages are Greek and Romanian. Now that I only have two of them instead of three, I plan to (ideally) study each for six hours per week instead of five. After that I still have two spots left over, so I've dedicated those to French and German for AP exam preparation. My German exam is on May 6th and my French exam is on May 10th, hence the ending date for this study schedule period. At that point I'll most likely choose two other languages to fill those spots. I'll follow this post up with a summary of both the month of March and the first quarter of 2011 (January-March) by the end of the evening. The second quarter begins tomorrow and the new schedule takes effect tomorrow too, even though these don't match up exactly with the end of the week. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| mirab3lla Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom lang-8.com/220477Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5230 days ago 161 posts - 229 votes Speaks: Romanian*, EnglishC2, German Studies: Spanish, FrenchB1, Mandarin | Message 194 of 392 02 April 2011 at 3:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Salut Philip, cum îți mai merge?
Eu tocmai m-am întors din Italia, unde m-am distrat foarte tare. Mă bucur că acum te concentrezi pe română, sper să înveți multe lucruri folositoare în acest timp. La sfârșitul acestei perioade sper că vom putea purta o conversație vorbită în limba română! Multă baftă și spor la lucru! Cu drag, Mirabela :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5929 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 195 of 392 03 April 2011 at 8:48am | IP Logged | |||||
Quarter 1: Swedish, Persian, Dutch  
MARCH 1-31 Total Study Time This Month: 58.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 221.25 hours Average Study Time This Month: 1.90 hours/day Average Study Time in 2011: 2.46 hours/day  
BLUE: Days I studied (^^ using a rather loose definition of "study") [Note: I know I said I would do these reports two days ago, but I had forgotten how busy I was and things only got crazier since then. I’ll post the summaries for the First Quarter and this past week tomorrow if I have time.] Oh god. March went from being the best month near the beginning to the worst month so far by the end. What happened? For the first two weeks I had a lot of extra free time and was averaging more than three hours of study per day. Then — bam! — life kicked in and I got sick and consequently very behind in my schoolwork, preventing me from studying. The next week was Spring Break so I theoretically should have been able to do plenty of language study, but I was traveling for most of it and too tired for the rest of it. Finally, during the last week I was so unmotivated by sudden burnout of the past couple weeks combined with the fact that school started back up with a bang and I barely touched my target languages. If I recall correctly, April was far worse than March last year in terms of opportunities to study, so hope it won’t become a repeating trend. On the bright side, if one considers that the hours I racked up this month essentially represent about two and a half weeks' worth of effort, that comes out to a much more satisfying average of 3.36 hours per day. On a second positive note, I reached my goal of basic fluency in Swedish this month so that’s something to smile about at least.  SVENSKA
Total Study Time This Month: 8.25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 37.25 hours - Assimil Lessons 56-61 (passive), 7-12 (active) - Swedish Radio - Song translation A pretty pathetic result considering that Swedish was supposed to be my “focus-focus” language for this month. I haven’t even studied any Swedish since March 8th…  فارسى
Total Study Time This Month: 7.25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 37.5 hours - Assimil Lessons 48-56 Even worse than Swedish. March 8th was also the last time I studied Persian. :(  NEDERLANDS
Total Study Time This Month: 7.5 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 43.75 hours - Dutch With Ease Lessons 36-39 (active wave) - La Pratique du Néerlandais Lessons 1-7 (passive wave) - Reading in Dutch Αχ Παναγία μου. Twenty hours of Dutch in February to 7.5 hours in March!? What is the world coming to?  Deutsch
Total Study Time This Month: 4.5 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 8.5 hours - Homework and Internet reading - Lots of German radio The only reason my figure for German is above an hour is because I had a German radio station playing for hours one day and I counted half of it as study time.  Français
Total Study Time This Month: 4.25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 4.5 hours - Vocabulary - Harry Potter et la Coupe de Feu: Chapters 1-4 (I think) Well at least I did something.  Română
