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Ellasevia’s TAC 2011: Team Ohana | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5923 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 233 of 392 14 May 2011 at 7:57am | IP Logged | ||
Quarter 2: Indonesian, Japanese, Dutch, Russian, Persian     
Week 19: May 7 – 13 Total Study Time This Week: 19.5 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 298.25 hours Average Study Time This Week: 2.79 hours/day Average Study Time in 2011: 2.24 hours/day 
Another great score this week! After having had so many weeks with fewer than 10 hours last month, I’m not going to complain about my “lack of study” for a week during I which I studied almost 20 hours. Over half of the study time this week went to French alone during my frantic immersion study period before my exam, but I also spent varying amounts of time on Indonesian, Japanese, Dutch, and Russian. Also, I am very close to breaking the 300-hour mark this year! If I still have time tonight after composing this log update (highly unlikely), I’ll try to squeeze in 1.75 more hours to top that figure off. Additionally, I’ve managed to keep all of my Anki reviews under control this week for the first time in approximately five months and totaled 6350 reviews. After having completely abused that rescheduling function to the point where it wouldn’t even have much of an effect anymore, I think I finally worked out a schedule for easing myself back into that routine that seems to be working well so far. As for kanji, I had essentially decided that it would be futile to try to catch up on my reviews before going to Greece (two weeks from today!!!) because I would just be greeted by a huge stack when I return anyways, since I’ve learned this week that I most likely won’t have any Internet connection at all during the month that I’m there. It was after officially making that decision that I remembered that there are pre-made Anki decks for RTK and immediately downloaded one such deck. It’s annoying to have to switch over from Reviewing the Kanji, but this keeps all of my reviews in one place and will make it possible for me to continue studying and reviewing kanji while I’m in Greece since I do have the mobile version of Anki on my iPod, which doesn’t require an Internet connection to use.  BAHASA INDONESIA
Total Study Time This Week: 0.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 5.25 hours - TYCI Lesson 2 Vocabulary Study (BYKI) Not the best week for my Indonesian. I simply decided to dedicate any time I had to the languages which are faithful, permanent residents of the “studies” area in my profile. I was actually getting a bit stressed earlier this week thinking about my absurd commitment to Indonesian right after having dropped several other languages and considered dropping out of the Six Week Challenge entirely. I probably would have, except that I’ve already invested the money in Assimil for Indonesian, and the stupid book hasn’t even arrived yet. That and I’m just very stubborn and don’t want to admit to defeat.  日本語
Total Study Time This Month: 2.5 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 27.25 hours - Japanese Sentence Patterns, Ch. 4-5 - Lots of Vocabulary to Anki Nothing really to comment on here, just the usual continuation of my slow-but-steady pace for Japanese. To speak about my school class instead, this week was a perfect example of my frustration with its slow pace. I remember learning about giving and receiving verbs in Japanese (there are seven total, depending on the social status of the people involved) sometime around March of last year, but we only covered it in my class for the first time this week. So, here are some of the sentences I wrote for my test on the subject today: 私は弟の誕生日のためにケーキを作って上げ た。(I made my younger brother a cake for his birthday.) 先生は漢字を書いて下さいました。(My teacher wrote the character for me.) 私は母から本を読んでもらいました。(I had my mother read me a book.)  NEDERLANDS
Total Study Time This Month: 3.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 51.5 hours - Assimil (La Pratique du Néerlandais) Lessons 6-9 - Pronunciation Practice (+evaluation) - Reading and writing in Dutch I got back into Assimil this week, although I have to say that the voices and accents of the actors on the recordings really annoy me. I’ve also had it confirmed that they are indeed Flemish accents. As for my own accent, I recorded a sample of myself reading another text from Assimil, this time about cars falling into the canals in the Netherlands, which is funny in a twisted sort of way. ReneeMona already evaluated it for me and gave me an amazing in-detail explanation of all of the trouble points, but I decided to include it here as a personal progress marker. Disclaimer: It was almost one in the morning when I made this recording, so I fully intend to place part of the blame for some of the stupid pronunciation mistakes on my having been tired at the time. OEFENING: Auto’s in de gracht. In Nederland gebeurt het heel dikwijls dat auto’s in de grachten vallen. Elk jaar rijden meer dan duizend wagens in het water en komen een honderdtal automobilisten daardoor om het leven. Soms komt het door de wind, die te sterk is, of door de mist. Maar het kan ook gebeuren dat de automobilist niet genoeg oplet; in een deel van een seconde verdwijnt de auto dan in de diepte. Bijna altijd worden de inzittenden met paniek geslagen. Ze willen de deuren openen, maar ze vergeten dat zoiets in de eerste minuten totaal onmogelijk is: de druk van het water buiten is immers te sterk. Dan openen ze soms de ramen, met het gevolg dat het water met geweld naar binnen stroomt. Het verdrijft de lucht in enige ogenblikken uit de wagen en drukt de passagiers tegen de zitplaatsen. Op die manier bestaat er maar weinig kans dat de ongelukkigen zich zullen kunnen redden. Als u met uw wagen in de gracht valt, moet u rustig wachten totdat het water, dat maar heel langzaam de auto vult, omdat u alles gesloten hebt gelaten, tot aan uw hals komt. De druk van het water is dan bijna even sterk aan beide kanten van het portier, dat zich gemakkelijk laat openen. Dikwijls hoeven de passagiers slechts op het dak van hun voertuig te klimmen om weer boven water te zijn, want op veel plaatsen zijn de Hollandse grachten maar twee meter diep.  РУССКИЙ
