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Kanewai 2015: Team Caesar | ||
Tags: Super Challenge | Catalan | Ancient Greek | Turkish | Polyglot | Arabic | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | Italian | Japanese | French | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4678 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 257 of 331 17 May 2014 at 3:10am | IP Logged | ||
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Learning with Texts looks interesting ... I'm going to have to try it out.
I'm slowly getting the feel of Harry Potter in Italian, and working with my verb charts is really helping. I was getting confused over silly things. I kept looking up fosse, which means grave or cemetery according to the dictionary, and all I could wonder was: I don't remember there being a graveyard on Privet Drive! I finally realized that fosse was also the imperfect subjunctive of essere, and the chapter starting making a lot more sense. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 4998 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 258 of 331 18 May 2014 at 2:51am | IP Logged | ||
That's great news about your French! I haven't been to Lyon (but will likely visit on a future trip, as some Couchsurfing guests - a family whose members I've now hosted a few times - live nearby. It has a reputation for excellent food: were there any regional dishes or other previously unknown culinary vocab which you encountered during your time there? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4678 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 259 of 331 19 May 2014 at 10:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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I did learn a cool new phrase: On mange bien en France.
I ate local as much as possible, and tried to focus on family-owned restaurants off the tourist track. That turned out to be a hit and miss affair (it turns out that sardines in France are still sardines ... I don't know what I was expecting). One woman I stayed with gave me a cookbook on traditional Provençal cooking, and I don't recognize a lot of the terms in it. I'll need to go through with my dictionary. My culinary discoveries (pics to come!) Crema di funghi (Florence) - a porcini mushroom spread for sandwiches. This should be the next pesto; Italian bread + pork + crema di funghi is a divine combination. Rosé de Provençe - these weren't 'great' wines, but were perfect on a sunny afternoon. We need to start drinking more rosé in North America! I think my local wine shop only stocks three. Friends told me that they only became popular about 20 years ago, but now it's very trendy among the young and everyone in the south is drinking them. Niçoise cuisine is strong and hearty! My stereotype was that it would be light, but it was developed to feed hungry fishermen. Tripe - it turns out I like tripe. A lot. It seemed that every city from Florence to Lyon had their own special version, and that it was considered a perfectly normal thing to order. Quenelles - A Lyon specialty, fishcakes made with pike and served in a crawfish-based sauce Nantua. It's like peasant food raised to the level of high cuisine. I tried making them at home, and it wasn't too hard - you need to make a choux pastry the day before, add the fish, and then first poach then bake the quenelles. You need about five hundred pounds of butter for every pound of fish (more or less), so they are rich. I haven't tried the sauce Nantua yet. Raw milk cheese - illegal in the US, and I was prepared to play the dumb American if customs questioned me on my purchases (but officer sir, "cru" means good! Like a "grand cru" wine is the best!), but luckily no one stopped me. I'm totally going to be the hero at the next dinner party - if I don't eat them all first. Meanwhile ... did you catch the Anthony Bourdain show set in Lyon? This article has a clip on school lunches that will make your mouth water: http://edition.cnn.com/video/shows/anthony-bourdain-parts-un known/season- 3/lyon/index.html 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5180 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 260 of 331 19 May 2014 at 11:00pm | IP Logged | ||
Sounds yummy! Rosé really needs to be enjoyed properly - chilled on a nice, warm day, preferably outdoors, paired with light foods. A little note on raw milk cheese - it's legal if it's been aged 60 days. So usually hard cheeses you can find raw here, soft cheeses not (if you got a soft cheese through, congrats!). But yeah, it'd be nice if the US government would re-visit this. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Penelope Diglot Senior Member Greece Joined 3658 days ago 110 posts - 155 votes Speaks: English, French Studies: Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 261 of 331 20 May 2014 at 9:11am | IP Logged | ||
I agree and endorse, as we say :) I've been there as well. I think that sort of motivation that comes from favourite books will eventually help us go a long way with Italian. I've read the name of the rose over 17 times (I know how that looks...) and after that I've lost count. But it is always in greek (a fantastic translation). I thought for a moment maybe I could read it in the original, to help my Italian as others read Harry Potter in many languages, but your comment was indeed a reality check! :D (Harry Potter and Umberto Eco in the same sentence? ) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4678 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 262 of 331 06 June 2014 at 10:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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@ sctroyenne - it was soft cheeses, and they were delicious. I still have some left,
and I'm trying real hard to save them for a nice meal rather than just opening them now. I've settled into a nice, light groove this past month. Italiano I'm managing about five pages of Assimil a week, and a couple chapters of Harry Potter. I'm comfortable with the slow and steady pace; I'll make a couple big pushes over the next year, but I'm not in a rush. Français The podcasts on France Culture are amazing. My comprehension isn't great, and it seems to vary wildly from day to day. I can usually follow enough to get the general thesis or plot. I've found I do a lot better when I read a plot synopsis beforehand. Right now I listen to 30 minutes of French while at the gym, and then switch to music for the rest of my workout. I'm hoping that massive amounts of exposure will help my comprehension. I'm going to claim victory when I can actually understand all of what Franck Ferrand, the narrator of Au coeur de l'histoire, says. I like his voice, but he doesn't pause much between sentences and I get really, really lost trying to follow him. Wanderlust It's hitting hard. Right now my focus is on reading in Italian and listening in French, and I have a few brain cells left over to do a Pimsleur-style course while commuting. I don't want to add a whole new language, I just want to have a summertime fling. Turkish or Ancient Greek would be my top choices, but I'm at a point where I would need to sit down and study them, and I don't have the time. I need an audio-only fling. I've collected lots of audio courses over the years, so I have tons of of choices - though I don't know how good many of them are: Greek, Swahili, or Hindi would be fun for a month or two, just to get a taste. Though I'm not sure if I actually have a Hindi course. I thought I did, but I don't see it on my hard drive. Arabic would be a refresher course, which would make it less stressful than a new language. German and Russian are other options, but I would like to become literate in both of these one day, and I'd rather not start until I'm ready to commit. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4698 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 263 of 331 07 June 2014 at 1:38am | IP Logged | ||
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If you want an audio Hindi course, I recommend Teach Yourself Hindi Conversation (or whatever the current version is called) over Pimsleur. It's much more useful, more interesting, and more like Hindi as it's spoken. The author, Rupert Snell, has also made free podcasts about vocabulary to accompany Teach Yourself Hindi, but you could listen to them without using the textbook. They are found at:
the Hindi Urdu flagship. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4678 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 264 of 331 07 June 2014 at 4:52am | IP Logged | ||
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The Hindu site looks nice - thanks for the link!
I started listening to Michel Thomas's Arabic Foundation, just to test it out, but it is painfully slow. As in, fifteen minutes in and there's only been four vocabulary words, one of which was "falafel." I skipped around a bit, and found a real confusing metaphor comparing verbs to flower stems in a vase, and some stems have flowers, and some have tails. I skipped ahead to a lesson on the advanced tape, and the narrator was introducing gender to the tails of the flowers. I want something light, but this might be ridiculous. Meanwhile, I'll follow Solfrid's mini-challenge and try an Italian Super Challenge- intensive weekend. I just logged everything I've already done this week; we'll see what I can add by Sunday evening. As of now I have 11.3 French books, 12.6 French movies, 4.4 Italian books, and 6.8 Italian films. My Italian isn't strong enough to do a full super-challenge related weekend, so I'll mix it up with Assimil, DuoLingo, and maybe some Living Language. It will be nice if I can bump up my skills a notch! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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