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Mani’s language confusion in Lux. | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Mani Diglot Senior Member Germany imsprachendickicht.b Joined 4695 days ago 258 posts - 323 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Swedish, Portuguese, Latin, Welsh, Luxembourgish | Message 1 of 28 01 July 2011 at 11:39am | IP Logged |
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October last year I moved to Luxembourg on the base of a 6 month contract. So I didn't think much about languages for I knew my mothertongue German was one of the national languages of Luxembourg and I also had some French at school. After that 6 month my boss asked me if I would like to stay. Well, I stayed of course. But now I was facing the "language problem". Having neither spoken, listened nor studied French for about 14 years my French knowledge fell back on the level of advanced beginner/low intermediate at the most. Of course I picked up a few words and phrases over the last months, but that's not enough! So I really want to study French. But as I can't stick to just one language (somehow I always studied more than one language at once) I will also start Russian (now) and Luxembourgish (in September). So here are my plans:
French: - use the FSI materials (haven't yet figured out which one, at the moment I work with the FSI Metropolitan French FAST) - listen to the RFI news in simple French - work through my French grammar - read a local newspaper in French - watch French television - talk to my colleagues (I already do that using a very simple French) - practise with my tandem partner Russian: - FSI Russian FAST - watch "Russisch bitte!" on youtube - find more material Luxembourgish: (not started yet) - get the materials In general: Keep writing this log so I really have to study... ;-) Edited by Mani on 04 March 2013 at 7:56am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iwwersetzerin Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member Luxembourg Joined 5459 days ago 259 posts - 513 votes Speaks: French*, Luxembourgish*, GermanC2, EnglishC2, SpanishC2, DutchC1, ItalianC1 Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 2 of 28 01 July 2011 at 5:50pm | IP Logged |
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Hi Mani,
Welcome to the forum and good luck with your language studies. Feel free to contact me if you need help with Luxembourgish. Christine 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Mani Diglot Senior Member Germany imsprachendickicht.b Joined 4695 days ago 258 posts - 323 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Swedish, Portuguese, Latin, Welsh, Luxembourgish | Message 3 of 28 09 July 2011 at 9:47am | IP Logged |
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WEEK 1
Okay, one week has passed. So what have I done? French: - Still haven't decided which FSI course to take, but I listened to the first 10 lessons of FSI Metropolitan French FAST (because they are already on my MP3 player) and had a good laugh at the end of lesson 3. :-) - I listened to the RFI news only twice - shame on me, I wanted to do that daily. I'm really glad there is a script for it, so I can get most of the information if not all the second time I listen to it while reading the script. - I finished the 1st chapter of my French grammar (nouns). Yippieh! Next chapter will be on articles. - I started listening to "L´affaire du coffret" by RFI. I like that one! - No tandem exchange this week. :-( My tandem-partner had to take her car to the garage. Went with a colleague and a friend of his to have diner instead. Conversation was a wild mix of French, English and German - I liked it. And I'm both astonished and a little concerned how much I understand when two guy talk about computer games and social networking in French! Russian: - I can read Cyrillic and I'm also halfway through Cyrillic handwriting! So hopefully next week I can both read and (hand)write Cyrillic. I also practise typing it. - Bought another language course. A book, two CDs. The book consists of 10 lessons, a little grammar, the transcription of the texts on CD and the vocabulary is about 900 words each direction. By the way does every introduction to Russian and the Cyrillic script start with the word атом? - Found another Russian-German podcast (RusslandJournal.de) I will listen to. Luxembourgish: (still not started yet, so I won't mention it again till August/September, the time I plan to start it.) @Christine (Iwwersetzerin): Thanks for your offer! Edited by Mani on 09 July 2011 at 9:49am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Mani Diglot Senior Member Germany imsprachendickicht.b Joined 4695 days ago 258 posts - 323 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Swedish, Portuguese, Latin, Welsh, Luxembourgish | Message 4 of 28 15 July 2011 at 10:29am | IP Logged |
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WEEK 2
