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Ellasevia’s TAC 2011: Team Ohana | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5558 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 377 of 392 07 December 2011 at 9:55am | IP Logged | ||
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Fantastic news, mate, I'm really excited for you! :D Croatia is a beautiful country, ideally located between Eastern and Central Europe. Any ideas where you'll be placed? I have family living north of Zagreb and they simply love it there; although I personally love the sea and prefer the coast. Apparently, wherever you end up next year, they say the "Zagorska juha" (Zagoria soup) is definitely worth a try. :P Edited by Teango on 07 December 2011 at 9:58am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6472 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 378 of 392 07 December 2011 at 12:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm so happy for you! Will we see you at the next Junulara E-Semajno then? It will be the
last few days of 2012 / beginning of 2013, somewhere in Germany. You also must visit me in Berlin! When exactly are you coming over? I don't suppose it's in May already? That would have been so cool... the London Globe Theatre is showing Shakespeare plays in various exotic languages, including Swahili, Greek, Japanese, Dari Persian... looking for someone to go to a Swahili or Maori play with me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5695 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 379 of 392 07 December 2011 at 1:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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WOW, congratulations Philip! This is absolutely thrilling news! :D
It's funny, just since moving to Germany I've made a Dutch-Swedish friend with whom I only speak German, and who is very interested in South-Eastern European languages (this kind of thing happens to me all the time). She's introduced me to some really cool Serbian and Croatian music, which I've been really getting into. You should check out the Croatian group "Klapa Maslina" – they do traditional songs in a very charming way. (Look them up on grooveshark.com for a good selection of music.) Oh, and...
Heh heh, my evil influence! I regret nothing. >:) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6144 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 380 of 392 08 December 2011 at 1:19am | IP Logged | ||
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Hvala svima! Ja sam jako uzbuđen! Sada moram učiti se hrvatski...
@Solfrid Cristin: It’s through Rotary Youth Exchange. I’ll be attending a normal Croatian high school – I’m repeating my senior year there – so I’ll be studying whatever Croatian high school students study. :) @TixhiiDon: Yes, I’ll be living with a host family for the whole time. Actually, I’ll probably be with three different families over the course of the year. As I told Solfrid Cristin, I’ll be attending a regular Croatian high school where everything will be taught in Croatian. The idea is both extremely exciting and a bit intimidating at the same time… Depending on the circumstances, I may also take a class for Croatian as a foreign language while I’m there. And I said that B2 will be my goal for the end of 2012, but I’ll be there until the summer of 2013, so I hope I’ll reach a much higher level than that. @hribecek: Yes, I would have been pleased to be going to any of those countries! One of the biggest factors was definitely the language. I originally was planning on listing the Netherlands as my first choice country, followed by France and Germany, but I decided somewhat last-minute that I’d rather go somewhere where I don’t already have a lot of experience with the language, and preferably where they speak a challenging language. I also decided that I wanted to go somewhere a little more “unusual” and not just to one of the frequently-visited Western European countries. As much as their ignorance horrified me at first, I love the fact that several of my friends and family members have had to ask me where exactly Croatia is. Croatia (as well as the Czech Republic and Hungary) also has quite an attractive climate and culture. :) Specifically for the Czech Republic, I went to Prague with my grandparents in 2007 and loved it, so I have very fond memories of that country and my decision to list it as my second choice was partially based on that. As for travel outside of Croatia, I’m not sure how much of that there will be just yet. I believe that at the end of my year there they’re going to offer an optional bus tour of Europe, which I would love to go on. Depending on where I’m placed and the family situation, I may be able to slip over into Hungary, Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia, or Italy. If I end up somewhere near the Hungarian border I’ll probably take up studying some Hungarian, and if I’m placed on the coast I might have to revisit my Italian… @Teango: The man who delivered the news to me on the phone yesterday told me that based on where exchange students have been placed in the past, I’ll most likely be in or near Zagreb. He also named a couple of other cities that are possibilities, but he seemed to be having some trouble with the pronunciation and I’m not that well-versed in Croatian geography just yet, so I’m not actually sure where those are… I think they might have been Šibenik and Koprivnica, though. @Sprachprofi: Again, I don’t know how lenient they are about allowing you to do independent travel, but I’ll try to visit if at all possible! I’m leaving at the beginning of August, I believe, so I unfortunately won’t be in Europe in May. I’ll be busy graduating and such at that time. :P Those plays do sound really awesome, though! @Jinx: Thank you for the recommendation! I just listened to a couple of their songs and they were quite nice. They sort of reminded me of traditional Greek music, but a bit more Western in sound, I guess? Thanks again. :) Edited by ellasevia on 08 December 2011 at 4:14am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| strikingstar Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5175 days ago 292 posts - 444 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Cantonese, Swahili Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written) | Message 381 of 392 10 December 2011 at 10:41am | IP Logged | ||
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Nimechelewa kidogo, lakini bado ninataka kusema "Hongera sana, Philip".
