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Solfrid Cristin TAC 2012 Team Sputnik | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5144 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 25 of 270 12 January 2012 at 10:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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@Mark: Thank you for the clarification. I am hoping to learn Ukrainian once I master Russian, so in a decade or so I should be good to go.
@ Fabriziocarraro: Yes, I know a lot of Russians watch that on New Year's Eve. I really look forward to understanding enough Russian to watch it too. ----------- YES! A really productive day! Most of my days I feel like I get so little done that it is next to nothing. In fact it is next to nothing. But today I have done lots and lots! 2.5 hours of Russian class, and masses of writing Russian words and sentences. And I have read quite a lot of Italian. But – I’ll start at the beginning. RUSSIAN So far this week I have focused on only two languages, to have half a chance of making any progress. Russian, as my main focus language has been the main beneficiary. I have done an hour and a half of Pimsleur, 40 minutes of Anki, during the beginning of the week, and today I went back to my Russian classes. I am so fortunate that my job pays for individual Russian classes at Berlitz. The problem is that between the way my life has been the last months, which has left me with no extra time to go to class, and the fact that I am scared of my Russian teacher, I have not been to Berlitz for 18 months. I know it sounds crazy to be intimidated by your private tutor, but it is a fact. I walk into the Berlitz office as a high flying company executive and boss, but the moment I step into Natalia’s class room, I become a 12 year old who have not done her homework, and with whom the teacher is really displeased. I have tried everything, wearing a power suit, pearl necklace, glasses, and high heels. I have even tried actually doing my home work. :-) Nothing helps. She always finds a weak spot, some grammatical point which she taught me two years ago which I should remember, and which I have happily forgotten. And although I keep telling her that I need heaps of repetition, she seems to see it as her life mission to teach me so much new material each time that I am left confused and at the verge of screaming. I decided that it was time to resume classes, and to class I went. And she actually complimented my Russian today! She said my pronunciation had improved, and that I was better at speaking - well - that actually only means that I was willing to try. So far I had been so scared that I have almost only spoken Norwegian, but this time I had decided that it was better to speak really horrible Russian than Norwegian, and that felt great. Even if I do not think I actually had any correct sentences apart from - I do not know, - I do not remember and - I do not understand. (I am getting absolutely brilliant at those three sentences in Russian though). So we did some repetition today, and she was of course displeased that I had forgotten vocabulary (when will I ever get to discuss curtains and table cloths in Russian anyway) but 18 months are 18 months. Anyhow, I was so pleased at seeing general progress, that I told my kids and husband that I had to go to my regular Thursday evening gym classes, and called the gym and said that I had to go to a school performance, and locked myself in my office and sat writing sentences with the new vocabulary I learned today for over 3 hours. I am generally a very truthful person, but I so much wanted to have a little time for myself and my Russian books, instead of the usual 10 minutes here and there, that I could not resist the temptation:-) Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 12 January 2012 at 10:51pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5144 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 26 of 270 15 January 2012 at 11:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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I feel motivation is seeping in, and have not done too badly this week. Hope to be able to keep that up!
