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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 5930 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 361 of 392 22 November 2011 at 8:18am | IP Logged | ||
Wow, it has really been too long since I've written, hasn't it? I have been incredibly busy and have barely been sleeping in the past few weeks. It's now Thanksgiving Break, though, so I have the entire week off to rest and catch up on everything. I'll try to give you an update either tomorrow or sometime within the next few days. P.S. How do you respond to someone saying that you're being missed? In this case "I miss you too" won't work because I've been following your (Solfrid Cristin's) log still, but neither does something like "I'm glad you miss me" because that implies joy in the other person's sorrow. Oh, communication. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5137 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 362 of 392 22 November 2011 at 5:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've noticed on the 6 week challenge that you've suddenly started studying Croatian a lot. Does this mean you're moving there next year?
Congratulations if it does mean that! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| TixhiiDon Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5252 days ago 772 posts - 1474 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, German, Russian Studies: Georgian | Message 363 of 392 22 November 2011 at 11:38pm | IP Logged | ||
"How kind of you to think of me. Sorry I've been out of contact for such a long time". Or maybe something that sounds a little less like it came straight out of 1907... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5930 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 364 of 392 26 November 2011 at 9:41am | IP Logged | ||
Quarter 4: German, Swahili  
Weeks 44-47: October 29 – November 25 Total Study Time This Week: 25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 556.75 hours Average Study Time This Week: 0.89 hours/day Average Study Time in 2011: 1.69 hours/day 
Ugh, I just finished writing the individual language sections and I’m not sure what else to say. I sort of want to just skip this boring “overview” section because it’s late and I want to go to bed, and I’m sure no one cares about this anyways. Here’s a nice, quick recap: It’s been almost a month since I updated this, so here I am. I’ve been participating in the 6WC with Swahili while simultaneously drowning in other work, and taking on a new language. My life is boring. The end.  DEUTSCH
Total Study Time This Week: 1.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 46.75 hours - Tagebuch - Letter in German - Jojo Sucht das Glück (eine Seifenoper für Deutschlerner) Hm, not a whole lot of individual German studying going on in the past month. From my notes I can tell you that I wrote an entry for my Tagebuch (for class), but it was so long ago that I don’t even remember what I wrote it on. Then I was able to reconnect with a German exchange student who lived with my family when I was about four, and wrote her a letter in German. Aside from those two writing activities, I also did some listening/TV-watching. Over the course of the semester in my German class we had been *very slowly* working our way through the German soap opera Jojo Sucht das Glück, which is produced by Deutsche Welle for German learners. Each episode is only a couple of minutes long, yet it had taken us forever to finish only about 20 episodes. Finally, another girl in the class and myself got frustrated with the painfully slow pace and took it upon ourselves to watch the rest of the series on our own. It only took about 45 minutes for me to watch the remaining ~15 episodes and it wasn’t terribly intellectually stimulating, but at least I got some German time out of it and finished the damn series once and for all. To summarize what it’s about: a Brazilian woman named Jojo moves to Germany (to Köln, I think, but I might be wrong) to study art at the university there, and to finally meet her Internet boyfriend, Ben. Over the course of many overly dramatic scenes that are stereotypical of soap operas, she begins to study at the university, meets new friends, and while searching for Ben, falls in love with someone else despite her original intentions…  KISWAHILI
Total Study Time This Week: 11.5 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 18.5 hours - Spoken World Swahili Lessons 1-13 - Swahili Radio Well, I started studying Swahili again for the 6 Week Challenge! I stayed up until midnight in order to start studying, and then barely stopped studying for the next couple days. Unfortunately, then life kicked in and I remembered that I have school, family, and friend commitments that conflict with studying Swahili all the time. The fact that I had basically ignored all of my schoolwork for the first week of November meant that I have been in “frantic scramble mode” since then, trying (largely in vain) to catch up. In addition to school, I also have the ever-present college applications, as well as that of the exchange program. Now that it’s Thanksgiving Break I have done no real Swahili study at all, because all of the time for languages that I’ve had has been dedicated to Croatian (more on that later). In other words, I have not actually studied any Swahili since November 5th… No wonder I’ve dropped way down on the rankings list. And to think that I was consistently in the top ten for the first few days – and for a brief time, I was even #1 for total study time! I should have taken a picture… While I was studying Swahili, however, I was extremely pleased with how easily it all came flooding back to me. The fact that I had learned everything before meant that I could speed through the lessons in my book, with most of the vocabulary and grammar that I encountered sticking with practically no effort at all this time. I literally was able to cram about 1000 “new” words with good retention in about three days. I believe I finished up through the thirteenth lesson in Spoken World Swahili – only two more to go before I finish it a second time. This is assuming, of course, that my Swahili burn-out period ends…preferably sooner rather than later.  Nederlands
