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Hříbeček’s TAC 2012 - Team *jäŋe/*ledús | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5148 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes  Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 33 of 62 02 June 2012 at 5:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I haven't written here for over three weeks, I've been focusing heavily on Czech, Hungarian and Polish and didn't want to waste time writing here in English. I promised to write some Polish/Czech false friends but I think I'll wait until after the 6 week challenge when I get more time.
June is a quite a busy time for us teachers, but I've managed at least a few hours a day of language work since the 6 week challenge started. I've been neglecting my wife a little and been trying to avoid my English speaking friend here, in favour of languages! What a sad statement, but it's a necessary measure and I know that in 2 weeks I'm going to Poland for a few days with both my wife and English friend so I'll make it up to them. I'll also hopefully be using my Polish as much as possible. Most of my focus has been on Czech; I saw some advice from Luca the Italian Polyglot, where he said that the secret to his language skills is hours of reading every day so since then I've bought and read the whole series of 3 Millenium books in Czech (each book is over 600 pages) and have now bought the first 5 of the 'House of Darkness' series. So I've been trying to read as much as possible every day and I can already feel the benefits. Before that I only read a few books in Czech a year and didn't really see any benefits to it, but intensive reading is fantastic as I've learned lots of new words and phrases and noticed lots of other constructions that I wasn't sure about before but now know a lot better. So I'll be maintaining the intensive Czech reading from now on. In Hungarian and Polish my philosophy has been to do at least 15 minutes every day and so far I've managed it, usually doing more than that in both. The result is that my Hungarian has at least stayed at the same level (low B1) and my Polish has improved rapidly. My active Polish is still at A1/A2 but my passive level has improved a lot (maybe high B1/low B2). As I said before most of that rapid improvement is because of my knowledge of Czech. It's a really nice feeling to not have to struggle with a new language. I've completed 16 units of my LEDA Polish book. I should have a Polish wedding to go to next year and a family visit in July to the Czech/Polish border, where my wife's relatives are bilingual in Czech and Polish so I'll be able to practise Polish with them too. I won't be actively maintaining my Polish after the family visit though (Czech, Spanish and Hungarian are enough for me in that regard for now), but will hopefully nevertheless maintain my passive understanding. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5148 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 34 of 62 13 June 2012 at 5:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The 6 week challenge was a big success for me.
I easily broke my record for total hours spent actively learning languages with 156 hours 30 minutes, 23 hours more than my previous record. I also broke my record for time spent on 1 language as I actively worked on Czech for over 104 hours, nearly 30 hours more than my previous record. I managed over 20 hours of Polish, so now I'm ready for my trip this weekend to Euro 2012 in Wroclaw. Getting by and understanding in Polish should be quite easy now. I also did more Hungarian (26 hours) than Polish which was one of my targets as I wanted to make sure I didn't neglect Hungarian. I did at least 15 minutes of Polish and Hungarian every day, plus a lot more Czech. I read about two and a half 600 page books, plus three 300 page books in Czech and feel the benefits as my brain felt swarming with Czech and I automatically started thinking in Czech after long sessions, plus I learned quite a few new words and refreshed others. So I averaged about 3 hours and 45 minutes of active language study every day. I say active, because I also chatted a lot in Czech, watched a lot more TV, read various other things etc. but didn't count it because I wasn't doing it with the intention of trying to learn or improve. Plus I had to work a lot more than 1 hour for me to write 1 hour in the records, depending on the activity. I finished 11th in the total language study table and 35th in the target language (Polish) table. It's clear however that some others count almost every second of anything done in a foreign language so it's impossible for me to ever compete with that. It's better to battle your own records in that respect, although the leaderboard provides good motivation. POLISH - CZECH FALSE FRIENDS TAK - TAK (P = yes, C = so) DROGI - DROGY (P = expensive, C = drugs) CHYBA - CHYBA (P = maybe, C = mistake) KWIECIEŇ - KVĚTEN (P = April, C = May) RZECZ - ŘEČ (P = thing, C = language/speech) SKLEP - SKLEP (P = shop, C = cellar) WLAŠNIE - VLASTNĚ (P = just now, C = actually) ZACHÓD - ZÁCHOD (P = West, C = toilet)!!! SZUKAČ - ŠUKAT (P = to look for, C = to shag/f**k)!!! These are just some examples that I've noticed, but there are many others. The last 2 are particularly funny to hear for a Czech. For example the common sentence - "Kogo szukasz" (Who are you looking for?) in Polish. You don't need to do much work to translate it to Czech and see how shocking it would be for a Czech (who hasn't heard about the Polish meaning) to hear this question from a Polish stranger. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Takato Tetraglot Senior Member HungaryRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4847 days ago 249 posts - 276 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, EnglishB2, GermanB2, Japanese | Message 35 of 62 15 June 2012 at 12:45am | IP Logged | |||||
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"Kisfröccs még a királynő hallgatásban" xD Mi nehéz amikor magyar szöveget hallgatsz? Sok az ismeretlen szó, vagy a kiejtés miatt nehéz megérteni? Egyébként elég sokat tanultál a hat hét alatt, amint látom. o.o
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5148 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 36 of 62 15 June 2012 at 12:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
Köszönöm az üzenetedet. :)) Nem tudom, mi pontosan a problémám a hallgatással, talán mindennel - a szavakkal, a kiejtéssel, de azt hiszem, hogy a legnagyobb problémám a gyorsaság, amivel beszélnek a magyarok. Igazad van, hogy sokat tanultam és egyre jobban értem, de a cseh nyelvben is volt problémám a hallgatással. Csak idő kell és gyakorolás. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5148 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 37 of 62 26 June 2012 at 3:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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So my Polish challenge has finished, culminating in a trip to Poland where I spoke to many, many Poles and enjoyed it a lot more as a result of my Polish studies. We were there to watch football matches in the fanzone and be a part of Euro 2012, but in reality I was there mainly for the cultural experience and the Polish language was part of that.