What a busy week! I finally bought some textbooks for Luxembourgish. O - I would love to start right away! But what about my Russian then? I haven't done so much about it this week just listening 2 or 3 chapters of the FSI FAST course, but - well - only as a background noise and some reading practice to make sure I won't forget the script. No cursive drills, no drills at all. (Dreams including Cyrillic don't count, do they?) French: Well, I finally decided that I will take the FSI French Phonology course. Thanks to my tandem partner who told me that I'm constantly mispronounincing je and j'ai. Couldn't someone have told me that before? But they are probably doing the same thing that I do while talking to each other - guessing. Hm ... I'm halfway through "L´affaire du coffret" by RFI. :-) A bilingual mystery story that gives you some basic vocabulary and grammar. It doesn't feel like learning at all. I also started reading a book about French orthography in French which I think will be very useful for my French spelling ability. So all in all I think it's been a good week for my French. I know now on what I have to focus. I'm really looking forward to the weekend for more French studies and finally some Russian studies to complete my Cyrillic cursive. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Mani Diglot Senior Member Germany imsprachendickicht.b Joined 4695 days ago 258 posts - 323 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Swedish, Portuguese, Latin, Welsh, Luxembourgish | Message 5 of 28 25 July 2011 at 9:48am | IP Logged |
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WEEK 3½
Yes, well I forgot to post, erm, so technically this is already week 4 for me, so here are my results from last week. Russian: Yes, I did something! :-) Okay, I'm still learning how to write - but heh - only 6 letters left! I really felt stupid when I tried to figure out how to write ж till I realised there should be some online guide for learning Cyrillic cursive. Of course there are some and ж is in fact easy to write. I like writing Cyrillic! French: I did some more drills fromt the FSI French Phonology course which I think really helps. I think, my pronounciation wasn't that bad before, I usually pronounced the same sounds like the guys on tape but it helps me reading out loud! I mean, I always read French in some way but I don't remember that anyone told me how to do, how to pronounce which combination of letters and which not to pronounce. This helps me a lot - especially with the E's (e, é, è). Thursday I met my tandem partner again. It was quite fun although I have had a "bad language day". You know that kind of days when you mix up everything? Thurday was such a day for me. I noticed it right from the start when I asked my colleague (who only speaks French) in the morning: "Est-ce que je peux te preguntar quelque chose? I'm looking for ... erm, ja genau..." So you see I started French, took a Spanish verb, continued English and finally fell back into German when I realised that I mixed up everything. And it was like that all day long. I started a sentence in French and mixed it up with a lot of words from other languages. Thank god they're all so patient with me! My tandem partner actually managed to get some real French sentences out of me. :-) And as an extra I learned 3 diffent ways to say "I'm talking nonsense." in French (1 for each time I banged my head on the table). :-) I especially like "Je débloque." It only can get better ... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Mani Diglot Senior Member Germany imsprachendickicht.b Joined 4695 days ago 258 posts - 323 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Swedish, Portuguese, Latin, Welsh, Luxembourgish | Message 6 of 28 01 August 2011 at 12:04pm | IP Logged |
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WEEK 4
Okay, Monday again and like last week I'm late with my report. This time I had problems with my WLAN - a whole weekend with only temporarily internet access - wah! But, well, I managed somehow ... So, here's what I've done last week: Russian: Haha! Finally managed to get through the all the cursive! Now I can read and write Cyrillic. :-) (Typing is still on my "to do list") I had some problems with the я especially the small one to make it look - erm - nice and neat, but after writing it about 100 times within different words, I think I know now how to write it. That means this week I will start listening to Russian pronounciation intensively so I can distinguish the hard and soft consonants and focus on the stress. French: No FSI drills this week. Instead I tried to listen to some fairy tales (MP3s taken from LibriVox). I started with Tom Pouce (Tom Thumb) which wasn't such a great success because I only understood about 20%, next one was better. Le Petit Chaperon rouge (Little Red Riding Hood) - I understood about 50-60%, probably because I knew the story better. So I maybe should go on to Cendrillon (Cinderella) which was one of my favorites as a child. My tandem exchange was great this week. It was 2 hours all French because an old friend of my tandem partner came to visit her. So it was chatting French all the time and I really felt okay with it. That friend is a nice guy and both didn't chat too fast and asked me questions and let me ask questions so I felt I really participated in their talk. And it was so great that they explained the things to me that I obviously didn't get (I think have a easy to recognise "Eh? What?" expression). So actually the 2 hours intense French were somehow relaxing in the end - I never thought I would say that with French. :-) But I think it's been so nice because my tandem partner and her friend made a real effort to include me. Some people are great, aren't they? And my French word