Total Study Time This Week: 1.25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 84 hours - Winnie de Poeh - Vocabulary One of my good friends is studying Dutch as her target language for the 6 Week Challenge and both she and I love Winnie the Pooh. So, we decided to watch “Winnie de Poeh” together in Dutch, with me noting down various vocabulary words for her as they came up in the movie. I must say, Pooh's raincloud song is quite cute in Dutch! Ik ben een heel klein vies wolkje Dat hier een beetje wil regenen Ik ben een heel klein vies wolkje Logisch dat ik wat verlegen ben Iedereen weet dat een wolkje Meestal heel weinig om honing geeft Vraag voor de grap Wilt u een hap? Dan weigert zo'n wolkje beleefd  Português
Total Study Time This Week: 1.5 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 9.5 hours - “Iberian” Anki deck This is completely irrelevant now, but I shall still explain what this mysterious hour and a half was spent on, Portuguesely-speaking (I think that should be a valid expression). I had an idea several months ago to combine my Spanish and Portuguese Anki decks into one mega-deck which I would call “Iberian,” since both are closely related languages originating from the Iberian Peninsula. The idea behind it was that since the languages are so closely related, I could save time by reviewing both the Spanish and Portuguese versions of a word at the same time. What I didn’t realize was that this wouldn’t really work because for the kind of higher-level words that I have circulating in my Spanish Anki deck, the Portuguese equivalents are more often than not quite different from the Spanish (if there was even a direct equivalent), thus defeating the purpose of the activity. Besides that, it would have taken forever to go back and add a Portuguese field to every term in my Spanish deck (that’s what the aforementioned time was spent on), or vice versa, so not much time would have been saved. In case it’s not already clear, I’ve given up on this idea and went back to my individual Spanish and Portuguese decks.  Ελληνικά
Total Study Time This Week: 0.25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 61.75 hours - Speaking in Greek (?) According to my notes, I spent 15 minutes speaking Greek on November 4th… I have no recollection of this because it was so long ago, but since it was a Friday my guess is that I was speaking with my grandparents. Really, I have no idea who I was talking to, why I was talking to them, or what I was talking about. All I know is that I spoke Greek for 15 minutes. Period.  Hrvatski
Total Study Time This Week: 8.5 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 8.5 hours - Colloquial Croatian Lessons 1-3 - Spoken World Croatian Lesson 0 (ie, the introduction, which for some reason had almost 50 vocabulary words) + BYKI Last Saturday I bought three Croatian books and have since clocked over eight hours of study. I guess I’m learning Croatian now…? Hribecek was almost right on when he asked whether I’ll be going to Croatia for my exchange next year. It’s by no means definite – I don’t even know if I’ve gotten into the program for sure yet – but I have decided somewhat last-minute to move Croatia up to my first choice country. I have a lot of long-winded reasons that I’m not going to waste time explaining, but one of them is simply that going there gives me the excuse to learn an awesome new language. I’ve made several fairly large assumptions by beginning to study the language already, but better safe than sorry, right? If I do end up in Croatia, I’d prefer not to be completely helpless when I arrive there. As for what I’ve done, I have gone through the first three lessons of Colloquial Croatian and have just begun to preview Spoken World Croatian. I only have a PDF version of the former without audio, and the latter only arrived recently so I haven’t had a chance to practice with the audio yet, but I’m anticipating that the pitch accent that I’ve heard so much about will give me some problems. In my Anki deck I’m artificially marking the stressed syllable of multisyllabic words (which carries the pitch) with an accent mark (kázalište, dŕžava, doviđénja, zádaća) while ignoring the different pitches/vowel lengths, partially because the traditional notation doesn’t make sense to me and partially because it doesn’t show up correctly in Anki. I’m hoping that through exposure to the spoken language I’ll be able to pick up on the correct pitch and intonation, the way I have with Swedish, for example. As far as the language is concerned, it really doesn’t seem all that difficult. It actually feels quite a bit easier than Russian or Polish. That could be because I have already struggled through the hard parts with those two, though, and so a lot of the vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation is already familiar to me. One thing that is sometimes tripping me up is the lack of palatalization in Croatian. There is some, of course, but not nearly as much as in Russian or Polish, where you practically chew your tongue while speaking. Unsurprisingly due to the geographic location of the country, Croatian has a much clearer sound that is reminiscent of Italian, particularly because of the different pitches. Another thing that was a bit annoying at first was that in Polish, the letter ‘ć’ is only found before consonants and at the end of words, whereas ‘ci’ is used before vowels. The Croats don’t seem to be nearly as picky as the Poles, though, so ‘ć’ can be found anywhere in Croatian, including before vowels (kuća, ići, piće, kćer). I’ve since gotten used to it, but it did look very out of place at first, having been used to the complicated Polish orthography. In addition to Russian and Polish, I’ve come across a few words that I recognized from having studied Romanian: skup (Ro: scump), jeftin (Ro: ieftin), slab (Ro: slab). I’ve noticed a couple interesting sound changes between Russian and Croatian: В [V] --> U