Utafurahia Croatia kabisa!! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6144 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 382 of 392 27 December 2011 at 6:38am | IP Logged | ||
Quarter 4: German, Swahili  
Weeks 48-51: November 26 – December 23 Total Study Time This Week: 18.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 575.5 hours Average Study Time This Week: 0.67 hours/day Average Study Time in 2011: 1.60 hours/day 
Oh dear, I just realized that I haven’t posted an update on here in exactly a month. It had seemed like much more recently than that because I let you know about Croatia already. Anyways, this is the second to last update of the year. After that I’ll post a summary for 2011 talking about everything that I didn’t accomplish and all the goals that I didn’t meet. :) In the past month I clearly did not do much studying at all. I was on Thanksgiving Break the last time I posted an update and am on Winter Break now, but I’m so busy and burned out with studying that I haven’t been able to take advantage of all the time off. Before and shortly after the last break I was dealing with applications and intense interviews for my exchange program in addition to college applications and schoolwork. Then there were finals, more college applications, and finally a swarm of family members descending upon our house for the holidays. All of the above have prevented me from working on my language studies, not to mention keeping me tottering on the brink of insanity. Oh, and the 6WC ended exactly two weeks ago. My Swahili score was terrible, but I’m going to pretend that’s okay because of everything I just talked about, and because I sort of switched my focus to Croatian halfway through the challenge. In terms of total study time I came in 12th place, which is surprisingly good, considering that I clocked in significantly fewer hours than last time – only 83.5. In terms of the languages that I worked on, sadly the time I spent on Japanese and German at school both outweighed my individual studies, followed not-so-closely by Croatian and then Swahili. Now, to the breakdown of the past month. I haven’t even done 20 hours, so hopefully this should be easy. :)  DEUTSCH
Total Study Time This Week: 1.5 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 48.25 hours - German Essay (sort of) - Pu der Bär - Hinduism Project Let’s begin with the essay. This was an essay talking about the play that we read in my German class and an American movie that we watched which was vaguely related. My German teacher said that we had to write the introduction and conclusion paragraphs in German but the body could be in English. I had intended to be an overachiever and wanted to write the whole thing in German, but by the time I actually got around to writing it I was so ready for it to be done that I decided to do the minimum amount of work like everyone else. I actually wrote the entire thing in English at first so that it wouldn’t seem disjointed because of the language, and then went back and translated the first and last paragraphs into German. I was writing this essay with a friend so that we could help each other come up with ideas for what to write and so that I could help her with the German. As for Pu der Bär (Winnie the Pooh in German), that’s what we watched while we were on our break from essay-writing because it was at least German-related. And very entertaining, I might add. :) Then we had to do a final project about “current events” – my topic was culture, so I found a recent short video in German about Hinduism in Germany and created a quick presentation on that. It took me less than an hour to assemble.  KISWAHILI
Total Study Time This Week: 0.5 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 19 hours - Vocabulary Supposedly I spent half an hour working on Swahili vocabulary of some sort. Not quite sure what that’s supposed to mean, and since this was a month ago I really have no clue what that could have been. Oh, and I remember writing something in Swahili about a week ago, but I don’t think it was significant enough to be counted in my study time.  Hrvatski
