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Accelerated Challenge (Feb) - Finnish | ||
Tags: Finnish | Learning Technique/Method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5162 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 33 of 64 27 February 2012 at 3:59pm | IP Logged | ||
I'm in. Slightly over 30 hours now, hope to reach the 35 mark before the end of the week/challenge. My dream plan would have been to meet with a language partner regularly, attempt conversation and get instant feedback. However, I had a very hard time locating a Finnish partner, and could only find one online, so I was a bit disappointed, as this would have otherwise been my main method of learning. Usually, I take what I learn on my own and try to use it with a partner. I then use the feedback to expand and get a better feel for how the language works. I met with my online partner 3 times, for one hour each time. Sessions were tough the first time (reading Assimil dialogues and receiving some oral questions about the text), better the second time (translation of some basic questions into Finnish), and great the third time (we even had some conversation going (questions like "when and why did you go to Japan?", etc.)) and I was learning lots from that. That's really how I learn best. If I were to continue, this is definitely what I'd keep doing. Attempting to have a discussion at the very early beginning can be quite difficult if the person you are speaking to has no idea of your limitations (the first time, I only knew whatever had come up in Assimil), but as you improve a bit, the other gets an idea of your level, adapts and a lot more becomes possible. Otherwise, I've been mostly using Assimil (I'm sticking with it, even though I don't like it; I don't have the time to order something else, lesson 55 now), a bit of Teach Yourself (up to unit 7) when I got fed up of Assimil, and a bit of the Supisuomea video series, which quickly moved past my level (lack of vocab, mostly). I also wrote a short text in Lang-8, and posted a short recording in my log. I have no idea where I might stand. I think Sprachprofi has been using more or less the same material, so we might be at a similar level, although she is a more dedicated student and probably worked harder doing the exercises :) I concentrated a fair bit on pronunciation, so I'm fairly confident with that. I'm not sure what the others have been doing. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6220 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 34 of 64 27 February 2012 at 4:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've been doing mainly LR and pronunciation work, though I've started playing with book2 as well, since it seems useful to get more comfortable producing useful phrases. LR is going well (but 35 or even 45 hours is too few, at least for me for Finnish). Pronunciation is not.
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| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6251 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 35 of 64 27 February 2012 at 8:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm at 33.6 hours as of now. I could have made 45 but decided to do almost nothing for
the past few days, both because of outside reasons and in order to ensure comparability. I've mostly been following Assimil with a supplement of Anki. This has enabled me to understand a few complete sentences in a random young adult's book that saw last night, but still too little to understand the story. Now that time is almost up, I am focussing on trying out phrases that are relevant to conversation, just in order to have seen them before. Right now my weakest skill is listening comprehension (speed problems). I can answer most questions, speaking slowly as I search for words, but I am unlikely to understand the question in the first place. This is very frustrating and I'm focussing the rest of my time on this issue, with the help of a Finnish Couchsurfer who arrived last night. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5923 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 36 of 64 28 February 2012 at 12:02am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm at a little over 41.5 hours at this point, so I'm definitely going to go for the 45-hour total goal. However, only ~18.5 of those hours have been this month; the other ~23 were last summer.
I've been using essentially the approach as Sprachprofi -- mainly Assimil with supplemental vocabulary study using Anki. I also did a few lessons of Teach Yourself, but that was all the way back in June and I don't remember how helpful they were for me overall. As for Assimil, I believe I'm at about lesson 65 (of 100), so in theory I should be well into the active wave by now, but I'm foregoing that since I don't use Assimil at all how they recommend to begin with. At a natural speed, listening is probably my weakest point, but my active speaking could very well prove to be worse if what I'm listening to is spoken slowly and clearly, since I've done next to nothing for speaking practice. In terms of writing and especially reading, I'm pleased with the amount of progress I've made this month, though lack of vocabulary still poses a problem for me.
I think I'll still go through with the written test, if only because I am curious to see where all of this study has taken me, and because I don't want to have neglected my schoolwork and my Croatian studies for no reason. :) I don't think I'll bother with the oral exam, because it would be near impossible to schedule a time that would work for both myself and the teacher while taking the time difference, my school schedule, and various other commitments into account. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5162 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 37 of 64 07 March 2012 at 5:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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A quick update on the Challenge.
Our volunteer teacher sent us two written tests: one that contained various types of questions (fill in the gap, write the answer, write the question, complete the dialogue, complete the case table, etc.) which were increasingly difficult, and a second one, a reading comprehension test where the dictionary was allowed. This last test also required a 100/150-word composition on school. That was tough! The results of the test still haven't come in. We were initially supposed to have an oral test, but the teacher was sick with the flu and the delay now has us reconsidering what kind of testing we will do. After such an intensive study bout, to do absolutely nothing for a week or two and then attempt to have a discussion/oral test is less than ideal, to put it mildly. Will keep you posted! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5162 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 38 of 64 10 March 2012 at 12:56am | IP Logged | ||
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The results of the written tests have come in!!!!
I would first like to note how courageous an endeavour this was, since after a few people joined and left, only 4 of us survived to the end: Sprachprofi, Volte, ellasevia and myself. It should also be noted that we didn’t all do the same amount of hours. Looking back, perhaps that was an impossible objective. Sprachprofi was the only one with sufficient determination, organisation and health (!) to do exactly 35 hours. I did 32.5. Volte did 28; she then took the tests after several days with very little Finnish, while not feeling well. About using LR as a method, she says: "Using LR for too little time (I did about 16 hours of it properly), for a new language family, is pretty much guaranteed not to give particularly great results - and even more so if you take a break before doing any exams. I also wasn't feeling well for either exam (I was, and am, exhausted by my allergies). [...] It's also a method which is -horrible- for test preparation below a certain threshold." Ellasevia was a special addition to our group: he did about 23 hours last summer and about the same in February to reach the 45 hour mark. In retrospect, our results seem to correspond to the time we each put in. Here is the email we received from our volunteer tester: Exam 1: grammar Since Finnish is morphologically quite complex, Finnish teachers (I included) easily overestimate the meaning of it. That means we use a lot of time and energy on courses with word stems, consonant gradation and such. This part of language skills was tested here. I chose to the test stuff from different levels. That is why the exam was partly difficult. Sorry about that. Some things (eg. passive sentences in the last excercise) are actually taught on the continuation course. Plural is not either basic course stuff. So do not worry if you did not know everything. I gave 1 point from every right sentence, and 0,5 points from every right form when only one word was asked. Your score: Ellasevia 41, Arekkusu 31, Sprachprofi 26, Volte 12. Exam 2: Reading This part was now a little bit too easy. All scored maximum points. ;) Exam 3: Writing There it is not so easy to rank your texts. All wrote well. Of course Ellasevia made not that much mistakes because (as you can see from the grammar test) his words were more often inflected correctly. Sprachprofi also wrote syntactically very idiomatic Finnish but made small mistakes. Arekkusu did well with morphology here, some un-idiomatic expressions though. Volte had some problems with word stem but the text is well understandable. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5337 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 39 of 64 10 March 2012 at 2:03am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for sharing these results, and a round of applause (and drinks, if only I had the futuristic technology ;) ) to Sprachprofi, Volte, ellasevia and Arekkusu for taking on this challenge and seeing it through to the end. Well done guys!!
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| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5115 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 40 of 64 10 March 2012 at 6:59am | IP Logged | ||
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Congratulations, all of you! You are true pioneers and an inspiration to us all. And so the celebration party is in Helsinki?
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