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Ellasevia’s TAC 2011: Team Ohana

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Teango
Triglot
Winner TAC 2010 & 2012
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United States
teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name
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Speaks: English*, German, Russian
Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona

 
 Message 274 of 392
13 June 2011 at 8:03pm | IP Logged 
Welcome to the fold, Finnish! :)
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Élan
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 Message 275 of 392
14 June 2011 at 6:42am | IP Logged 
Woo! Enjoy Finnish!
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ellasevia
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Winner TAC 2011
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Germany
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Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian
Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian

 
 Message 276 of 392
17 June 2011 at 7:44pm | IP Logged 
Quarter 2: Greek
Week 24: June 11 - June 17

Total Study Time This Week: 12.5 hours
Total Study Time in 2011: 338 hours

Average Study Time This Week: 1.79 hours/day
Average Study Time in 2011: 2.01 hours/day


I finally changed the order of the languages on the graph, which has been driving me crazy for months. I can't be bothered to go back and change it on all the previous ones though.

This is my third week in Greece, I believe, which means I have only a little over one week left here before returning to the US. Oddly I spent very little time on Greek this week but quite a lot on Finnish once I found some resources and got started on it on Wednesday. My evil plan for Finnish appears to be working, at least in theory. So far I've only worked on Finnish but I've been having motivation to work on other languages but I just haven't had the chance to do so. Hopefully next week will be a bit more fruitful.

It's quite likely that this will be updated later to include some more study time that will hopefully happen after posting it, both for Greek and Finnish.

ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ
Total Study Time This Week: 4.5 hours
Total Study Time in 2011: 47 hours

- Immersion in Greece

Hm, I really haven't spent much time on Greek at all this week. I blame that on the arrival of my parents and brother here last Saturday, which means that much less Greek is now spoken at home and it's more difficult for everyone to go out or for people to come to our house now that there are more people here. However, the little time that I did spend on Greek had more of a focus on conversing than usual because my brother speaks almost no Greek at all so I would have to interpret for him, and also because a cousin of mine from Athens who is the same age as me was visiting so we were talking for a while, completely in Greek. Not much else to comment on here.

Suomi
Total Study Time This Week: 8 hours
Total Study Time in 2011: 8 hours

- Teach Yourself Finnish, Lessons 1-3 (+BYKI)
- Bought Assimil Le Finnois Sans Peine

Well, in the three days that I've spent on Finnish so far I've already surpassed both the amount of time I spent on Indonesian during my short-lived 6WC attempt and also the amount of time I spent on Swahili during the first several months of the year. I would say that's a success. I'm really enjoying Finnish so far and have now completed the first three lessons of TY Finnish, which I was luckily able to download here (I have the actual book back at home). I also ordered Assimil for Finnish so that it will hopefully have arrived by the time I get back. With that note, here's a short composition I wrote in Finnish yesterday. I have no guarantees as to its quality, but hopefully it's not too horrible.

Hyvää päivää! Nimeni on Philip ja minä olen amerikkalainen. Olen kaupungista Boulderista. Nyt me olemme Kreikassa mutta emme asu täällä. Minä olen opiskelija ja äitini on opettaja. Hän on työssä koulussa. Isäni on insinööri ja hän on työssä toimistossa. Minä puhun englantia, espanjaa, kreikkaa, ja ruotsia mutta en puhu suomea hyvin. Opiskelen japania, hollantia, venäjää, farsia, ja suomea. Minä pidän kielistä. Mitä kuuluu? Mikä sinun nimesi on? Oletko Venäjältä? Mistä sinä olet kotoisin? Missä sinä olet työssä? Ymmärrätkö saksaa?

One thing I was unsure of when writing that is whether or not Finnish is a pro-drop language, which is to say, it allows for the omission of pronouns when the subject is clear from the verb ending. I left the subject pronouns in for most of the sentences, but removed a few because it sounded too repetitive to keep using them. I hope that's acceptable! I'm also not sure about the construction "olen kaupungista Boulderista"...

EDIT: Added more immersion/"study" time for Greek. None for Finnish though. :(

Edited by ellasevia on 28 June 2011 at 4:33pm

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Kounotori
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Finland
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 Message 277 of 392
17 June 2011 at 11:20pm | IP Logged 
ellasevia wrote:
Hyvää päivää! Nimeni on Philip ja minä olen amerikkalainen. Olen kaupungista Boulderista. Nyt me olemme Kreikassa mutta emme asu täällä. Minä olen opiskelija ja äitini on opettaja. Hän on työssä koulussa. Isäni on insinööri ja hän on työssä toimistossa. Minä puhun englantia, espanjaa, kreikkaa, ja ruotsia mutta en puhu suomea hyvin. Opiskelen japania, hollantia, venäjää, farsia, ja suomea. Minä pidän kielistä. Mitä kuuluu? Mikä sinun nimesi on? Oletko Venäjältä? Mistä sinä olet kotoisin? Missä sinä olet työssä? Ymmärrätkö saksaa?