Total Study Time This Month: 2.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 11 hours - TY Romanian Lesson 10-11 (+ BYKI vocab study) I’m expecting this number to multiply by eight in the next month. If not… I don’t what to tell you.  Ελληνικά
Total Study Time This Month: 6.25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 12.75 hours - “Reading, vocabulary” (<-- whatever that means; it’s just what I have written down) - Greek immersion The extensive exposure to Greek was the only positive part of my trip two weeks ago.  Polski
Total Study Time This Month: 3 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 17.5 hours - Spoken World Polish Lesson 2 (+BYKI) - Teach Yourself Polish Lesson 3 - Wrote short letter in Polish - Mała Syrenka Not bad considering that język polski is not one of my main languages (yet). I haven’t worked on it at all since March 11th, though…  Русский
Total Study Time This Month: 4.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 13.25 hours - Linguaphone Russian Lessons 4 - MT Russian Vocabulary - Writing in Russian My Russian didn’t actually suffer this month because while I was sick the only studying that I felt up to doing was listening to the MT Vocabulary course.  Kiswahili
Total Study Time This Month: 1 hour Total Study Time in 2011: 7 hours - Translated news article about Japan earthquake and tsunami Don’t even ask.  日本語
Total Study Time This Month: 6 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 15.5 hours - Smart.fm vocabulary - Japanese Sentence Patterns, Ch. 1-3 and 7 That sentence pattern book is seriously addictive. :)  漢字
Total Kanji Reviews This Month: 1582 reviews Total Restudied Kanji This Month: 394 characters Total Restudied Kanji in 2011: 700 characters I could have made it further, to at least 900, but I’ll just accept a victory here. OTHER -  ქართული: Beginner’s Georgian Lessons 1 (+BYKI) and 2 [3.75 hours]
-  العربية: Teach Yourself Arabic Introduction and Lesson 1 [1.25 hours]
-  Italiano: Teach Yourself Improve Your Italian Lesson 1 [0.75 hours]Edited by ellasevia on 04 April 2011 at 7:56am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5929 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 196 of 392 04 April 2011 at 8:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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Quarter 1: Swedish, Persian, Dutch
JANUARY 1 – MARCH 31 Total Study Time This Quarter: 221.25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 221.25 hours Average Study Time This Quarter: 2.46 hours/day Average Study Time in 2011: 2.46 hours/day
I simply cannot believe that three months have already passed and that it’s already April. Of the 90 days included in the First Quarter, I did some sort of language study on 81 of them. (I think it’s best not to mention my kanji and especially my Anki reviews.) With the exception of the last three weeks of March, I felt like I was constantly making good progress, with an average weekly total of just over 17 hours per week. I learned a great deal of Swedish, Dutch, and Persian during these three months, along with maintaining and furthering my knowledge of the other languages on the side. In short, I think it was a very successful start for the year and I hope that the journey will become even more exciting as it progresses. If I keep studying at this pace all year, I will have clocked almost 900 hours of language study by the end of 2011. My goal is to reach 1000 hours… Reflections on this focus system? I think it’s good, but Sprachprofi was definitely right about only concentrating on two languages per quarter. Even though Dutch was always very pleasant and easy to study, I felt overstretched trying to work on three languages intensively in addition to maintaining all the others, and I didn’t work as much on any of my focus languages as I could have if I had only had two of them. SVENSKA
Total Study Time This Quarter: 37.25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 37.25 hours - Assimil Review (1-21) + Lessons 22-61 (passive), 1-12 (active) - A huge amount of Swedish radio - Den Lilla Sjöjungfrun + vocabulary - Song translation - Pronunciation practice I most definitely could have and should have done more work with Swedish, but over these three months I felt an immense jump in both my passive and active knowledge of the language. I can now understand the majority of Swedish radio broadcasts (a huge milestone for me), can easily understand written texts in Swedish, and can express myself with much more ease and confidence, and hopefully accuracy as well, than was possible previously. Thinking back to the end of 2010 when I was contemplating whether or not I was at basic fluency yet, I’m surprised I was even considering it! (Not to mention that I was also thinking of it last summer…) Although I can now claim to “speak” the language, that does not mean by any means that I’m planning on abandoning my studies of it; I intend to continue furthering and refining my abilities for the rest of 2011, at least. December 2010 Level: B1+ March 2011 Level: B2 فارسى
