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TAC 2011, Team Œ, Language Funtimes | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Metaflower Newbie Australia Joined 5277 days ago 9 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 1 of 8 28 December 2010 at 10:33pm | IP Logged |
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This is my log for TAC 2011, where I’ll chronicle my learning, any problems, and, hopefully, my amazing successes.
Firstly, a bit about me. I’m an Australian girl, I’ve lived in Sydney all my life. Being fluent in several languages was, when I was a kid, part of the elaborate daydream that I would grow up to be a modern superspy, traveling the globe and saving it with my extensive linguistic and martial arts skills. Some of you polyglots here put even daydream Meta to shame!:P So part of the appeal of learning languages is the ‘wow’ factor, the showoff side, but directed more at those who speak my target language than fellow Anglophiles. In addition, I have passionate and mostly fun reasons I want to learn each of the languages I’m studying. I have traditionally never been good at things that involve schedules (very good at creating them though!), however I did an experiment that proved to me that all I need to be successful in sticking to a schedule is accountability, hence TAC. I am also an avid learner of circus arts, currently acrobalance, aerial silks, aerial hoop, diabolo, juggling and rola bola. I wanted to be able to get my splits, to be a better performer, so I and another circus performer made a promise to our friend (who could do the splits) that we would stretch twice a day. When we did so, we would get a sticker on a chart. It worked surprisingly well for a strategy my friend uses on her 5 year old piano students! The key was being accountable to her and to the other performer, and I managed to get the splits on one side before I got injured and had to stop. However this worked more than anything else will, so I’m hoping this log, and my team, become an online version of my sticker chart. My plan is to follow a barebones version of something ellasevia and sprachprofi have been using/talking about – focusing on one language for a period of time while leaving the others in ‘maintenance’. I have university holidays now until late February, and I intend to make the first segment Jan-April, intensively studying Spanish. I’ll then move on to German, then French, then Mandarin (that’s the plan, anyway!) I’ll have a lot more time to study when I’m not in university term, and first semester will be particularly difficult for me as I’m directing a circus show at my circus, and that will take up a lot of my time. We’ll see how we go. French This was my first second language. I studied it for 4 and a bit years in high school, with all the inefficiencies that come with foreign language classes in Australian schools. After school I took a gap year and traveled, part of which included staying on a French farm near the Pyrenees, speaking only French for a month while I was there, with www.wwoof.org (a vastly underrated, practically free form of immersion!). By the end of my stay I found myself thinking in French, and I could carry on a long conversation (around half an hour), albeit with much searching for words, and a lot of mistakes. However because I haven’t used it since I returned, it’s gotten a bit rusty. I’d like to get it up to a high intermediate level and in particular improve my listening – my listening in Spanish has long since surpassed it, even though I’ve only studied Spanish for less than a year. I’ll elaborate on materials and methods later, in the New Year (I haven’t gathered them all yet). Spanish Definitely my favourite language I’ve learnt – with Spanish I’ve fallen in love with the cultures it allows me access to. I did a bit of AJATT-style immersion (without any real study) when I started it earlier this year, so while my pronounciation isn’t great (in particular, I often get lazy and don’t roll my r’s), I have 80-90% comprehension on something like a telenovela (currently watching Mujeres Asesinas, a Mexican TV show, I can understand almost every word that’s said). However I’m a long way from producing speech of that standard. In particular I have great difficulty with verb conjugation. I started Spanish at the beginning of this year at university, and did the same wwoof mini-immersion as I did for French in July in Spain, I was able to skip two levels when I returned and complete Spanish 4. My Spanish is, on the whole, more fluent than my French, although I possibly have a wider French vocabulary. I hope to go on exchange to Mexico in first semester 2012, so this is my highest priority language. German A new challenge for me this year. I am planning to go to Austria in July, probably for around 3 weeks, and I have gone to Austria for a bodypainting festival (I have weird passions!) the last two years. Because of this festival, I have a lot of German speaking friends, and I predict this country as being very important in my future, so I want to learn German, because I feel like I only get half the story when I’m there. I can already understand bits and pieces (mostly pertaining to art and painting), and it will be interesting to learn my first language by myself from scratch. Chinese I also started this in first semester along with Spanish, however I didn’t continue. Spanish was so effortless and fun, while Chinese class involved very little use of the language, and lots of rote memorization. However I really enjoyed exploring it, and while I dropped the class, that was an indication of my interest in the class, not the language. I would really like to get my Mandarin to a basic conversational level. Edited by Metaflower on 01 January 2011 at 11:10am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Metaflower Newbie Australia Joined 5277 days ago 9 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 2 of 8 01 January 2011 at 11:35am | IP Logged |
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I'm planning to try out the LR method on my Spanish (I'm easing into language study at the moment and just starting with Spanish, once I get my Spanish study organised I'll organise the non-focus languages.) I have El Retrato de Dorian Gray as a text, and I've started with the Preface tonight. My plan is to spend about 2 hours doing it tomorrow, and put all the words that don't stick by the end of the session into Anki. I'll also post the English to Spanish translation on Lang-8 to see how accurate I was.