One thing I was unsure of when writing that is whether or not Finnish is a pro-drop language, which is to say, it allows for the omission of pronouns when the subject is clear from the verb ending. I left the subject pronouns in for most of the sentences, but removed a few because it sounded too repetitive to keep using them. I hope that's acceptable! I'm also not sure about the construction "olen kaupungista Boulderista"...


Well done! Apart from the third sentence, there were no grammar mistakes (I just corrected some punctuation, but that's minor stuff).

Quote:
Hyvää päivää! Nimeni on Philip ja minä olen amerikkalainen. Olen Boulderista. Nyt me olemme Kreikassa, mutta emme asu täällä. Minä olen opiskelija ja äitini on opettaja. Hän on työssä koulussa. Isäni on insinööri ja hän on työssä toimistossa. Minä puhun englantia, espanjaa, kreikkaa ja ruotsia, mutta en puhu suomea hyvin. Opiskelen japania, hollantia, venäjää, farsia ja suomea. Minä pidän kielistä. Mitä kuuluu? Mikä sinun nimesi on? Oletko Venäjältä? Mistä sinä olet kotoisin? Missä sinä olet työssä? Ymmärrätkö saksaa?


You can simply say "Olen Boulderista," but if you really want to use the word city there, then you could say "Olen Boulder-nimisestä kaupungista."

Finnish is also a pro-drop language, but only in the first and second person: you can't drop the pronoun with verbs in the third person:

Teen työni hyvin. (I do my job well)
Teet työsi hyvin.
Hän tekee työnsä hyvin.
Teemme työmme hyvin.
Teette työnne hyvin.
He tekevät työnsä hyvin.


So *Tekee työnsä hyvin and *Tekevät työnsä hyvin would be incomplete sentences.

Edited by Kounotori on 17 June 2011 at 11:22pm

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Solfrid Cristin
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 Message 278 of 392
19 June 2011 at 8:37pm | IP Logged 
ellasevia wrote:
To change the subject slightly, do your daughters worship you? If not they should and you can tell them I said so. I wish my mother would offer to take me to a foreign country if I learned 100 words of the language spoken there...


The short answer to this is: They are teenagers... I'll give you a longer one in my own log in order not to take over yours.
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Kappa
Groupie
Japan
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99 posts - 172 votes 

 
 Message 279 of 392
20 June 2011 at 11:46pm | IP Logged 
ellasevia wrote:
Thanks for stopping by and for that link. I'm afraid my Japanese isn't quite good enough yet to read that without trouble but I was able to gather that it's about the difference in usage between 届く and 着く so I'd assume that the way I wrote that sentence about the package I should have used 届く? I think I took that sentence directly out of my book though, so I'm not sure.
The example you picked up in your book is just fine as it is. I merely thought it might be something interesting but it rather confused you and I'm sorry about that.

"どこかから小包が届く" = "a package from somewhere to arrive"
Here, you'd use "届く" because you're wondering where it came from. There's always "from" with this verb although it may not be verbally mentioned. In the dictionary it's defined "送った品物や郵便物が相手の所に着く / something that someone sent arrives at the destination" where "着く" is "あるものが他のものや他の所まで達する。 / something arrives at somewhere (else)". "届く is a verb that somehow *connect* "from" and "to", it's like a line with "from" on one end and "to" on the other. And "着く" is just a dot. And now I wish I hadn't even mentioned that so I could have avoided this embarrassment of not being able to explain anything at all and not knowing anything I'm talking about. Eh, you'll figure it out, you'll be fine! :)
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ellasevia
Super Polyglot
Winner TAC 2011
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5927 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 280 of 392
24 June 2011 at 8:07pm | IP Logged 
Quarter 2: Greek
Week 25: June 18 – June 24

Total Study Time This Week: 19.5 hours
Total Study Time in 2011: 357 hours

Average Study Time This Week: 2.79 hours/day
Average Study Time in 2011: 2.04 hours/day



This week has proved to be much better than last week, so that's cause for celebration! This was in part due to the combination of me getting addicted to reading Harry Potter again and being trapped in a car for hours on end for a road-trip in the middle of the week, which gave me plenty of reading time. On this road-trip, which took us up to Mount Olympus and to the tomb of Alexander the Great's father among other places, I heard a whole collection of different languages being spoken. Those that I can remember besides the obvious Greek and English were Russian, Czech, Polish, Italian, Spanish, and Hungarian. I even saw a sign written in Persian at a gas station, which was an interesting surprise! In any case, French was the big winner in terms of study time with lesser amounts of Greek, Finnish, Persian, Dutch, and Italian.

Also, I feel rather stupid to have just found out this week that you can have the desktop version of Anki on multiple computers simultaneously, so I've downloaded that to the computer here and set about the remodel on my Anki decks which I had been planning to start on when I return to the US next week. It's extremely boring, but hopefully the results will be good. The main problem is that most of my decks are just too big and bulky. To fix this I've decided to go to just one-sided decks (L1 --> L2) with the exception of my Japanese decks, where I also need to be able to recognize and read the characters. My reasoning is that if I know the word well enough to consistently produce it correctly (again, L1 --> L2), then I should naturally be able to recognize it when I come across it as well. I hope. Besides that, many of my decks are full of old words which I already know very well, so by reviewing them I'm just wasting time. That means that I've started combing through all of my decks, beginning with my French one where I've already deleted over 700 words, to get rid of any superfluous entries that aren't doing me any good. It sounds simple enough, but when you have ten such decks with thousands of cards in each one it gets extremely tedious.