Total Study Time This Quarter: 37.5 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 37.5 hours - Assimil Lessons 1-56 (passive), 1-7 (active) - Spoken World Farsi Review (1-3) + Lessons 4-8 (+BYKI) - Colloquial Persian Lesson 4 (+BYKI) - Lots of Persian Bible listening I entered the New Year feeling very “bleh” about my Persian studies. I knew very few words, very little grammar, and not nearly enough exposure to or confidence in the language to put it all together. Besides that, my motivation was sinking and I was actually wondering whether I wanted to continue with Persian. I’m glad that I decided to keep going. In the past three months, I feel like I have reconnected with the language and very much enjoy studying it (and using it, were I to have the chance) now, in addition to having learned a huge amount of the language and about the culture of Iran. Although I haven’t had the time to study it recently, I’ve missed it and look forward to resuming and carrying on with my studies. After studying a tiny bit of Arabic in the past week, I realized how spoiled I am with Persian because of its not-giving-me-a-headache-after-only-an-hour-of-study-ness, yet still allowing me the experience of discovering a language of the fascinating Middle East. December 2010 Level: A1+ March 2011 Level: A2 NEDERLANDS
Total Study Time This Quarter: 43.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 43.75 hours - Reviewed MT Dutch Advanced Course - Reviewed Routledge Intensive Dutch Course Lessons 1-3 - Reviewed Teach Yourself Dutch Lessons 1-11 - [Assimil] Dutch With Ease Review (1-12) + Lessons 13-84 (passive), 1-39 (active) - [Assimil] Le Néerlandais Sans Peine Lessons 1-7 (passive wave) - Reading/writing in Dutch - Pronunciation practice - De Kleine Zeemeermin Already knowing English, German, and a fair amount of Swedish, Dutch was hardly a difficult language even from the very beginning (especially since I had already studied it for a while earlier in 2010). Nonetheless, it was always a pleasure to work on my Dutch since it’s such a fun language. Indeed, I started Dutch planning only to focus on it during the January Dutch Challenge, which extended into a true 6WC and then into a full-fledged TAC 2011 focus language and even the most studied among those, all because I couldn’t keep myself away from the charm of the language. I would estimate that my passive skills are already at B2 level thanks to numerous similarities with other closely-related Germanic languages and I just need to work on my active skills to get them up to the same level before I can truly claim to “speak” Dutch. I also intend to continue with Dutch to the end of this year, and possibly beyond. December 2010 Level: A2 March 2011 Level: B1/B2 Deutsch
Total Study Time This Quarter: 11.5 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 11.5 hours - German Grammar Drills - Tagebucheinträge // other German class homework - Vocabulary - Internet reading/writing - Lots of German radio December 2010 Level: B2 March 2011 Level: B2 Français
Total Study Time This Quarter: 8.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 8.75 hours - Letter writing - Vocabulary - French radio - AP Prep Exercises - Harry Potter et la Coupe de Feu, Ch. 1-3 December 2010 Level: C1 (rusty) March 2011 Level: C1 (refreshed) Română
Total Study Time This Quarter: 11 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 11 hours - Assimil review/shadowing (1-30), restudy (22-30) - Assimil Lesson 31 - Teach Yourself Romanian Review (1-9) + Lessons 10-11 (+BYKI) - Writing in Romanian December 2010 Level: A2- March 2011 Level: A2+ Ελληνικά
Total Study Time This Quarter: 12.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 12.75 hours - Greek lessons with grandmother - Newspaper/story/mythology/poetry/etc reading + vocabulary - Greek immersion December 2010 Level: B2 March 2011 Level: B2 Polski
Total Study Time This Quarter: 17.5 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 17.5 hours - MT Polish Foundation Course (completed) - MT Polish Advanced Course (in progress) - Assimil Lessons 1-8 - Teach Yourself Polish Lessons 0-3 (+BYKI) - Spoken World Polish Lessons 0-2 (+BYKI and shadowing) - Przygody Krystyny, Pawła i Reksa (1 story) - Writing/reading letters in Polish - Extra grammar practice - Vocabulary - Mała Syrenka December 2010 Level: A0 March 2011 Level: A1+/A2- [Note: I had already studied for at least six hours in the four days leading up to the beginning of 2011.] Русский
Total Study Time This Quarter: 13.25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 13.25 hours - Roots of the Russian Language (a small bit) - Cortina Russian Lessons 7-8; Translations 3-4 - BYKI’ed Teach Yourself Russian Lessons 8-9 - Linguaphone Russian Lessons 1-4 - MT Russian Vocabulary - Writing in Russian - Russian Bible Listening December 2010 Level: A2 March 2011 Level: A2+ Kiswahili