Total Study Time This Week: 2.5 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 17.75 hours - Finished MT Vocabulary - Thematic vocabulary lists to Anki (professions, food/kitchen, nature) I finished off the last bit of the MT Russian Vocabulary course for the second time last night. I’ll make the same observation I did last time: this is one of my favorite Michel Thomas courses. In fact, all of the MT Russian courses are excellent. The teacher is very good and the students seem to actually have some sort of idea of what they’re doing and sound like they’re genuinely having fun learning Russian. Now I’ll have to get back into my normal study books. Other than that, I went through a few Russian thematic vocabulary lists from Internet Polyglot and added their contents to Anki.  Français
Total Study Time This Week: 10 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 26 hours - Harry Potter et la Coupe de Feu, Ch. 10-13 - French radio - Writing in French - AP French review book exercises - AP French EXAM!!! I already wrote in detail about my experience with the AP French Exam earlier this week, so instead I’ll just briefly mention what I did before that for preparation. So, I continued reading a few chapters from Harry Potter as part of my immersive environment, in conjunction with having a French radio station playing continuously for hours on end (including while I was asleep the night before the exam). I also decided to do some of my habitual writing tasks in French instead of English, and thought it might be a good idea to preview some of the actual exam exercises from my review book. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| polyglossia Senior Member FranceRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5185 days ago 205 posts - 255 votes Speaks: French* | Message 234 of 392 14 May 2011 at 1:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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Your pronunciation of dutch is just... impressive !! I couldnt believe it, but then I'm not a native speaker, so, I'm refering to my audio material... But then, maybe we should wait the opinion of ReneeMona...
Good luck with Bahasa Indonesia ! I bought the TY book a year ago, but obiously I still didnt find the motivation.. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5923 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 235 of 392 16 May 2011 at 2:53am | IP Logged | ||
  Decisions Regarding Polish, Romanian, French, and Italian  
Well, it's been almost three weeks since I made those cuts to my target language list so my trial period for Polish and Romanian is nearly over. I was supposed to make this decision tomorrow, but I've already had my mind made up about this for a while and I'm just sitting here being bored so I thought that I might as well make good use of my time and get this out of the way. First off, I'm going to completely disregard the main criterion I was going to use to judge whether or not I want to bring back these two languages. I stated that if I truly missed studying Polish and/or Romanian and really felt the motivation to continue with them, I would bring them back. However, I've decided to alter that statement, particularly regarding Polish. POLISH Let's get this over with: I'm not continuing with Polish at this point. I was very conflicted about this decision since I genuinely enjoyed studying Polish this year and did miss studying it over the last several weeks. However, since I've gotten Polish out of the way, I've had more time to rediscover and focus on Russian, which is my #1 priority Slavic language, which Polish had begun to eclipse. I've really enjoyed revisiting Russian more in the past weeks and was upset by how much Russian I had lost to Polish. In short, as fun as it is, I think it's too much to simultaneously juggle two beginner-level Slavic languages and I'd rather just focus on my Russian for now. Polish has become very dear to me though, so I'll definitely be returning to it in the future once I've brought my Russian up to a more acceptable level. ROMANIAN Sadly, the same decision has been made for Romanian as for Polish. Despite my original enthusiasm for the language when I started it last summer and my labeling of it as my favorite Romance language (tied with French), I've lost much of the passion I had for it before and I've decided that my time would be better spent focusing on only a few languages which I still have good motivation for. To be perfectly honest I didn't miss Romanian all that much during this trial period, but rather mostly guilty for having "betrayed" it. Like with Polish, I'm planning on spending my time on continuing to refine my French and reawaken my Italian before moving on to this last Romance language. I still very much want to learn Romanian but now is not the time. Likely sometime next year... FRENCH and Italian Having just ridded myself of my obligations to Polish and Romanian and gotten past the stress of the AP French Exam, I'm suddenly feeling