в - u войти - ući вчера - jučer вторник - utorak внук - unuk ВС [VS] --> SV всё - sve все - svi всякий - svaki For these two changes, I wonder if closer contact with Italian had anything to do with them. I know that there are not as many consonant clusters – and certainly no consonants left to fend for themselves – in the Romance languages, so perhaps that could be a reason why the Croats have come to prefer a vowel followed by a consonant rather than a consonant cluster at the beginning of the word. In the case of the second change, I know that ‘sv’ is an acceptable initial consonant cluster in Italian words while ‘vs’ is not. This leads me to believe that Italian is behind the second change as well. Please correct me if I’m wrong though! And because this Croatian section isn’t long enough, I’ll give you my first official piece of writing in Croatian, followed by the same text in Russian for comparison. I welcome any corrections on either text! Zdravo! Zovem se Philip, sam Amerikanac, i imam sedamnaest godina. U mojem obitelji ima četiri ljudi: imam majku, oca, i mlađeg brata. Još ne mogu jako dobro govoriti hrvatski, ali učim. Hoću da putujem u Hrvatsku sljedeće godine, jer hrvatski jezik mi se sviđa i mislim da Hrvatska je lijepa država s interesantnom kulturom. Sada hoću popiti čašu čaj. Привет! Меня зовут Филипп, я – Американец, и мне семнадцать лет. В моей семье есть четыре люди: у меня есть мать, отец, и младший брат. Ещё не могу очень хорошо говорить по-хорватски, но учусь. Я хочу поехать в Хорватию в будущем году, потому что мне нравится хорватский язык и думаю что Хорватия – красивая страна с интересной культурой. Сейчас я хочу выпить чашку чай. I suppose it would have made for a more meaningful comparison if they had both been in the same alphabet, wouldn't it? Oh well. I should probably learn the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet anyways. Aha, I found an automatic online converter. Here's the Croatian text written in its Cyrillic equivalent, even though they don't use Cyrillic in Croatia: Здраво! Зовем се Филипп, сам Американац, и имам седамнаест година. У мојем обитељи има четири људи: имам мајку, оца, и млађег брата. Још не могу јако добро говорити хрватски, али учим. Хоћу да путујем у Хрватску сљедеће године, јер хрватски језик ми се свиђа и мислим да Хрватска је лијепа држава с интересантном културом. Сада хоћу попити чашу чај. OTHER  I spent a little bit of time wanderlusting (I verbed a noun) after Catalan a couple weeks back. I suspect that Jinx is to blame, what with her exciting first text in Catalan in her log tempting me...
EDIT: Why is it that after spending several minutes looking over the post preview to check for errors, I always notice the mistakes literally seconds after submitting the post? Edited by ellasevia on 26 November 2011 at 6:36pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5122 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 365 of 392 26 November 2011 at 10:53am | IP Logged | ||
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Your post made me very happy for three reasons:
1. You are back 2. I understood most of the Croatian 3. I understood all of the Russian A good day :-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kraft Newbie Russian Federation Joined 5011 days ago 34 posts - 45 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 366 of 392 26 November 2011 at 11:49am | IP Logged | ||
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Привет! Меня зовут Филипп, я – американец и мне семнадцать лет. В моей семье четыре ЧЕЛОВЕКА: Я, мать, отец и младший брат. Я ещё не могу очень хорошо говорить по-хорватски, но Я учусь. Я хочу поехать в Хорватию в будущем году, потому что мне нравится хорватский язык и Я думаю, что Хорватия – красивая страна с интересной культурой. Сейчас я хочу выпить чашку чаЯ. Edited by kraft on 26 November 2011 at 12:14pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| prz_ Tetraglot Senior Member Poland last.fm/user/prz_rul Joined 4647 days ago 890 posts - 1190 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Bulgarian, Croatian Studies: Slovenian, Macedonian, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Dutch, Swedish, German, Italian, Armenian, Kurdish | Message 367 of 392 26 November 2011 at 3:47pm | IP Logged | ||
Oh, you don't know how wrong you are... "touching" 16 languages during 1 year... Even for me it's extremely impressive. And I'd like to become octaglot, let's say, in 5 years, too... But then you'll be probably a hexadecaglot ;) Edited by prz_ on 26 November 2011 at 3:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6944 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 368 of 392 27 November 2011 at 4:58pm | IP Logged | ||
No izvrsno, Philip! I'll make a couple of observations about your sample. 1) I'm not sure about the cause of the switch from vs- to sv-, however in none of the sources available to me is mentioned an Italian origin. Slovenian uses vs- (cf. vse "all") and it too developed close to the Italian speech communities. Somehow the original vs- became sv- in certain dialects of the western Balkans including the one used to create standard BCMS/SC (cf. standard sve vs. dialectal vsa, se (*vs- > s-) etc. See here for some examples from dialects of western Croatia) 2) A correction for your text would be u mojoj obitelji since obitelj is feminine, while a point of interest may be that some Croats would not use Hoću da putujem... but Želim putovati... instead. What you used isn't "wrong" but the use of "da" in this instance may be viewed as a "Serbianism" by some Croats and so as a point of a usage it may have some value to the foreigner. Apparently there's a difference between Hoću putovati... (I shall travel) and Hoću da putujem.../Želim putovati (I want to travel) but the observation that Serbs are less likely to use the infinitive than Croats has led to some Croatian purists scrupulously replacing da + [verb] with the infinitive for fear of being labelled as Serbophiles :-P. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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