Total Study Time This Week: 15.25 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 23.75 hours - Spoken World Croatian Lessons 1-2 (+ BYKI) - Pimsleur Croatian Lessons 1-10 (x1.5) - Mala Sirena (x2) As you can see, most of my study time in the past month has been focused on Croatian, and understandably so. :) I’m very excited to have been accepted into this program and to have the chance to live in Croatia next year! I’m going to explain the activities in the reverse order of how I have them listed. I watched The Little Mermaid twice in Croatian – the first time was fairly late at night the weekend before finals started and helped me succeed in my goal of quelling my overabundance of homicidal and suicidal thoughts; the second time was after school had gotten out and I guess I was just bored. I was very pleased to notice already how many words I could discern from the dialogue. Given, I’ve seen this movie hundreds of times and know the entire thing by heart, but it still made me happy. Ah, Pimsleur. I normally can’t stand Pimsleur, but I made an exception here because I desperately needed to work specifically on my pronunciation. Pimsleur’s mind-numbing drills are perfect for grinding the basics of the language and correct pronunciation and intonation into your head. I got to the end of the ten lessons available to me and realized that I hadn’t actually mastered the intonation as well as I wanted, so I went back and did the last five lessons over again. After having repeated certain words and phrases countless times, I *think* I can claim to have gotten their correct intonation down. I know that I can say at least the following with the proper pronunciation now: Oprostite, da li govorite engleski? Ja nisam Hrvat i ne razumijem hrvatski vrlo dobro. Da li biste htjeli sa mnom nešto pojesti u restoranu u Jadranskoj Ulici? Then we come to Spoken World Croatian. I really love the Spoken World series – it’s fabulous. I have now completed the first two lessons of it, but am a bit afraid to start on the third because of how discouraged I got from the second one. I started the second lesson after finishing all of Pimsleur and thinking that I finally had a grasp on the pitch accent…and then I listened to the dialogue and tried to shadow it. Complete disaster. This pitch accent thing is definitely going to cause me a lot of problems. I don’t know why either – I really don’t have many problems with the pitch accents in Swedish or Japanese, so I don’t understand why the pitch accent in Croatian (and Italian, for that matter) is so challenging for me. I’ll definitely need to keep working on that quite a lot and make extensive use of audio materials.  فارسى
Total Study Time This Week: 0.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 55.75 hours - Vocabulary Same situation as with Swahili. I marked in my study spreadsheet that I did 45 minutes of Persian vocabulary about a month ago, but I really have no recollection of what it was. And speaking of Persian… Goodness, mine has gotten rusty. !اين چيز خوب نيست  日本語
Total Study Time This Week: 0.75 hours Total Study Time in 2011: 52.5 hours - Vocabulary I was about to say that this is the same as with Swahili and Persian, but I do actually remember what vocabulary this was. Someone sent me a link to a website with listings of kanji and example words with each of them, so I spent about 45 minutes going through and entering a lot of those into Anki. It was surprisingly addicting. OTHER @strikingstar: Usihangaike kama ulichelewa kidogo – asante sana, rafiki! Nchi ni nzuri, lugha ni ya kupendeza, na nimesisimka sana. Natumai tu kwamba nitaweza kusoma lugha ile kidogo kabla ya Agosti! Kwa mimi Kikroatia ni kigumu kabisa! Bado siwezi kukisema… 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5336 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 383 of 392 27 December 2011 at 8:03am | IP Logged | ||
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Well done, ellasevia, there is no reason why you should be dissatisfied with your output. You get done more than most of us, and I see that you have allready clocked in a respectable amount of Croatian. If there is anyone who can come back from a year abroad speaking the local language like a native, it must be you.
Good luck on your next TAC. It has been an honour to be on your team in 2011. Just out of curiosity, what level are you at in your other languages now? You know you will blow your new Croatian friends away with all your languages, if you let them know about them, right:-) ? 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 5558 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 384 of 392 28 December 2011 at 12:13am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm already excited about your preliminary plans for next year, and knowing you mate, I'm half-expecting further eye-catching flags to appear in the course of the year anyway! Of course, you're going to own Croatian (that goes without saying), and you'll be on a great team to keep you motivated. So best of luck, and hope you don't mind me dropping by from time to time to catch up on your progress. :)
1 person has voted this message useful |
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