I'm also going to go to a Spanish speakers meetup in the city on Wednesday. I've been to it once before, and, while my Spanish was far from fluent, it was a lot of fun, and most of the participants staying in Spanish much more than I had anticipated. It's a regular event, and one of my goals for this month will be to attend it every week. While it is summer and therefore I'm not in the mood to study (when am I ever?) the intense heat that happens in the middle of the day means I'm stuck inside, and I think I'll enjoy a break from the heat with Spanish. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Adrean TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member France adrean83.wordpress.c Joined 5979 days ago 348 posts - 411 votes  Speaks: FrenchC1 | Message 3 of 8 01 January 2011 at 9:52pm | IP Logged |
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Best of luck to you with your log. Great to see you are going to meetups, learning
languages can be a great excuse for meeting people, as meeting people is a great excuse for practicing your language skillz. Your stay near the Pyrenees sounded like a really cool way to get in some practice. If you have any questions about where to begin with your French resources I will be more then happy to help. Of course you won't be studying French for a little while, but it's always good to prepare. Finally, I'll be returning to sizzling Sydney soon after several years away, if you know of any French meet-ups or the like I will be most interested to hear about it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Metaflower Newbie Australia Joined 5277 days ago 9 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 4 of 8 03 January 2011 at 5:12am | IP Logged |
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Adrean, I know that the Meetup I'm planning to go to shares the venue with the French meetup every second week, and its pretty central in the Sydney CBD. As for studying...
Yesterday I did one hour of LR El Retrato de Dorian Gray. I had a bit of trouble with it because my Spanish recording and my Spanish text don't match up,and the often obscure, poetic vocabulary means it's difficult to work out what the non-matching words mean from context. For example, one word translated to 'lyse' in English. I looked up said English word and I still don't know what 'lyse' means! I also watched an episode of Mujeres Asesinas, a Mexican TV show with full episodes on Youtube. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Metaflower Newbie Australia Joined 5277 days ago 9 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 5 of 8 05 January 2011 at 11:51pm | IP Logged |
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I went to the Spanish meetup last night, and it was heaps of fun! It was slightly different to the one I went to
previously in that it was less structured, and it was happening right next to the French meetup. At one point one of the French speakers came over and started talking to me and the man I was talking to in a mixture of English, French and Spanish. I replied in French, and then the man I was talking to wanted to know how I'd learnt it. I ended up speaking in a very sorry mix of the two languages, and while my Spanish survived mostly unscathed, my poor French was in a quivering mess by the end of the ordeal. Guess it needs more attention then! I spent about an hour the day before reading and putting vocabulary into anki for Spanish, and I spent half an hour yesterday reading out loud in French from 'les hommes qui n'aiment pas les femmes' by Stieg Larsson. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Metaflower Newbie Australia Joined 5277 days ago 9 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 6 of 8 10 January 2011 at 11:13am | IP Logged |
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I haven't posted in a couple of days, which is a testament to the amount of language study I have been doing. I have been doing a lot of fudging around study, including doing a short online grammar test in Spanish which put my skills in that language at a pitiful A1 (however I was able to almost pass the test for each level up to B2, so I'm not entirely sure how reliable said test is). I've also borrowed a whole load of grammar and instruction books for Spanish and one for German from the library. I'm leaving tomorrow on holidays for about a week and a half, and in addition to the big stack of English books (and a new ebook reader) I'm bringing, I'm also planning on bringing some study material.
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| Metaflower Newbie Australia Joined 5277 days ago 9 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 7 of 8 11 January 2011 at 4:00am | IP Logged |
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So after I posted that I went and cracked open my new intermediate Spanish book - it's packed away in my bag right now but I think it's called the Everything Book of Intermediate Spanish. It seems thorough enough for me at the moment, and has some simple grammar exercises scattered throughout the explanations. I did 45 mins of study with it, and I'll finish the rest of the chapter (like 3 pages) tonight on the train or when I get to the holiday house I'll be staying at with my family. I also posted a short piece of writing on Lang-8 about my new e-reader, and got some very useful feedback. Total time spent actively studying Spanish yesterday: ~1 hr.
However, I'm going on holidays in about an hour or so, and 3/4 of my bag is filled with books - about 5 hefty non-fiction books on various subjects, a couple of language books, and my e-reader, which has a little over 100 books, mostly public domain fiction that' I've been meaning to read. So while I may not post much for the next little while, I'll have a big long post for when I get back, which will be in around a week or so. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Metaflower Newbie Australia Joined 5277 days ago 9 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 8 of 8 02 February 2011 at 4:04am | IP Logged |
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Gah. I have done some Spanish study in the past few weeks since I last posted, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was. I have done some reading and listening to the news, but that's about it. Been very busy in my non-Spanish life. I'm going to the meetup tonight so I'll get a chance for some nonstop Spanish speaking then.
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