Total Study Time This Quarter: 7 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 7 hours - Multilingual Lounge Reading/Writing - [Grammar Review] Mwana Simba Lessons 36-40 - Assimil Lessons 1-10 - Reading/listening to news in Swahili, + translation December 2010 Level: B1 March 2011 Level: B1- [Note: This is what I get for neglecting Swahili so much recently. I’ve forgotten way too much to be assessed at the strong(ish) B1 I was at before, but I still probably know too much to be considered at A2. I think a big review is in order.] 日本語
Total Study Time This Quarter: 15.5 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 15.5 hours - Japanese class vocabulary - Reviewed Ultimate Japanese Lessons 1-12 - Reviewed Assimil Lessons 1-17 - Smart.fm vocabulary/sentences - Japanese Sentence Patterns, Ch. 1-3 and 7 - Pronunciation Practice (Pitch Accent) December 2010 Level: A2/B1 March 2011 Level: A2+/B1 漢字
Total Kanji Reviews This Quarter: 3401 reviews Total Restudied Kanji This Quarter: 700 characters Total Restudied Kanji in 2011: 700 characters OTHER In addition to all listed above, I also spent time on… -  Spanish in the form of watching El Internado and speaking weekly;
-  Portuguese by watching A Pequena Sereia, speaking with myself and my history teacher, and reading a story;
-  Italian by listening to some of LearnItalianPod, reading the first two chapters of L’Ombra del Vento, and working through a bit of TY Improve Your Italian;
-  Hungarian by studying part of the first lesson of TY Hungarian;
-  Georgian by studying the first two lessons of Beginner’s Georgian and revising the Mkhedruli alphabet;
-  Hebrew by listening to a Pimsleur lesson and learning a few letters of the Hebrew alphabet;
-  Arabic by working through the introduction and first lesson of TY Arabic; and
-  Korean by learning 한글 (Hangul alphabet).Edited by ellasevia on 13 April 2011 at 11:29pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| strikingstar Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4960 days ago 292 posts - 444 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Cantonese, Swahili Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written) | Message 197 of 392 04 April 2011 at 7:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
:( Kiswahili kinasikia huzuni... Lakini... ushihangaike. Nimekuwa nikisahau maneno mengi pia. Inaonekana kwamba ninahitaji kuendelea kujifunza Kiswa tena pia.
!!أشاهد أنك تبدأ لتدرس اللغة العربية. أكبر 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5122 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 198 of 392 04 April 2011 at 11:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
Ach ja, zo gaat dat met het Nederlands, hè. Langzaam maar zeker gooit het z'n charme in de strijd en voor je het weet zit je als een rat in de val. Kat in 't bakkie, elke keer weer. :) Maar even serieus, gefeliciteerd met een heel mooi eerste kwartaal en ik kijk reikhalzend uit naar het relaas van de rest van je taalbelevenissen dit jaar. En mocht je nog een keertje je Nederlands willen oefenen dan weet je me te vinden. :) EDIT: Ik kan niet spellen. Edited by ReneeMona on 04 April 2011 at 11:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5929 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 199 of 392 09 April 2011 at 8:25am | IP Logged | |||||
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Quarter 2: Greek, Romanian
Weeks 13-14: March 26 – April 8 Total Study Time This Week: 13.5 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 226.25 hours Average Study Time This Week: 0.96 hours/day Average Study Time in 2011: 2.31 hours/day 
I decided to combine this week’s summary with last week’s so that it would look like I had done something. It doesn't, so that plan failed, but here it is anyways… A short summary The almost-no-study streak has continued. Between lack of time and lack of motivation, I was lucky to have scraped up even a few hours in the past two weeks. The longer story After returning from my trip two weeks ago and having to confront my lack of productivity, I was discouraged and simply could not motivate myself to work on any of my target languages. I really wanted to, yet couldn’t bring myself to open the book, start up the Anki deck, or review the due kanji list. I had a bit of a longing for working on some non-target languages, so I decided to exploit that desire to make me want to work on my old languages again. I pulled out my books on Arabic, Georgian, Hungarian, Finnish, and Turkish, all difficult languages and also the prime targets of my wanderlust. My plan was that after discovering first-hand how difficult those languages are, I would be thrilled to come running home to my own easier ones. The motives transformed over time to become that since it was the end of the quarter anyways I would give myself a break and study anything I wanted, a so-called “Wild Wanderlust Week,” which would count for my total