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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 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 313 of 392 30 July 2011 at 6:16am | IP Logged | ||
Quarter 3: Russian, Japanese  
Week 30: July 23 – July 29 Total Study Time This Week: 18.5 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 455.25 hours Average Study Time This Week: 2.64 hours/day Average Study Time in 2011: 2.17 hours/day 
Normally I would rejoice at fitting in almost 20 hours of study into one week but that figure just pales in comparison with last week’s record. Nevertheless, study is study and I should be glad about any progress that I make. That does not make the fact that I did very little (compared with how much I aim to do, I mean) with Japanese this week and nothing at all for Russian any less embarrassing, though. Again, the big winner of the week was Dutch for similar reasons, followed by Japanese, Swedish, and Persian. As mentioned earlier and evidenced by the stream of kind comments, my birthday was on Wednesday so I am now officially 17. In terms of language-related gifts, on Monday I received a mysterious package from France full of Dutch-related things, which was an amazing surprise. It was from someone on this forum, in fact… :) Aside from that I got quite a bit of money, which may be put to use in the not-so-distant future for financing a Russian book I actually like, a new Japanese book, and some foreign language reading material. We’ll see. I’m leaving for another short trip up to Oregon and Washington on Sunday, so I won’t have much access to my materials for most of the week. I’ll bring a couple resources with me, of course, but I don’t foresee next week’s study time being anything special.  日本語
Total Study Time This Week: 3.5 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 50 hours - Ultimate Japanese Lessons 39-40 (+BYKI) I finished off the last two lessons of Ultimate Japanese at the beginning of the week, leaving me again to wonder what I should use for continued Japanese study. The last two lessons were about bookstores and poetry, with the latter even teaching a little bit of Classical Japanese in order to read some haikus in the original. Since I really have nothing else to comment on, I’ll give a short review of Ultimate Japanese. Like the other books from that series which I’ve completed, I think it was a very good and thorough course covering a broad vocabulary base and extensive grammar and cultural explanations. My only qualm with this book is that it’s entirely Romanized, which in fact makes it more difficult to use for more advanced students of Japanese who are more used to reading in Japanese script. It does slowly teach all of hiragana and katakana as well as some kanji, but it is at a very leisurely pace and considered an optional part of each lesson, so it’s really not given much emphasis. I would have at least liked to have the dialogues and example sentences written in authentic Japanese script, even if there is a transliteration provided (or better yet, furigana). I much prefer reading 授業に出たくても、休まない訳に行かなかっ たんです to Jugyoo ni detakute mo, yasumanai wake ni ikanakatta n desu.  Nederlands
Total Study Time This Week: 7.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 73.75 hours - Reading and writing emails in Dutch - De Kleine Zeemeermin audiobook (listening/reading) - Harry Potter en de Gevangene van Azkaban: Ch. 1 - Vocabulary from all of the above I continued with last week’s practice of reading and writing lots of emails in Dutch this week, although less so. In addition to that, I also read a long letter in Dutch which came with the aforementioned surprise birthday presents, from the same person as the emails. In terms of the other presents, they were a little storybook with the plot of The Little Mermaid in Dutch with accompanying audio and the third Harry Potter book in Dutch. Simply fantastic! I read and listened to the audiobook several times, although I only counted the one of those in addition to the time I reread it to comb for vocabulary. Then I read the first chapter of my new Harry Potter book. I decided that I would list only new words that I was sure had come up at least twice already, which seems to be a good compromise between looking up every new word I come across and not looking up anything at all, which are usually the two extremes I stick to. By the way, to anyone who has not seen what the Dutch versions of the Harry Potter books look like, I highly recommend Googling their titles because the cover illustrations are better than any others I’ve ever seen!  Svenska
Total Study Time This Week: 3.25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 41.5 hours - Reading in Swedish - Swedish proverbs - Vocabulary - Den Lilla Sjöjungfrun (3x)* I was feeling strangely motivated for Swedish this week so I did much more than usual for it. First of all I did a bit of reading in Swedish about last week’s tragic events in Norway, looking up the new vocabulary. I also rediscovered a previous passion that I once had for proverbs, and remembered an unfinished project that I set out to do over a year ago in learning and digesting one new Swedish proverb each day. Today I went through a long list of them, although I’m still not finished, and I really like this way of studying. I get some vocabulary out of it, some cultural knowledge, and some fun expressions as well. Finally, I found a full version of The Little Mermaid in Swedish on YouTube, so naturally I had to watch that. Now I’ve watched this movie so many times that I really shouldn’t count it as study time at all, no matter what language it’s in, because I would bet that I would still understand everything in completely foreign languages like Arabic and Chinese. On the other hand, it was time spent immersed in spoken Swedish, if simple, so I decided to compromise and count only one of the three times I watched that movie this week. * Yes, I know, I have just a small obsession with this movie. In fact I’m listening to it in the background in English as I’m writing this…  فارسى