of the week is: la gouttière - die Regenrinne - drip moulding/drip rail/eaves gutter (whatever you say to that in English!) I love the sound of this word. :-) Luxembourgish: My first try yesterday with the first of my textbooks and I already feel I could slap someone (e. g. the one who created the texts). Really, nothing against housewives, if you feel like you want to be a housewife and/or stay-at-home mum (and can affort it) - fine! But don't come with texts like this: A: Oh, I have to stay at home because my 4 kids are still small. B: How old are they? A: 12, 14, 16 and 18. They really need someone to drive them around. Please? Small kids? Have I missed something? They're all adolescents, one of them is already of age. That's gonna be fun when they go on like this ... Okay, let's see what I will learn this week. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Mani Diglot Senior Member Germany imsprachendickicht.b Joined 4695 days ago 258 posts - 323 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Swedish, Portuguese, Latin, Welsh, Luxembourgish | Message 7 of 28 08 August 2011 at 12:24pm | IP Logged |
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WEEK 5
Last week I hardly worked on French which isn't good at all for it should be my main focus. So no report on French this time. :-( But I promise myself here I will spend at least 1 hour learning French each day (easy communication with colleagues doesn't count). Uff. Russian: I tried the Princeton Russian Course last week and I think I'll stick with it. I'll use the FSI FAST Course and the PONS Course (in German) as side material. Luxembourgish: I like Luxembourgish so far, it's easy for me because it is so close to German - although not to my dialect. But there's a litte complication for self-study - the textbooks don't have a vocabulary. I mean, I understand why, because this is such a small language and the learners are from many different nations speaking many different languages, so it's not economic to print textbooks for all that languages, but still it's strange. Okay, the material is meant to be used in courses, but a beginners textbook all in Luxembourgish ... I'm lucky that my mothertongue is German otherwise I think I would be facing a major problem. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Mani Diglot Senior Member Germany imsprachendickicht.b Joined 4695 days ago 258 posts - 323 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Swedish, Portuguese, Latin, Welsh, Luxembourgish | Message 8 of 28 25 August 2011 at 1:35pm | IP Logged |
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WEEK 6, 7 and 8
I admit - wanderlust got me. Against all my language plans I switched. Russian will be a kind of 'on and off study' from now on and is replaced by Kurdish (now that I have the books). To be honest, I started to learn Kurdish in January with the Dersa Kurdî series on youtube, but as I'm better learning the foundation of a language by reading than by listening, I skipped it after lesson 6 and now that I bought some books on Kurdish language (Kurmanci dialect) I couldn't resist - that reminds me not to buy any books on East Armenian before the end of 2012 ... So: Kurdish: My first materials are: For grammar and as textbook: Rojbaş - Einführung in die kurdische Sprache. 2nd edition. by Petra Wurzel. For listening: the Dersa Kurdî series on youtube. I'm halfway through the 1st chapter of the textbook by now, although I got the book only yesterday. I'm very motivated, first time I heared Kurdish I fell in love with it (same feeling about Luxembourgish, Bangla and English). My best friends husband was watching tv (he is Kurd) and as the will have their baby girl in November and plan to rise her bilingual German/Kurdish, what better excuse do I have to study it? Apart from the fact that I promised my best friend to help her and study Kurdish with her together. :-) Luxembourgish: I love it! It's so easy to understand and so nice to speak, though I'm struggeling with the spelling. And I'm concerned that I will fall for false friends (I hope aren't so many). 2 weeks ago I understood my first Luxembourgish joke :-) ... Belgians, I'm so sorry for you! French: Although French isn't a language I favour, I can see an improvement. French is getting easier. I still miss a lot, but I understand more than I did 2 month ago and - oh - my speaking skills have improved that much. A language tandem is a great thing! [OT]With the next languages I won't wait that long. Actually I already 'torture' people around me with my still very imperfect Luxembourgish skills. :-)[/OT] I'm really sorry that my tandem partner is on vacations, that means no tough French-German exchanges for 2 weeks ... so I have to do my drills all alone. And I have a new favourite word. :-) la peluche - das Plüschtier - plush toy (cuddly toy, stuffed animal) The story behind this word - while sitting in the garden of the house my tandem partner lives in and having our regular tandem exchange a sweet tiny puppy-dog was playing in the neighbours garden. And while watching it and chatting my tandem partner at once said: "Oh, il est drôle. Il est comme une peluche." (Oh, it is cute. It's like a plush toy.) And yes, she was right! Edited by Mani on 26 August 2011 at 9:42am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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