study time. In any case, it worked out for a couple days but suddenly I was overwhelmed by an unexpected tide of homework and make-up work from when I was sick just before Spring Break and only had time to work on Arabic, Georgian, and Italian. I ended up finishing off my WWW and starting the new quarter even more tired and discouraged that before. That was last week. I don’t even remember if I had any motivation to work on my languages this week because I was so busy. I think this was among the most difficult weeks, if not the most difficult week, of the school year. I have probably slept no more than 20 hours since Sunday and on the rare occasion that I had the chance to take a break from schoolwork, I was far too exhausted to even think about my studies. Besides that, I had other non-school and non-language related things on my mind, like the fact that there was a huge mountain lion in my neighbor’s backyard which was then on the loose in my neighborhood at a time when I was walking home from school all alone, blissfully ignorant of the fact that there was giant cat lurking in the bushes nearby. Comforting thoughts like those.  ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ
Total Study Time This Week: 1 hour Total Study Time in 2011: 13.75 hours Days Until Greece: 49 days - Reading in Greek I was with my grandmother earlier today and she was having me read in Greek, even though it was extremely easy material from a textbook that I finished almost a year ago. I think she’s run out of ideas. I figured that even if it was below my level, I was reading in Greek, and therefore counted the approximate time spent. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this here yet, but my travel plans for this summer are now set. Some things came up last minute, like the fact that it’s my aunt’s birthday at the beginning of July so my entire family will be flocking to California, and unfortunately that includes me. (Supposedly I was given a choice in whether I wanted to go or not, but this was only made clear to me after the tickets were already purchased.) I have to leave Greece before the end of June which means that the other places I mentioned before (Romania, Scotland, Ukraine) won’t be happening. The most annoying part is that if I could have stayed there only five or so days longer I could still have gone to Scotland with my grandmother. To offset the early return home, I’m leaving for Greece with my grandparents the day after school gets out on May 27th, which gives us about an extra week there. My parents and brother will follow two weeks later, I think, and then we all come back together around June 27th. All hope of other European travel is not yet lost, however. In the two weeks before the rest of my family comes, it’s possible that we can take a small side-trip to a nearby destination. We did this a few years ago when we went to Prague for four days, so it’s simply a matter of convincing my grandparents. Français
Total Study Time This Week: 0.25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 9 hours - French Radio I listened to a French radio program for 15 minutes earlier this week, but turned it off after it switched to some rather aggravating music. I should really do more with French (and German). My exam is just over a month away… Deutsch
Total Study Time This Week: 0.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 12.25 hours - German Project All I had time for this week in terms of German was working on a German final project of sorts, which involves everyone in the class choosing a subject of interest and becoming the “Lehrer für einen Tag” (Teacher for a Day) and conducting a lesson on it in German and assigning homework, creating a test, and so on. My chosen subject is the Mkhedruli alphabet used in Georgian, which I shall attempt to teach to my class within the hour. I hope they’re fast learners, because the homework and test that I give them actually count for their grades. :)  Nederlands
Total Study Time This Week: 0.5 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 43.75 hours - Reading in Dutch Geen commentaar. Polski
Total Study Time This Week: 0.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 18.25 hours - Food and kitchen vocabulary! This was one of the rare occasions that I had a break from homework and actually did some language study. Most of it consisted of putting some vocabulary lists of food and kitchen words (ryba, mięso, nóż, gryźć) into Anki, but it was quite fun and I recognized many words from Russian. 日本語
Total Study Time This Week: 3.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 17.75 hours - Japanese Sentence Patterns, Ch. 1-3 and 7 - Created Anki deck for Japanese sentences Like I said before, that sentence pattern book is just awesome and very addicting once I start going through it. I couldn’t even put it down while I was walking on the mall (not that I wanted to be there, but still). :P I also decided to make an Anki deck for all of the sentences that it teaches because I thought it would be a good way to cement some of the patterns and vocabulary into my head. Besides, it would be a list that I would probably enjoy reviewing since I always get a thrill out of being able to fully read and understand sentences in Japanese. 漢字
