WingSuet Triglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 5364 days ago 169 posts - 211 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: Cantonese
| Message 1 of 116 14 June 2011 at 5:09pm | IP Logged |
TAC 2015 - Team Rätsel Stars on page 14
TAC 2013 - Team Schnitzel Starts on page 9
Introduction TAC 2015
A new year is here, and so far I've had plenty of motivation for studying. That's what
made me decide to give the TAC another go! I didn't join last year and also struggled
finding motivation to study anything at all. So after months of break (not complete
though, as I've been studying German Translation at the university) I finally feel up
for it!
German
This is the language I'll spend most time on. I'm currently studying to become a
translator from German into Swedish at University and only have one semester to go. If
I want to become a translator I have to improve my German a lot, so I need to work
harder!
I will also try to regain my knowledge in Cantonese, which is almost totally gone by
now.
Edited by WingSuet on 10 January 2015 at 11:29am
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WingSuet Triglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 5364 days ago 169 posts - 211 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: Cantonese
| Message 2 of 116 14 June 2011 at 5:24pm | IP Logged |
I started using Mnemosyne a few months ago - a flashcard program that I think works really well. I've created two decks, one for Chinese characters and one for spoken Cantonese. Currently I have 500 cards in the characters deck (meaning 250 characters, since I have two sides for every character) and 566 cards in the Cantonese deck (also two sides).
I had a break for a few weeks from learning Cantonese as I had a big essay to finish in school. When I finally went back to using Mnemosyne again I had most of the cards waiting to be revised again and it turned out I had forgotten so many characters - even many of which I thought I knew really well!
Now I have finally caught up! Finally I can start adding new cards! I’ve been planning to add all radicals (the smallest components of Chinese characters) to Mnemosyne to hopefully make it easier for me to learn more characters. I can already recognize most radicals but I also want to know the meaning of all of them to be able to figure out the meaning of new characters (hopefully).
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newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6392 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map
| Message 3 of 116 15 June 2011 at 2:52am | IP Logged |
Wanderlust for Cantonese is starting to stir in me. I'll be following your log although it might make it worse!
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Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6595 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German
| Message 4 of 116 15 June 2011 at 5:54am | IP Logged |
I'm just loving the attention Cantonese has started to get from learners on this forum recently. 好嘢! Good luck in
your studies, WingSuet.
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hkboy Groupie Hong Kong Joined 5689 days ago 65 posts - 86 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Cantonese, Mandarin
| Message 5 of 116 15 June 2011 at 2:24pm | IP Logged |
Yes, welcome to the Cantonese group. I think there are about 4 or 5 of us. I'm looking forward to hearing about your progress.
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zhanglong Senior Member United States Joined 4942 days ago 322 posts - 427 votes Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese
| Message 6 of 116 15 June 2011 at 7:34pm | IP Logged |
As the baby of the bunch on the forum studying Cantonese, all I can say is, welcome back to the most fun language of the Far East. LOL!
Anyway, good luck with your studies. I will be following your progress intently.
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WingSuet Triglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 5364 days ago 169 posts - 211 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: Cantonese
| Message 7 of 116 05 August 2011 at 1:21pm | IP Logged |
Thanks everyone for your support! I'm glad to find other people interested in
Cantonese! :) I'll try to update my log more regularly.
Summer has made me lazy. I stopped going through my flashcards in Mnemosyne for a
while
and that made it even harder to go back to them again. I've started going through them
again now and starting making progress. The Cantonese pile is finished and I will not
let it build up on me again. Started going through the Chinese character pile now,
many
have been forgotten.
I've found a new website for learning Cantonese that I have been using lately. It's
called Popup Cantonese, and I like it mainly because they have short clips of about 8
minutes which doesn't take much effort. I started from the basic level just to make
sure I wouldn't miss anything, and sure enough I was able to pick out a bunch of new
words. I'm now starting at the elementary lesson.
Something I learned from popup Cantonese: nei5 go3 nou5 heui3 jo2 bin1 a3? 'Where did
your brain go' - a fun way to call someone stupid, or "brainless" ^^
Edited by WingSuet on 10 January 2015 at 11:21am
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WingSuet Triglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 5364 days ago 169 posts - 211 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: Cantonese
| Message 8 of 116 22 August 2011 at 8:24pm | IP Logged |
Lately I've been working with Mnemosyne (as always). I also started using Teach Yourself again. I've used it before, as well as many other learning sources, but never finished it. My biggest flaw is that I tend to quit fairly quickly - either when things start to get boring, or when I don't learn quickly enough. That probably explains why I don't know more Cantonese after years of studying it :P
So I went back to Teach Yourself and to mix up my studies a little I took a notebook and started writing down all the dialogues I've listened to so far to really analyze all words. I find those what I call "small words" - words like 重 jung6 and 就 jau6 - to be very difficult to understand and use, since they can have very different meanings. Breaking down each sentence helped me understand the dialogues better and not just rush to the next dialogue. I have now finished chapter 9.
I also continued on my list of Chinese radicals, trying to learn all of them to help me learn new characters. I've learned most of them now, and I'm eager to continue learning the 500 most common characters again!
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