TAC 2011 tozick SpaEn (Language Learning Log) Language Learning Forum

TAC 2011 tozick SpaEn
Tags: Finnish \| Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) \| English \| Spanish
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Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log

tozick Diglot Groupie Poland Joined 6173 days ago 44 posts - 69 votes Speaks: Polish*, English	Message 1 of 3 07 January 2011 at 6:45pm \| IP Logged
	Welcome. My name's Bart, I'm 19, bred and born in Poland. Eventhough I've been a member for a while now, it's the first time i participate in TAC. I hope it will be as beneficial to me as it's been to other people, and hopefully it'll help me overcome my laziness. My TAC is supposed to be 9 months long only, as I will be moving to the UK next year to study at the university there. Getting to the point, these are the languages that I'm going to study: English Background I began learning it in the 1st grade(13 years ago). It was obligatory, so it wasn't really my choice, and i really disliked the language for the first few years. My attitude started changing when i became better at it (after 10 years of boring classes twice a week), and, surprisingly, I truly love it now. I've never been to any English-speaking country ( unbelievable, I know), but I have quite a few friends from the UK and the USA. I've made real progress in the past 2-3 years thanks to chatting my friends and reading/watching books/movies/shows in English. While I admire all varieties of English, the one that i truly adore is Scottish, maybe because I'm partly Scottish myself. Current level C1 - reading being my strongest and writing the weakest Goal C2 What I'll be doing 1)I'm going to read at least 25 books. I read 2 books at a time - 1 extensively, 1 intensively, switching every hour or so depending on how i feel. 2)I'm going to work on my accent a lot, because it's not quite as good as I'd like it to be. It's not very thick, nor is it very 'polish', but it's far from being perfect, so there is a lot of space for improvement. I want to give shadowing a try, so it'll probably be the main method, although it may change. I will be shadowing Ian Rankin's audiobook, because Scottish accent is what I'm aiming for. 3) I'm going to work with 1 or 2 student books, possibly 1 targetted at people preparing for CPE, and 1 on academic English. 4) Whatever else comes to my mind including movies, shows, blogs and whatnot. Spanish Background I became interested in it before when I was 15, and being able to study it was 1 of the most important factors when it came to choosing highschool 1 year later. I studied it in highshcool for 3 years, and eventhough it was highly disappointing (learning it there that is, not the language itself) it didn't discourage me. I spent the 2nd half of 2010 watching everything in Spanish, reading Harry Potter y el Caliz del Fuego, and doing other random stuff, inspired by AJATT. I didn't really do anything in Spanish whole December and when i first watched an episode of House in Spanish yesterday, I was able to understand about 80% of things I heard, which i consider to be a pretty decent result considering a lot of medical language, and lack of formal study(Spanish in school was mostly about learning few dialogues by heart and arguing with teacher). I'm mostly interested in Rioplatense Spanish. I'm going to study Spanish at uni. Level I'd say it's around B1, writing/speaking significantly worse(virtually non-existant) Goals C1 Methods I'm not sure what exactly I will be doing but reading will be 1 of the activities for sure ( starting with La Tabla de Flandes by Arturo Perez-Reverte which is lying right in front of me). I'm going to try Teango's study-and-click method with Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal I think. I guess I will continue watching shows in Spanish, possibly Resistire because it's from Argentina. I will listen to Radio Mitre aswell, I guess. Probably I'll do a lot of other things too, but I can't really think of anything right now. Finnish Background Few years ago (3-4) i attended a 1 month long Finnish course at a language school during holidays. We had a really good teacher, who happened to be a lecture at the University of Warsaw. Unfortunetly she wasn't interested in private tutoring or anything like that, and there were no books for teaching yourself finnish over here, so it ended after 1 month. It's the language I like the most though. I love pretty much everything about Finland so I want to finally learn the language. I travel to Finland