Total Kanji Reviews This Week: 188 reviews Total Restudied Kanji This Week: 37 characters Total Restudied Kanji in 2011: 700 characters I finished up through 700 characters last week but didn’t have the chance to study any this week. I hardly did any kanji reviews either, and now have over 300 of them waiting for me.  العربية
Total Study Time This Week: 1.25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 1.25 hours - TY Arabic, Introduction and Lesson 1 As much as I adore the sound and appearance of Arabic, as well as the culture and history that comes along with it, I must admit that the prospect of having to learn this language is terrifying. After about an hour, I already had a headache and was feeling exhausted from the intensity of the language. I can see why others have termed it a “time leech.” Suffice it to say, this little stint with Arabic was enough to postpone any ambitions of learning it in the near future for quite a ways. ქართული
Total Study Time This Week: 3.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 3.75 hours - Revised Mkhedruli alphabet - Beginner’s Georgian Lesson 1 (+BYKI) and 2 Georgian was quite fun while I was working on it last week, but I did start to get confused by the infamous verbs already partway through the second lesson. I spent nearly four hours on Georgian and I really enjoyed most of that time, but again, this helped me to remember that Georgian, like Arabic, is a project for the future when I have lots of time on my hands. Italiano
Total Study Time This Week: 0.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: >0.75 hours - TY Improve Your Italian Lesson 1 Recently I’ve had a bit of motivation returning to me to work with Italian again, so I decided to start on the first lesson from the book which I had planned to use at some point last year. It was enjoyable but I didn’t finish the lesson due to time constraints. I think that after I’m done with the AP French Exam I’ll study some more Italian this summer if my motivation is still there. OTHER Mirab3lla, strikingstar, and ReneeMona, now that I’ve finished catching up on all of my updates I’ll respond to your comments in your various languages when I’m slightly less brain dead. Edited by ellasevia on 10 April 2011 at 7:03am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5929 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 200 of 392 16 April 2011 at 7:57am | IP Logged | |||||
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Quarter 2: Greek, Romanian
Week 15: April 9 – April 15 Total Study Time This Week: 18 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 244.25 hours Average Study Time This Week: 2.57 hours/day Average Study Time in 2011: 2.33 hours/day 
April is already half over! Fortunately I finally was able to do some actual language work this week and dragged myself out of that horrible study slump. Like last week, I was extremely busy with school (April is the busiest month in my opinion) so I’ll admit that some of the time I spent on language was at the expense of math assignments, reading history textbooks, and so on. In any case, I squeezed in time for seven of my eleven current target languages. The only ones I didn’t have the chance to interact with this week were Swedish, Russian, Persian, and Swahili. Tomorrow I have a Japanese competition all day and I won’t have much time on Sunday either, so I don’t expect this to be a very productive weekend. At least I can count the Japanese competition as study time. :) ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ
Total Study Time This Week: 6.25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 20 hours Days Until Greece: 42 days - Ο Χάρι Πότερ και η Κάμαρα με τα Μυστικά: Ch. 5-15 (L-R) I tried out a new method this week: Listening-Reading. I was reading the second Harry Potter book in Greek while listening to the English audio. Impressions? I think this method is very promising. At first it was extremely tiring to read the Greek while listening to the English and to focus on both simultaneously and I often couldn’t even keep up with the speed that the narrator was reading the English, and had to take periodic breaks. I found myself skipping over the longer words which appear so frequently in Greek, so I started reading the Greek aloud while listening to the English. This forced me to focus more on the Greek text and sound out the longer unfamiliar words rather than just skip over them while I was reading in my head. I could only keep this up for a short time though, so now I mostly do that in the beginning of a session to get me warmed up to the appropriate reading speed before switching to following along silently. Results? Over the course of the week I’ve experienced a big jump in my reading speed in Greek and especially in quickly sounding out unknown words. I also am recognizing words that I knew already (or ones that I learned through L-Ring) more quickly than I was before. I found this to be a very fun way to study (as long as I wasn’t reading a Quidditch scene) and am sad that this is the only book I have in Greek right now. In any case, I read ten chapters of Harry Potter this way this week which amounted to about 220 pages. Only 60 more pages to go…  ROMÂNĂ