RUSSIAN I think I may have underestimated how much Pimsleur I have been listening to so far. I have usually tried to calculate it approximately, but yesterday I used a stop watch (is that the English term for it – you know the one they use for sports events?) and when I thought I had listened for an hour, it turned out that I had listened for 2 hours and 40 minutes. The lessons were among other things focusing on how to say that you needed this or that. I listened to 4 lessons altogether, but I have no idea how many times I listened to each lesson. I had heard the first one a couple of times already, and was pretty fed up by the topic by the time I finished. I read somewhere that you learn better when you work and learn at the same time, and housework and Russian tapes is the perfect combination. Two hours and 40 minutes will take any house from pigpen to paradise. My house hasn’t looked so good in months. :-) I watched the beginning of the movie “Garfield” in Russian yesterday. I managed to bully the rest of my family into accepting watching it in Russian with English subtitles, but after 20 minutes I felt so guilty that I said we could switch to English. I only got the occasional word and sentence anyway. GERMAN I have had a bit of a bad conscience for doing so little German so far, since that is one of my focus languages. I therefore decided to grab a novel, and found one called “Vergiss ihn nicht”. It is translated from English, and by an author called Liane Moriarty. As the Sherlock Holmes fan that I am, I could not resist buying that book. At the moment it looks a bit crazy, as the main character has a bad fall, which makes her forget the last 10 years of her life. 10 years ago she was expecting a baby, crazy in love with her husband, and very happy, and now she is the mother of three, and the love of her life has left her. It made me think of how my life has changed in 10 years, Fortunately, it has not changed so dramatically. Same husband, same kids, just a greyer husband and bigger kids:-) As I have mentioned earlier I am not really a fast reader in German either, in fact, if anything it takes even longer than in Italian. The first day I read 50 pages and it took me almost 45 minutes. The second day I got to page 74 and it took me another 40 minutes. It varies considerably how fast I am , according to how tired I am when I am doing the reading. There are more unknown words for me in German than in Italian. I usually just charge through them, like Joan of Arc in the face of foreign legions, but on a couple of occasions I was a bit puzzled. I can have a sentence where I understand most words, and then there is one word that just rocks the boat. Like “Unzurechnungsfähigkeit”. Norwegians are big on long words, just like the Germans, but this one was too much. The funny thing is that I would give my left arm to be at this level in Russian. What makes me unsatisfied in German, I think would have made me really happy in Russian – though you never know. Perhaps you are just simply never happy with the level you are at, always reaching for the next one? GREEK I HAVE FOUND MY GREEK BOOK!!! Now that may not sound like very exciting news, but I have been searching frantically for it for a month, and finally found it day before yesterday under a heap of papers, which I was supposed to “look at later”. I even found the CD which goes with it, so now I am all set to go. I was so desperate to find them both, that I even tried to offer the kids a reward for finding them, but to no avail. That was the good news. The bad news is that I have forgotten everything. A fling with Greek for a few weeks in June was not enough to make it stick. Oh well, it is just to start over. I went over the alphabet and the first lesson yesterday for half an hour, and did a full hour today on writing out things in small and large letters, but I had forgotten almost everything. I am hoping that I will learn faster, the second time around, but that is it. Another good thing is that now I know where all of my language material is. My daughter insisted that we organize the book shelf where I keep my language resources, as it was looking really messy, and now she has arranged all my books and DVDs according to height. I did manage to convince her that I needed to keep the books from the same language together though, so I got some sort of system in them. It sure beats coming home from a vacation when I was in my late twenties, only to find out that my mother had passed by my flat, and rearranged all my books according to color. She also felt it looked messy when they were arranged alphabetically. I am therefore able to tell exactly how much resources I have in Russian: 2 meters and 10 cm.:-) S Studies this week: Russian: 10 hours German: 1 h 25 minutes Italian: 2 hours Greek: 1 h 30 minutes Total this year: Russian: 21 h 30 min German: 1.50 minutes Greek: 2h 10 min Spanish: 6 h 25 English: 5 h French: 40 minutes Italian: 3h 30 minutes Icelandic:20 minutes Mandarin: 45 minutes Ukrainian: 30 minutes I am really, really satisfied with how much Russian I have got done. Definitely need to do more German though. And if I want to get any results in Greek, I really need to step up there. Oh well, we are just through the first two weeks, right? Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 15 January 2012 at 11:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4607 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 27 of 270 23 January 2012 at 10:25pm | IP Logged | ||