And while I'm talking (or rather, I was before) about my geographic whereabouts, I should mention that a week from now I will have returned to the US and spent a little over two days at home before having to leave again next Friday for California, where I'll spend a week. I suspect that I will get next to nothing done that week because I'll be staying in a house with something like (and I'm not exaggerating at all) 16 other people. In fact, there isn't even enough room for everyone so I will be having to sleep in a tent in the yard all week with several of my cousins, which isn't exactly an environment fit for studying.

ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ
Total Study Time This Week: 3.25 hours
Total Study Time in 2011: 50.25 hours

- Immersion in Greece

Not a very Greek-filled week either, but I noticed that when I was spying on the foreign tourists at the places we stopped at on our road-trip and I tried to think in Italian and Spanish, I kept coming up with Greek words instead... So that could potentially be construed as a good thing. Or maybe not. I'll let you decide that individually.

Nederlands
Total Study Time This Week: 0.75 hours
Total Study Time in 2011: 53.25 hours

- Reading/writing in Dutch (a very small bit)
- Watched excerpts of De Kleine Zeemeermin 2

Not at that much for Dutch this week, but alle kleine beetjes helpen. I think my activities list is fairly self-explanatory here; I read and wrote a little bit in Dutch and then watched as much of De Kleine Zeemeermin 2 as I could find on YouTube, which was only about half an hour. Maybe I'll crack open my Assimil book in the last few days that I'm here so that I can justify having lugged it all the way across the Atlantic.

Fraais
Total Study Time This Week: 12.25 hours
Total Study Time in 2011: 40.25 hours

- Harry Potter et la Coupe de Feu: Ch. 16-29
- Vocabulary

I'm very pleased with my French this week! I read 14 chapters of Harry Potter in total, which comes to over 350 pages of reading in French, all of which was very easy and comfortable to do. Now given, Harry Potter isn't exactly what you'd call difficult reading, but I'm still pleased to see how little effort it takes to read in French. As for the vocabulary which I mentioned, that was when I decided to finally indulge myself in some of the awesome words that are being used in this book that I absolutely have to know. I simply don't know how I've managed to survive this long without knowing that 'unicorn' in French is licorne!

Italiano
Total Study Time This Week: 0.75 hours
Total Study Time in 2011: 3.5 hours

- L'Ombra del Vento: Ch. 0-2

After having Harry Potter-ed myself out for a while yesterday, I decided to pick up that old Italian book which I bought way back in January and had made an attempt at starting. I never got past the first couple chapters then though, so I just started over. However, I only read a little further beyond where I had reached originally before calling it quits and fleeing back to the safe, cradling arms of my dear friend le français. I should probably do something about the sorry state of my decaying Italian. Will I? Uh... I'll get back to you on that one.

فارسى
Total Study Time This Week: 1.25 hours
Total Study Time in 2011: 40 hours

- Reviewed Lessons 1-2 of Spoken World Farsi
- Reviewed/shadowed Lessons 1-31 of Assimil

I think it was probably the realization that I've neglected my Persian to the point of having forgotten almost everything I managed to pound into my head at the beginning of the year that made me feel guilty enough to propel me into action this week. I skimmed through the first couple lessons of Spoken World Farsi before turning back to the audio for Assimil and shadowed the first 31 lessons of that while taking a nice walk on the beach this morning (I walked all the way to the next town without meaning to!). Listening to all of those Assimil lessons served as a nice refresher for many of the things I had forgotten and I was able to understand the majority of what was spoken for all the lessons I heard, even if I had to stop and think for a moment what a particular word meant. I think I should probably give Pimsleur Farsi another go as well once I get back home.

Suomi
Total Study Time This Week: 1.25 hours
Total Study Time in 2011: 9.25 hours

- TY Finnish, Lesson 4

I really didn't spend very much time on any new Finnish this week but rather let the new material sink in a little more. Also, all of my materials are currently on the computer and we were on a road-trip during the middle of the week so that prevented me from working on Finnish. Finally, I got just a bit bored of TY Finnish because it concentrates all of the very boring topics which I don't care about (banks and exchanging money, giving/receiving directions, etc.) right at the beginning and I couldn't take any more of it after a certain point. I hope my Assimil will have arrived once I get back to the US...

OTHER
@Kounotori: Paljon kiitoksia for the helpful critique of my text and the explanation. I'm afraid that I'll have to give the credit to the surprisingly good quality of what I wrote to the simplicity of what I was saying and not to any actual skill on my behalf. :)
@Solfrid Cristin: Ah, alright. Makes sense.
@Kappa: Don't worry! I'm fairly certain I understand what you mean. I think it helps that I remember learning the kanji in 届く as meaning 'deliver.' Thank you for that explanation anyway!

Edited by ellasevia on 28 June 2011 at 4:37pm



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