Total Study Time This Week: 3 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 52 hours - Pimsleur Farsi 20-24 Still more of the same for Persian. I’m now up through lesson 24, which means that I only have six more until the end of Pimsleur. At that point I’ll review what I already did with Spoken World, Colloquial, and Assimil and from there hopefully pick up from where I left off. I’m very excited about Persian right now. :)  Suomi
Total Study Time This Week: 1 hour Total Study Time in 2011: 21.5 hours - Assimil Lessons 27-28 Just a little bit of Finnish this week, with two new Assimil lessons. I did those right at the beginning of the week so I don’t really remember if there was anything I wanted to comment on about them. I need to start writing these things down in advance… OTHER As already commented on by ReneeMona in her log, we have now formed a new team – “Team Ohana” – joining together myself, Élan, ReneeMona, Solfrid Cristin, nogoodnik, and joanthemaid. We don’t really have a clearly defined main language, but I think the main shared target languages for our new team are Russian, Persian, French, and German. @Sprachprofi, Teango, Élan, darkwhispersdal: Thank you all for the encouragement! @mirab3lla: Nice to see you on here again! And of course, mulţumesc for those extensive multilingual birthday wishes. @ReneeMona: Dank je wel (en ook nogmaals voor de cadeautjes)! Hm, Papiamentu? Danki! @Teango: Thank you, Teango! I had never heard of that language before so it was interesting to read about it. @Élan: !خيلى متشکرم Thank you so much for those songs, Élan. Especially the second one I loved and have been listening to it over and over ever since Wednesday. I adore traditional Persian music. :) @Ncruz: Thank you, Nick. Yes, we really do need to get together at some point when you get back. Where are you now, by the way? School is starting in just over two weeks… I’m looking forward to having German and Art History with you! @Solfrid Cristin: Tack så mycket, Solfrid! Som jag har redan sagt, fick jag några utmärkta födelsedagspresenter, särskilt för holländska, så där är jag ganska glad över. (Jag måste öva min svenska mer – jag glömmer allt!) @LazyLinguist and darkwhispersdal: Thank you to both of you as well! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6570 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 314 of 392 30 July 2011 at 10:39am | IP Logged | ||
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Interesting numbers, Philip! I guess I assumed a veteran like yourself was consistently
outclassing me, but I've just checked my records and I have 586 hours in 2011, which is the same ballpark more or less. To think that if I were as clever as you I could distribute that wisely over not 3 languages but 15! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5121 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 315 of 392 03 August 2011 at 10:05am | IP Logged | ||
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Wow, you are doing an amazing job - as always - I am proud to be on your team!
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| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5480 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 316 of 392 06 August 2011 at 5:10am | IP Logged | ||
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Dang it, I missed the day itself, so I'll just say it now: a very happy belated birthday to you, Philip! I am blown away by your recent hours, and it's a good reminder for me to get back in the saddle. :)
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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 317 of 392 07 August 2011 at 12:58am | IP Logged | ||
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Quarter 3: Russian, Japanese
Week 31: July 30 – August 5 Total Study Time This Week: 2.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 458 hours Average Study Time This Week: 0.39 hours/day Average Study Time in 2011: 2.10 hours/day 
Just as I suspected – I had almost no time at all to study this week due to being away from Sunday until Thursday. However, while I was in Portland, Oregon I went to a huge bookstore (with a proportionately huge language section) and spent a couple hours there browsing through all of their language collections. In the end I ended up buying Гарри Поттер и Дары Смерти (the seventh Harry Potter book in Russian), Orkestergraven (some sort of Swedish crime novel), an introductory Persian grammar-vocabulary course which looks pretty thorough to me, and a lovely little book of Old English poetry with parallel translations in Modern English. The only studying that I did this week was some reading in Dutch before leaving on my trip and then some Persian and Greek after I came back. Since the 6WC has been going on for almost a week now, I really need to do some Russian! I don’t like this business of being in last place at all. Happy August to everyone! I don’t know if there’s something about months that begin with the letter J that makes me study more, but July’s final study time of 83.25 hours is now the second-highest of the whole year, second only to January’s 86.5 hours. :) Wait, if it had to do with the letter J then June would have had a lot more study time too. Never mind. Nederlands