a huge burst of motivation to work on my French and Italian. I've set the statuses of both of these to "studying on and off" because I don't want to feel like I have to work on these regularly, but rather just whenever I feel the motivation. For French my studies will probably consist mainly of continued exposure to the language through reading and possibly studying some vocabulary every once in a while. My Italian, on the other hand, has become extremely rusty and is in serious need of attention. I'll likely be continuing to read from the novel which I bought in January but I should definitely review and study some aspects of the language actively as well. [EDIT: I can't seem to get the "Italian" in the title of this section to be written in capitals. The site appears to have some sort of auto-correct for this word.] NOTE: I've just added Italian into my list of study languages (graph, etc.) and estimated the time spent on various activities which I had recorded, so some of the old figures are no longer the same. For example, the new total time for Quarter 1 is exactly 222 hours instead of 221.25 hours. I estimated that I've spent about 2.75 hours on Italian so far this year. OTHER STUFF At this point I've reduced my study load to the point where I can mostly just work on whichever language I want without having to worry too much about finding the time for all of them in the course of the week. For that reason I'm going to refrain from creating a new schedule, also because schedules are a bit stressful when you don't keep up with them and because I have no idea what my days will look like while I'm in Greece (well I do since I've been there many times before, but it's not set in stone). Edited by ellasevia on 17 May 2011 at 2:34am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5337 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 236 of 392 16 May 2011 at 10:04am | IP Logged | ||
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It must be a constant challenge to balance all these languages with your other studies, so I think you've made some sensible decisions here (especially regarding Russian ;) ). And don't fret, Polish and Romanian won't run away to some unreachable continent in the meantime. You can always return to them later on with the added benefit of stronger skills in related languages.
And congrats on topping 300 hours of study so far in 2011 - замечательно! :) Edited by Teango on 17 May 2011 at 10:14am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5923 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 237 of 392 17 May 2011 at 3:13am | IP Logged | ||
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@polyglossia: Dank je wel voor het complimentje! Renee heeft 't me al goed verklaard dus ik denk niet dat ze het weer ga beschrijven, maar ze dacht dat het wel goed was in ieder geval, ook al ik nog sommige probleempjes bij de uitspraak heb. Oefening baart kunst. :) Wat het Indonesisch betreft, ik heb nog weinige vorderingen gemaakt maar de taal is werkelijk echt gemakkelijk. De motivatie en gebrek aan tijd zijn momenteel ook mijn grootste problemen. (Do you speak/study Dutch, by the way? If you couldn't understand this I'll gladly translate it for you.)
@Teango: Спасибо большое! Ты прав, это часто трудно изучать много языков и одновременно делать домашнее задание и изучать для школы, но я люблю эти языки так я думаю что... Yeah, I can't write this in Russian yet. Anyways, thank you and even though it's difficult and even stressful a lot of the time, I love studying these languages and it gives me a sense of sanity so I think the time spent on them is definitely worth it. And thanks about the 300 hours. It would be nicer if it were 350 or 400 at this point, but you can't have everything. Edited by ellasevia on 17 May 2011 at 3:20am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5341 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 238 of 392 17 May 2011 at 1:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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Can you do a few more of those Dutch recordings? I think I'd quite like to speak Dutch with an ellasevian accent.
Do you know whether the accents on "with ease" were dutch or flemish? The accents didn't bother me too much, but the poor audio quality was a bit annoying. I seem to be really struggling to complete that too. I know your not supposed to blame your tools, but the later chapters just seemed to get really boring. Edited by schoenewaelder on 17 May 2011 at 1:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5116 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 239 of 392 17 May 2011 at 1:35pm | IP Logged | ||
“Wel goed”? Niet zo bescheiden, Philip. Volgens mij heb ik eerder “heel goed” gezegd. :) Ik was vooral erg onder de indruk van je intonatie en ik vond dat je heel erg vooruit bent gegaan sinds de eerste opname, zeker toen ik later hoorde wat voor vreemde Vlaamse accenten ze je voorschotelen om na te apen. Weet je nog dat ik zei dat je het woord ‘seconde’ een beetje vreemd uitsprak? Dat kwam vast omdat de vrouw op de opname het ook heel raar zei. ;-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5923 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 240 of 392 21 May 2011 at 6:28am | IP Logged | ||
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Just a short delay in my log post. I tried to write it tonight but doing so ended with giving me a panic attack/mental breakdown, so I'm going to bed now. I'll try to see if I can get through it tomorrow.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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