Total Study Time This Week: 3 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 14 hours - Assimil Lessons 32-35 (+review) Unfortunately, my enthusiasm for L-Ring in Greek this week was at the expense of my Romanian, so I didn’t get to work as much on it as I would have liked to. I made a surprise return to Assimil and completed the next four lessons as well as a review of several previous ones. I also glanced a little bit at the next chapter of TY Romanian on the bus, but not enough to count as studying. Français
Total Study Time This Week: 1 hour Total Study Time in 2011: 10 hours - Harry Potter et la Coupe de Feu: Ch. 4-5 I should have done more with French, but all I had time to do was to read these two chapters from my Harry Potter book in French. I figure that to have done something is better than nothing at all, so I’m happy with that result. Deutsch
Total Study Time This Week: 3 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 15.25 hours - German Radio - Reading “Lügengeschichten” (Münschhausen) - Wrote a short essay on synaesthesia Besides listening to German radio, which I did while working on other things, my activities for German were only for school. We were reading some German tall tales (Lügengeschichten) for class and then we had to write another entry for our Tagebücher. This week it was a free choice and I was feeling rather uninspired, so I decided to write about my synaesthesia on a whim, and ended up writing a 600 word essay (it was supposed to be 100 words) on the subject. I got just a tad carried away there… Nederlands
Total Study Time This Week: 2.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 46.5 hours - Reading/writing in Dutch Just corresponding casually in Dutch this week and doing some reading on Dutch websites. Not much to mention in the way of actual study here. Polski
Total Study Time This Week: 1 hour Total Study Time in 2011: 19.25 hours - Spoken World Polish Lesson 3 I found the time to do a Polish lesson this week despite all the craziness. I haven’t studied the vocabulary yet though, so that’s probably what I’ll do next week. In the lesson I came across this amusing sentence: Cieszę się, że ci się podoba. There’s nothing funny about its meaning (“I’m glad that you like it”), but when I heard it spoken I began laughing because it is mostly a bunch of ‘ch’, ‘sh’, and ‘zh’ sounds all squashed together. It sounds something like ‘Cheshe she zhe chi she podoba.’ 日本語
Total Study Time This Week: 1 hour Total Study Time in 2011: 18.75 hours - Japanese Sentence Patterns, Ch. 2-3 (review) - Created Anki deck for Japanese names This week I mainly spent time on reviewing the sentences that I’ve already covered and entering them into my new Anki deck for Japanese sentences. I’ve also created a deck for family and place names (ex: 吉田 = Yoshida; 広島 = Hiroshima) because it’s a topic that I’m going to be tested on at this Japanese competition. Speaking of that, I should probably explain what it is. I think it’s called the Japan Cup and my friend and I are on a team together representing our level from our school. We are going to be tested on various aspects of Japanese and…I don’t really know what else is going to happen. My friend and I split up some of the rote memorization tasks so that I study the kanji, family/place names, and so on. I also just found out that I will have to learn several Japanese proverbs too (such as 猿も木から落ちる), which would not be a problem except that I don’t know what most of them mean in English. I’ll probably be cramming those in the car tomorrow. :P Anyways, my Japanese teacher thinks that my friend and I have a good chance of getting to the final round, but I’m not setting any expectations for myself. 漢字
Total Kanji Reviews This Week: 204 reviews Total Restudied Kanji This Week: 0 characters Total Restudied Kanji in 2011: 700 characters I’ve been so bad with my kanji reviews in the past few weeks (not to even mention my Anki reviews…). This needs to change. You’d think that the fact that I will be tested on kanji tomorrow would provide some sort of motivation to study, but it would seem that it hasn’t. Edited by ellasevia on 17 April 2011 at 4:22am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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