Total Study Time This Week: 1.25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 75 hours - Harry Potter en de Gevangene van Azkaban: Ch. 2-3 - Vocabulary Just a little bit of reading out of Harry Potter this week. At the moment I’m somewhere in the middle of the third chapter and all is going well. It’s interesting to see some of the Dutch slang being used and the translated names for some things are so cool! Some of my favorites that I’ve encountered thus far are Dreuzel (Muggle), Zweinstein (Hogwarts), and Zwadderich (Slytherin). In fact, after having told those to one of my friends, she has decided that she needs to learn Dutch, if only to read Harry Potter in it. :)  Ελληνικά
Total Study Time This Week: 1 hour Total Study Time in 2011: 53.5 hours - Tatoeba That website is really fun and since I seem to be translating almost exclusively into Greek, I’m counting the approximate amount of time I spend playing around on it as Greek study time. Plus, I do learn new words – yesterday I learned that the Greek word for ‘zinc’ is ψευδάργυρος, for example. فارسى
Total Study Time This Week: 0.5 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 52.5 hours - Pimsleur Farsi 25 I only had the chance to listen to one lesson of Pimsleur this week, but one is still better than none at all. Optimally I’ll finish the last five lessons of that in the next week or two so that I can finally get back into my Persian books. OTHER @numerodix: Don’t overestimate me! You’re obviously doing much better than you thought, so congratulations on almost having broken 600 hours of study this year – that’s a fabulous achievement, whether it’s spread over three languages or fifteen. (Is that really how many I have? Wow, that’s actually a bit frightening…) @Solfrid Cristin: Thanks once again. It’s always nice to get compliments and encouragement from wonderful teammates such as yourself. :) @Jinx: Don’t worry about missing the day – thank you anyways. I’m afraid this week’s update might look rather silly with your comment about my hours hovering just above it though. :P Edited by ellasevia on 14 August 2011 at 7:51pm 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 318 of 392 13 August 2011 at 9:43am | IP Logged | ||
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Quarter 3: Russian, Japanese
Week 32: August 6 – August 12 Total Study Time This Week: 30 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 488 hours Average Study Time This Week: 4.29 hours/day Average Study Time in 2011: 2.17 hours/day 
(I apologize in advance for this scattered and disorganized post. It’s rather late now because I was trying to squeeze in a little extra study time so that I could make it an even 30 hours this week. I succeeded, so I hope it’s worth it to stay up late.) Hooray for the second best weekly score of the year! It’s always a nice motivation boost to have a 30-hour week right after a not even three-hour one. To what do I owe this success? As much as I’d like to claim full credit, I really have to hand it to that Twitter Bot that Sprachprofi set up for the Six Week Challenge – it’s amazing! I was very reluctant to use it at first, but now that I can see what a wonderful tool it is for motivation, I love it! In addition to just making me study more overall, it has also forced me to work more on Russian, my declared focus language for the challenge, than I probably would have otherwise because that’s the only way your ranking will improve. The only downside of that is that I’ve neglected my other languages to varying degrees, most notably my co-focus language, Japanese. Speaking of rankings though, I think I’ve done quite well in that respect, if I may say so myself. At the beginning of the week I was still in last place but over the course of the week I’ve worked my way up to 26th place for target language hours, and 13th place for total study hours! I’m loving this Six Week Challenge already! Oh, and for anyone who is for whatever reason really scrutinizing my scores, I should warn you that my scores on the Twitter Bot will not match up with the time I report in my log because I’m counting activities such as doing Anki reviews and school classes, which I don’t normally count here. This week was also a great way to conclude the summer. The school year starts back up for me on Tuesday so I shall have to tone my language studies down a bit to compensate for the fact that I’ll be at school for eight hours a day. I am, however, very much looking forward to returning, because, among other reasons, I feel like I’m really lacking structure in my life at the moment. Another plus is that I’ll have daily (or almost daily, since we’re having some sort of strange “modified block schedule” this year whereby we don’t actually have each class everyday) contact with German and Japanese at school since I’ll be taking classes for both at the highest level that my school offers.  РУССКИЙ