twice a year trying to attend at least 1 JYP's game every year and spend a weekend at my friend's mokki every summer. I absolutely adore Helsinki and I would really like to live there in few years. Level Impossible to measure. I'd say 0 although I do know some of the basics and i know quite a lot of slang and spoken language thanks to my friends, probably including words that aren't known to students who are quite fluent in Finnish, but it's too random to claim that I'm at A1/2 or anyhting like that. Goal I would love to have basic fluency (B2+?)by the end of this challenge. I guess it will be hard to reach, but that's the goal. I am pretty ambitious and all that so i aim high. Method I will probably use TY Finnish, because it's the only book that's available here. I'm not the biggest fan of TY, but I don't really have a choice. Other than that I will be using a couple of websites ( Supisuomea being the main 1, I think). Once I'm done with all of that I'll see how good my Finnish is and then try to find something suitable. I have Harry Potter ja kuoleman varjelukset( 7th part) so maybe I will be able to read it then. So these are the languages I'm going to focus on. I will probably toy with a bunch of other languages. I'm consdiering studying Russian somewhat more seriously, but I'm not sure yet. I will probably be experimenting with different methods using different languages. So far I've tried L-R with German but it didn't really go too well. I started from 0 and it was not effective at all. After about 15 hours of listening (2 days) I gave up because i learned like 10 words and didn't really enjoy it that much ( probably because of lack of results). I planned a reward for reaching all of the aforementioned goals. I was going to stay in Poland whole summer this year, because of the uni and everything. So i came up with an idea. If i succeed in all 3 languages I'm going to go to finland for 2 weeks in August/September. It;s supposed to serve as an additional motivator. That's it for now. Congrats if you managed to read it all. I hope no one died of boredom reading it, just as I hope my plan won't die on the vine. Thanks for reading once again and good luck with your studies everyone. 1 person has voted this message useful
Mistral Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5740 days ago 160 posts - 179 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, German	Message 2 of 3 24 January 2011 at 3:41pm \| IP Logged
	Szkocki... jak ja żałuję, że tak ciężko trafić na nagrania, słowniki z wymową szkocką. Szkoda, że w szkołach i na kursach sprzedają nam brytyjsko-amerykańską papkę, do tego z okropnym, polskim akcentem. Co to za uniwersytet, na który się wybierasz? Może jakiś szkocki? Ja właśnie czekam na odpowiedź od University of Edinburgh, modlę się o zaproszenie ;) A to CPE ze względu na studia w Wielkiej Brytanii? Bo ja z tej racji wybrałam np. TOEFL, jako że wydaje mi się prostszy i zdecydowanie bardziej dostępny (egzaminy co tydzień). Trzymam kciuki! (nie tylko za angielski) 1 person has voted this message useful
tozick Diglot Groupie Poland Joined 6173 days ago 44 posts - 69 votes Speaks: Polish*, English	Message 3 of 3 24 January 2011 at 7:09pm \| IP Logged
	Niestety dla uczniów przygotowują tylko materiały do 2 głównych wersji angielskiego. Tak na dobrą sprawę do nauki 'amerykańskiego angielskiego' też nie ma u nas chyba aż tylu materiałów, a już na pewno nie w szkołach, gdzie panuje przekonanie, że tylko brytyjska odmiana jest prawdziwa i warta nauki. Na szczęście mam dostęp do sporej liczby audiobook'ów czytanych przez Szkotów i do native'ów ze Szkocji. Jeśli chodzi o CPE to nie przygotowuje się do egzaminu jako takiego, tylko pomyślałem, że warto będzie wykorzystać materiały przygotowujące do CPE, żeby nauczyć się rzeczy wymaganych na najwyższym poziomie. Głównie po to żeby było szybciej, bo w nich już wszystko jest gotowe i podane na tacy. Przejrzałem na razie 1 książkę i szczerze mówiąc było w niej mało interesujących, a jeszcze mniej nowych/nieznanych rzeczy, więc na razie dałem sobie z nimi spokój. A co do egzaminu na studia, to ja się pewnie zdecyduje na TOEFL albo IELTS zobaczę, co będzie wygodniej zrobić. Uniwersytet - o dziwo nie Szkocja. Aplikowałem do Aberystwyth w Walii. Myślałem o Szkocji, ale mają gorszy kierunek, który mnie interesuje. Edinburgh jest świetny, mam nadzieję że się dostaniesz. Szczególnie biorąc pod uwagę tą masakryczną aplikację, a w szczególności PS. Dzięki :) 1 person has voted this message useful

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