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Kat’s Log {TAC 2013 *jäŋe / *ledús} | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Phantom Kat Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4852 days ago 160 posts - 253 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Finnish | Message 1 of 39 26 June 2011 at 12:08am | IP Logged | ||
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{Wiped the journal to start anew!}
Well well well, time to start this log again. The Finnish bug has bitten me hard since I started school, for some odd reason, so it's time to start documenting my progress again. I actually feel rather proud that I have started to migrate more and more from my beginner's book to the essential grammar book for more complex grammatical structures. Whether that means I'm actually starting to learn more of the language is up to debate, but I definitely feel as though the grammar is becoming less and less alien. The amazing part is that it has never been once been a drag to learn. I still find Finnish melodic and fun to learn. A bit of background: I was interested in Finnish from the very first time I heard a Finnish song on Youtube around two and a half years ago (Aamun Kuiskaus by Stella). It was love at first sound, and the first thing I bought was a small pocket dictionary and learned the colors by writing them on index cards. I've been studying it off and on since then, nothing serious. Since my roommate has expressed an interest in learning Russian I've also joined in with her. I'll just be dabbling in Russian, focusing more on pronunciation and vocabulary than grammar. Polish actually interests me more than Russian, both in looks and sound, but perhaps I'll grow to like Russian the more I dabble in it. Only time will tell. Edited by Phantom Kat on 06 March 2013 at 1:56am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Phantom Kat Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4852 days ago 160 posts - 253 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Finnish | Message 2 of 39 17 October 2012 at 4:13am | IP Logged | ||
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October 16th, 2012
Russian So I just spent an hour going through the first lesson of FSI Russian, which is the alphabet. I had already gone through this lesson a day ago, but I just breezed through it with the audio to see what it was all about. Needless to say I could not keep up with reading the words and kept getting confused about which letters had which sounds. Today I started again and went through each section, stopping the audio after every list of words so I could go back and read through the lists slowly, syllable by syllable with my finger on the screen. And progress! I was able to read through the words slowly and without stumbling so much. I stopped at Ж and will continue tomorrow starting with Й. I will also go through the past lists with the audio for review. Perhaps I can get my roommate to do it with me. I also added the Russian keyboard along with my default US English and Finland's Finnish keyboard. Keyboard collection! :) - Kat Edited by Phantom Kat on 18 October 2012 at 10:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Phantom Kat Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4852 days ago 160 posts - 253 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Finnish | Message 3 of 39 18 October 2012 at 3:10am | IP Logged | ||
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October 17th, 2012
Finnish The good thing about Wednesdays (and Mondays) is that I have an hour between my first and second class, which is great for some language studying. Today I spent that hour reading through Finnish's Four Infinitives from Finnish: An Essential Grammar, something I had done a couple of days ago. Now that I'm made my way through most of my beginner's book concepts like infinitives don't seem so intimidating anymore. The most complicated one seems to be the third infinitive only because it uses six cases, but I plan to practice that one the most in the upcoming days because it's very common, both in the spoken and the written language. I began writing notes about this, and I'll post them here when I complete them. I also began to review the use of the nominative and the partitive because, again, they are very common cases. I understand a lot of the partitive, but reviewing never hurts, right? :) At night I watched an episode of the Finnish show Pasila with English subtitles on Youtube. There's some funny parts, but it's not really my cup of tea. I might watch more, though. Until tomorrow! - Kat Edited by Phantom Kat on 19 October 2012 at 6:34am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| caam_imt Triglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 4651 days ago 232 posts - 357 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2, Finnish Studies: German, Swedish | Message 4 of 39 18 October 2012 at 9:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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Good luck with your studies! I must say that when I first saw Pasila (years ago) I didn't
find it fun either. However, I saw it again recently and it was way better than last time (trying no to rely on the subs). I found that the translation does not always convey the exact same meaning, specially in the fun parts (things like idioms or word plays are usually adapted to some cultural paradigm known to the English speaking world, in order for the translation to make sense). Some times they deal with recent events in Finnish culture that are funnier when you know about them beforehand (e.g. the issue of the beggars in Helsinki). Sorry if this seems obvious to you, but I just wanted to comment on this a bit based on my own experience :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Phantom Kat Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4852 days ago 160 posts - 253 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Finnish | Message 5 of 39 18 October 2012 at 10:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks!
And no problem! I'm always interested in other people's views, especially on shows I haven't watched before. Pasila will probably grow on me the more I watch it because there are funny parts; I can't expect every moment to be perfect, right? And I know what you mean about the subtitles not matching up with the Finnish because I noticed on one occurance, with my very limited Finnish, that it wasn't what they were saying. Speaking of Finnish cultures, I need to start reading about Finland news and events. - Kat 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Phantom Kat Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4852 days ago 160 posts - 253 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Finnish | Message 6 of 39 19 October 2012 at 6:30am | IP Logged | ||
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October 18th, 2012
I just watched Zombieland! What a fun movie! It's not language related, but I just had to say something about it. Now I really want to watch The Walking Dead. Finnish Today I began to read Unit 1 of Colloquial Finnish through my university's online library catalog. Although Unit 1 is basically a review for me (Finnish pronunciation, pronouns, -ko/ö,etc.) I was glad to find little tidbits of information my beginner's book didn't mention. Here are the notes I've taken so far: + Ne is used colloquially for he. So instead of he ovat the colloquial form is ne on. + -isti, -ikko, and -ri denote occupations. + -ja is close to the English (-er), as in "writer". + Use niin when the question word is -ko/ö is added to any word other than the verb. It's polite to repeat the questioned word along with it. + When declining nouns with -nen you use -se then the case ending. I’ll look into exceptions besides the ones mentioned in the book. Tonight I also began to watch another episode of Pasila, this one about a pirate, Mikko “Pekka”, who is illegally downloading Finnish music. I’ll finish watching it tomorrow, but here are some notes I took on vocab and some phrases that I can see using frequently in life. I’m going to start doing that for each episode and creating a deck on Anki for it. Reviewing will then require me to rewatch the episode, or parts of it, so I can listen to it in context. I find I learn vocab a lot better when in context, such as dialogues or sentences I create myself. Lääket = medicines Onko muuta? = anything more/else? Raha = money Jumalauta! = Godammit! Jännä = exciting Tyttökullat = the Golden Girls Kaudet = seasons It's getting late, so I'll call it a night. Hyvää yötä! - Kat Edited by Phantom Kat on 19 October 2012 at 2:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Phantom Kat Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4852 days ago 160 posts - 253 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Finnish | Message 7 of 39 20 October 2012 at 8:05am | IP Logged | ||
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October 19th, 2012
Finnish There wasn't much studying today, unfortunately. I did go over some of Unit 1 of Colloquial Finnish, about their section on consonant gradation. They call it consonant compression, and they use the idea of the case being a 'lid' on the word. That's a unique way of thinking about it, and it might help me remember some of the gradations better. I watched the rest of the Pasila episode. Here are some new vocab words to add: Aivan kamala = Just horrible/That’s horrible Mahtava = Great Puhkea = break out Paska = shit I also got some notes on the partitive from some grammar reading: + When negating the existence of something, if the thing exists somewhere else then use the nominative. (I've never thought of that. Thanks, book!) + The objects of emotions are always in the partitive. (I need to start making sentences with this use.) Night! - Kat 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6386 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 8 of 39 20 October 2012 at 2:23pm | IP Logged | ||
And yes, making up your own examples is fantastic! There are never enough exercises :) I think this one is generalized too much. is liking an emotion? Yet you say pidän sinusta. Best always google when in doubt:) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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