Total Study Time This Week: 17.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 50.5 hours - Ultimate Russian Lessons 8-19 (+BYKI) Wow! I should think that nearly twenty hours of pure Russian is a good result for my first real week of participating in the 6WC. All of that time was spent scouring over the pages of my copy of Ultimate Russian, which I have found that I really like. I check it out from the library and I it’s mine for another two weeks so I intend to make the most of that time and hopefully finish the entire book by then. If not, I do have plenty of other Russian materials to work with, and I can always just check it out again. Not much else to say here, although I might note that for whatever reason I find it more logical to complete the lessons almost exactly backwards from the way they’re written. The different sections of the lesson as ordered in the book go: Dialogue, Grammar, Vocabulary, Cultural Note, Exercises. However, I always go about attacking them in this order: Vocabulary, Cultural Note, Grammar, Dialogue. I then substitute doing the exercises with studying the vocabulary using BYKI and practicing the grammar points in my head as I learn about them. Nederlands
Total Study Time This Week: 6.25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 81.25 hours - Reading and writing in Dutch - Vocabulary - Dutch Radio This week I resumed my previous trend of reading and writing lots of emails in Dutch, which I find to be extremely helpful in putting what I’ve learned to use. At one point while I was writing, a Dutch radio station randomly turned itself on somehow and I listened to it for a while, but it turned out that it was mostly a music station and shortly went back to the classical music that I had been listening to before. Still, I counted it as part of my study activities for the week, if only so that I would have something more to write about. Svenska
Total Study Time This Week: 0.5 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 42 hours - Swedish Proverbs - Vocabulary - Writing in Swedish - Reviewing old Swedish lessons from SEGR I only spent a little bit of time on Swedish this week, but every little bit counts. (Vet någon om det finns ett svenskt ordspråk som säger detsamma?) I spent about half of that time on studying proverbs and extracting vocabulary from them, and then the other half writing a very small bit in Swedish and reviewing some texts from my old Swedish book (Swedish: An Elementary Grammar-Reader). Ελληνικά
Total Study Time This Week: 2.25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 55.75 hours - Ο Αλχημιστής - Vocabulary My uncle returned from Greece this week after having spent a few weeks there, and with him he brought a birthday present from my grandparents, which was a copy of Ο Αλχημιστής (The Alchemist) in Greek. I started reading it earlier today and it’s fairly easy, although it does help that it’s not exactly difficult language and also that I read the book in English a couple years ago. While reading it, I’m keeping with my new rule of making note of new words which have surfaced at least twice and then looking them up and adding them to Anki afterwards. فارسى
Total Study Time This Week: 2.5 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 55 hours - Pimsleur Farsi 26-30 I’m done with Pimsleur Farsi! I finished the last five lessons this week so now I’m free to move onto a new project, probably consisting of reviewing and relearning the material from the lessons of Spoken World, Colloquial, and Assimil that I completed earlier in the year. But let’s not think about that now – I’d rather just revel in the satisfaction of having actually completed a project for once. Oh, and I wanted to share two sentences from Pimsleur which I just love saying: إن شاء الله معنيش چه ميشه؟ En shâ’ Allâh ma’anish che mishe? “What does ‘en shâ’ Allâh’ [god willing] mean?” اما مى خوام ى چيزى براى دخترم بخرم. Ammâ mixâm ye chizi barâye doxtaram bexaram. “But I want to buy something for my daughter.” Suomi
Total Study Time This Week: 0.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 22.25 hours - Nalle Puh: Toivomuskaivo - Vocabulary While looking for an episode of Winnie the Pooh to watch (yes, I’m 17 and I still adore Winnie the Pooh) I came across this one in Finnish and decided to watch it. Naturally I didn’t understand a huge amount but I remembered the plot of the episode from when I was little and could actually recognize a surprising number of words. There were a couple times when I even understood an entire sentence! These were of course very short and simple sentences, but it was still quite a thrill. After watching that episode, I decided to “extend the learning” by looking up some vocabulary related to the episode. For example: syntymäpäivä (birthday), mehiläinen (bee), hunaja (honey), banaani (banana), porkkana (carrot), jäätelö (ice cream), tiikeri (tiger), toivo (hope/wish), kynttilä (candle), and so on. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| aloysius Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6027 days ago 226 posts - 291 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: French, Greek, Italian, Russian | Message 319 of 392 13 August 2011 at 1:33pm | IP Logged | ||
What about "många bäckar små gör en stor å"? Literally this means many small brooks make a big river (actually an "å" is a small river, but a big small river doesn't make sense). Nice to see your Russian going well. I have a lot of text books for this language, but Ultimate Russian isn't among them. And that Finnish vocabulary list was nice. Funny, didn't know Nalle Puh (Sw) was called Nalle Puh in Finnish. Well done in the 6WC! //aloysius 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5121 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 320 of 392 18 August 2011 at 12:13am | IP Logged | ||
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Lucky you who have such a high level of Greek. I seem to be already forgetting the little Greek I learned this summer, but I feel I have to focus on Russian to at least make progress in one language. How on on earth do you manage to keep up so many?.
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