That was the funniest line I read all week :) My mom used to arrange my books according to color, too, and it used to drive me crazy :):):) 2 meters and 10 cm sounds pretty good!!! Don't worry about forgetting everything. It's stored somewhere in your brain, and with maintenance and repetition it'll come back out easily. I'm constantly finding out that what brings a language alive isn't what method or resource you use, but how much motivation you have for it, and how much you keep at it. But of course you know that. I wish I get to be where you are someday, so keep up the great work! It's so cool that you're logging in fantastic hours with Russian. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6430 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 28 of 270 24 January 2012 at 7:30am | IP Logged | ||
I've been studying Japanese a long time (on again, off again). And I've finally gotten to the point where I can read a page in an easy novel meant for 13-year-olds in about 3 minutes, so don't complain too much about being slow. Your rearranging of your books reminded me of when I was young. I had all my non-fiction arranged according to the Dewey decimal system (like in a library) and all my fiction grouped by genre and arranged alphabetically by the author's last name. Fortunately, my mother knew of the horrors (at least some of them) that she would find if she went in my room, so she never did. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5144 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 29 of 270 24 January 2012 at 10:30am | IP Logged | ||
When I tell you that my mother's nickname in the family was "the bulldozer" you will understand that it was not easy to stop her. And this book rearranging thing was not even while I was under her roof, it was after I had lived independently for 10 years in my own flat, and she came by and decided to "help me". This is actually one of her minor deeds. She rearranged all the fixed elements of my kitchen while I was on holiday. Twice. She tore down a wall in my sister's flat while she was on vacation, and had a friend chop off the pride of my garden - a large beautiful Magnolia tree - while I was working in Belgium. When she at one point thought I was not focused enough in my studies, she came by my flat and left me a daily schedule. When to get up, how long I would have for breakfast and a shower, when to take a break, when to go to bed. Needless to say, it went into the paper basket in 5 seconds flat. I was 27. After I got married she was irritated that my husband was not efficient enough with our renovations, so she wrote down a list of all the things she felt he should do - in our house - and asked me to rewrite it in my handwriting, so that he would not see that she had written it. And these are only the examples that I can share... Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 24 January 2012 at 10:32am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6593 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 30 of 270 24 January 2012 at 10:49am | IP Logged | ||
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The part about tearing down walls while someone's on vacation really takes the cake. :)
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| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5144 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 31 of 270 24 January 2012 at 11:08am | IP Logged | ||
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Yep. My sister went ballistic when she came home and saw what had happened. She changed the locks to her appartement after that, something which my mother thought was an outrage. My mother was an extraordinary woman in every possible sense of the word, but she had absolutely no limits.
That also had its positive sides of course. When a family near by lost everything they had, and were not insured, my mom went from shop to shop, asking people to give them articles they needed, and raised so much money and free help from friends and neighbours that before she was finished, the family had a new house and barn, with everything they needed, plus extra money in their bank account. When she was 16 she started as a news paper girl, delivering news papers to people's houses, and within 5 years she was offered the post as editor in chief. She was the only bread winner of the family for those 5 years, as my grand dad was unable to get a job. When he finally got a job, she could quit hers, and passed the three years of high school in 5 months. At the age of 40 she trained as a teacher, while being responsible for two kids,two cats, a dog and a turtle, plus her demented mother and her father and going through a messy divorce. I am sometimes complimented for being able to handle a lot of stress, and stand through a storm. Well, I had the best teacher possible. Yesterday it was one year since she passed away, and 6 months since my dad passed away, so I am thinking a lot of both of them today. As her epitaph we wrote "A truely exceptional woman" which she really was. Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 24 January 2012 at 11:25am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6593 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 32 of 270 24 January 2012 at 11:51am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm sad to hear they passed away.
I guess there is a certain lore about "war time" people, especially kids who grew up in those days and having lived those tough times the rest of life seemed very doable by comparison. I have a grandmother like that, not invasive like you describe your mother, but certainly full of energy and always been the driving force in the family. Somehow it is that certain people, while physically no different or stronger, seem far stronger mentally and rarely concede that something is hard. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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