I used a mix of Czech with lots of Polish vocabulary thrown in to express myself to the Poles I met and when they spoke slowly and repeated themselves I was able to understand what they were saying. Due to the fact that there were literally thousands and thousands of friendly Poles everywhere we looked, I was never short of someone to speak to. I had conversations about racism, Communism, normal life and of course mainly about football, all in Polish with a heavy influence from Czech. I've given up Polish now, so that I can focus properly on Czech, Hungarian and Spanish, because I've realised that 3 permanent languages are enough for me to maintain and hopefully improve. I'll return to Polish again sometime within the next 6 months to a year, as I'll be going to a wedding in Krakow. CZECH AND HUNGARIAN I've still been reading a hell of a lot in Czech and watching quite a lot of Czech TV and films and I spent this past weekend with my Czech friends, speaking only Czech. I'd still like to have more opportunity to use my spoken Czech in a bigger variety of ways though, that's my goal for the next school year - organise some lessons where I can tell stories in Czech and be corrected. I've been a little bit lazy with Hungarian because of the Poland trip and then trying to get back in the groove of regular usage. My hope is that I'll start some skype exchanges next week or the week after; that would give my Hungarian a massive boost, I must say that I'm a bit scared about it though. I'm shy in general and the thought of speaking to a stranger on my computer seems very scary to me. My main focus for the next month or so is loads and loads of Czech. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5148 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 38 of 62 02 July 2012 at 8:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I just have to write an update today after a milestone day for me. I had my first ever proper conversation in Hungarian!!!
I don't include asking for and about food and train tickets etc. which I did in Hungary last year. This was on skype with a guy called Balsz (a member here) from Budapest. We had our first language exchange. Balsz seems to be a really nice guy and was extremely helpful with my Hungarian, he really had to work hard because I completely butchered his language for about 35 minutes. I've been on a high since the conversation ended but I have to admit that it was a rude awakening for me to how bad my Hungarian is. I really enjoyed it, but I understood very little of what he said, maybe 25% and the intense pressure that I had imposed on myself made me make many stupid mistakes. After the conversation I felt like somebody had boiled my brain, which I suppose is a good sign. I feel both very happy that I now have this possibility to improve my Hungarian and a bit down on myself for performing worse than I had hoped to. I'm hoping that one of the big factors causing my poor performance was that it was the first ever conversation for me and that I wasn't confident. Hopefully I'll start to understand more once I realise that I CAN understand (at the moment I expect not to understand which means that I don't). I don't know if I feel more motivated than ever to improve ready for next time or less motivated because I know now even more clearly how much work I need to do. In other news I'm going to Poland again this coming weekend, so I might get to practise a bit again. It will only be for 1 day probably but I'll also be spending 3 or 4 days with bilingual Czech and Polish speakers so I might throw a few Polish words their way. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Takato Tetraglot Senior Member HungaryRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4847 days ago 249 posts - 276 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, EnglishB2, GermanB2, Japanese | Message 39 of 62 03 July 2012 at 2:13am | IP Logged | |||||
I felt the same way after my first and only Skype conversation in English. ._. Hope you have some other conversations, too. And it's much easier for me to talk to strangers the second time, so I suppose it'll get easier for you, too. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5148 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 40 of 62 03 July 2012 at 5:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
Hi Takato Thanks for the message and encouragement. We've already agreed on a second conversation and I'm hoping to have a few more over the next couple of weeks. The fact that it was like a telephone call (without video) probably made it harder too language-wise, but more comfortable shyness-wise. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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